“How do you write your articles?” A question that I was asked various times and I thought that I had to write an article about it and share its answer with you guys. It’s very healthy for any blogger and her/his blog to set a certain criteria/routine of how they’re going to create content for their blogs. Personally I follow some steps in every article I write that I think are “a-must” for every article, there are other steps I do with some articles only. Before listing these steps or things I do, I would like to say that with time these steps turn into a habit.

1- Collect Ideas:

Whenever an idea pops into my mind, I just write it down either on a notepad or on my iPhone notes! Whenever I decide to write, I just take a look at my notepad and a lot of topics will be waiting for me there. This activity also helps you in bulk writing, which is the best thing any blogger could do!

2- Summarize before going into details:

After choosing a topic to write about; I start by listing all the main points that the article will evolve around. After listing all the main points, I start writing about each one separately and add some intro text and closure if needed.

3- Do some research:

While writing my articles I have to do some research on the topic itself, I have to validate my knowledge before sharing it with others. I am not saying go steal information from other writers, but at least to make sure that what you are saying is true, valid, and is adding benefit and value to your readers.

4- Professional proof reading:

After I finish writing my articles, I always share them with my wife, who is an English Copywriter originally, to proof read it, fix all my grammatical and spelling mistakes and re-phrase some of the sentences where needed. It is really important to have someone professional to proof read your articles, you should be aware of spelling and grammar mistakes that could make some of your readers lose trust in you or just not give your articles the importance that they deserve!

5- Read it one more time:

After having your article proof read, you should go over it one more time in order to make sure that there are no spelling or contextual mistakes after it has been adjusted by the proof reader. By reading it for the last time you will also be able to make sure that it has a complete message, that it’s relevant and adds value to the reader.

This is how I usually write my articles, how do you write yours? Do you have any specific criteria which you follow when writing your articles or do you write them immediately onto WordPress editor and publish them directly?

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Now after 2010 has started and almost everyone has set his goals and objectives that they want to achieve in this year, how are you going to work them?

First of all, if you haven’t yet set any goals for this year; it is highly recommended that you do in order to start your journey towards your goals.

Now after you have your goals set and written, you should not keep them as a private property or something that you don’t want anybody to know about, in the contrary, you should share them with your friends, colleagues and with the public. Yes, sharing your goals with others will highly motivate you in achieving them either by being advised or by getting feedback on your goals or by simply being ashamed of not achieving them so you work harder in doing so. I do believe that this activity works and I have tried it personally.

I consider myself a Goal Oriented person rather than being Task Oriented, since I love to set a goal that I want to reach in a certain period of time, regardless the procedure and the task I go through to achieve this goal! Since I am not a full-time blogger, while I sometimes can dedicate 5 hours or more a day for my blog there are other days where I can’t even afford an hour for it. Which honestly makes me sad but it’s a challenge as well, I will take it to the next level and be a full-time blogger some day. It’s just a matter of time.

You have to always keep your goals in front of your eyes, keep looking at them and recognize how far you are from reaching them! Moreover, you should also review them every quarter of the year, just in case you have achieved some of your goals earlier so you can add new goals to work on. At the same time, some goals might look easy to achieve but when the time comes and you work on them you find that they are hard and that you can’t achieve them within the assigned period of time. So, reviewing your goals every quarter will really help you know where you are standing in terms of your goals.

In my earlier post about the 2010 goals, I received a suggestion from my friend Mike to review the goals after the first quarter of the year over here on SteitBlog, which I think is a really cool idea and a healthy activity to do every now and then!

Since this topic is a bit long, I will be dividing it into parts! So this is the first part and so there are yet other parts to come.

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If you’re a regular reader of SteitBlog, you will know that I always stress on two things; killer content and socializing. Socializing has really great effects on your blog and on you personally. You may have read earlier, the post in which I shared the achievements of SteitBlog in its first month. I was really impressed with the results, and the feedback I received from the readers and other friends was really amazing, but also they were a bit shocked on this achievement within this short period of time. One of the key reasons of such an achievement is socializing and in my case, I launched SteitBlog after building a good presence online and through social media which helped me a lot. You need to be out there, you need to get to know people and make people know you.

Be everywhere

What does it take from you to create an account on different social networks, even the ones you won’t be using regularly? It takes no time, every registration takes no more than 2 minutes, all you need to do is to fill in your information and customize your profile. Registering an account with your name in networks that you will never use will help you avoid others registering your name and black mail you or just use it in a way that would harm your brand. There is a tool online called “know em”, this tool will help you know where your user name is available and where it’s not.

