You hear about sites that take off and get thousands of users overnight, before they know it the owners are getting millions of unique users hitting their site and the world is their oyster. Okay, now let’s talk about everyone else, the 99% of the population of bloggers, podcasters and video producers. Unless you own a successful brand or property with thousands of dedicated fans, you’re starting at ground zero like myself.

Prepare yourself for many nights and weekends working on your personal brand and website. Making money on advertising occurs when you can show advertisers “impressions” on your properties and your new property may be receiving under twenty visitors a day even if you’re pushing one to three daily pieces of content; it’s a slow process. Video bloggers are worse off because all their awesome content is unsearchable–it’s not textual. They’ve got to work hard, craft great headline articles and start supporting blogs and articles to support their effort to bring in organic searches. It’s possible but it takes time.

I’ve found very few working shortcuts to getting seen as a video podcaster and audio podcaster. There are no fast ways to be number-one in a search engine or ranking on the top podcasts in a podcast directory aside from paid advertising or getting a web celebrity to pimp your show. You can setup twitter accounts, facebook fan pages and accounts on all the trendy social network systems on the Internet and that won’t make your show popular until you understand how to use the tools most effectively. You can buy consulting for a hefty fee or do what I did: follow a few other brands that are doing it successfully and mimic their behavior, that’s not a shortcut, that’s an educational experience.

Spend less time looking for the shortest route to success and spend more time pumping out quality content, watching others performing social networking techniques and being an all-around normal guy or gal with the drive and passion for success. Let people know about what you’re doing and why you’re confident it’s a successful venture.

Trust In Yourself

When producing audio and video content, there is only one person you can trust to get the job done: yourself.

When most of your salary is being paid in blood, sweat and tears you’re going to find very few people want to work with you in the effort. Unless you can find co-hosts, guest audio speakers or a video crew of dedicated passionate individuals, you’re going to be doing most of your work alone. Creating a great audio show is only as good as the participants in the show. You may have the best idea in the world along with a great chemistry with your fellow podcasters but if they decided to leave, lose interest or “no show” for a few episodes, where does that leave yours how and your audience? Are they going to work those same nights and weekends to promote the production you’ve all been working so hard on?

I’ve found the most reliable thing to do is build a list of friends that are comfortable on camera (or on a mic) and get as many to show up to the shows as possible. Don’t trust any one individual to have the same drive and interests as yourself but, as a whole, you’ve got enough folks to always make the show. Having a pool of individuals to call upon (much like they do on This Week in Tech), then you can always have a successful broadcast.

Lessons of the day: Only trust yourself to get the job done and plan on working your ass off to get there. Don’t hire SEO experts, social media professionals and all that crap; learn the techniques yourself using articles and free editorials on the Net. Teach yourself how to be successful, don’t expect others to do it for you.

If you live near a big city, it’s usually easier to find some folks in the industry you’re trying to dominate with video and audio content. For instance, I’m working to build a cocktail show from the ground up and I’ve build a good roll of PR folks, industry leaders and distributors who are ready and willing to send me content in the form of spirit samples. They’re dedicated to your cause because they’re hoping you can show their products off in your content. This is a good give-and-take relationship but that’s about where the line is drawn and you’re still only a name.

A launch event last week in Boston gave me the opportunity to shake a few hands. I’m 45-minutes out of Boston but making the trip was well worth the time and effort. I met up with some folks I’ve talked with in the industry and build some new relationships with folks that I didn’t know existed before the event.

Meeting folks in person allows you to establish a stronger relationship. Hitting parties and industry gatherings will give you new exposure to journalists and bloggers to which you can swap “business cards.” Saying, “hi I’m Derrick from everydaydrinkers.tv” isn’t good enough; do you want them to remember you among all the other party gatherers? If so, you’ll want to toss them your card with contact information on it. After the event they’ll head home and toss all the business cards they gathered on the coffee table for later viewing. You want to be part of that list otherwise they’re not going to remember “that guy” they met at the show.

A week after the event the e-mails will start to come in saying, “nice meeting you last week, love your website.” Some folks may have never heard of you before while others could have seen you in passing while working in the industry. Of course, you’ll know a few people from “chatting” over e-mail or Twitter direct-messages but now there is a greater connection: you’re a real person. The experience of a five minute chat at an event is all that is needed to begin to grow a new contact. Next time you hit an event you may see them again and can shake with a familiar grasp.

