Yesterday WordPress 2.7 was oficially launched and today, after reading some articles about plugins and themes compatibilities, I upgraded my wordpress.

The first screen I saw made me say a wow! It’s completely different and it’s very well organized, I really like the new presentation…

Here is a screenshot of the Dashboard of WordPress 2.7:

New Features

• New Commenting system
• New Dashboard Features
• Sticky Posts
• QuickPress
• Dashboard and Write Rearrangements
• Batch Editing for Posts
• One-Click Plugin Installs
• Comment Replies From the Admin Section

That list contains just some of the new features of WordPress. If you still thinking about upgrading or not to this version, I invite you to check the following posts in order to learn in details more about the new features:

• WordPress 2.7 – 20 Must See Features

• 5 Amazing New WordPress 2.7 Features

• WordPress 2.7: Ten useful new features

Happy Blogging!

Writing articles for a blog can be a problem when you don’t have inspiration, those days when you don’t have idea about what to write. As I mentioned before, if you don’t have inspiration it will be better for you to take some free days, and after then you could go back to the work.

That’s great, but in this post I’m going to give you some tips about how to get inspiration almost instantaneously! Yes, do you think that bloggers write articles by their own every day? Of course not… Well let’s stop talking and let’s review my main sources of inspiration!.

1- Reading my own articles: May be you can be thinking Are you serious? You gotta be kidding me… But yes! Reading your own articles can give you inspiration automagically and I’m going to tell you why. Sometimes when we write things, we leave -unconsciously- some ideas in the air, and waiting to be developed. By reading your own past posts, you can discover some of those undeveloped ideas and then you can get inspiration to write something completely new, being related with your old post.

2- Reading other people’s articles: I am subscribed through RSS feed to 60 blogs more or less. Blogs about blogging, making money online, tech, design, random and crazy, politics and many other things… Normally, I have about 600 unread posts, but I try to keep that number as low as I can. WIth all those information comming from many sites, everytime I open my Google Reader is such as a big brainstorm. By reading many of those articles from different bloggers you can get another perspective of a specific topic, giving you the inspiration you need to create a killer blog post.

3- Searching for something: Many times I have been looking for something on Google, but after reading many sites I don’t find the information that I expected before. But wait a minute, if I couldn’t find anything about X topic, why don’t I write something about it on my blog?! It has happened to me some times and I’m sure that it has happened to you too. So if the thing you have been looking for many hours is related with your blog, go ahead and write exactly what you were expecting to read in other sites, be the first on providing that information!.

4- Talking with friends: This is my main source of inspiration. Every time I talk with a friend about my online businesses, he or she asks me many things that I never thought to write about on my blog. Everything starts when the person tells me that it was looking for X information but it never found something clearly explained, and it asks me for tips. After that, my brain starts thinking and linking many concepts, creating a big package of information and preparing it to be blogged. So, if you have friends who make businesses on internet, talk with them! Share your tips and you will see that at the end of the conversation, you will have great material to write about.

Also once you have a topic to write about, you can try to detach it in some pieces, let’s say 3. So then, you can create 3 separate posts about the same topic but with different points of view, or may be dealing with different characteristics… When a topic is too big you can create a series of posts and linking each chapter with the other ones. By doing that, you will be giving plenty of content in a pleasant way without boring your readers.

And you? Where do you get inspiration from? Share your main sources!

Hi everyone, since 1 hour ago I have the WordPress manager openned, but I just couldn’t start my post before… I wasted some time reading some great feeds, news, articles and looking stupid videos on youtube, as the following one:

That was funny huh? Well, what’s this post about? This could be named an experiment, to see if it’s possible to create any kind of reactions by writing something real quick, and without sense at all. Some minutes ago, I had not idea about what was I writing, but now I find a little path among this randomness.

What should you make in order to get reactions?

With the passing of time, I have seen viral things being spread through the web, and they didn’t have sense at all. So I was thinking about it, and I have listed some things that I think you can generate some buzz from:

• Craziness: The most of the viral videos have a little of craziness, shocking you the first time you see it. That’s why they are viral, because many people get shocked and then, when the video ends, they decided to share it with friends, just because they cannot believe it!.
• Professionalism: When something is very very impressive because of its quality, it will generate buzz without any doubt. This factor cannot be combined with the last one, perhaps you can add a bit of amusement in order to make it more fun and enjoyable.
• Charisma: You can suck at what you are doing, but if you have the gift to manipulate and convince people about what you are saying, certainly you will impact them.