Connect with others

Social presence with no friends is useless; therefore you should increase your list of friends in order to be able to convert them into loyal readers. One VERY important point since we mentioned increasing friends’ lists; be aware not to use these automatic friends following tools, mainly for Twitter! A proper list of followers should be under the niche that you are writing about! At least 80% of your followers and followings should be interested in your niche, otherwise you’ll have a HUGE list of friends whom are not interested in what you blog about, and therefore, won’t be visiting your blog.

Interact with your friends

Having a list of friends, that took a while to build, and staying quite will make people stop following you because you are not being active! You should show them a reason why they should really wait for your updates, show them what you know and since you will most probably share an area of interest, they will be impressed of your knowledge and will stay tuned for your updates. Interacting with your friends will definitely help in converting them into readers and they will also spread the word about you and your blog.

Be friendly and offer help (when you can)

Remember that you are in a phase in which you are building a good reputation of you and your blog. You need to make people love you and this could be done by being friendly; say what they would love to hear and keep the rest to yourself, by offering a helping hand always does the trick too. If you find one of your friends asking for help in an area which you are very knowledgeable about, why don’t you offer to help? Trust me it will end up with a loyal reader that will spread the word about you and your blog. What I’ve done is, I’ve made a couple of filters on TweetDeck on specific topics that I think I can offer help in when it comes to them.

Be generous

I have offered to give Google Wave invitations to my readers earlier within a post on SteitBlog, LinkedIn profile and Twitter. Doing this really increased the number of page views and new visitors, it gave me a chance to interact personally with my readers and friends and made those friends love my blog and trust me. What more can I ask for? Those couple of friends, whom I gave the invitations to, will spread the word about me and my blog, there is nothing better than word of mouth.

Be yourself

Be yourself and never put on an act! People will follow you because of you and if you fake your attitude or knowledge they will find out soon and will stop following you, and I don’t think anybody likes to loose friends, it would also affect your reputation in the industry

One-to-one conversations

Dedicating 15 minutes of your time everyday to contact 2 or 3 of your friends by email personally, will never harm your work or consume your time. In the contrary, it will help you build a better brand, spread the word and obtain more readers. Readers love attention, this will show them that you are aware of them, and you care about their opinions and feedback. Some people ask, how could a couple of readers help me increase my traffic and build my brand? Easily, such a loyal reader will spread the word about you and your blog much more than an AdWords campaign will! Invest in people and friends; they are who count at the end of the day.

Socializing is not closed to Social Networks only, socializing could be by joining forums and participating and building a name over there. Also you can socialize through commenting on others’ blogs, by giving feedback on their products, articles, blogs or whatever. Try to participate in private betas as well and of course provide the owners with your feedback and suggestions, they will appreciate and love it. You can also socialize in the real world, not only virtually, participate in conferences, attend speeches, join public activities and help others out there.

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In the fourth chapter of Healthy Blogging, you will be taken through multiple ways of monetizing your blog. I will be briefing you about them in this post, but I will be publishing posts for each one where I will be concentrating on each one separately.

1- Ad Networks

You can easily subscribe to different Ad networks as a publisher and generate money through Pay Per Click (PPC) or Pay Per Millie impressions (PPM) campaigns. Google AdSense is the most known Ad Network on the web, but not the biggest cash cow according to various six figure income bloggers. There are much more networks other than Google AdSense, such as Chitika, Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), Text-Link-Ads and much more. Ad Networks have a very basic concept, which is that the publisher (the blogger in our case) generates a code and places it on her/his site and then Ad blocks will be appearing to the visitors containing ads related to the content on each page. In this case of Ads, you should know that the publisher doesn’t have any kind of contact with the advertisers or their agencies.

2- Direct Ad Sales

What makes this model different from using Ad Networks is that in this case the publisher deals directly with the advertisers or agencies in order to have some of their ads run on his/her site. Both parties agree on either to charge on a PPC basis or a PPM basis, some others offer PPA (Pay Per Action). At the end of the day, it depends on what both parties agree on. To increase the chance of having advertisers consider your site in their media plan, you should have a well-built “Advertise” page, which I am currently working on.

3- Affiliate Marketing

What I like most about Affiliate Marketing is that you only have to sell the product to people without having to worry about the delivery, support, or the whole headache. Commission rates are fair enough sometimes, but it does depend on the median, I personally prefer e-junkie. Affiliate marketing is almost available for all products over the Internet; Hosting packages, Books, Workshops, Airline tickets, training courses and much more.

4- Sell your own Products/Services

The very first item that any blogger creates after his blog is up and running is an e-book. Regardless whether you have an e-book for sale or any other product or service that you can provide for people, such as (design, development, consultation, etc…), you should be offering them for sale on your blog.

