Oh well, since we’re here. Couple of plug-ins that I would like to point out to you:

Wordbooker
This nice little gadget posts a link to your Facebook page or profile and syncs comments between your FB and WP. I’m sure you have noticed people being a lot more likely to comment on Facebook than on your blog so now you can just suck their comments right out of their mouths and import them onto your blog. Serves them right, lazy b….ds.

SEO Ultimate
I’ve been using All in One SEO Pack for quite some time, but have replaced it with SEO ultimate on all sites except this one… Because I forgot I have this one so… Yeah. It’s a goody!

SBS Blogroll
To kill off the list of dead links on your side bar! Let’s face it, you don’t have time to check every link on your blogroll to see they’re still working, do you? Besides, even if you use a tool like broken link checker, you know nobody clicks those links! So here’s a nice little gadget, it pulls the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and lists 10 of the latest ones in your sidebar, with headings, authors,  dates, the lot. A lot more attractive than an obscure list of obscure blogs – and, no updates, no links!

Lastly;

Rank Tracker tool
You might want to take a serious look at this one. (No, I’m not an affiliate.) It’s a powerful tool that shows you exactly how your SEO optimization is going. No more guess work, you’ll know, and you can compare your rankings to a competitors site too. Although you still have to do the hard work of writing for SEO, you’ll know if your efforts are paying off or not. It’s a bit pricey for a hobby tool, but if you’re even half serious about your SEO, consider getting this one. Just one of my sites: When I first got this, I had 0 links in top 10 in Google. Now I’ve got 46. It doesn’t take the work of you, but it sure motivates you to keep going! (Note: Do not use headings like this post has for SEO purposes. )

Turning readers into cash

The easiest way to turn your traffic into cash is selling ad space. That’s the theory. If you have visitors the money will roll in. However, I have found through years of experience that this just doesn’t happen unless your blog fits into a very detailed category of blogs.

The most important thing for a blog to have is “high paying keywords”. On the top of the list, is “domains Yahoo” which can bring in a ridiculous amount of $97 a click. Ninety Seven Per Click! I wish I made 97 a year of my blogs or websites! The keywords by themselves of course don’t solve your problems alone. You will have to have the blog, have traffic, then have keywords in your content and advertisers who are willing to pay for displaying an ad on your website. It won’t help me one bit if I repeated that keyphrase a hundred times on this page, because my blog is low ranking and I don’t even run AdSense here (because it makes no sense on this type of blog).

In addition, your topic determines what kind of keywords you actually CAN use on your blog. If you blog about making handbags at home by hand, you won’t normally slip in words like insurance, lawyer and viagra. Even if you did, once or twice, the keyword density would make it obvious that you’re not exactly blogging about those topics, and therefore the advertisers stay away. If you started using these keywords regularly, I’m willing to bet your hand bag making readers would be quite put off by it.

If most of your readers come from countries that are not high on advertisers radar, they can cut you out from the list as well. This localisation, or targeting thing is really great if you’re advertising a local business and you really don’t need traffic from the other side of the world, but if you’re the blogger or webmaster and your readers, as in “eyeballs on your page” are of non-american origin, you’ve got the short end of the stick again. You can combat this a bit by targeting your content to the same market as the advertisers would, for example, if you’re Finnish, blog in Finnish for Finnish people about something they can buy in Finland.

Then there are those of us, who are not prepared to plan their website under the conditions of what advertisers want them for. In our case, monetising is a lot harder. Our readers may be scattered all around the world, with just a couple in each country, or just a “wrong” country. Our topics are not keyword dense. We talk about creativity, psychology and imagination, and those are things that are priceless – in the true sense of the word. They are the best things in life, but even though your readers would put a lot of money on their hobby, there’s not much of a reason why they would put money on your website, or why an advertiser would like to spend dollars on advertising on your site. The bottom line here is, that if you want to turn that kind of a site into cold hard cash, you’ll have to think outside the box. How do we do this?

