Traffic secrets

The power of podcasts.

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 06:32:05 +0000

The Power of podcasts

How to use the leverage of the Apple’s corporations online itunes store to drive traffic to your website.

Its no big secret that Search Engine Optimisation is a key part of any website. One sure fire way of ensuring that the search engines index your site frequently is by having quality content on your site and updating that site on a regular basis.

O.K standard stuff so far and not too revealing either.

However its getting harder and harder to find new and exciting things to write about and to provide new fresh content for a blog site, or is it. What is the most effective way of re-using old content to create new content that is search engine friendly and a very powerful way to refresh your old content?

Podcasting.

Everyone and his dog is incorporating video and flash files into their websites these days and that’s a great way to drive volumes of traffic using the search engines. But its a true fact that in recent months the top search engines have listed podcasts in less than 5 minutes and that podcasts are now overtaking video in the online arena. So what about using the power of a relatively underused free resource that is so unique and so “out-there” to drive insane amounts of free traffic right to your website or blogpost. I am talking about Apple corporations flagship online store itunes.

Itunes is an online store where people can purchase music and find online video etc. However itunes also has a little used application for showcasing your podcasts thats FREE. Podcasting is an easy way of providing fresh web based content in an MP3 format. You host the podcasts right on your blog and Apple links to it right from within your own podcast channel at its online iTunes store using the RSS feed from your post.

So why should you care about that I hear you ask. Simply because by getting registered with your own unique podcast channel at the itunes store you can leverage the sales power of the Apple corporation to drive new untapped customers right to your blog or sales page.

Now let me repeat that again so its real clear, you can have Apple corporation link to and advertise your podcast for free and drive thousands of Apple customers right to your blog. Thats a huge market of information hungry iPod owners. Imagine the potential sales volumes that you could harness or the endless new subscribers you could harvest from that massive exposure. This is an untapped goldmine that is right for the picking in early 2009.

O.k so how does this work?

Essentially you have to produce or re-purpose your content from your blog , by recording an audio
version of each blog post using a free program from http://audacity.org with which you can record your audio ready for your podcast. You then add this podcast right to the corresponding written blog post using another free podcast resource from word press at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podcasting

Once you have the podcast completed and posted to your blog you have to manually submit the post to iTunes for consideration. The first post you submit should be a series of at least 3 podcasts on a chosen subject so that the iTunes staff have enough material to make an informed choice about the perceived value of the material. Submission and acceptance usually takes around 2 weeks on average so be patient. There are a few more hoops to be gone over in order to get your podcast channel up and running but the details are all available online at the itunes FAQ page and the terms and conditions pages of the site.

Happy podcasting in 2009.

I published this article today Wednesday 7th january 2009 because i have just published the same in an article at Ezinearticles.com. Sometime in the next few days I am going to upload this same article as a podcast to demonstrate how quickly podcasts can get listed in the search engines to prove the point of this post. Watch this space for more details

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Welcome to 2009.

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:10:20 +0000

Hello and welcome to yet another new year.

I would like to welcome each and every reader new and old a very warm and prosperous 2009.

Now 2009 should see a marked improvement on last year especially for those of us fortunate enough to be in an online business. Why you may well ask, and you should.

In 2008 the world began a rapid cataclysmic financial meltdown that has wiped some very famous names from the business world. Yet there has been a remarkable increase in web based business and online shopping is increasing at an unbelievable pace. There are numerous reasons for this change of pace such as more secure online websites, people are more comfortable with the online shopping concept and with the success of big names such as Amazon.com and eBay more people are aware of what shopping experiences there are online, so the profile of online shopping is only going to increase.

Now one key element in the expansion of the online business is one of overhead verses profit. With an online business the overhead is so small it is almost none existant as a business cost. It is so inexpensive to buy a domain and to host it that a single sale will often cover this cost for a whole year. Outsourcing the technical side is a wise move which is probably the single biggest cost to bear yet this can also be inexpensive depending on the needs of your business. Now where profit is concerned this can be huge and I really do mean huge with a capital H. Informational products and “how to” products are a goldmine as is software that automates or reduces workload etc. Which if priced competativelly can sell in large numbers at little or no cost to the site owner. Profit therefore can be insane, and often are!

2009 will be the year that major businesses witness a rebirth of fortune as global economies respond to the capital expenditure promises from the various governments around the world. This cash injection will see some resurgence in cash flow and the online world will be on the recieving end of quite a lot of that new cash. Sales will again exceed the best projections and I believe we are set for another record year. It will take the traditional business quite some time before the recovery is manifested in their bottomline and they have a little more pain to withstand over the next few months. Online will proceed as normal and I for one am thankful for that.

