Who am I to teach you about blogger mistakes? I’m not a big-time blogger. Neither has my blog won any award.

But I do know one thing, that is, how to use my blog as a tool to achieve my goal.

I’m telling you this because this is exactly the TOP mistake that many new bloggers make.

Many new bloggers tend to treat their blog as some kind of online holy grail, thinking that as long as they have a blog, traffic will come and they will make money.

What they should do instead is to think of blog as just another a tool. It should be part of the business, not the business.

I know this is a bit theoretical and ‘dry’, but this is an important fundamental that you must understand, if you want to follow my advice.

As you know, I get most of my writing inspiration from our members’ questions. Today’s topic on blogger mistakes is no different.

Here’s the question I received from a member:

“I respect you as a master marketer with great knowledge and insight. Could you have a quick look at my blog, http://membership-millions.com/blog/, and suggest ways to get it really going… and also to start making REAL money??” - Izzy Joseph

I’m not sure how Izzy’s blog is performing now. But if I were to be critical, here are some advice I can think of:

1) Build A Business, Not A Blog

As I said, I don’t consider myself as a blogger. My approach to blogging is from the perspective of a marketer.

To me, blog is one of my marketing tools for my business. In other words, blogging is not my business, and it should not be your business too.

Frankly, I can’t see a business in your blog. What I can see instead is you are trying to write some articles and get people to buy the Clickbank product you’re affiliated to. That’s not a business.

Your domain name is membership-millions.com. If I were you, I will turn the blog into a resource centre that teaches people how to make money from membership. You may write articles that teach people how to start a membership site, how to promote membership sites, etc. You can engage a freelancer to create a membership script to give away.

If you choose to go the membership way, everything you do should be related to membership. Your opt-in freebie should be an ebook about membership. Your articles should be about membership.

If you are afraid that you may not have enough material to write about membership, your worry is unnecessary. Everything about internet marketing can be twisted to link to membership. For example, your little twitter ebook can be renamed to “how to promote your membership with twitter”.

2) Forget About Making Money

Beggars can’t be choosers. New bloggers can’t be choosers too. For a new blog, you must focus on providing useful content and forget about making money.

At the beginning stage, you MUST establish your blog as a useful resource that people can turn to. Promoting affiliate products should be a by-the-way thing.

For example, while teaching people how to promote their membership websites, there may be some traffic tools that you can recommend.

You are more likely to make sales if you focus on providing useful advice rather than focusing on promoting the product.

3) Be Extremely Proactive In List Building

If you have been reading my blog, you should know that I advocate ‘list’ before ‘blog’.

If you haven’t started building a list, you should do it asap.

When I say building a list, I’m not talking about the opt-in form that is currently in your blog. I’m talking about a separate squeeze page that you actively advertise and promote to get people to opt-in.

You need to build your list fast so that these subscribers can become your blog readers. Else you are forever talking to dust.

Check out our list builder script in your members’ area and see how it can help you in this.

4) Practice Search Engine Optimization

Your blog may be SEO ready, but your articles are not, or at least I can’t see how a new blog can get to the top search result for a highly competitive keyword of “How To Make Money Online Fast” with some 1,390,000,000 competitions.

If you don’t understand SEO, learn it. If you have learnt it, practise it.

Build links to your blog. Research your keywords before every post. This is the minimum you should do.

You won’t see immediate effects. But in 3 to 6 months, you will reap what you sow.

These are the immediate things you as a blogger.

Moving ahead, there are tons of things you can do to keep you very busy. For example, you can sell your own product, start your own affiliate program, create a brand for yourself in your niche and a lot more.

The key message I want to put across to you is a blog is just a tool to achieve your goal. Create a game plan and see how a blog can fit into the picture instead of the other way round.

“I am a blogger with Adsense now and I need to know what I can do in LeadsLeap to improve my traffic to my blogs to make money from the ads?” - Love in Jesus, Marina.

There are many things you can do in LeadsLeap to drive traffic to your blog. Here are some of the ways I can think of:

1) Set up your LeadsLeap ad

The easiest way to drive traffic to your blog is to set up your LeadsLeap ad. If you have an ‘okay’ written ad, it should drive some traffic to your blog. If you upgrade your account, it will drive more traffic to your blog. If you’re using a free account, make sure that you have positive credits in your account or you should build a team that you can advertise to.

2) Build a list

As a blogger, you must understand the pros and cons of a blog.

A blog is good at attracting Search Engine Traffic and building relationship with your prospects. But it is not effective in retaining traffic, especially traffic generated from advertising.

