How To Start An Online Business | Malaysia Internet Marketing Blog » Blogging

OBM’s Blog Installation Service – FREE Till 11th April 2010

William — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:28:00 +0000

If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you would have recently received an email telling you about the new blog installation service we’ve recently added to online business Malaysia.

And only for my newsletter subscribers, you’ll have been told that this service is FREE for a limited time only.

Well I am extending that offer to my readers as well, but this offer is only valid until 11th April 2010.

What Service Are We Offering?

Taken directly from the services page:

Are you new to blogging, want to start a blog now, but don’t have the time to do it yourself?

Or maybe you’ve been blogging using Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com for a while now and you’ve decided to step it up to the next level?

Well with the Install-a-Blog package, we’ll have you up and running in no time at all!

Which is basically an installation service for people who want a brand new blog up and running on their own server, with their own domain.

Click the link below to find out more:

http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/services/blog-installation-service-install-a-blog-package/

Remember, you only have till 11th April before the service becomes a paid for service, so make use of this opportunity and find out more today:

The OBM Blog Installation Service

Looking At The Man In The Mirror – How To Start A Personal Blog

William — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:40:51 +0000

Blogging, the new ‘it’ term of the 21st century.

But how do you start a blog? And is it a difficult thing to do?

This post will bring you through the general steps needed in starting up your own blog, and when I say general, I mean general.

Because if I had to write down each and every step, from getting your own domain, to hosting to installing Wordpress and installing a Wordpress theme – this post would be very long indeed.

Identify What You Want To Talk About

It’s all well and good to say, ‘I want to start blogging’ or ‘I’m going to become a blogger’ but what are you really blogging about?

I can tell you from first hand experience that blogging without a purpose will get you nowhere fast.

“I Hate Work and I Had Noodles For Lunch”

Most people start here – they have an opinion, they’d like to share that opinion, so they start a blog and tell people about their opinion.

Their first blog probably has a domain like xanydude.blogspot.com (this is the name of my first blog – seriously) and they share stories about what they had for dinner, why they’re angry at work, why they’re angry at the government and so on.

But truth be told, unless you are a really really interesting person, or you’re a model, politician or some sort of celebrity, this kind of blogging won’t get you anywhere.

After all, it’s your ramblings. Would you expect someone to enjoy reading your diary full of ramblings if you gave it to them?

Then why should they read about your ramblings on a blog?

Know Yourself

This blog aims to teach people how to make money online and if you blog without a purpose, then don’t hope to be able to do that.

Notice how I’ve not mentioned that you CAN’T make money online with a personal blog, it’s just it’s harder – but it can be done.

Firstly, identify why you’re writing on your blog in the first place. If you’re already popular, great – you’re halfway there as it is.

If you’re not, if you’re like everyone else, with a medium sized group of friends, working in a mid-level 9 to 5 job and are starting fresh, then identify what you’re good at.

Let’s face it, everyone is good at something or another.

Some people are good at making people laugh, some people are good at teaching finance, some people are good at drawing/ art. What are YOU good at?

For me? I’m good at writing about things, things like this for example, how to start a blog.

That’s why I started Online Business Malaysia (OBM) – that’s what I was good at. But note, this blog, is NOT a personal blog.

A true personal blog will be someone who blogs about:

Day to day life
The experiences they have encountered (such as travelling, holidays, studying etc.)
Their like/ dislike for the government, work etc.
Some people make up stories
But most important of all, it is written with feeling, emotions and in a way that lets your audience relate with you at a personal level

Brand Yourself

Now that you’ve identified what you’re good at, it’s time to plan out what/ how you’re going to write out your posts and how to make money from it.

Since you’re intent on writing a personal blog, I would suggest you buy/ use a personal domain name to go along with it.

That would be:

yourname.blogspot.com
yourname.wordpress.com
My recommendation – yourname.com or yournameonline.com or yourname.net

Of course you’ll need to get hosting too, a home/ small business package should be good enough for your uses. Blogspot and Wordpress.com blogs don’t need to get hosting, they’re free, but less effective.

Building a Community

It’s time to go about building a community of followers who will come back to your blog, reading all your new posts as they come out, who tell other people about your blog, repeating the cycle.

Easier said than done.

Building a community is about writing engaging blog posts, they don’t need to be long, but they HAVE to be engaging.

Let’s take for example, you’re writing a personal post and it’s about going for a movie, let’s say that movie is Avatar.

Most people would write part of their blog post like this:

Today I went to see Avatar with Ben and Jenny, it was damn good, great effects, loved the 3D effect that you get from the glasses!

To make it more engaging, you could write the same sentence in these ways:

Funny:

Today I went to watch a James Cameron picture about tall Smurfs, which were trying to take back their world from us puny humans. They can talk to trees and for some reason, the lady Smurf looked hot in 3D.