In a little side note to this post,

I have not posted much for around 4 weeks now because I was very busy setting up my latest website. All the pieces are almost there now and I intend to launch this new site sometime in mid January so please watch out for that and some special offers I will be making to those fortunate enough to get in early on that launch, lots of free stuff and special offers etc.

In the mean time have a great new year and i look forward to helping you in your endeavours online throughout 2009.

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Recession proof business

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Internet Marketing Is Recession Proof

When the economy goes south, be thankful for your computer, your DSL connection, and all you know about SEO, PPC and site design. One of the coolest aspects of Internet marketing is how resistant the process is to economic downturns. Hold on now before you call me out on that statement…allow me to explain.

Sure, plenty of the big sites will take a hit - no doubt about it. However, for the many one-man-shows out here (or one-woman shows!), broad economic problems do not have to mean troubled times. Never before in history have business owners enjoyed such flexibility. In hard times, online marketers can easily write the book on “going with the flow”.

Here’s why the Internet offers a far superior platform during hard times:

Imagine you own the local car dealership when the economy tanks. You are stuck with that business and are forced to simply “ride it out” when the economy slows. Of course you throw in some marketing bells and whistles…free oil changes and tires for life for example… and squeeze all you can out of the local market. However, there is only so much that can be done to convince economy skittish people to sign up for their $20,000 dream car when times get tough.

Likewise, an upscale clothing store will see many of its customers at Wal-Mart when the economy slows. Some niches will be harder hit than others, but one thing is almost certain: Brick and mortar businesses burdened with overhead will feel the pain.

Online entrepreneurs have an advantage however. We aren’t joined at the hip to any one business. If things go awry in one niche, for what ever reason, there are always others which smart marketers can jump into. Remember, even during hard times, there are still marketers making a LOT of money in the right niches. All an Internet entrepreneur has to do is retool a bit and go after those niches. Can you imagine the car dealer or clothing store owner switching gears during a downturn and building another business or two during those hard times? I don’t think so.

Even during down times, there are countless underdeveloped niches ripe for exploiting. Many of these seemed too small when times were good; now they can easily pull up the slack for savvy marketers. The risk for branching out is minimal. Domains are cheap, hosting is cheap, a new site can be thrown up in a matter of weeks if not days - nothing beats the opportunity of an Internet business in a questionable economy.

When the talking heads preach economic woes, be thankful you had the foresight to learn Internet marketing. Be thankful you aren’t looking over your shoulder for the layoff hammer to fall. Be thankful your business is all but free of overhead. Be thankful you control your dreams!

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SEO an introduction

admin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:07:04 +0000

As is usual with subjects relating to the online marketing industry the road to search engine optimisation (SEO) is a long and often treacherous journey which can boggle the greatest of minds. The subject is vast and ever changing and it has evolved as the internet has evolved. This alone makes the art of optimisation that much harder to implement and certainly harder to understand.

What is fortunate is that because it is so important a whole industry has evolved solely dedicated to this craft, which means that people have figured out some aspects of what works and what does not.

It would be frivolous of me to attempt to divulge all of the little foibles of SEO in a single post and to try would leave large and valuable holes in the knowledge of those who read this blog post long after we have all moved on. Therefore this will be the first of several posts relating to Search engine optimisation that will appear on this blog.

You can also check out my video on SEO

http://ttsvideoblog.com/2008/10/an-introduction-to-search-engine-optimisation-seo/

So in that knowledge let’s dig in.

Search Engine Optimisation is a phrase used to describe the process of improving the volume and quality of natural traffic to a web page from the search engines using keyword search terms. Basically the higher up the page ranks in the search engines the more visible the page becomes on Google and consequently the more visitors that are likely to visit that website due to its high ranking and overall visibility.

Now that sounds rather incongruous and undefined and in many respects that’s exactly right. However the requirements of the search engines is what drives SOE and every webmaster out there is trying to gain an edge in the ranking wars by trying to understand the mysterious Google algorithm. Unfortunately in a previous post that touched on this particular topic of organic website traffic, I explained how difficult it was to know what made up the individual components of that Google algorithm that would guarantee success.

So in essence, due to the nature of the Google code it is more productive to try small tweaks and small differences in website architecture that are known to make a difference than in trying to second guess the mathematics and mechanics involved in the Google algorithm.

