Where and how to use keywords

If you are like most bloggers that are desperately trying to earn some sort of income from blogging then you must have some vague knowledge of "keywords". Keywords are what people put into search engines to find what they are looking for. If you want to be found by those search engines you must take advantage of using keywords for your blog or website and use those keywords throughout your site. If you have a blog or website that is about growing blueberries then you want to be found for the phrase "growing blueberries". One of the ways is to bold any keywords in your blog posts to make them stand out, just like I did with the blueberries.

The best way is to use your keyword or phrase in the title of your posts. Search engines will ignore the title of "what I did today" and usually not even look at the rest of the post even if the blog post was unique and interesting. Search engines, like people, look for attention grabbing titles that say up front what the blog post is about. It is the title that the search engines will look at first.

Back to my example of the blueberries, you want to put blueberries in the titles of your posts whenever you can since you want people to find you when they want to know anything about blueberries. Don't just name a title of a blog post "a wonderful, productive little fruit". You want to name the title "The blueberry, a productive friut plant".

Use the search engines to your advantage and keep using keywords in your titles.

Google pagerank and your loading time

I just finished watching the bio channel on TV. They had a very interesting program on the development of Google. During the program they mentioned several of the factors that determine a website's pagerank. Most people know about having lots of other websites linking to your website and the fact those links are relevant to the same subject matter as your website or blog will move your website or blog to the top of the Google search engine results. What was new to me was the fact they also stated that websites and blogs that load faster than other websites and blogs are also ranked higher.

That loading time fact was interesting enough for me to change a few of my blogs and list only 3-4 blog posts on the front page instead of 5-8 like I normally do. I have noticed an increase of visitors from Google search in just a matter of hours. This has also changed how many widgets and other stuff I put in my sidebar. If it slows the loading time down I try not to use it.

Now this brings up an interesting fact. If I had a blog about swimming pools and pool supplies and I loved to put lots of photos on the blog it will slow the loading time down of the blog. At the same time if some else had a blog about swimming pools and supplies and they had less photos and a quicker loading time they could be ranked higher than my blog simply because it loaded faster.

Next time you visit your own website or blog, take notice of how long it takes to load. The slower it loads the less your pagerank will be at Google.

Are you saving or wasting money?

I bet you think that you are doing great on saving your hard earned money. Do you really think ahead when you are shopping? We all know that installing energy saving devices in our home will save money on our electric bill. I bet at least 50% of you have already changed to florescent or led lights in part of your home. But did you know that you are probably throwing away your money on everyday shopping items?

Take for example disposable razors. They cost anywhere from a $1 to $10 for a bag or pack of them. A well made, top quality electric razor will cost from $50 to $150. Now how many of you buy those disposable razors verses the electric razor? I bet lots of you buy the cheap disposable ones simply because they are cheap. You know that in the long run it will be cheaper to buy an electric razor but you keep wasting your money on the cheap disposable ones.

The paper towel industry has us all convinced that cleaning up with a paper towel is better than a reusable cloth towel. Air fresheners that you plug in is another source of money wasting. Just open a window and air the room out.

Look in your shopping bag the next time you go to the store. How many of those items are quick one use only items that can easily be replaced with longer lasting items.

Freelance writing

What I have really enjoyed doing the last year or so is the fact that I have now become a fully fledged freelance writer for the internet. When I was a child I was always writing fictional stories and one day dreamed of writing a full length novel. Then the internet came along and it has revolutionized the entire world of writing. No longer do you have to submit articles or samples of your writing to magazines or publishers in hopes they don't send you a rejection letter. Now you can self publish, write a blog or submit your articles to places like Associated Content or Helium. Now everyone has the chance to show off their writing talent.

I also enjoy the times when I am offered a chance to write an article for a website about something I have experience or knowledge about. Last month I was paid $25 to do a short article for a travel web site. Associated Content offered me the chance to write an article on baby shower ideas. The article itself does not pay very much but I know from experience that articles for or about children get lots of views so I will be making more money in the long run on that article.

By changing my goal from an affiliate oriented blogger, who just wanted clicks and traffic to a freelance writer it has opened up a much larger world of possibilities and income.