I wish I could give you an answer. I know you were waiting for an answer, but instead all I can offer is a place for a conversation, maybe you, my reader would have some ideas. Maybe you can just vent out your frustration about your popular blog or website being worth zip in money… I’m thinking hard about this, and I promise I’ll tell as soon as I come up with something that I can actually try out in practise.

Blogrolls are also a bit stupid because they require maintenance and you need to periodically check your links are actually up to date. As I was installing RSS Blogroll for my “thinking blog” My Dear Hard Drive, I noticed a lot of them were either completely broken, pointing in a wrong place or the blogger had updated some time last year saying they’re quitting blogging. Even though I visited some of the blogs anyway, I didn’t remember to update the blogroll when they stopped blogging. RSS Blogroll is going to fix that problem for you!

RSS Blogroll is a plugin that updates your favourite blogs feeds instead just the name of the blog and the link. It will give links to the latest articles written on your favourite blogs, and if your blogger friends are not updating – no problem, as their blogs will simply disappear from your list! Check out my RSS Blogroll on the sidebar for reference. Don’t you just love it?

The great thing about them is that they can reflect their owner freely, without topical restrictions, concern about SEO, marketability or anything of the sort. Sure, they’re hard to promote, and if you like a lot of people reading your stuff, you are bound to find it harder than with any other type of blog or website you may have. Unfortunately, the difficulty in promoting them is the reason why many of the bloggers quit or redefine their topic into something less personal.

In ten years, I haven’t even found a good term to describe different kind of personal sites, which can be anything from a politicians blah-blah about his individual thoughts within his party, to a house wife’s musings about what to cook today or how much poop did the little one produce today. In between, there are a multitude of different ways to write personal blogs, and they should have sub categories! Let’s have a think about it, shall we? (Please feel free to add your thoughts about the matter in the comments.)

Personal Blog or Website

• Artist’s blog -showcasing a person’s works of art and describing the process to create them.
• Politician’s blog – collection of thoughts, opinions and suggestions by a politician.
• Mommy blog – Actually probably the only type of a personal blogs that has a clearly defined sub category.
• Online Journal – The other fairly well known type of personal blogs, but with a lot of confusion. Reports of the daily antics of the blogger. (The original type of blog.)
• “A Thinking blog” – A collection of person’s thoughts of various matters, written in creative non-fiction, without the intent to showcase the writing as art, political view or philosophy, per say, but with the intent to stir thoughts, make a point and/or simply entertain.

For a writer, having a personal blog, the thinking blog -type, is just a must. This will help you to identify the topics and things you keep thinking about, and that will give you further help in finding the topics that will sustain your interest enough for an individual blog or maybe a full book! Even if nobody read it, it’s good to have. (My thinking blog is at http://www.sebastyne.net .)

Does this make sense or ring true to you? Do you think the personal blogs should have more status? Have you noticed how hard it is to even find a category suited for something like a thinking blog when submitting it to blog directories? Any other type you think should be on the list?

A blogger should be fairly approachable to large audiences, and if their writing is very polished, people can literally shy away. For good writers, who are simply born good writers, I’d advice not to spend more than a half an hour writing a blog post, (possible research time excluded) so it won’t be too polished or too finished. People like to add stuff to your posts by commenting, and if you’ve thought of everything, that doesn’t really leave much for commenting – and a lot of people see the number of comments as a measure of a blog. (See my previous post.)

Most blog readers don’t expect you to be a great writer. This is not the medium that people expect that from, quite the opposite. Most bloggers are rather engineers than authors, so you just jump right in there and get started.

The reasons I post a comment:

1) I read a blog post that is a fairly good one, but could be better. I have something to add or point out.

2) What the blogger said was so god damned idiotic, that I just have to tell them how things REALLY are.

Then there’s two reasons for not commenting:

1) The post was so pointless that it would be waste of my time to say anything.

2) The post was SO GOOD, that it would be pointless to say anything, because the only thing to add would be: “Hey, great post” and that reeks of someone after your Google Juice.