This means if you advertise your blog, chances are you are driving traffic ‘through’ your blog, i.e. the traffic just come and go.

To me, that’s a waste.

You should try to retain the traffic (a.k.a build a list) so that you can drive this traffic back to your blog again and again.

You can easily build a list with two of the tools provided in LeadsLeap:

- List Builder Script: Install this script to your server and you’re ready to build a list (as well as a full-fledged business).
- SlideSense: Add SlideSense to your blog to send your blog traffic to your opt-in offer.

3) Practice search engine optimization

If you are running a blog, but not practising search engine optimization, you are missing the greatest power of blogging.

Though LeadsLeap has YET to develop any tool to help you in this search engine optimization, I’ve written many articles in this blog to teach you how to do it. Read this blog. If other members get result after following my advice, there’s no reason why you can’t.

In my last blog post, I said that blog plays a different role in advertising. As a follow up, let’s discuss the purpose of blogging and the role it plays in advertising.

My discussion is purely from marketing point of view. If you are blogging for fun or to pass time, that’s another purpose but it’s not our focus here.

So, why blog?

1. To Use It As A Bait

Blog is a good bait to attract traffic to your website.

First, if your blog is search engine optimized (I discussed this last week), it is a good bait to hook search engine traffic.

Second, if you provide useful information on your blog, it is a good bait to hook more traffic through networking and referrals from other bloggers.

Last but not least, it is a good bait to hook your existing traffic, who will revisit your website again and again.

2. To Differentiate Yourself From Others

With so many websites and competition on the net, it’s really not easy to make yourself stand out from the rest.

But with a good blog, you stand a much better chance.

Through blogging, you can connect with your audiance, let them know you better and thus foster better relationship with them.

People like to do business with people they trust. You know this, don’t you?

3. To Stimulate Your Creative Juice

Someone just posted a comment on this blog saying that he run out of things to write for his blog and ask how about me.

I don’t have such a problem because when I read the comments you guys and gals have posted, I will have new ideas for my next post.

The comments in my blog can also help me to generate ideas for my future projects.

The Purpose Of A Blog In Advertising

I said in my last post that it’s not a good idea to advertise your blog directly because the traffic is not likely to stick long. If you were to advertise, advertise to build a list.

But you can use a blog to increase the conversion rate of your ad, by using your blog as a tool to build your prospects’ trust and confidence in you.

If you have a decent blog, with some good posts and comments from the readers, you can direct the traffic from your squeeze page to your blog.

In the past, I thought this will reduce the conversion rate, since you send traffic away from the squeeze page. But my recent test shows that doing so can actually increase the conversion rate because people know that you are real and you really provide values.

Just a quick technical note. Make sure that you open the link to your blog in a new window, so that your prospects do not navigate away from the squeeze page.

Nowadays it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.

From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)

Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?

Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.

Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?

Well, you know things are not that simple.

A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.

In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.

How do you build a search engine optimized blog?

There are just two things you need to do.

1) Write search engine optimized posts

Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.

A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.

2) Build backlinks

The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.

My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.

The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.

Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.

Did I say ‘necessary’?

Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.

It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.

For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free Wordpress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.

Final comments

Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.

This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.

Since we launched LeadsLeap widget, I’ve received several questions asking how to add widget to wordpress blog.

Instead of answering these questions in private, I think it’s easier for me to post the answer in our blog, so that I can use screenshots to explain.

First, if you are using a hosted blog on Wordpress.com, you can’t add a javascript Widget like LeadsLeap Widget.

In this article, we are talking about self-hosted Wordpress blog, one that you install on your own server.

Clear on that? Ok, let’s start.

There are two ways to add a widget.

1) By editing the Theme’s html code
2) By using a plugin

1) By editing the Theme’s html code

If you understand some basic html, you can go to your Wordpress Theme or template and add the widget code manually.

Here’s how to do it:

- Login to your server via your preferred FTP client, select the directory where you install your wordpress files and go to wp-content > themes > (your current theme).

- Look for a file named sidebar.php and open it. (Some themes may call it another name. Go through all the files in the folder. You should be able to figure out which is the correct one.)

- Study the html code and see where you want the widget to appear. Then, simply copy and paste the widget into the code.

Another way is to edit the html code directly from your Wordpress admin. Just go to Presentation > Theme Editor and choose sidebar.php to edit.

The problem with this alternative method is that you have to set the permission of sidebar.php to 766 before you can save the changes. But by default, the permission is set to 644.