Saving on your electric bill

I have just finished switching most of our incandescent light bulbs to florescent ones. I had 3 ceiling fixtures in the house that the incandescent bulbs were constantly burning out in. The bulbs would last as long as 2-3 months before I had to get on the ladder again and replace them. The fixtures would only allow for a 60 watt bulb and in many of the places they were located. That size bulb was not enough to light up the area. So now the bulbs are switched out. I did not replace the bulbs with their equivalent but allowed for more light. For example the florescent light bulb that gave out 60 watts of light only used 13 watts of energy. I replaced that with the 150 watts of light which uses only 23 watts of energy. Now I will see how much money I will save on my electric bill for lighting.

We have a small work shop that doubles as a garage at times. We were thinking about putting in a hot water heater in there for a small bathroom. I simply can't stand it when someone works on machinery and uses my kitchen sink to clean up in. They usually leave a mess. Hence the idea for the bathroom in the work shop. We were looking at small hot water heaters but found a better solution with a tankless hot water heater, commonly known as an "insta hot". They fit under a cabinet and provide hot water by heating up the cold water as it runs through the unit thus providing hot water instantly. Because it does not have a tank to keep the water hot in there should be an energy savings right there.

Investing in metals

The stock market is unpredictable to say the least right now. Interest rates for bank accounts and CD's are not much better as a hedge against inflation. So what are the other places to invest your money? Municipal bonds are a good choice and so is precious metals. Gold and sliver prices have not seen an increase in prices since the mid 1990's. Right now gold is at $900+ an ounce.

If you wanted to buy gold how would you go about doing so? There are many types of gold and some people erroneously believe that buying gold jewelry is a good investment. That is so wrong on many levels. First off, gold jewelry is not pure gold so the value is no where near the $900 per ounce range. Second, jewelry is typically marked up at least 500% at the retail level (I should know I worked in a major retail chain, corporate office, accounts department, years ago). The next type of gold investing is gold coins. The coin market has not only the amount of gold as a price standard but also the rarity of the coin is also taken into account. I don't know much about the aspect of investing in gold coins but one company called Monex does. They are an international gold coin dealer that has over 5000 employees world wide. One of their specialties is locating rare coins for investors and collectors. The next type of gold investing is in gold bullion. The bullion can be in the form of ingots, bars or minted one ounce coins that are just used for their gold value such as Krugerrands.

Would I invest in gold? Lets just say that if the US government keeps on printing more paper money than it has gold reserves to back those notes up with, then yes I would. Once the paper money starts to go down in value the gold value will sky rocket. I have not invested in gold just yet but I am seriously looking into it.

One way to stop people from stealing your blog posts

I have found a way to stop those splogs (spammy blogs) from taking my RSS feed and putting it on their splogs. I have Google Adsense and have the option of adding Adsense to my feeds. This weekend I decided to add the Google Adsense to the feeds and low and behold my feed syndication has gone from 10 a day to 1 or 2. The Google Ads don't show up in subscriber or email feeds, just feeds that are grabbed by people putting them on other blogs or websites.

I put the Google Ads before the posts so the ads would come first. Obviously this was not liked by those splog owners so they dropped my feed. That is fine by me since I don't want them to make money from my work anyway.

If you have a blog you should take a good look at your "feed" setting. I have mine set to partial and not full post. If you have it set to full post then other people can grab your feed and put it on their own blog or website and make it look like it is their work.

Trying to get 1000 visitors a day

That elusive 1000 visitors a day, everyday, is my personal goal for this blog. I have a few blogs that get that number and higher but it is not consistent. One day I might get 2500 visitors and the next day 20. My traffic is not that consistent yet.

Why do I want to achieve that number? Well, that is when I can look for an invite to join blogads, an advertising company that places ads for their customers on blogs. They handle Perez Hilton and ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER blogs. The only thing is, I have to be invited to join their network. One of the requirements is having 1000 visitors a day and be a quality blog. You would think that I would not have to go to the Outer Banks of Pluto to get my visitors but I might have to make the trip.

I just have to work harder to get this little blog noticed in the great big world of blogs, where 100,000 blogs are added daily to the mix.

How are you saving money everyday?

I have not gone into the coupon clipping craze yet. That would require that I either subscribe to a newspaper or buy one. Since I don't do either, coupon clipping is out for me. I do try to look for coupons on line to print out but since the cost of ink cartridges are not on the cheap side I'll pass on that too. I don't get women's magazines either, since they are the only ones that tend to have coupons in them. Let's face it, coupons and me don't mix.

So how do I save money on our grocery bill every week? The number one thing I do is shop at the discount grocery stores. The one I go to is Grocery Outlet. I can easily get a whole cart load of groceries there for under $60. Even in the Walmart superstore the same cart load would cost close to $150.

