As many of you already know, the SXSW blog conference came to a close this past weekend. Twitter was buzzing last week with excited attendee tweets that made me wish I’d made plans to go.

I’ve never attended any of the many blog conventions that take place annually, but I have heard the experience is indescribable and unforgettable. If you blog for a living, you may want to add attending one of these events to your goal list. You’ll be completely in your element.

You know how your spouse’s eyes glaze over whenever you talk about blogging? Well, from my understanding, everyone attending these events is just as gung-ho about blogging as you are; and it’s all anyone wants to talk about. You’re completely in your element! Can you imagine?

These conventions are just like any other industry business convention. They provides bloggers with a rare networking opportunity. Some of the biggest benefits of attending conventions are:

• Getting to meet and spend time face-to-face with bloggers you communicate with every day.
• Gain invaluable education and information you get attending various classes and sessions.
• Access to great exhibits and swag.
• A unique off-line networking opportunity.
• A chance to connect with and build relationships and partnerships with others in the blogging community.

What’s great is that these conferences can be tax deductable as a business expense as well. Will you be attending any blog conferences this year?

photo credit: ellyjonez

Been waiting for just the right time to get set up with your own blog?  This is it:  Blog Week!

Mom’s Talk Biz and Mom Webs Hosting have teamed up to bring you an incredible bundle offer.  It includes:

• A domain name of your choice.
• Three months of hosting.
• WordPress blog installation.
• Theme installation.
• Header Graphic Customization.
• Promotional Button Graphic.
• WordPress Orientation Training.

If you bought all of this separately you’d spend nearly $150.  During blog week you’ll only pay $79

There’s a delicious upgrade deal to!

• Add a blog to an existing HTML site.
• Leave Blogger for hosted WordPress at last.
• Start a new affiliate site venture.
• Create a blog to share your kid’s pictures and projects with friends and family

Go for it!

I really hope that my four part series, SEO for Your Blog, provided some helpful tips you’ll be able to use in your own SEO campaign for your blog. The great thing about blogs is as long as you keep posting content regularly the search engines will index your post because the search engine spiders are always on the look out for fresh content.

You may remember that in Part 1 I discussed long tail keywords and how choosing phrases that are relevant to your blog’s overall theme can make it easier for online visitors to find you whenever they type a commonly searched for phrase in the search engine.

In Part 2, I talked about whether or not keyword density is important. We know that having targeted, long tail keywords helps visitors locate your blog much easier, but I explained why you want to stay away from Black Hat methods like keyword stuffing.

In Part 3, I spend some time explaining how important its is to search engines that you produce high quality content; and Part 4 covered tips for building natural back links that point the search engines toward your blog.

Despite what some people say, SEO is still as important as ever. It’s a good idea to educate yourself on the changing terms and conditions of the search engines so that you don’t waste your effort on techniques that no longer work.

Know that the effort you put into SEO for your blog can make it easier for customers to find you online for years to come.

photo credit: Anonymous Account

After being slammed with heavy rain and storms for the past three days, me and the family are rushing around trying to finish our weekend cleaning routine so that we can get out and enjoy some much needed fun and sunshine.

As usual, there were lots of great articles posting around the blogosphere this week. I’m sharing a few of my favorites I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did.  Happy Saturday!:~)

• Grace…Heap it on Yourself
• Affiliates Beware: Will Your State Kill Your Business with the Amazon Tax
• Easy Guide to Stretch Content
• Are Blogging Jobs Over?

photo credit: ninchen_

Today’s Follow Friday on Twitter and I thought I’d post some of my favorite “Tweeps” (a.k.a. Peeps) in today’s post. For those who may not be familiar with Twitter, Follow Friday is the day to let everyone know which Twitter users you think others should be following for various reasons.

I didn’t really spend as much time on Twitter this week due to a very hectic schedule, but when I did pop in these folks caught my attention:

@debng: I recommend Deb Ng for Follow Friday because she works so hard to provide bloggers and freelance writers with decent paying gigs. She does all of the hard work of searching out these opportunities so that you don’t have to. Her Freelance Writing blog is a portal filled with valuable advice about writing tips, running your blog as a business and more.

@debng often punctuates her daily Freelance Job tweets with hilarious observations and general commentary.

@JHaynesWriter: She blogs about organization, productivity and time management, and if you’ve never followed my own Twitter stream, I often tweet about my never-ending fight against desk clutter. @JHaynesWriter kindly offered some very useful tips to guide me towards becoming more organized. She even invited me to contact her off Twitter if I needed more help developing office systems that will keep me organized. She genuinely likes helping the hopelessly messy.

@ChristinaGayle: I first started following @ChristinaGayle because I did some freelance writing work for her; but I continue to follow her because she’s a great example of a successful WAHM running her own business, she shares valuable information, always speaks her mind and shares my obsession for “LOST.”