During the event you may pickup a few new folks that have never heard of your show. This goes back to my preaching about building your relationships one person at a time. If you give away one business card at an event and they take a look at your website, you’ve established a new potential fan. Even public relations folks in the industry can become fans of your content for more than just pimping their products. I’ve got many PR agencies that watch every show I produce because they like the content, quality and it’s relevant to their industry. PR agents are typically passionate about the industry they’re in, this is what keeps them going to work each day and your content brings them closer to their own world.

Many folks may live far away from the big city and find it much more challenging to get out to launch parties, meet up and all the good human gathering that occurs in our social circles. For those folks (much like myself) plan to hit two events a year that have large gatherings where you can do a full year of meetings in a single day. Make yourself known, stand out, print up some business cards and spread the love with as many people as you can shake hands.

It may cost you $30 to head to staples to print out a few hundred basic business cards. If it has your domain, name and contact information on the card then you’ve done your job right for very little cash out of pocket. It is important to make those connections and let a small group of folks in your industry know you’re a human and not just a voice. Who knows, you may establish some great relationships beyond a simple ‘tweet’.

Looking through iTunes, I can find tons of untapped niche markets that could bring old advertisers to new media. Want to test the waters before you start down the road of video podcasting? Start a blog.

This sounds like old school marketing but this is your petri dish to start building relationships with companys and PR agencies. If you become a small “professional” in your field of blogging, from yarn, wood, tools, clocks to gardening you’ll start receiving e-mails asking to post reviews, news and events for people in the industry. Once you grab a few PR agencies and establish relationships with them, they’ll send you press releases, product demonstrations and perhaps hook you up with interviews with company owners.

As you build your reputation over the course of three to six months you can start experimenting with some video content as you roll your blog into a vlog. Now, you can push out new shows and begin to build a small viewership of a few dozen or a few hundred downloads. Once you’ve got your fan base started, four months after producing some video shows and providing evidence that people care enough to come back and watch your episodes, you can start pitching to sponsors.

Some people will say you need 1,000 to 2,000 views a day to get sponsorship but that’s highly dependent on your industry. You can get sponsorship with as low as 450 views per show if you price it right and provide content that’s so niche and specific that your viewers actually desire the products of your sponsor.

Using a $30.00 CPM ($30 per 1,000 viewers) model, you can sell a sponsor a full episode of your video show for around $12 (considering you don’t have 1,000 viewers yet) and still get them interested. Why? Because $12 to gain 450 highly focused eyes on a brand is huge value to anyone that understands new media. Plus, when six months down the line their ad is still in the old video and new viewers typically drive through old archives to catch up and see what you have covered in the past. Their old sponsorship grows with the audience of your show, long after they paid the measly $12.

Companies will spend millions of dollars to reach 2% of a large pool of viewership. You’re just asking for $12 to gain 100% attention of the viewership pool, sounds tempting, no? A single episode will not build huge brand awareness and your sponsor knows this; they will buy a block of episodes to test the waters. Realistically, without at least three to four episodes on your show there is no way to track the impact. So, even if they decide not to renew, they’re probably already in it for $36 to $48 which goes into your pocket for your hard work.

It is hard work. Don’t expect to toss your mug on a camera and get people to throw money your way. You’re going to have to prove to them that you’re energetic, consistent, trustworthy and have the passion to get the job done. Of course, $12 an episode isn’t going to make you rich, but everyone has to start somewhere.

You start at the bottom and work your way to the top. If you think there is an easier way, show us. Otherwise, get out there and produce great content and watch your community grow.

Success is really what you want to make it, if you want to be the next big social networking scene than do it, but you’ve got a lot of challengers. Or, you can just try to be something unique and different all together. Niche markets exist for all areas of life and they’re going to draw a smaller audience than a broad topic but have less competition.

You can be a success in a small demographic more so than you can in a huge demographic. Much the way I chose a college, I could go to a smaller college and be known as someone or I could go to a huge college and be yet another number in a classroom of hundreds. I wanted to stand out without having to break through the thousands of peers. Was I looking for less of a challenge? No, I was looking to be seen for who I was: an individual with desires and motivations in a timely manner.