Next I buy the cheap dry dog food and cat food for our pets. One older cat does get canned cat food and I pay .33 cents a can.

I also shop at the bakery outlet store. We have several near us and I shop at the Orowheat outlet store. I can usually buy 6 to 8 loafs of bread and rolls for under $4. We have a freezer and when I get home I freeze the bread. Just one trip to that store every 2 weeks and we have more than enough bread. I really love their buy one get one free deals. Often the buy one is only $1 or less so I really do come out of there with lots of bread, donuts, muffins and specialty items.

What I have learned is to also use the telephone to shop around too. Just today we need to get a part for a fence that we are putting up. Rather than just go into town to buy at Home Depot I phoned up several places and found that the prices ranged from $5.50 to $9.50 on that part. Since we needed 10 of them it made sense to shop around. By the way Home Depot was the most expensive one. I not only saved on gas, since the cheaper one was closer than Home Depot but I also saw more stuff in that store that we might need in the future, at a cheaper price than another store I normally shop at.

It does pay to shop around. Now what are your experiences? Would you care to share them? Just leave a comment.

How to destroy your quality website or blog reputation

I think there is nothing worse than having to wade through a blog or website that is so badly written that it looked like a 6 year old put it together. For those of you that have a quality blog or website you know how much work you put into it to get those visitors coming back after that first visit. Now we have on the market the lazy man's blogging or website design. It is called Agents of Value at agentsofvalue.com

The company in my opinion is so bad that I am not going to give them the privilege of having an incoming link from me. Here is a brief description of what they do straight from their website:
"Agents of Value is an acclaimed IT outsourcing company that specializes in providing web development and marketing service staff for entrepreneurial clients across multiple continents to help them nurture their online business into fully profitable business ventures."

That sounds good, doesn't it? That is until you get half way down their page and read this:
"The Agents of Value North American headquarters are located at New Kensington, Pennsylvania, but the staff offices are located in the Philippines. Through outsourced webmaster staffing our clients can directly choose and supervise the work of the individuals that work for them. Outsourcing the staff gives our clients the special privilege of hiring well-educated and trained link builders, web developers, virtual assistants, graphics designers and webmaster staff at a very cost efficient price without sacrificing quality of output."

What they have is cheap slave labor in the Philippines that will probably ruin your blog and website with grammar and spelling mistakes galore. Heck you can do that for free without paying $675 a month for someone else to do it. I have nothing against non-English speaking people doing blogs or websites as long as it is is their native tongue. Leave the English language blogs to those who have English as their first language. Even English speaking people have a hard time with grammar and spelling so why would you want to use a company that out sources writing in English?

I think with me, the subject has a lot to do with calling a customer service number and speaking to someone I cannot understand or them me because and I find out that they are not even in the USA but in India! I am just getting sick and tired of out sourcing labor to countries that English is not their language.

The new economy is setting the stage for new businesses

If you take a look around, there is not only businesses that are going under but many new businesses that are flourishing. Stress and anxiety are causing a whole new industry to form to find holistic Cures for Ailments that are now plaguing the American public. Books and blogs about relaxation and herb growing seem to have increased. Headaches and depression are the number one and two complaints that doctors are hearing about the most.

If you are thinking about a change in your career or starting your own business you might look into the holistic medical field. Look into suggested cures for ailments and see where you can fit your own career into it. If you want to know more about cures for ailments, check out expert advice from Dr Daniel Amen. Find more information about Dr Daniel Amen here.

In the economy full of lemons right now you need to learn how to make lemon aid.

Starting a small business today

Would you start a small business today, knowing full well the economic surroundings are not the best? You may not have a choice in the matter if there is no chance of decent employment in your area. A small business might be the way to go.

I have always started up my small businesses over the years on literally a shoestring. Sometimes they were started up with no more than $20. I have never bothered with getting a business loan as quite frankly I wouldn't want to put the pressure on myself of trying to start a business and paying back a loan all at the same time.

Since my shoestring start up businesses are very tight on cash in the beginning I have to watch my finances and keep any records totally separate from any personal financial records. Having a Small Business Finance plan is crucial to your success.

For questions concerning small business finance, Jon M Queen can help clarify these important financial issues. Proceed to Jon Queen's profile at Law Firm Blogging. His site can help you out regarding any legal questions about small businesses.