If the above method sounds ‘rocket science’ to you, your last chance is to use a plugin.

2) By using a plugin

Using a plugin is an easier way to manage not one but all your widgets. It’s excellent for those who knows nothing about html.

The plugin I’m talking about is Fuzzy Widget Plugin. You can download it here.

Installing the plugin is pretty straight forward. Just follow the given instruction. If you’ve installed a plugin before, the method is about the same.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, login to you Wordpress admin, go to Presentation > Widgets.

The screenshot below is for your reference. (Note: Your admin area may look slightly different because my Wordpress version is not the most update one.)

From the screenshot above, you can see a “Sidebar 1″ and “Available Widgets”. You can drag widgets from Available Widgets to Sidebar 1 and arrange the position of the widgets in Sidebar 1 in any way you like.

Just play with it. You’ll understand what I mean. It’s very easy.

Now, LeadsLeap Widget is not one of the standard widgets available. So you have to manually add it in.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Drag an empty widget (both Text 1 and Text 2 are empty widgets) from Available Widget to Sidebar 1

Step 2: Click on the configure button. You will see a popup form as shown below.

- Leave the first field empty. Copy and paste your LeadsLeap widget code into the second field as shown and then close it by clicking the ‘x’ sign.

Step 3: Save the changes.

Done.

Go to your blog and you should see LeadsLeap widget in the sidebar of your blog.

There are other standard widgets such as Recent Posts, Calendar and Recent Comments that you can play around with in Fuzzy Widget Plugin. Also, you can easily adjust the position of different widgets by simply “drag n drop”.

Note: For maximum clickthrough, try to position LeadsLeap widget at the top.

Have fun playing with this plugin.

Latest announcement: As requested by some members, LeadsLeap widget now comes in 3 widths: 160 pixels, 173 pixels and 250 pixels. There should be one size that can fit your sidebar. Check out the new setup page now!

This is an article about “Add-on domain vs Subdomain vs Subdirectory”. It’s a reply to a member’s question.

Here’s her question:

“Hi Kenneth, just like to know exactly what is the difference between an add-on and a sub domain, and what do you use each one for? I know you can host several different websites, or pages but, which do you use for what?” - Glenda

Hi Glenda, an add-on domain is a new domain, such as domain123.com, domain456.com, domain567.com. You have to buy a new domain name whenever you want to add an add-on domain to your hosting account. A sub-domain is a domain derived from your existing domain. Let’s say your existing domain is domain123.com, you can have unlimited sub-domain such as abc.domain123.com, xyz.domain123.com and so on.

Whenever you want to start a new project, there are 3 types of website structure you can consider.

1) A brand new domain (i.e. an add-on domain)
2) A subdomain
3) A subdirectory (simply a sub-folder of your domain)

If you are starting a new project in a completely different niche, it’s obvious that you should buy a new domain and host it as an add-on domain. But if you are starting a new project in the same niche, you will have to think which of the 3 structures above you should adopt.
Let’s say you have a website called esuccessonline.com, and you are thinking of starting a blog related to online success, you have 3 options to structure your new blog.

1) A brand new domain - you can call it esuccessonlineblog.com
2) A subdomain - you can call it blog.esuccessonline.com
3) A subdirectory - you can call it esuccessonline.com/blog

Below are some issues you should consider when deciding which option to choose.

1) From SEO perspective

If your original website esuccessonline.com is already well established, with a decent PR, you may NOT want to start a brand new domain just for your blog. This means option 1 is out.

If you use option 2 or 3, you can pass the credibility of your original domain to your blog, which is in either a subdomain or subdirectory. This will help your new blog and subsequent blog posts to get ranked in the search engines faster and better. Also your new blog content will help boost your original website. So it’s a win-win situation.

2) From branding perspective

If you plan to brand your blog in the future, then you should start a new domain called esuccessonlineblog.com. In general, as long as you intend to brand your new project as a new entity, it’s always a good idea to register a new domain for it.

3) “Expandability” issues

If you envision that your blog is going to be very big and it may require a lot of server resources, then it may be a good idea to start your blog in a new domain or subdomain, not a subdirectory.

To understand why, let me explain the technical difference between a subdomain and subdirectory. A subdomain can be technically treated as a new domain, in the sense that it can be hosted separately from its root domain. This means you can have blog.esuccessonline.com and esuccessonline.com hosted on different servers. But this cannot be done for esuccessonline.com/blog.