There are so many parts to a website it is difficult to know where to start when it comes to optimising for the search engines.

However there are a few fundamentals that are important and will remain important for a considerable time to come.

Write your web page for People not the search engines. People are going to read the content so remember that.

Make the domain name relevant to the web page if possible.

Use a .com whenever possible.

Use two words or less in the domain.

Do not use hyphens or special characters in your domain.

Make sure every page of your entire site is structured with SEO in mind not just your home page.

Link to all pages in your site from the home page.

When you structure your link strategy make sure that no page on your site is more than 3 mouse clicks from the home page.

Over time establish links to other related websites and have them link to your site. Make those links quality links from established well received web sites. Poor links hurt your own site.

As you can see this subject is vast and complex but at the same time it makes sense. The search engines are trying to ensure that the person searching finds the most suitable material available based upon the words and phrases they enter into the search box. Therefore the more relevance your site has to the subject matter concerned the more likely your page will appear nearer the top of the search list of relevant sites for a particular search term. This is so important for the Natural search traffic and can double or even triple the number of visitors to a website, leading to increased sales and profit.

I have barely touched on this subject here today, but i will expand this topic to cover some specific strategies that work for SEO over the next few weeks.

Or if you are in need of this information now why not check out my Videoblog at http://ttsvideoblog.com

In the mean time have a good week.

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How to profit from a blog

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:34:04 +0000

Hi Kevin here with an interesting series on blogging for profit.

This will be the first post in a 3 part series on the big question of what makes a successful blog. Success measured of course based on the profit that is made from the blog.

So let’s get started.

The first key to the success of a blog site is that it has to target a group of people who are hungry for information of a specific nature. The choice of your niche is based upon this information and will determine your target audience so it must be chosen with extreme care. Get this wrong and you will make little or no profit at all..

Next your target group has to be a distinct group who all have the same or a similar set of problems. Problems that require a solution, or the group is looking to make a distinctive improvement in some aspect of their life. Furthermore, in a great niche, there is an overwhelming NEED for a solution that is so important that the group feels pain, yes you heard that right the group is in pain and looking for a solution. Now this pain can be anything from Financial, physical, or emotional but essentially any sort of dire need to alieviate a serious painful problem. The reasons why we target this particular client base is for the simple reason that people who are in pain are the people who will have the greatest need for a solution. That’s where your blog comes in. It’s no surprise that the world’s largest companies are Pharmaceuticals, who deal in products that relieve all manner of human suffering, because lets face it suffering sells probably better than the sex industry does because sex is based on desire which is a powerful motivator in itself but is far surpassed by the NEED of those who suffer.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a viable solution to whatever ails them, which is what marketing is all about, presenting a solution to a percieved problem where those who seek it can easily find that solution.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet than makes a decent profit for you to tap into. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who you sell it to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to your clients.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, competition is good for your business. Competition is a strong indicator that the niche is a profitable one and the stronger that competition is the more profit there obviously is in the niche. However, what you actually want is a little competition, but competition that you can outclass by the power of your marketing skills and by making a better site, providing better resolution to “the” problem and in a better way.

So to recap on this you are looking for a group of people who have an urgent need of help and sufficient numbers who search the internet for a viable solution to their problem. You also need to do some research to establish who your competition is and then to outclass them with some plain old fashioned relevent content.

Thats enough for today. In my next post I will continue on this theme and detail the other things a successful blog must have in order to be profitable.

So until the next time, have a great week.

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Blogging with a difference

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:35:02 +0000

Hi, Kevin here again with a slight deviation from my normal post.

Today I am going to share with you a software service I discovered only recently which has gotten me all excited and made me a little money at the same time, which is always good .

Blogging and in particular blogging for profit, has becomes ever more popular amongst online marketers, and even the CEO’s of large corporations are blogging to create brand awareness, especially in these tough economic times. Further to this we are seeing new tools being created to generate more Blog functionality and to automate a lot of the tedious routines that we have to do to get traffic and generate new leads etc.

With that in mind todays post is going to concentrate on a software service that I started using recently to try and target a few new niches without diverting my attention too far from my main blog here at Truetrafficsecrets.com.

In this post I’m going to talk about a relative newcommer in terms of the Blogging niche, Firepow Blogging Software,

I have come to like this because having tried a few Content Management Systems also based on the WP platform such as Semiologic pro and Expert wordpress I find this one to be a whole league above these other services especially in
terms of it’s flexibility and just the overall ease in which it achieves my three primary aims for my blog:-

1.Creating a blog with all the right plugins already installed and ready to go.

