Do You Need A Custom Domain To Get Traffic?

When you use free services like Blogger.com you can choose to have your blog's URL be hosted as a subdomain on blogspot.com or you can choose to purchase you're own domain. That way your blog's url will look more like money howtoNOTmakemoneyonline.com instead of someblog.blogspot.com.



From what I've seen, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in terms of traffic when you have your own domain name or you don't. It seems like more of a vanity issue. I've listed the top 30 Blogger blogs hosted using a blogspot.com subdomain below.



If you're blog starts becoming popular and you want to spend a little on it ou can get cheap domain names for under $7 a year with free WhoisGuard privacy protection for the first year at NameCheap.

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Blogger vs Wordpress

Blogging is a cheap and easy way for people who don't know how to build their own website to start making money online. All you have to be able to do is write interesting articles. Two popular free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress.



If you're just starting out and plan to make money blogging you should choose Blogger even though I think WordPress is a more powerful blogging platform.



It seems a little strange to not pick the best tool but I also believe in picking the right tool for the right job. As I'll explain, Blogger is better than WordPress if you're just starting out.

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How To Twitter Like A Normal Person

Twitter is a great way to communicate and meet new people with similar interests. If you run a business you can leverage Twitter to help promote your brand but it can all seem a bit overwhelming.



By now everyone knows what Twitter is but lately it seems like it's filling up with spammers and people are just plain doing things wrong. If you're just getting started, or if you're having trouble getting the results from Twitter it might be because you're not coming off like a genuine person.



I've had some fairly successful Twitter accounts (this one is new) and I've learned a bit by helping others and spent time examining how some businesses found success with Twitter. I'd like to share the key points I learned that can help you promote your company through Twitter including some Do's and Don'ts of business tweets.

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Blogging Is Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme

Over the years more and more people have been looking for ways to make money online. Many have turned to blogging. But how much money can you expect to make from a blog?



I addressed this topic back in 2008 in How Much Money Do Bloggers Make (analysis of a poll from Darren Rowse) and it turns out to be not that much for most. Now I'd like to address the same topic by looking at the stats of 7 of the 10 last blogs in tecnorati's top 100 blog list.



They're not the top of the list but also nothing to sneeze at either. Being in the top 100 when there are hundreds of millions of blogs out there is a very big accomplishment!



So let's look at what it takes to make the least, most popular blog and what type of success it has.

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What Happens When You Stop Blogging?

Many of you know what it's like. You start a blog and you have every intention of posting to it regularly. then after a while you start to lose interest in blogging.



You don't want to fill your blog up with the same old stuff everyone else is posting and slowly your posting frequency goes down to zero.



There are many of these sleeping or zombie blogs out there. I've had some. Heck, this one is one that I thought I'd be posting to more.



I also have another blog that was fairly popular but circumstances changed that prevented me from writing articles regularly for it.



Or, even worse things might have happened? Maybe you really did pass away. Well, not you personally or you wouldn't be reading this.



So what happens when you stop updating your blog?

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Inline Contextual Text Popup Ads with Amazon and Blogger

Google has been making a lot of improvements to their free blogging platform, Blogger.com.

One of these recent changes has been the integration of Blogger with the Amazon Affiliate program.



Now you can easily link your blog with your Amazon Associates tracking id. One of the benefits is you can quickly and easily add affiliate links to products on Amazon.com by using the Amazon Product Finder that is located next to your post editor.

Just type search for the product you want and click to insert a text, image or advanced link+image link which includes pricing information.



This is a lot faster than logging into Amazon's affiliate site, searching for the product, choosing the appropriate tracking id, setting the options to match your site's template then copying and pasting the code. It's even better if you usually add plain image links. In the past you had to download the image and then upload it to blogger. Not anymore!





You can also use your Amazon Associates account and blogger to include contextual inline text pop up ads in your blog posts. When your guest hovers over a link a small pop-up will appear showing the details of the product. Here's how to do it.

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