I’ve found the Internet follows much the same social structures. By picking an area to blog, talk or video yourself you’ll soon become somewhat of an expert in the field: no certification required. If you take it seriously, you’ll learn a ton of information along the way as you prepare your show notes, blog articles and news reporting. You’ll establish a small community of like-minded individuals that, hopefully, enjoy the content you are providing. You’ve got your niche and you’re ready to take it to the next level.

Now, you can establish relationships in your area of “expertise.” When you seek advertisers or look to establish partnership with others in your industry you’ll find plenty of great opportunities. If you run a show about beer cozy’s, you’ll be able to affiliate with folks making custom cozies, labeled cozies or beer products expanding beyond the cozy. You may not reach Coors Brewing Company’s attention, but who cares? You’ll find plenty of smaller businesses and individuals trying to make it in the industry, like yourself, by grouping together with like-minded folks.

You may find a person that can produce custom glassware, a shop looking for some promotions on their home brew accessories or small/local cozy manufacturers. One by one your circle of relationships grow and each one makes your brand stronger than the last. But, why would they want to work with you?

Because your community, the viewers of your content, want to know what you have to say. They’re not random readers, they are people that are interested in the topic you’re working in. They are the perfect eyes and ears to promote products and advertising; the industry is learning this quickly. Why bid on a google keyword “cozy” hoping someone will find your ad, click on it and be interested enough to buy it from you. Furthermore, what if they’re looking for a “cozy place” to vacation? Wrong audience.

However, had that cozy been talked about on a show by a host that’s passionate about the topic, someone you can relate to on a personal level (as often happens with viewers) then the game changes. Your community will get to know you, even if you’ve not met them all or communicated with them. You see this behavior all the time with celebrities who have tons of fans talking to them as if they’re their best friends – complete strangers! If you run a website, video podcast or audio show your fans will feel much the same, only in smaller quantities and with less insane fervor.

Do you trust a google ad or the word of someone you’ve grown to watch on internet shows, audio shows or a frequented blog? Most people won’t click a banner ad and those that do may still not purchase the product. You and your brand are more important than ever to these advertisers looking to spend their cash for the “biggest bang for the buck.”

In this down economy advertisers want to make more with less. Focused niche markets are a great place to experiment with little cash in hopes for a big return. You start a website about tea and write about tea for two months and you’ll probably find tea producers asking to ship you products so you can review them on your website or Internet show. You get free products, they get virtually free advertising and your community gets to learn about a product they may never have heard about otherwise.

It’s a win win situation. You win relationships and you win great content for your brand.

Podcasters track their downloads, watch for trends and do all they can to promote their show. That might be using SEO style techniques to get brand awareness in google to social networking with friends and strangers. If you google the keywords: gaming podcast you’ll notice my property: gamingpodcast.net arrives near first if not right at the top (depends on the day). Was that a coincidence? No, not really. Now google drinking podcast and you’ll have similar results: my properties arrive first.

That was key number one: free advertising via google for people looking for podcasts related to gaming and drinking (not always going hand-in-hand of course). Two years went by with almost no user feedback in my gaming podcast, but each episode was going from ten downloads a week to twenty, and thirty and fifty then one hundred and so one… but who was listening? Silence.

I was #1 on my google search terms which brought an expanding audience but still very little in terms of feedback. The first major barrier is finding a topic that elicits a lot of feedback. The drinking podcast receives very little feedback and I’m not expecting it to grow too much in the next year. The show is more for entertainment value and learning but doesn’t ask a lot of questions. In 20+ episodes we received, probably, three e-mails about the show. Not a stunning reception.

But, the audience continues to grow, the RSS feed statistics rise and we get more downloads minutes after posting than ever before. For this podcast I have relied on my instincts as to which direction to take each episode – a drinking podcast doesn’t bring a lot of feedback but if the audience rises instead of falls I know I’m doing it right. If you’re driving in the dark and never hit a tree than you know you’re doing some pretty awesome driving.

The gaming podcast was a personal challenge, how do I grow an audience of interactive gamers. A few guidelines that have worked well for me:

Build a Blog

If you don’t have a website as a landing page for your podcast audience than you need to get one yesterday! WordPress is a great launching point because you can get a blog up and running in under an hour with a comment system and spam protection. This will be where you’ll post your show notes with open community comments.