@karenswim: I just started following @karenswim yesterday after noticing someone retweeted a very important tweet that she was sending out warning affiliate marketers about certain states attempting to institute an Affiliate Nexus Tax. This tax could potentially shut down online businesses that depend on affiliate sales to operate. This is an important issue that many of us will want to follow closely, and I appreciate her willingness to spread the word and educate everyone.

Who are some of your Follow Friday favs?

If you’re looking for ways to promote your blog and increase readership, it’s easy and inexpensive to incorporate a few SEO strategies so that more people can find you online. In yesterday’s post I talked about why high quality content is so important in SEO. Today I want to share a few natural link building tips that can expose more readers to your well written content.

Make no mistake; link building remains one of the best ways to increase traffic to your blog.. The search engines take notice when authority sites have links pointing to your blog.

It can take time to build those links naturally, but in the end they can also help get you where you want to be in the search engine results.

Commenting on Blogs

This is one of the easiest ways of creating natural back links. Visit other blogs in your industry and leave meaningful comments contributing to the post. When you sign up to leave a comment, you get to establish a link back to your blog. This makes it easy for others to visit your blog with just one click of the mouse.

Social Media Sites and Forums

Setting up profiles at social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are another easy way to build back links to your blog. When you include your url in your profile, visitors that land on your page can easily access your blog.

Industry and niche forums provide another back linking opportunity. Most forums allow members to include urls in their signature. Make sure the url is hyperlinked if possible. Whenever you engage in forum discussions, members and anyone else who comes across your comments will have access to your blog.

Guest Blog Posting

This is a great way to get some positive exposure for your blog. Start by choosing an authority blog in your industry or niche that you follow and contact the owner about submitting a guest blog post. If the owner agrees to your request, make sure to include a one or two line bio at the end of your post including your own blog’s url. A guest post gives you immediate access to a well-known blogger’s larger audience which could end up sending quite a bit of traffic your way.

Utilize Social Bookmarking Sites

Submitting an article or post to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg can expose your blog to thousands of visitors; especially if it makes the first page. Make sure you submit high quality content and ask several of your friends to tag it for you.

photo credit: disoculated

So far we’ve talked about optimizing your blog posts with long tail keyword phrases in Part 1 of this SEO For Your Blog series, and discussed keyword density in Part 2.

Today we’ll discuss what makes a high quality blog post and why it matters so much in SEO.

Bottom line: the search engines and your readers are looking for unique, highly valuable content.

Period.

The whole reason people go online is in search of information. Those mysterious Google algorithms can distinguish quality content from insufficient quality which in the end can effect your position in the search results.

A blog with helpful, information-rich content naturally attracts readers. I can tell you there’s nothing more frustrating than searching for information, or a solution to a problem, and finding nothing but superficial, incomplete articles. Providing valuable, interesting, engaging content pays off in the long run.

How can you be sure you’re publishing quality content?

Here’s a handy checklist you can use to evaluate your posts before making them public:

• Make sure it relates to your business or niche
• Keep your topics fresh and unique; don’t be rehash what’s already out there
• Make sure it’s useful
• Make it personal by including stories about your own or your customer’s experiences

The SEO rules are always changing. The same techniques that got you on the first page of the Google search results back in 2007 may not yield the same results in 2010. The search engines look at many elements of a blog when  indexing your site pages and assigning a position in the search results; but the search engine algorithms pretty much remain a mystery.

Which brings me back to pinning down SEO techniques that work. You know from yesterday’s post that choosing targeted keywords, especially long tail phrases, can optimize your blog for better ranking. The question is does it matter how many time the phrase appears in your content.

Does Keyword density matter?

In SEO the number of times a keyword/keyword phrase appears in content is known as the keyword density. A couple of years ago SEO experts swore packing your content to a certain keyword density would get you noticed online.

There was a lot of awkwardly written, overstuffed keyword articles floating around, but because the algorithms seemed to love content stuffed to a 15 percent keyword density, producing quality content became less important to some bloggers.

Eventually, the algorithms caught on to keyword stuffed content and began penalizing it as keyword spamming. Since Google no longer recognizes content containing an excessive number of repeated keywords, does keyword density even matter anymore?

Those mysterious algorithms

Well, yes and no. Since including targeted keywords in your blog posts can affect your blog’s search engine ranking, you’ll need to include the phrase enough times for the algorithms to recognize the phrase.

Aim for a density of 1 to 3 percent.

That means that a 300 word article at 2 percent density will include a long tail phrase six times. That’s more than enough to appeal to the search engines and deliver quality, natural flowing content your readers will enjoy reading.

Keyword placement can make a difference

Focus less on density and more on where you place your keyword phrases in your posts.

Here is where your keywords should appear for maximum impact:

• Title
• First sentence
• One subheading
• Last sentence

You don’t have to follow this guideline to the letter, but including your keyword in the title of your post and sprinkling the phrases throughout will produce results over time. Keep in mind that providing your readers with well-written, useful content is much more important than keyword density.