2. Managing or maintaining the blog and ensure the plugins work seamlessly and updates are done when available.

3. drive lots of traffic to the blog which results in sales from the on-page advertisements.

It was hard to know where to start with this post primarily because I don’t, as a rule, endorse products on my blogs to any great extent but in this case I decided to review the service and see if others would agree with this or offer a less flatering observation.

O.K its time to discuss this all singing all dancing software and why I like it over the others that I have used. To give you a brief overview of how it works…

Firepow is like the other ones i have mentioned and is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse. Yes it really is that simple.

If you’ve used Wordpress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party
plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get hopelessly lost in all the plugins and potential feature additions that can be made. I have lost track of how many times I have tried to manually upgrade or enhance my blog and almost destroyed it instead. It’s so confusing sometimes to get this right.

So the first thing that I like about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work already. The have installed into the software the best 50 or so plugins from around the web to add maximum functionality without creating layout or theme distortion so your site looks clean and professional right off the bat. You just have to concentrate on the content (well not really).

That’s a great feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more - the software actually does that part for you too - so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added - which saves you time and prevents website stress.

Whats so mindblowing however is that you can create a fully customised blog complete with your own images, colour preferences, style the whole works from right inside the software. No more trawling WP looking for a unique theme, or buying one only to change it later on at more expense, just go right inside Firepow and create a unique theme yourself, tweak it play with it and set it just right before you go live. You can even fully optimise for SEO and design the site with your adsense codes and all sorts of other neat stuff.

Whats more is that within the site you can create multiple blogs in multiple niches and then Manage the whole lot via a management tool. Before even getting into the Wordpress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search
rankings of all your sites, and a task manager that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when that maintenence is due.

But absolutelly the best thing of all happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have unimaginable control over your content. You make a post and then automatically have the software pull relevent images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically
building backlinks to your site) to your posts… and thats mearly breaking the surface on the capabilities this software has.

How much would you be willing to pay for being able to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and loads more besides. There is nothing else out there that is anywhere near as good. This really is a blog on Fire

O.K I have plugged this for all its worth and now the best thing to do is show you the power and abilities this thing has so you can evaluate it yourself. So go check it out and let me know what you think.

check out firepow here.

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

Have a great week and watch for more Truetrafficsecrets later this week.

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Technorati Tags: blogging for profit, content management systems, niches, online marketers, page advertisements, software service, wordpress

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How the search engines work.

admin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:43:45 +0000

Hi Kevin here with a new post series on how the search engines work.

Yes we all think we know more than we do and what you learn here you probably
never considered before.

In real terms there are 3 major players in the Search Engine field.

1. Google

2. Yahoo.

3. MSN

Outside of these 3 there are bit players with degrees of accuracy but they are not really large players and essentially for us are an irrelevance.

AOL has a search capability but it draws its search material directly from Google so they are considered essentially part of that search engine albeit a separate entity from it.

Ask.com is all but dead as a search engine. It does not even index pages anymore so is slowly rotting in cyberspace and will not survive much longer.

Now the first thing you have to consider before you try to get indexed and get to that coveted No.1 spot on page 1 of Google is how insignificant you and you business are to these three Monster companies.

They don’t give two nanoseconds of their time to consider you in any form. Their only criterion for them is to satisfy the customer who is making the search. You don’t warrant a thought. The customer is their Money target and their satisfaction is paramount. So the second you step out of line is the second you go from No.1 to nowhere, not seen and basically dead.

So before you try and apply your pathetic mentality against these companies remember this, they have an army and I do mean an army of professor grade PHD’s whose sole existence is to make sure that Customer 1 is satisfied. So do not try and pit your wits or your measly few bucks thinking that your killer method of manoeuvring will escape their attention. Cheaters never win and the end result for you will be pain and financial loss on a scale you cannot afford.

So now it’s actually more cost effective to ensure that our online working methods are ethical so we don’t risk a cataclysmic shutdown of our site because we have been accused of SPAM activity. Recovery from these accusations may not always be possible and the damage to our reputation is just not worth it in the short or long term.

Now a search engine determines our site content and relevance by using “crawlers” which are basically robots to index pages on the web. Their job is to search your page follow links on your page to see where the end and to check the page relevance in terms of the search term used by the client.

What a search engine does not do is index every single thing on your webpage, such as Flash video or PDF files or office files. The crawlers will not follow “nofollow” links or broken links. Instead thesearch engine indexes WORDS specifically words placed in particular places on your webpage. Such as the words that make up your page “Title tag” the Meta tags and then the H1 to H6 sub header title tags. Links are also important and they follow these to see where they end and add a Value for those to your quality score.

