Submit to major search engines

To enable us bloggers to earn money, we will need awareness. The kind of awareness which i am referring to is search engine awareness. And how to get search engines to be aware of us? Thru search engine submittion of cos.

The major search engines are

- Google

- Yahoo

- MSN

The remaining search engines shall be left out as they contribute to less than 20% of the searches, which means the above 3 search engine giants process at least 80% of the whole searches! Which makes it extremely important 

for us to be listed or indexed in their directory. So that when searches is performed for a certain keyword or phrase, our website will be taken into consideration.

Does this seems difficult? Yes? You will change your mind after read through the rest of this post.

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Google

Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/    

Enter your URL into the URL box, eg http://yourname.com

At the "Comments" Box, enter the keywords or slogan for your website/blog

Lastly, Pass the image test and click on "Add URL" and you are done submitting your URL to google

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Yahoo

Go to Yahoo.com

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and look for the link "Suggest a Site"

After clicking on "Suggest a site", at the next page, select the option "Submit Your Site for Free" (usually the top option) 

*Side note : The rest of the options (without the "FREE" word) will require payment for submittion.

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Select "Submit a site or webpage", key in your URL and submit. However, you will need a Yahoo account. If you do not have, you will need to create an account before Yahoo allows you to submit your URL. If you have an account, login and you are done!

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MSN

go to http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSUT, 

Enter your URL and key in the characters in the image. and you are done!

Yahoo is the only search engine that requires login, which in my opinion is a good thing. The websites and feeds submitted are located in your yahoo account which you can access in the future.

If you were to notice, there are several websites that assist you to submit to even more search engines, however, i will not really recommend those options.

Why?

- They will need your email address, to send verification mails, which i feel could be used for spams. Besides, some of the search engines are using the technology of the major 3 search engines and rarely people uses those search engines.

Hundred or even thousands of these search engine take less than 20% market share of searches, by taking law of average, each engine takes less den 0.2% of the market share! 

Worth the effort to risk getting spam and time to click on verification mails? 

To me, after some calculation, the risk and efforts are not worth it.

I have to stress heavily that search engine submittion is a basic yet important step for us to bring our website to the world. Which is the starting path for us to earn the money that we that we bloggers deserved!

Starting a Popular Blog - Blogging Platform

 

    

What are the methods to ensure that your blogs are popular and growing in size everyday? With every 10 blogs created every minute, how do you differentiate yourselves from the others?

Blogging Platform

This is the essential yet most overlooked rule. Are you comfortable with using non-unique web address? Eg http://yourname.blogspot.com or do you prefer http://www.yourname.com 

This has to be the most important step before you earn money online, as changing your domain name in the future will be very tedious and could caused you to lose page rank and created broken links.

Personally i will decide the platform more than to decide on how to blog a blog.

Currently, for most of the bloggers, they have a lot of choices for blogging platform, however, i shall concentrate on the 2 mainstream platforms. Blogspot and Wordpress, to start a blog.

Blogger

As you can see, i am using blogger or blogspot platform, the free blogger platform. Why did i choose this? Because its free =D

The functionalities is ample for me to show you how to setup the basic of a blog and advanced features to earn more money. 

Blogspot is suitable for starters, to learn how to blog and to start a blog and is extremely easy to start on a new blog.

Setting up your first post could be as fast as within 3 min!!

Blogspot is owned by google as well, thus, with the web advertising giant backing it up, you can be sure that the support is there, though you have to follow the policies set by it as well.

Wordpress

Another blogging web hosting platform, is pretty easy to setup and allows a lot of tweaking. 

Wordpress have a huge group of plugin programmers as compared to blogspot, thus this is my number one choice for various serious add-ons.

However, Adsense cannot work on free wordpress accounts, as wordpress does not allow javascript. Thus to use adsense on wordpress accounts, you will need to buy your own domain name and upload wordpress before adsense can be enabled.

Setup  

Blogspot is much easier to setup, Adsense is available on free blogspot as well.

Functionalities  

Wordpress, they have far more plugins and allows more customized tweaking to your blog.

Troubleshooting and Support

Both sides are tied at this. Both sides have their fair share of supporter and problem solving volunteers.

JavaScript (needed for adsense and most of the monetization programs)

Free blogspot wins on this, as wordpress will not support javascript on its free servers.

Blogging platform interface

blogspot wins again in this field, the graphical interface looks and feels very friendly as compared to wordpress.

If you wish to start a blog, on a free domain, i personally will choose blogspot over wordpress as they are able to provide what i want to start a blog.

- Adsense

- easy to setup interface

I am not saying Wordpress is extremely difficult to setup, but their interface are cluttered and looks messy to me. Apologises to the wordpress supporters. And interface is pretty important for me.

However, if i willingly to spend some money on domain name and webhost, in the long run, i am willingly to sacrifice my slight discomfortable for their interface and consider wordpress. However, i will not fully rule out google blogspot and wil keep them in my radar should i need to start a blog again