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Some sites, such as eBay and Yahoo!, manage to conduct online business in more than one of the four basic ways. Currently, commercial blogs are ad-supported, for the most part. Just as many thousands of small Webmasters have earned online income from running ads on their nonblog sites, bloggersare doing the same thing. And with the emergence of some high-profile blogs attracting millions of readers, a few bloggers are making very good money.
Blogging is a legitimate and maturing genre of publishing. Some companies hire professional bloggers (or pro writers who have never blogged and learnon the job) to produce corporate blogs in the same way that these companies hire copywriters to produce marketing brochures. That is one path forwriters who want to ply the blogging trade. Then there are the blog networks, which are pushing the envelope of the blo-
gosphere as a publishing force.
Links on other blogs are powerful, and there are two kinds. First, gaining a link in another blogger’s blogroll (the list of favorite sites in that blog’s sidebar) means continuous promotions for your blog, in some cases repeated on every page of the other blog. Blogroll links usually lead to a blog’s home page (the index page). Second, getting linked in another blogger’s entry as a citation for that entry promotes something you said. These links are extremelY targeted and can bring bursts of traffic. Such a link can be an endorsement or an argument against something you posted in your blog; either way, you gain some degree of notoriety and visibility. Citation links usually go to one of your entry pages. You can gain visibility in the blogosphere and start getting linked on other blogs in two ways:
Ask for links. Write a good blog that naturally draws attention. Sometimes those two tactics go together. If you know other bloggers writing
in your subject, it doesn’t hurt to ask for a place on their blogroll. Just ask in private e-mail, not in a comment on their blog, and back up your request with some good content on your blog. Wait until you’ve been blogging for a month or so and can display at least a small archive of entries. Never place a link to your site in another blog’s comment section, unless it’s part of a substantial comment. Even then, you probably shouldn’t do it.
Practicing optimization habits For several years, an Internet marketing field called search engine optimization has been growing in influence. Abbreviated as SEO, search engine optimization involves writing and design skills that make a Web site (blog or nonblog) higher in search results listings than a nonoptimized site. Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN Search) look for certain qualities and site characteristics, and use these cues to determine how good a site is, how closely it matches a searcher’s keywords, and how it should appear on a result page for those keywords. Savvy Webmasters improve their search engine visibility by optimizing their pages according to principles that tend to improve search ranking. There is no reason why bloggers should not do the same thing. Keep your pages short Because blogs tend to feature short bursts of content, with each entry on its own page, they are optimized for optimization, so to speak. Blogs are perfect for SEO because one of the most important optimization principles is to keep your pages short and highly topical. So, if you write a blog about folk music, you might post an entry about the Celtic band Filska; as long as that entry doesn’t veer off-topic, you end up with a naturally optimized Web page.