So what this means for you is that the SERP (search engine results page) that is displayed for a given search term will search its cache and the web, plus check your title, meta, H1 - H6 tags check the page for relevance
for content and follow all the internal and external links then deliver a result in around 0.66 of a second. So your page is effectively ranked against all the others with similar attributes in relation to the search in
less time than it takes to actually say the word “Ranked”.

The SERP’s that are displayed for the three majors are all broadly similar in style.

Google will display around 3PPC (pay-per-click) listings at the top of their list which will be pink
shaded and distinct from the organic (natural) search traffic below that. On the right hand side of the page will be more PPC advertisements. Google also shows a vertical search list such as video’s and maps at the top of their SERP. It is not unusual to find Video clips interspersed within the organic search
material, which is a relativelly new development driven by demand from sites like YouTube and
other social media. However even if your video is at No.1 it is still at least 3 clicks away from your site.

Yahoo will display 2 or maybe 3 PPC advertisements at the top, with the organic stuff below and more PPC to the right side of the page. Yahoo’s PPC is shaded light Blue to distinguish it from the rest of the search material. Yahoo also shows alternative potential listing titles and the vertical search terms inside the page header.

MSN will display their PPC advertisements at the top organic below and to the Lower right and a related search list top right. PPC is also shaded blue. Again the vertical search forms part of the header for the SERP

So in summary, your site is insignificant in the great scheme, SEO matters because content matters and all three of the largest players all paly the same game and trying to outwit them is foolish.

In my next post in this series I will concentrate on Links and the value they provide and how ranking can be affected by the links you have.

So until the next time have a good one.

Kevin

Twittering away at social media.

admin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:08:55 +0000

Social media is everywhere these days and is increasingly
being used to drive traffic to websites and online businesses.

Social media is one of the most powerful FREE methods of getting organic
website traffic that exists today.

Site like Youtube
and facebook are
priceless areas that we can exploit for our marketing and because there are
millions of subscribers and groups on these sites the possibilities are
endless. Most people tend to stick with thier friends lists they create on
facebook, YouTube being video based takes more work and is generally utilised
by those more akin to budding movie directors or people who share a particular
passion, as well as marketing pro’s promoting thier businesses. But there
are lots more of these sites out there and they are growing at an exponential
rate.

Social media sites as far as marketing goes are just sensational. The explosion
of the social media site has been going on now for around 4 years and has been
so dramatic that most social media website are rapidly climbing the Alexa
rankings and most achieve the higher numbers like 20 - 30 very quickly indeed.

That essentially means that these sites get more visitors per day than some
brand websites such as CNN or the New York times do. Companies that have been
around for over 50 years or more with established credentials are getting less
than 5% of the traffic from say, myspace or Bebo.

So this shows the extent of the exposure that your product could get if you use
these social media sites correctly.

One of the most overlooked of the media sites for Marketers
is a little relativelly new one called Twitter

Now Twitter is a very simple concept of telling the world
the answer to one question.

“What are you doing now”

Whilst this is in appearance very limiting it is also very
liberating. It is in essence microblogging and like blogging in general it is
useful for contact purposes and to generate a following. It is also used to create relationships and
partnerships and to just link up in general with like minded people who share
your business niche or interest.

Because it limits your post length to 140 characters you don’t
have to agonise for hours about the message or Post that you upload. Its quick,
easy and sweet. No information overload and no cliched sales pitch, save for
your website address.

I recently discovered a plugin for my wordpress blog that
just takes this whole thing to a new level.

Tweetmyblog
is a fantastic plugin that allows you to
link your wordpress blog posts to your twitter account. So each post to either
site is shown in the other. Now given
the limits of 140 characters your tweet (twitterpost) is not going to display your
blog post in its entirity, but it will
show the title and your URL.

This is a very powerful advertising tool for marketing
anything you want to on line. An affiliate program, a website or blog post or
just how you are feeling.

O.K thats enough about social media for today. I will cover
other sites and how to exploit these over the coming weeks.

Have a great day.

Kevin

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Technorati Tags: facebook, marketers, marketing, Social Media, Twitter, website traffic

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Traffic secrets

The power of podcasts.

The Power of podcasts

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Welcome to 2009.

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Recession proof business

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SEO an introduction

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How to profit from a blog

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Blogging with a difference

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How the search engines work.

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Twittering away at social media.

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