Initially, you’ll want to post content on your blog to build up content on the site and get google to start chewing on it. If your podcast is about cats, you’ll want to blog about cats, post silly cat images, link to cat related websites and click the links to hit their site and bump their referral logs (so the author sees you). “Work the room” with people and their cat interests and let them know you’ve got a website and audio/video podcast. Post on your blog three times a day for at least three weeks to build up a bankroll of content.

I used this post method on everydaydrinkers.com and started receiving alcohol from PR people to review along with accessories. Heck, I even got a portable beer pong table because, with all my editorials, I became an expert in the drinking industry. Not too shabby as a method to start a landing site for my audio show, eh?

Setup Forums

Setup some forums, if you’re using wordpress I suggest Simple:Press from YellowFish. They will link to the user accounting system within WordPress so commentors that sign up on your blog can post forum topics immediately. Post forum topics, get your friends to post some topics and populate the forums. Don’t expect to build a 1,000 user audience overnight or even in the first few years. But, if you make it available someone may use it and you can use that as feedback for your show.

Contact Us and E-Mail

Don’t post your e-mail address on your blog if you don’t want a lot of spam – but you can setup a contact us form using WordPress and the Secure and Accessible Contact Form module. This will give your audience another way to contact you. If you’re creating a podcast you can use your e-mail in the audio since spammers aren’t that smart.

Promote Your Podcast

You can promote your podcast in a number of easy and affordable ways. After you’ve got three episodes you can submit it to iTunes. You can google “podcast directories” and create an account on all the directories then submit your RSS feed. I suggest tying your RSS feed to Feedburner so you can track statistics in one of the more industry standard methods. Each directory that accepts your podcast will also automatically link back to your website because it’s part of the standard iTunes complaint RSS feed (which Feedburner will standardize for you). That increases the chances google will rank you well.

You can also use a very low cost advertising method as I have done for my shows at ProjectWonderful. For a few cents a day you can splash your podcast banners on all types of sites that focus on the demographic you want to capture. That might be personal blogs, business, food and drinks, lifestyle, home gardening and many others. Don’t expect people to find you, find them first and do it on the cheap.

Ask Questions

There are a few ways to get your listeners to submit feedback. You can ask questions in the podcast that you think people may have an opinion on or you can discuss things that people just cannot afford to let pass, usually dealing with politics, international affairs or anything you’ve had past heated discussions about on a personal level. Some folks will go out of their way to demand feedback by just being over the top controversial, you’ll get hate mail but it is, in fact, feedback.

Do It

Do setup a website, do keep the content fresh, do post consistent episodes on a regular schedule and give your audience many outlets to respond to your podcast you’ll get some traction. We received roughly four comments on our Gaming Podcast until we setup gamingpodcast.net and built out a forum. and comment system

Many people are shy and don’t want to compose an e-mail to a stranger. Others are paranoid and don’t want their email being spread around. Some folks post on forums on a daily bases and find that the natural way to comment while others will blindly and anonymously post in response to a blog entry. Feedback comes in many forms and everyone seems to use their own technique. This is why we choose to include forum posts, blog responses and e-mails in our “feedback” section of our gaming podcast. Some users may not have submitted it thinking it would make the show, but we pick and choose to make sure gamers realize they too can talk back.

At first, you may have your own friends write in or simply make up questions from people that don’t even exist. Perhaps that “imaginary” writer has something controversial to say and it could elicit more feedback from real users. Once you start a trend others will feed into it and chat on a normal bases.

Lastly, you may notice that every podcast has its own set of responders. From Buzz Out Loud form CNET to The Daily Giz Wiz by Leo Laporte to GameSpots podcasts and language learning podcasts, there is a set of “regulars” that write in constantly and keep the show interesting. Everybody needs a few regulars, just like a bar or a restaurant — you’ll know them by name and they’ll add a new dynamic personality to the show.

Once you’ve got a few regulars consider your job done. Most of your audience is listening to an audio podcast because its a nice passive way to get through their day. They don’t need to write in to show their support because their downloads and impressions are left on the show through the shows yearly growth.

Have you ever called into an FM radio show? Probably not.

You can find yourself out of favor with Google. We found this out at casualgamerchick.com when we received an e-mail from google stating the site was being removed from google because it violated the terms of services….

What?

Yeah, a day or two ago we got hacked and the site theme was modified to include hidden links to sites that broke the terms of service (and most moral values). A day after our notification our organic searches went from 800+ a day to 0.

Google has no warning messages, just a standard message that even considers what occurred as a problem, “This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.”