Once you have learned to keep track of your business income and outgo you can then keep an eye on what is making you money and what is not. That is how you learn to streamline you new small business to concentrate on the areas that are making you money. That works really well even if you are just selling used items on eBay. Just keep a chart on your fees, shipping expenses and what is selling. Use that chart to help you see where the money is going and what brings the money in.

There is no reason not to start up a small business today. In fact the great majority of business in the world are not corporations but small family owned and run businesses.

Job fairs - are they worth going to?

I accompanied a friend to a job fair last week. The last time I went to a job fair was over 20 years ago and I went to see if they had changed at all in 20 years. Before we went I looked at the job fair's website and it said to dress up as if you were going to an interview. We both dressed very nicely for the event.

When we got to the parking lot we had to drive around for about 10 minutes just to find a place to park. It was raining and windy so we also had to keep our hair nice for inside the event.

Inside the auditorium (it was at a community college campus) it was packed with people. There were at least 100 small tables set up and behind each one someone representing that business or help desk. There was a section set aside for interviews and places for people to fill out application forms.

After going around the entire area we both found out that there were maybe 20 job openings in the entire place. Most of the tables were for city, state or other government agencies, all of them had their budgets on hold so they were not hiring until at least May or June 2009. I finally asked one of the city workers why they were even at the job fair. Her reply was "because we already paid for the table".

One company had a line for one job opening. The line had at least 30 or more people in it and when we left the line was still growing.

I was totally disappointed at the whole ordeal. If all those companies and government agencies were not hiring they should have had at least a sign at their tables that stated "NO JOB OPENINGS", instead of letting people ask them every 2 minutes.

There were at least 6 non-profit agencies looking for volunteers for various jobs. Those places were not even getting people to stop and read their signs.

I came away from the event with a great sense of let down for my friend as well as 6 pens (from various companies) and a chip clip (from a dried fruit snack company). Are job fairs worth the trip to them? You be the judge. I can honestly say I won't be attending any more.

The nightly news is now turned off at our house

At the advice of my husband's doctor the nightly TV news has been bid farewell at our house. The state of the economy has hit my husband in the stomach, literately with a festering ulcer. Tonight was the last show for him to stomach (pun intended). When the NBC news with Brian Williams got to the part about the tent city springing up around Sacramento, husband had to leave the room.

We were talking about it a few hours later and he was upset at the fact that no one seems to be helping those people and that the businesses that put them there are still doing fine.

I personally don't understand the logic of evicting someone instead of offering to rent the home back to them at a reduced rate. The former homeowner would get to stay in their home and the mortgage company would still be making money from being a landlord.

Using a blogging community to boost your own hosted blog or website

I hear people say "what good is a wordpress.com blog or a Today.com blog if you can't use it to make money?" The answer to that is yes you can make money from them, if you know how. Both of them are blogging communities that you can have a free blog on.

Wordpress.com will not let you put ads or paid posts on their blogs but you can have a blog on there and write about your other blogs or websites. Since Wordpress internally promotes the free blogs that they host, you can count on some free promotion for your Wordpress.com blog. The same is true of the Today.com blogs but Today will also pay you for views at a rate of $2 per thousand.

Both of those communities have lots of links and ready made traffic into their sites, so why not use it to promote your hosted blogs too?

You can go to either Wordpress.com or Today.com and sign up and start a new blog. What you need to do is make the blog a type of review blog, that way you can suggest blogs and websites for people to visit. Then you can write about your own blogs and websites on there. Those posts with links to your other blogs will give your other blogs a boost in search engines.

Now for an added bonus. For anyone signing up for a Today.com blog I will give that blog a boost by adding a link to them from this blog thus giving them an added in bound link. Just use any of the Today links (in bold) in this blog post to sign up and you'll get a mention in this blog after you have completed 10 posts on your Today blog.

I would now like to congratulate the following blogs on joining through my referral link:

Webfinds
All the Creatures at Today.com

Using keywords to boost your blog's popularity

We all want our blogs to be found by the search engines and also want our blogs to ranked high up on the searches for what people type in for their searches. For example, if I had a travel blog that specialized in cruises I would want that blog to be found whenever someone was looking for cruises. So how do I go about getting that high ranking on the searches? It is pretty simple really. I am going to show you how.

