Dear readers,

My good friend Jack Spirko wrote an awesome blog post today about how to do search engine optimization for wordpress blogs.  He talks about plugins to use. He gives you some tips on how to get links, and also some tips on how to turn your blog posts into cash.

If you are a blogger or podcaster or are thinking about setting up a home business you’ll want to read Jack’s post.  He gives a lot of solid advice on why you need a blog and how to make money from that blog.

I’d also like to recommend another article on SEO for WordPress by Yoast (Joost de Valk). Yoast is a WordPress plugin developer who has a lot of expertise in SEO.

Do I practice what I preach? I wrote my book Nichework Marketing  about the importance of blogging for your business. I also recently converted my Custom Greeting Card Guy web site from a traditional web site to a WordPress powered site. I’m using many of the same plugins Jack and Yoast talk about in their articles on WordPress SEO and my site ranks very well (top 3) for a bunch of keywords on Google.

Check out the articles above on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress (SEO) and let me know if you have any questions. I’m happy to help!

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > blogging

Dear reader,

What do we all want?

More traffic, more leads, and more sales!

If you are a blogger, here’s a trick for you to get more traffic.

Guest post on other people’s blogs!

What is guest posting?

The idea with guest posting is that you write an article for another blogger’s blog.You are writing a post that will be interesting to the other blogs readers. The other blogger gets some free content and you get a link or two to your blog.

Develop the idea and write the guest post first.

You write the blog article on spec. You don’t know if they are going to approve it or not.  Just like how a writer may write a book or a screenplay before he gets someone to agree to publish it.

Then you pitch it to the blog you want it to appear on.

This should be a win win situation.

The blogger gets free content from you. They have to do less work that day because they have a guest post that should be pretty much ready to go with only minor editing.

They are also getting great content. Hopefully you wrote one of your best pieces to submit to their blog. You don’t want to submit a bad article! You want to submit one of your best!

You get more traffic to your blog. You get exposure to a new audience. You get to put a link or two in the article and get to build a name for yourself with a new group of potential blog readers. It could mean dozens or even hundreds of new readers over night!

How do you do it?

Here is an article on how to guest post at ProBlogger. This post is even a guest post!

Do I accept guest posts?

I haven’t accepted guest posts yet, but I’m looking to allow them in the future. If you can write on a topic that relates well to my blog I will consider it.  If you are writing about some junk program or something that doesn’t relate to network marketing then don’t bother submitting   Read the article from pro blogger on guest posting. It will give you some ideas about how to go about the process.

Contact  me if you have ideas for a guest post.

Speaking of guest posts…

I’m now guest blogging once a week over at that MLM Beat.  George Fourie has put together a great group of bloggers. You should check it out.  My first post was: Why you should NOT use your MLM company web site!

I look forward to reading your ideas for posts at Home Business Blogs

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > blogging

Dear readers,

I wrote last week about a wordpress SEO plugin.  I heard a good bit of positive feedback so I thought I’d share another WordPress blogging tip for you.

If you do SEO (search engine optimization) you might want to check out cbnet Ping Optimizer. This wordpress plugin does a couple of key things.

#1 it includes a list of popular ping services

#2 it prevents you from ping spamming

What does that mean?

Ping services are provided by blog directories and search engines.  When you update your blog you send a “ping” to these services to let them know that they need to check your site for a new entry.  This can be a very powerful tool for SEO because it gets links to your site and can help you get indexed quickly.  This is one reason why you can get a blog into the search engines within days. You don’t have to wait weeks or months to get a blog listed.

Cbnet ping optimizer has a list of ping directories included in it.  You don’t even need to know what to do You just need to activate the plugin. They’ll update your list of ping services for you!

The problem is Ping Spam

Typically when your blog pings one of these services it pings it every time you update your blog.  If you’re like me and you edit your posts, change the text, correct spelling, etc.  Every time you do this it pings those blog directories.  However if you ping them too often, they may consider you to be spamming them and may block updates from your site.  Let’s say for example you post a new blog entry, then you read it and find some spelling errors. You correct the error and save your changes.  That is 2 pings.  Then what if you decided you want to add another note or a PS to your entry. That is a 3rd and 4th ping.  If you do that within 10 or 15 minutes it might appear as if you are trying to spam the blog directory to get more links to your site or keep your site at the top of their “updates”.

Cbnet Ping Optimizer to the Rescue!

Another feature of this plugin is that it can help prevent you from accidentally ping spamming!

When you install the plugin click on the settings link.  Then you’ll notice the list of ping services. Right under that will be two checkboxes.

1. enable pinging

2. limit excessive pinging in a short time

I have my blog set to not ping unless I have gone 30 minutes without a ping.  That way if I go and edit my blog entry several times it won’t ping again.  This protects me from being a blog “ping” spammer.

Pretty cool right?

Perhaps you don’t understand all this… and that’s ok.  However if you run a wordpress blog you should install this cbnet Ping Optimizer.  Then activate it, view the settings, and check off the two checkboxes.  You’ll be glad you did.

Got questions? Let me know! I’m glad to help.

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > blogging

Dear readers,

Are you a blogger? Do you want do SEO? Do you want to get better search engine rankings?

There is a new plugin for WordPress blogs which takes a lot of the SEO burden off your shoulders.  This plugin replaces a half dozen other plugins.   The plugin is simply enough called WordPress SEO.  It is written by Joost De Valk who is a well known plugin writer as well as the host of a popular WordPress podcast.

WordPress SEO is a great new plugin.  It replaces the need for separate plugins. Before you’d need plugins for:

• Titles
• XML sitemaps
• Breadcrumbs
• Google Analytics
• Meta Headers
• robots.txt
• RSS footers

WordPress SEO attempts to put all these tasks into one plugin.  It can even look at your configuration and popup some basic warning messages for SEO optimization.

Congrats Joost. You did a great job with this plugin!

- Ben Fitts

MLM Training > blogging

Here is a real powerful way to use blogs.

Go to all the free blog sites and setup a blog.

WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Myspace.com
thoughts.com
livejournal.com
clearblogs.com

(Note I haven’t Thoughts.com or Clearblogs.com before. I googled “free blog” to see what I could find. I will try them out though.)

There are many many more.

Now even if you don’t post to them regularly, post to them a few times.  In one day you can write say 10 posts. Then “post date” them to come out once a week over the next 10 weeks.

In your blog posts link to your main web site.

Now submit each of these blogs to rss directories and blog search engines.

The way this works is like the spokes on a wheel.  You have 5 freebie blogs (or more) that all point back to your main web site.  Don’t link your main web site back to the blogs only link one way.

This way you’re passing your link juice to your main web site.

You also don’t want to waste your link juice pointing at your company web site. You want to point to a unique web site that you and only you own.

Does that make sense?

So in my case I’d setup a bunch of blogs and point them all to my custom greeting card guy web site. NOT my Send Out Cards corporate web site.  If I point it to my corporate web site I’m just passing all my link juice to the corporate web site not to my own sites. AND the corporate web site doesn’t need any more link juice!

MLM Training > blogging