Now, the thing for you to do is to decide whether your posts are god damned pointless or simply amazing, and figure out which is the more likely reason for the lack of comments.

And the How To:

If you have one blog

Facebook allows you to directly import one blog into your notes. Every time you update, a note is automatically created including your post in whole, notifying your friends. Your friends can then comment directly on Facebook or click a link to your blog (which you would probably prefer, but you shouldn’t get too demanding here.) Your friends are a lot more likely to comment than a random reader.

1 Go to Notes Import a blog -settings. (The link here should take you automatically there, but if not, you can find it on Notes-page on the side bar. Import settings.)

2. Find your blog feed and enter it into the entry box. (To find your feed, go to your blog, then look for the feed icon in the browser address bar or your side bar. If you’re on WordPress it is formed as www.yoururl.com/feed/ on Blogger it is formed as http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/)

3. Confirm

If you have more than one blog you want to import, here’s one way to do it:

1. Start an account with FriendFeed for blog entries only.

2. Enter the blog feed urls on the Custom RSS/Atom (Check above how to find your blog feeds.) Select the option “Include entry description as a comment”

3. Take that feed and follow the instructions on how to import one blog to Facebook. Unfortunately, FriendFeed will only import the headline and a link to your blog, but at least that forces people to actually visit your blog and is more likely they comment directly on it.

There are other ways to import blogs through Facebook applications, but unfortunately most of them import them only onto your profile and the updates are not included on the update time line on the Facebook front page. Because notes are Facebook standard apps, the updates will show up on the time line. In addition, some of the importers I’ve tried only update the feed if you manually tell it to update. To me that’s way too much trouble! :p

Photo of a child on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Photo of a child on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about but her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.) Unprofessional.

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. This also gives you the option of using different theme in the photos while still tying them to yourself. The one I’m holding my dog is used on social sites for field spaniel owners. The one I hold a pen in, is designed for my writer’s profile.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to upload your avatar to Gravatar, which is a centralized avatar storage, that will allow you to link a photo to your email address. This way when you comment on a blog (all that have Gravatar enabled) will fetch your photo that matches the email address you used. Sweet.

Another thing that can damage our success is to write simple topics using complex language, rather than taking a complex topic using simple language. The worst case scenario is to take a complex topic and “spice it up” with complex language and words. Sometimes bloggers are tempted to use words that sound “sophisticated” forcing their readers to use a dictionary while they’re reading – even if the readers were native speakers. This can also happen to non-English speaking bloggers, who are not sure of the translation, take a dictionary and pick a word they are not familiar with, because it kind of sounds about right. It may be the perfect word, but if native speakers are not using it, it may be more damaging than helpful. The challenge of writing doesn’t come in “sounding sophisticated” but in trying to write so clearly that even a child will understand what you’re saying without sounding like you dumb things down for your stupid readers.

I am not too concerned with some grammatical errors here and there, even if they were foreign type of errors. My proof reader / English teacher husband strongly disagrees though. He’s a native speaker, I’m not. He thinks non-English mistakes distract from the message and make the writer sound a bit stupid. I, on the other hand, kind of like to hear the bloggers native language come through in their blogs, as long as it doesn’t make it incomprehensible and very difficult to read. Some mistakes and culture specific grammar errors here and there don’t bother me – you are free to disagree and I encourage you to do so, should you wish to advice non-native bloggers.

Every blogger could take the time to write in Word first to have the available spelling and grammar check together with readability scores at their usage. (If you don’t have Word, try this link.) Writing in Word is good practice also in the point of view of storing your blog posts on your computer. Who knows, you might compile them into a book one day.

People often complain about customer service especially on free services like SezWho, but I have to say that was up there with the best paid services I’ve used. I didn’t have to wait for long to get an answer, then I got help by email and was offered help through Skype but they solved the problem before I saw that message. Very cool. And in the end they were happy to have gotten some debugging experience.

Thanks SezWho, sezI. (Apparently there are some people from SezWho in the pic there.)