5- Sponsorships

Sponsorship packages differ from case to case, some people have hosting providers to sponsor their blogs by hosting them for free and they would place a banner on their blog in return. Others have design companies create their blog’s identity and design and also place a banner for them that the design is provided by company X. If your blog is a killer blog, you might be approached by different companies asking to sponsor your blog as a whole.

6- Paid/Sponsored Posts

Paid posts are when you get paid to write about a specific product, company…etc which is what we also call a “Paid Review”. On the other hand, Sponsored posts are when you get approached by a certain company asking you to sponsor 10 posts a month regardless the content or the subject of the post. This way of making money comes in an advanced stage of your blog’s journey and you can also subscribe to the services that gets you connected to advertisers who want to get their products reviewed on different blogs. If you are interested in such services, check out ReviewMe.

Do you have any other ways of monetization? Share your ideas with us.

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Now you have your blog up and running, quality content is being uploaded every day and your blogging journey is getting more exciting everyday. What comes next? I have shared a couple of tips earlier on how to build an affordable brand, and now I am going to share new tips on the other part of branding which is considered to be related to external factors such as, what people say about your blog, how to increase the awareness about your blog, how to drive traffic and much more.

Tip #1: Read other blogs and interact

You have to read other blogs and comment on their posts as well! In order to have all the industry’s readers know about you and your blog, you have to meet them and discuss what ever issues are raised with them. Meeting people is very easy in the blogosphere; all you need to do is visit popular blogs in your field and comment/reply to others comments.

You will be surprised that commenting on related blogs will be one of the most traffic generating activities that you can do. So, by commenting you will be spreading your brand all over the sphere and you will also be generating traffic to your blog. another value you gain from some of blogs is that when you comment you get back-links to your blog which will increase your Google Page Rank (PR), that happen when the blog’s owner does not add a “no-follow” tag to the comments field.

Tip #2: Do guest posts on others’ blogs

If you have an interesting topic to talk about, write a very killer article and try sending it out to one of the biggest bloggers in your field. Almost all bloggers host guest posts on their blogs but they need to match certain requirements and rules. Try sending it out to one blogger at a time, because it will be very embarrassing if two or more accept to publish the same article! So I suggest making a list of blogs based on priority and then send it out one at a time, if you get an apology from the first, then send it to the second and so on. Don’t get mad or depressed if your article was rejected, there are many reasons for that which has nothing to do with the quality of your writing. The blogger might have many similar articles and cannot post yours, the topic could be a bit irrelevant to his main interest, there are lots of reasons why your article may be rejected.

Tip #3: Be part of the sphere

Social media has made the world a real small village, and right now you can easily know what’s going on any other part of the world by easily checking the trending topics of Twitter. I remember when Michael Jackson passed away, how I first heard of it through Twitter, and prior to his death Iran’s election was the top trending topic aswell. Twitter specifically has really made an extreme change in ways of communication and how a breaking-news goes viral to the whole globe in a message containing less than 140 characters.

Are you missing this party? You have to be part of the sphere and specifically Twitter! If you don’t have an account, just go create one right now. You can use your personal account for your blog or you can create a dedicated one, it depends on many thing which we will be discussing later on, with tips on how to manage more than one Twitter account.

From a branding point of view you have to be every where, not only Twitter. You have to be on Facebook, YouTube (even if you don’t use videos), FriendFeed, Flickr and every social network you know. You won’t be losing anything on the contrary you will be gaining.

Tip #4: Socialize

This tip is some-how linked to the previous one, but I thought I should be concentrating on it separately, because the social factor is very important in any blogger’s life! Interact with people, answer their questions if you know the answer, share your opinions (where needed) and help others if you can. All these activities and actions will give you presence in your field, you might not feel it directly, but trust me it will happen! And you will be receiving messages from unknown people asking for help and advice. All of this is part of your brand, whether it was a personal brand or a professional one!

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Earlier I have shared some tips that should be considered in the phase prior starting your blog, and now it’s time to share some other tips that you should work around when you start your blog and when the actual work starts.

Remember, you are blogging to make money out of your blog! Making money online was never easy nor fast, it takes time, it needs patience and hard work! You have to dedicate a certain amount of your time for your blog, either to research, write, socialize or any other related activity to populate and improve your blog.

In this chapter of Healthy Blogging 101 I will be mentioning 6 rules that are all internal and directly related to you and have nothing to do with any external factor. These rules should be took care of throughout your blogging journey!

Rule #1: Don’t think about money.

Yes, I have just said that you are in the business to make money, but it takes a lot of work and effort to move your blog to the next level. For the first 6 months never think about how much money your AdSense is bringing you, or how to increase your blog’s income! Just concentrate on your articles and their quality, making sure you post beneficial articles frequently.