They are very efficient about bring your traffic to a screaming halt and losing any ad revenue you make. We’re still waiting to see how long it ‘really’ takes to be re-included into their index. They send you a link where you can plead your case and ask to be re-included–they say it can take up to 30 days but sites on the Net seem to have folks getting back in within three days. We’re hoping it’s closer to three than to thirty.

Lesson learned. A few other sites I help run also were hacked but I fixed them before they were found by google, but a site that gets constantly scanned by google because of it’s great content is the site that will be de-listed first (go figure).

Although I don’t agree, I believe you should get at least a 3-day advanced warning to fix the issue, there isn’t much you can do against the mega-giant Google; you need google rank.

Here are some lessons you’ll want to keep in handy if you’re a blogger with a site that has mild to great traffic:

• Monitor Security Advisories: Take them seriously, don’t wait until later to do the updates because later can be too late.
• Perform Weekly Site Audits: You might be small but you should practice the work of the big boys, try to go through error logs, access logs or at least view your sites source in a browser once a week to check for hidden links.
• Perform Weekly Backups: Run a backup and put the backup off-site each week (or more). Try to keep a site with up-to-date content staged on a secondary hidden site that you can quickly ‘diff’ and repair the changes. If you’re hacked this can save you hours of hunting for the problems.
• Minimal Plugins: Only take the needed plugins for your CMS. If you don’t utilize them, disable them. Every plugin is an exploit waiting to happen and increases the chances of SQL injections and other badness.

Hopefully it won’t happen to you, however, the more popular your site is the more likely you’re going to be subject to an attack. Hackers don’t care if they only get links to their site from your hacked blog for a few days before your site is destroyed. It’s unfortunate people exist that have this type of attitude and lack of caring for others but it’s not going to change anytime soon so be prepared.

If you’ve been de-listed, read up on google’s help center.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

More than likely you’re not breaking any news stories but you are probably providing content that’s informative, interesting and well crafted. You can write the best blog content in the world, but if you’re site is hideous to look at you’ll probably never get anyone reading the content. Just as the best pie won’t be tasted if it smells like dirty feet, the best blog won’t be read if it’s an eye sore.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a world class graphic designer to build a nice blog layout. If you’re using a wordpress blog you can find plenty of high quality themes to get your point across, if you’re using Drupal you’ll find a huge supply of pre-created themes. Every great content management system has a theme installation process so you can find classy themes by inspiring artists free of charge and all it takes is a few clicks to make it happen.

When building a blog it’s best to provide a two or three column layout so your text can be fit into a smaller area of space. Nobody wants to read a sea of text, they want something managed, organized and easy to read. Many of us are used to reading editorial “columns” or articles in a magazine or newspaper so you want to provide the same format to keep your readers feeling comfortable about your text. This starts with making columns in your blog and gives you an area to provide advertising space, categories and other site links.

A light colored background may be easier on the eyes and avoid additional strain on your reader. Your audience won’t be happy if their always straining their eyes trying to read your important content and, believe it or not, there are other sites with important content with light colored backgrounds… if you want to keep your readers coming back to your site make them feel at home.

“Several light-on-dark sites look fantastic for a few seconds or even a minute. I just find actually reading articles on them very straining on my eyes, and I hate the way they linger on the retina when I look away from my screen.” (456bereastreet)

There are plenty of examples of sites that can invert text with white text and black backgrounds but a site that is primarily about content in the form of writing is probably not one of them. Reading a two paragraph product description isn’t the same as reading a blog novel or travelers journal. Keep that in mind when you wrap a theme around your writing.

You’ll find a variety of different themes, all accomplish different tasks and explain their content differently. When choosing your theme ask yourself if you could see it looking more like The New York Times or WalMart–both styles have a purpose but accomplish it with different color combinations and themes.

If you’re at a loss for which to choose, stick with a white background with black text and work from there. Plus, you can embed images into your site which have a white background to them without looking out of place.

Some people try to boost their site quickly by buying links to high page rank sites which they must maintain for months before google will recognize them as real. Nothing is more useless than buying a few links for a month while google hasn’t even noticed the link or considered it significant, why waste your money?

Most great sites on the web have grown naturally, even google itself started out small and grew over the years. Blogging isn’t an instant path to big money, it’s going to take time and patience. Work a schedule trying to achieve a few referrals a week for a few months and see what happens. If you’re building great content others will link to you without even requesting and you’ll get some low ranked links without problem.