Also, by doing something really terrible/bored you can attract the people attention, but this is a harder task.

Now, let’s take this 3 elements and let’s put them together focused in a blog. Blogs depend of the personality of the blogger, but there is something that can affect this behavior, and this thing is the niche. You cannot act like a crazy if you are blogging about something important, something related with your business for example… But instead, if you are blogging about your life, you can do it so crazy as you want.

There is a balance?

Of course! You can blog about something relatively serious but giving it a touch of your personality, being funny sometimes… But watch out! You need to measure this kind of behaviors because not everybody likes them. May be, you can start losing readers because of that.

Moral

Every story has a moral, and this post also has one. You won’t always know what will cause reactions on your readers. What many bloggers do is to stick to things/methods that have worked for them before. That’s a good idea, but also could be a bad one. What I recommend is to experiment! You can’t know if something will work if you don’t try it.

Don’t be afraid of trying new things, perhaps you discover a non wise potential that tapeworms . Wow! I got over 500 words in this real quick post which I wrote it in less than 30 minutes, what do you think about it?

There are many ways to boost your blog that you can use to increase your subscribers, visits/month, pageviews, etc. In this contest, I will make a study of what I did in my last contest, how I do it and what were the results of applying different techniques…

Promote Something

It’s good to do giveaways without a reason, but it’s even better if you have a reason to do it. If you have a product or service that you want to promote, do it! I recommend you to offer free samples of them, this way you will attract many people, making them stick to your site just because of the product/service. In my case, I was promoting my ebook The Affiliate StartGuide, which the people could get for free by signing up for my newsletter.

Remember something, people love to get things for free. So if you offer them something without charging a penny, you will attract masses…

Find Sponsors

The major of the blog contests on internet are based on Entrecard Credits. That’s not bad, but there are so common and at least that you give away a big amoung of credits, 50k or even more, people won’t pay attention to you.

How can you make them think something different than “bah! It’s just another entrecard contest…” ? Giving uncommon prizes. The first thing you need to do before launching a contest, is to find sponsors for it. Contact companies and bloggers related with your niche asking them for sponsorship.

How I did it? I contacted them by using the following email:

Hi Company/name of the blogger,

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Javier and I manage a blog on http://mrjavo.com, which is related to blogging and internet marketing tips.

Recently, I launched Mr Javo dot Com 2.0, which have some new features, including an ebook and a newsletter.

In order to promote the new features, I’m holding a contest which has over $XXX in prizes, sponsored by companies like XXXX,YYYY,ZZZZ among others…

How does it work? To take part in the contest is simple, the users will need to sign up for my newsletter. Once they signed up and verified their mails, they will receive a copy of my new ebook. As you see, is very simple. I will pick 10 lucky winners through a drawing using the service provided by random.org.

What do you get? By sponsoring this contest your website, product or service will be exposed in front of thousand of users, making it a win-win situation for us. This is something big, and I will sponsor it through many ways, including social media networks, forums and blogs, among others…

Let me know if you want to sponsor something, a service, product or anything else is very well welcome!

Best Regards,

Mr Javo.

In this email, there are some important aspects that you need to clarify:

• Brief introduction of yourself, how you are and which’s your blog.
• Why are you asking for sponsorship?
• If you count with other sponsorships, mention them.
• How the contest will work?
• What will a sponsor get by sponsoring your contest?

If one of these aspects are not especified in your email, you have the risk of being ignored, and even more when you deal with big companies… You can use that email format or improve it even more.

Something is sure, the bigger your prizes the more the BOOM that will cause your contest…

Spread The Word

You have different ways to spread the word about your contest. Adding the post of the contest to social media networks (such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, etc…) is a great way to do it, because of the infinite users that you can contact over there. If your contest is good enough, your friends will share it and the other people too, being a big chain read by several people.

By talking of your contest in forums like Digital Point can help you a lot, because there are many users that are looking for an opportunity to get something for free. But something that I highly recommend you is not to ask to your readers to share your contest. Why? When you do something good enough, you don’t need to ask to, and also, it will be more legitimate.