As such, if you expect your blog (or whatever new project you have) to consume a lot of server resources, your current server may not be sufficient to satisfy your needs. In such case, if you start your new project in a new domain or subdomain, you can always host it on another server in the future.

One good example is Google.com. Google.com is a brand. Everything it does must enhance its brand “Google”. So when Google started Google Map, which obviously requires a lot of server resources, it only has 2 choices. Google can either call it GoogleMaps.com or maps.google.com.

And you should know their decision. It’s logical to make that decision too. They call it maps.google.com.

4) To boost your Alexa ranking

More and more people, especially in the internet marketing niche, look at the Alexa ranking of a website as a means to gauge the credibility of the website. So if you want to boost the Alexa ranking of your website, it may be a good idea to put all your projects under one domain. This means you can either use a subdomain or subdirectory.

Take Google and Yahoo as a case study. Google names its international websites in separate domains, such as google.com.sg, but Yahoo names its international websites as a subdomain, such as sg.yahoo.com. The result is yahoo.com is now ranked #1 in Alexa ranking. I believe if Google were to consolidate all its international websites under google.com., it should rank #1 in Alexa ranking.

The Conclusion?

There is no conclusion. It really depends on what you want to do now and in the future. New domain costs money but it looks professional. Subdomain is free and it’s technically as flexible as a new domain, but it’s not as professional. Yet, if you want to create a mega website like Google.com, subdomain can give you a lot of leverage. Subdirectory is the simplest option for website structuring. If branding and server requirement are non-issue, it’s always easier to just use a subdirectory.

After reading my previous post on The Truth About Creating A Passive Income Online, someone asked me this question, “Can Blogging Create Passive Income?”

To answer this question, first of all, we must understand what is blogging.

To me, blogging is just another traffic strategy, something like article marketing.

Assuming you have not done anything to your blog, no link, no promotion, no JV, a blog post is just another piece of content lying somewhere on the net. If you’re lucky, someone may find the post through the search engine and read it. If not, it will just be another digital dust.

When the gurus tell you that you can make money from blogging, what he is really saying is you can make money by leaving tons of ‘content footprint’ on the net. The more ‘content footprint’ you have on the net, the more traffic you are likely to attract.

(Sidenote: That’s the reason why I started LeadsLeap Blog - to create a large content footprint so as to attract more traffic and benefit our members who show their ads in this blog.)

As I’ve said, blogging is just another traffic strategy. It’s what you do with the traffic that determines whether you can create a passive income from it.

So can blogging create passive income? My ‘immediate’ answer is - it depends on what you do with the traffic to your blog.

Blogging Myth 101

Many years back, when the idea of internet marketing first started, there was a myth that says “Built it and traffic will come”. ‘it’ refers to a website.

People started building different kinds of websites, only to realize that their websites are only visited by ghosts.

Years later, history repeats.

The concept of blogging was introduced and everyone starts to blog. The myth now becomes “Blog and traffic will come”.

People started to blog about different things under the sun, only to realize that they are just talking to themselves.

So can blogging create passive income? My ‘better’ answer is - it depends on whether you can generate ‘passive traffic’ to your blog and what you do with the ‘passive traffic’.

What Should You Do With The Traffic So As To Create Passive Income?

Assuming you know how to generate passive traffic to your blog, the next challenge is how to monetize the traffic so that you can earn passive income.

Here is what you can do:

1) Sell advertising space

Unless you have a very popular blog, chances are no one will advertise directly with you. The easiest way to start selling your advertising space is by putting Google Ads on your blog.

As your blog becomes more popular, you can find your own advertisers and earn more.

2) Sell affiliate products

I’m not talking about selling ebooks. If you want to build a passive income, you should promote products or services that can earn you recurring commissions.

Some examples are web hosting services, autoresponder services, network marketing products and membership programs.

For non-internet marketing niche, try to promote membership programs that can generate recurring commissions for you every month.

3) Sell your own products

Eventually, you want to sell your own products through your blog, preferably a membership program so that you can build another recurring income.

Selling your own product has another advantage because you can recruit affiliates and generate more traffic to your blog.

4) Position your blog as a brand

This is the ultimate thing you should do with your blog to create long term passive income.

Do you know why companies spend so much money on branding? Because people prefer to buy from brands that they are familiar with.

Once your blog becomes a brand by itself, every other things will fall into places. Your traffic will increase beyond your wildest dream. Advertisers will be queuing to pay you. Your sales will soar. And more importantly, you can employ people to produce the content.

This is when your blog truly becomes a passive income source for you.