If you’re blogging for profit, you’ll want to find ways to increase your online visibility and really stand out. Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can help. There are two types of SEO: pay per click (PPC) and organic search.

This will be the first of four series posts getting to the bottom of how SEO can give your blog a Google search engine boost making it easier for other to find you. I’ll be focusing on organic search methods because these are simple, highly effective techniques you can do on your own.

You won’t see immediate results from organic SEO methods, but once they start working for you the results are long lasting with very little maintenance; best of all these strategies won’t cost you a thing.

photo credit: davidflanders

According to Jakob Nielsen, author of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, people who surf the web don’t read. They scan information instead.

Writing for the web is much different from writing print articles and newsletters. The speed of the Internet coupled with pages and pages of information at your fingertips means readers want instant gratification so they spend more time scanning content online than they do reading it word for word.

Writing scannable blog posts is much easier on the eyes and allows your readers to quickly digest the information you provide. Here are a few tips for writing scannable blog posts:

Use a Friendly, Conversational Tone

Pretend you’re writing to a good friend so that the tone of your posts is easy and conversational. Write the way you naturally speak. For instance use contractions (e.g. isn’t instead of is not) and common colloquialisms instead of writing in a formal tone.

Remember the Inverted Pyramid Writing Style

The inverted pyramid style of writing simply means that you start your post presenting your key points and conclusion first; and then you provide background information and other details.

The first line or two of your blog post could determine whether or not a reader decides to stick around for more so grab their attention right away.

Keep paragraphs short

Forget what your high school grammar teacher taught you about paragraphs consisting of four or more sentences. Keeping paragraphs shorter with white space between to break up the copy is much easier to scan. One tip that might help is putting only one idea at a time in a paragraph.

Use Bullets

Bullet lists are a great way to summarize important points. They really stand out.

Use interesting headlines

Headlines are important because they serve two purposes: They entice your reader to keep reading and they let the reader know what the next paragraph is about.
Your reader can scan your post and get the gist of what you’re saying by scanning the headlines. Many times they’ll go back to read more in depth the get to the meat and potatoes of your topic.

Your content is what draws readers to your blog so it’s important to make sure it’s easy to “read.”

photo credit: auntjojo

Even if you’re blogging everyday about a topic that’s near and dear to your heart, chances are eventually you’ll run into trouble coming up with new ideas. It’s not unusual to hit a brick wall. It’s one reason so many bloggers wind up abandoning perfectly good blogs – they think they’ve run out of things to say.

If you’re delivering good content to your readers and building a community of  loyal followers, you don’t want to all of a sudden stop supplying them with good information. Fortunately, this is an easy problem to solve. There are ways to get unstuck and get those great ideas flowing freely again.

Plan Ahead

Create your own editorial calendar by making a list of topics in advance. You can plan a week, month or even a year in advance if you’re feeling ambitious. This will ensure that you’re never left with nothing to say.

Revisit Older Posts

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably noticed that some posts draw more discussion than others. When you feel blocked, read over your more popular posts again – and don’t forget to read the comments too. Sometimes reader comments will spark a completely new idea you may have never thought to blog about.

Tackle a Topic from a New Angle

You can revisit an older topic and explore it from another angle. For example, let’s say you have an attachment parenting blog and six months ago you wrote a post listing the benefits of breastfeeding.  You could revisit the topic and writing about overcoming breastfeeding challenges, breastfeeding multiples, how to treat and cure thrush while breastfeeding, etc.

Look Out for Ideas While Networking

Forums and social media sites like Twitter can be great places to find new ideas for your blog. Pay attention to what others are saying – especially if you notice topics discussed in your niche. It can lead to lots of topic ideas.

Just Ask Your Readers

Your readers can be your greatest source of inspiration. Invite them to send in ideas for future posts. If a reader contacts you privately with a question you feel might benefit others, create a post based on the question (taking care to protect your reader’s anonymity, of course!). Make sure that your contact information is easy to access.

photo credit: opensourceway

Hi, I’m Kimberly and I’m the new intern blogger here at Profitable Mommy Blogging.  I’m really  excited to be a part of the Moms Talk Network, and look forward to sharing helpful blogging and Internet marketing tips as well as interesting news tidbits that will benefit your business.

A little background about me: I’m married with four children ranging in age from nine to three. I’m a blogger and web entrepreneur working from home and love every crazy minute of it.

It’s so amazing how far the business of blogging has come. You can find blogs covering just about every topic under the sun giving readers vital information and sparking community discussions. As a business model, a blog can do everything from help you connect with and understand your customers and sell products/services to raising awareness about important issues.

If there is a topic you’d like to see covered, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m always keeping an eye out for new ideas.

photo credit: Claudio Matsuoka