Invite People… directly

Another way to get more participants is contacting the people directly. As the email that I wrote before, I also wrote a letter of invitation, which I spread through the contact forms of the blogs. I invite directly some bloggers, who replied me with an affirmative answer…

Have Fun

Don’t take it so serious. Don’t stress or feel bad if you don’t get great sponsors, it could be a difficult task. In my past experience I contacted many people, getting rejected or ignored by some of them. So, don’t feel bad and keep contacting another people, hopefully you will get great prizes for your contest…

Analyzing My Results

Everything I told you in this post seems to be great, but how was the performance of it? Well, first of all, let’s review the changes in the RSS counter:

When I started the contest, I had an average of 240 subscribers. As you can see, in the first 3 days the number of subscribers jumped over 300! Getting a big peak of 500 in a week (the 7th day). At the present time, I’m handling 450 subscribers, which means that I increased over 100% the number of subscribers!

If we talk about the number of followers on twitter, mybloglog and other social sites, I can’t give you an exact number but I can tell you that I have had a good reaction too.

At the end of the month, I ended with over 100 subscribers listed in my newsletter, which means that I increased that number over 100% again!

To conclude, I can say that I boosted my blog more than 100%, increasing my followers by RSS, newsletter and social media networks. That’s a great thing, it means that I expanded my brand and now, I’m being read by more people than before, helping me in my future actions, contests and projects.

So do you have doubts of my success? I don’t think so… If you need help to hold your own blog contest, don’t doubt on asking me, I will be glad to help you .

Since some days ago, I have only a thought in my mind: What makes you a good blogger? What things determine how good or bad are you on blogging? So I started a discussion with some friends who are (or were) bloggers and we talked about some interesting points which I will share with you in this post.

Is it the money you earn?

When we talk about MMO blogs, may be the first thing you think is how much that blogger earn? If it shares tips about making money online is because it really makes money with online businesses! So, is the money that thing that makes you a good blogger? What about if you don’t make money with your blog, that makes you a bad blogger or not?.

Questions like that arise when we talk about bloggers who manage MMO blogs, but what if you don’t deal with this niche? Should you be judged under that parameter? Of course not! So definitively, this factor cannot tell us if you are good or bad on blogging.

Is it your writing frequency?

On internet there are many classes of bloggers… There are some of them who write a couple of articles per month and others who write several articles a day! So as you can see, there are many variety in this topic because everybody is different, so each blogger has a different style and availability to write many times a day. If you think about the frequency of posting, is very logical to think the more the number of posts the better, but have to say that I disagree with this idea. Easily, I could publish 10 articles per day saying hello, things of 100 words or less, without anything valuable for you… So that could make me a good blogger? Of course not, instead I will be frighten you and probably you will leave my blog.

So the lesson of this point is that you need to publish articles as fast as you can, but always try to provide good content to your readers. This way, you will maintain your level and you will get more loyalty…

Is it your popularity?

This seems to be better then the other ones. The popularity you have in the web is something very valuable when you want to run an online business. Having a good popularity, people will be looking for your next step, following you everywhere you go. Everything you do on internet will be seen by many people: regular readers, subscribers or just strangers.

This is good and bad at the same time. Why? Because many people will critique what you do, being this good or bad. And when I say critique I’m refering not to “constructive criquite”… But I think that once you are on the hill you won’t commit errors, at least not so bad like the first ones… Blogging is all about practicing, the more time you spend, the better.

Is it the number of subscribers?

The number of subscribers is an indicative of how popular are you, so this is related to the latest point. The bigger the number of subscribers, “the better” you are, and I suppose this because nobody will follow you if you suck at blogging! So I think that certainly, this cound be an indicative.

But take care, don’t take so serious this number. There are people who hack this counter, increasing their number of subscribers from less than one hundred to thousands. If the source is not trusty, you should not take this counter as a good indicative to know if the blogger is good or bad.

What Else?

With my friends, I talked about other things like the number of twitter followers, plurk friends, emails per day, comments per article and others… I think that there’s not just one thing that can define if you are good or not at blogging.

Just combining some elements you can determine this thing, but in my personal opinion I think that certainty and dedication are one of the main things that make a good blogger. Besides the money or the number of subscribers, in my opinion other factors related with the personality of the blogger is that can tell you if it is a good or bad blogger.

What do you think? I’m a good or bad blogger? Ask the same question to yourself and to your readers!

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.