First you need to have more than one blog going. I have several and try to interlink them with ping backs or writing a post on one blog that has a link to one of my other blogs. The key is to use keywords as your linking text. If you are writing about one of your other blogs and want to boost it's ranking for a keyword, never use the text "click here" or "go here" as your linking text. You want to use the keyword that you want people to find your blog by. Back to my example of the travel blog. If I want to be found for cruises then I would not use the link "travel" or "Argentina travel" even if I blogged about it sometimes. I want people to find my blog for cruises so I would use the word "cruises" or "vacations by ship" or "ocean cruise" as my linking text. What the search engines do when following a link to another blog or website is find out how relevant the link word is to the landing page is and through a mathematical equation place your landing page in the search results.

The same thing also holds true for linking to friends blogs or websites. You want the text to be relevant to what their blog or website is about. If your friend does video game reviews you don't want the text to read "Joe's blog", you would want it to read "video game reviews" or "great game reviews". That way Joe's blog would get a boost in the search engines for those phrases.

A few tips from other blogs

While visiting some of my other favorite blogs I found a few things I would like to share with you. First up is a page of links to free stuff and coupons for pet owners.
Freebies and coupons for pet owners
I know that we all need to save some money so why not pet owners too?

Next is a tip from a blog about dieting. Stay away from the TV news. It seems that people are stressing over the economy and eating too much because of it. Read more about it at Put that remote down.

Pressured into buying

One of my biggest pet peeves is getting email offers or seeing an ad on TV that always ends with "hurry before the price goes up". Those people know as well as we do that the price is very unlikely to go up. Another phrase I hate is "while supplies last" like there is a shortage of what ever they are selling. I have news for them, if they don't have "it" at the price I want "it" I'll find someone who is selling "it" at the price I am willing to pay for "it".

I would just wish that companies and ad agencies would quit trying to do a hard sell on me. Just tell me how great the product is and let me decide if I want it or not. Don't pressure me to "buy it today" or "this is the last time it will be offered at this price".

If people are not buying your product then it could either be a luxury item that people can do without or it is just a plain lousy product.

Blog owners take note - you are doing it all wrong

As I surf the internet looking for some well written websites and blogs I run into the most awful brain retching blogs there are. What is more appalling is the fact that the great majority of most blogs out there are awful.

If you are just keeping a journal of your thoughts then please keep your blog set to private or password protect it. I don't need to know what you had for breakfast or the fact that you found a dirty sock under the bed. It is mindless drivel. Don't you have anything better to do?

What gets me is the fact that those types of blogs are also selling paid links and and getting money for it! Those poor unsuspecting advertisers, they are getting ripped off big time. What company in their right minds would want to be associated with blogs that only have PR (Page Rank) and not worth reading in the first place?

Once those poorly written blogs lose their PR, not because of Google but because they never were any good to begin with, they complain that Google slapped them. Wake up and smell the coffee people, your blog was never that good to begin with. You just happened to get PR because you just lucked out. I had 2 old blogs at Wordpress.com several years ago that had a PR of 4 and 5. I never could figure out how 2 blogs with about 10 posts each and no traffic could get PR. It proved to me then that Google's PR is meaningless. What does have meaning is how well your blog is written and it is written for your readers and not yourself.

Making good use of the internet

Just today I was going through a spare bedroom and tossing old items and sorting through sellable ones. I came across an older Casio full size keyboard that I had bought almost 20 years ago. I use to play piano when I was a teen but it has been years since I last played. I put fresh batteries in it and found out it still works. That sent me on a short field trip into my boxes of books to find my old sheet music. I could not find the sheet music. I never did learn to play by ear or remember just to play standard chording so I thought I have some extra time on my hands so why not learn something new?

In the days when I was learning I only had books or maybe a TV show on to learn by. Now we have the internet and lots of places to learn from - for free. At first I found a few how-to blogs on piano playing that were more like the old fashion book reading. Then I went to YouTube and found lots of learn how to play videos. YouTube is great for learning new hobbies or techniques as well as just watching videos.

I highly suggest visiting YouTube to find out if you can learn something new if you have some spare time. It will take your mind off of the economy it might just take you in a whole new direction. Me, I am re-learning how to play the piano.

Snow storm hits New York city

Where I live a snow storm is not that big of a deal, but when it hits a large metropolitan area like New York City everything comes to a stand still. I was watching the morning national news and even the news casters were telling people not to go out. The snow storm seems to had no affect on the stock exchange other than to go below 7000 points today. So if you happen to be in New York on business just stay in your New York City hotel today and not worry about work. It is more than likely that the people you were to see are also home bound.

The layoff scorecard

The high tech industry has an online scorecard that you can see at a glance who is laying off right now. The link is below.

Tech layoffs

On the same page you will see a link to who is hiring in high tech.