As your site grows in size, content and rank it will appear more frequently (we hope!) in google and other search engines and new users will see it and link to it. You’ll probably find yourself in a few blog indexers and aggregators too, which is nice for a little linky linky.

When building back links on social websites and networks make sure you’re not wasting your time linking to sites that have the “nofollow” directive in their anchor tags to your site. A good example is reddit and stumbleupon.com both of which are nice for minor flash crowed traffic for a few days but neither will allow google to follow the links to your site. The “no follow” directive tells google to not follow the link to the other destination. A good way to tell, post your stuff where you’re trying to and view the source; if the source has a “no follow” link then don’t bother attempting to use that source for link back activities.

That’s not to say many of those sites aren’t worth a bit of flash crowd traffic to see if anyone finds your content interesting. Maybe you’ll get a few RSS subscribers out of your effort. It’s good not to hunt for general link backs, hunt for people that may find your content interesting no matter what avenue it is.

I’ve found blinklist offers a good bookmarking tool that links back to your site correctly and has one or two aggregator tools that people use to build ‘recent blinks’ and such, this gives you even more link backs. You can also try a site like Jaiku, which builds your “social presence” on the Net. With Jaiku you can setup RSS’s from your blog and it will post them into your presence which will be linked back to your site very quickly. Jaiku, recently acquired by Google, seems to have a high rank and usually appears before my own site in google when searching for my own article names!

Jaiku has been hard to get into for new users since the google acquisition so you may have to try for delicious to bookmark and create back links to your website(s). You can try on Facebook but if you only have one or two people on your friends list you probably won’t get too many clicks. Thus far I’ve found many of the social bookmarks have more value in link backs than actual clicks to your site. In a month my basic delicious bookmarks may net me 10 clicks to my site from random users, is that worth using daily for blogging when it requires you to manually click “bookmark” and enter some data about your article? Again, depends if anyone digs (pun intended) your delicious links.

Slow and steady wins the race, get your links but take your time. Aggression buys you flash crowds, maybe, but organic searching is free marketing, flash crowds only last a few days and you’ll be back to very few users again.

Now, those widgets may slowly get better ranked in google if they’re truly unique, however my experience in video games shows that it’s too popular to rank in many search engines on page one or two of the results. So, this may or may not work out for you and your widgets. The “standard practice,” today, is to blog daily to show google you’re serious about content and providing it to the masses.

Therefore, I learned to blog on my own e-commerce site to provide new press releases, personal reviews of video games and just rant about the industry. For the first year I blogged once a day at least to gain keywords I wanted, making sure to blog about my own products as much as possible (and linking to them). Then, one day, someone put one of my content-rich articles on digg.com…

You want to see how fast an article can be marked as spam? Get 30+ diggs and hit the homepage and all of a sudden…silence. Users flamed through comments and marking the article as spam. Why? It was an article that apparently had value and merit in the industry and it had enough diggs to hit the homepage.

Because social diggers and other anonymous internet users are fickle and have bad attitudes about much of the stuff they find on the Internet. The fact that the article was from an e-commerce site raised eyebrows with thoughts of “you’re pushing your own products through digg, you spammer.” In reality, I wasn’t even the person that put it on digg to begin with yet I’m being yelled at as a spammer? It doesn’t take long to realize you’re article/site is on digg because the “digg effect” is substantial and potentially destructive to your website and bandwidth.

You’ll have better luck on StumbleUpon.com for trying to spread your information than a social news site like digg. People love great content but they don’t like the fact that they think they were duped into coming to the site to make a purchase. We’ve grown so used to spam, lies, tricks, deception and fraud that we cannot stand the idea of liking content on a page that may also sell products.

Readers are far more used to advertising and affiliations around the site content than they are knowing the overall theme of the site is to sell. In other words, if you don’t work hard enough to ‘trick’ them they’ll drop your site in a ball of flames and rants. Had the site been bundled with affiliations and embedded popup links it wouldn’t have been battered by the public because we’re so used to a daily dose of advertising.

Moral of the story, watch what you do when blogging on an e-commerce website, if you want to provide rich content it might be easier to start up a WordPress blog and link back to your site when you want to bring users closer to your products. It’s really just a “front” for the real site but it keeps whiners at bay.