Rule #2: Don’t waste your time looking at your stats

Its natural during the early stages of your blog for you to be excited on how your blog is doing, and how many visitors you receive everyday, where they’re from and their details, but there are a lot of other priorities that you have to be doing more than monitoring your visitors coming in and out of your blog. Checking the stats twice a day is fine, but note that it won’t improve your blog’s performance.

Rule #3: Content is the KING

As mentioned before by myself and many others, content is the KING and your content and its quality is what will make your readers return to your blog, not the design nor your-kind-self. So concentrate on the quality of information you’re providing your readers and make them come back by writing things that would interest them.

Rule #4: Never stop writing:

One of the most common sins of any blogger (who is aiming to generate money out of her/his blog) is to stop writing. Try to commit to a fixed schedule of publishing, your readers will get used to you in less than a month. They will get used to how many posts you publish everyday, when and if you have special days with special topics.

Rule #5: Don’t over do things:

It’s great if you can post 2 – 3 articles a day, but remember that there is a limit for everything! If you overwhelm your readers with articles, they will easily bounce off your blog and come back occasionally. So, if you have the ability to write that much, the best choice is to write in advance and schedule the publishing process for the whole week or the coming couple of days.

Rule #6: Blogging is a priority:

As I said at the beginning, you have to dedicate time for your blog and improving it, otherwise it will all go to waste. Many bloggers ask “I do not have enough time to blog, what shall I do?” my reply with a very simple and straight forward answer: you wanna make money from your blog, you gotta dedicate time and effort so it could be monetized! No effort, no money!

The next chapter of Healthy Blogging 101 will be discussing external factors that could affect your blog and how to benefit of these factors. Stay tuned!

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I will be sharing some tips with you guys about how to start a proper blog and have it ready to be monetized and generate a decent amount of money. There are a lot of schools in the industry of blogging and the way it’s done, so all the information that I will be sharing with you is what I have learned from the different schools with time. As to not cause any confusion and to best make use out of the information, each topic here will be divided into parts and segments.

Today I will list a couple of tips that will mainly focus on how start your blog and have everything planned before taking any further step.

1- Why do you want to blog?

First of all, you need to ask yourself why you want to blog, and what your purpose for blogging is. Some people blog for fun, some because it’s part of their job, while others blog simply for making money online. So basically, I will be your step by step guide on how to get your blog on the go and ready to be monetized.

2- What are your interests?

To make money from your blog, you need to write about a topic that you know well about because people are always looking for more information. Many schools say that you need to identify a niche in the areas which you have good knowledge in and start blogging about it. I honestly do not see that this is the best solution in most cases, it depends on “the” niche and the knowledge of the person. If the niche topic was narrow, you won’t be able to write more than 100 articles about it, what will you be doing afterwards? So mainly, you have got to write about a topic that people search for and at the same time, you should be willing to write about as to not get bored half-way through (which is considered as the worst sin to any blogger).

3- What do you want to call your blog?

Now you know why do you want to blog, you have goals to achieve and you know what are you going to talk about, now it’s time to choose a name for your blog. There are many points that should be considered when choosing a blog name. It should be the same as the domain name, a lot of people change the whole name of the project because of the unavailability of the .com of their desired name. The second point is your domain name should be spellable over the phone, what is meant here is that once you say it to a friend over the phone, they can easily write it down without waiting for you to spell it for them, so just forget the dashes, shortcuts and numbers which would harm your domain name. Always try to have a domain name that is easy to remember, therefore try having it reflect what you do and what your readers would say about you. If you found a domain name with a keyword of your industry, that would be great! But never go with domain that consists of more than two words (remember, NO DASHES), that doesn’t mean having a longer domain name won’t work its just that a shorter, easier one is more likely to get you where you want. Finally, you should take care of the TLD of your domain, you get a .net or .info or .cc or what ever, but .com is always the best and the most memorable TLD, I highly recommend going .com rather than anything else.

4- I have everything ready to start my blog, what now?

You have the domain name, you know what you’re going to blog about and you have your goals ahead, what comes next? You need to create a brand. Yes, a brand is very important right from day one! And you have to invest a bit on creating your brand, I’m not saying to pay a 3 digit amount while your still starting up, but you need to get a proper logo design and a theme. I will be sharing in other articles how to get a proper logo for less money and same thing goes for the themes. You must also decide before blogging which blogging platform you are going to use for. There are a lot of blogging platforms; Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, MovableType, Typepad, Blogsmith, WordPress and much more but WordPress is the one with the highest market share and user-friendliness, not to forget their support forums and 3rd parties specializing in WordPress support cases.

Once you have decided what you want your blog to be about, it would be very useful to start preparing articles for when your blog is ready. This was you will save you time and effort, and then you will have yourself a pipeline of work for the time ahead.

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