Interactive:

Today I went to see Avatar with Ben and Jenny, it was damn good, great effects, loved the 3D effect that you get from the glasses! I gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but Ben and Jenny both hated the movie. What do you guys think?

Of course there are many other ways to engage your audience, but little things, like asking them questions as if they were right next to you, help in building your community.

Upload interesting pictures, videos, links to news articles, make use of Twitter and Facebook. These things will ultimately increase you readership and traffic – just remember to post regularly and engage your readers.

Making Money From Your Personal Blog

A personal blog can be harder in some ways and easier in others to make money online.

Due to the random nature of a personal blog (you’re talking about different stuff all the time after all), it tends to be quite hard to get targeted Google Adverts on your site, you’ll get adverts matched to what you could be writing about at that one time.

But it’s unlikely your readers will click through, as they are on your blog looking for your opinion, rather than the content of your posts.

But what can be easier could be using 3rd party advertising instead, such as the Nuffnang network or Admax.

The reason it’s easier with these kind of networks is that they are used to having personal blogs as part of their community and hence they know their advertisers are already targeting personal bloggers.

You would then be served a more general, main stream type of advert, like adverts for cars, movies, food and fashion etc.

These adverts are more likely to be clicked through by your audience, since they’re evergreen topics, mainstream subjects that people might be interested in.

A good example of someone who’s doing well with Nuffnang is Malaysian blogger Kenny Sia who gets asked to do a lot of advertorials, where he is paid to write a blog post about a certain product, in his own way, with his own character.

As your readership grows, as your traffic increases, you may get approached to do advertorials for businesses and that’s where some good money comes in, with advertorials on some of the bigger blogs paying out a few thousand RM for a single post.

Remember To Have Character

Last but not least, remember to have an interesting character. Yes it’s probably the hardest tip on this page, after all, what does this involve?

Well the easiest way to do it is probably to write like how you would talk. Talking is where most peoples’ character comes out in the first place, so replicate it into written words and you should be settled.

Making money with a personal blog isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible.

In fact most things aren’t impossible if you put your mind to it.

Choosing The Heading For Your Post, To SEO Or Not?

William — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:18:09 +0000

When choosing the title of your post, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. These being a) are you approaching it from an SEO point of view or b) are you writing it as a title to ‘catch’ your audience?

Of course a combination of both would be the best, although it will be alot harder to write one of these.

For example, from an SEO point of view, you’d want to write: “How To Drive Traffic Using Articles”, this would give the best long term SEO value for your post as it is exactly what someone might type into Google searching for that information.

From a ‘catchy’ point of view, you may write instead: “Articles Articles, Read All About It!”, ok that wasn’t the best example but you can see what I mean.

SEO works if you’ve already got a good Google Page rank, as posts you write will appear higher up in the Search Ranking on the 1st page.

Writing catchy post titles works if you drive traffic by other means, such as through Twitter, which benefits alot more from short interesting info bytes, such as a catchy title.

If you’ve got tonnes of direct traffic, then it doesn’t really matter, you can lable post titles whatever you want.

For the rest of us, spare a thought about how you phrase your title, SEO or short and snappy, it can make a big difference.

Till next time,

-William Lee

Testing My SEO Skills

William — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:08:25 +0000

Ok I’ve stopped by the blog of former Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mahatir Mohamad and I’ve noticed that some of his pages have very high page rank.

Also, if you do a simple trackback, a link to your blog will be displayed under the respective post.

I will trackback to his post and see if it leaves a do-follow link right back here…

A little sneaky, but that’s Internet Marketing right?

If you came from his blog to here, please don’t be angry

And let me know if it worked..

Thanks,

-William

http://chedet.co.cc/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-tb.cgi/1

Pillar Articles – Good Content For Your Blog

William — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:22:47 +0000

A pillar article is basically a really long, informative and content packed article that is chock full of keywords, is useful to your audience and helps drive traffic to your site.

My first attempt at a pillar article came in the form of my ‘How To Register Online with SSM‘ post which was an informative how-to on registering your business online using the ssm.com.my site.

To date, it brings in the most traffic, and ranks the best amongst the search engine keywords, along side ‘online business malaysia’.

I first read about pillar articles from Yaro Starak’s blog post, ‘How To Write Great Blog Content – Pillar Articles‘

In his words:

Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice.

Ideally you don’t want to fill it with affiliate links, as you’re meant to be providing good content with no ulterior motive right? But since it’s going to bring it a good amount of traffic, ‘useful’ affiliate links are allowed.

What are useful affiliate links? Maybe a link to a good web host your readers can use? Or even a useful product that might enhance your subject matter? Use your common sense, don’t go overboard and you’ll probably make a little from it as well.

But the main aim is to drive traffic.

I’m working on my pillar article as we speak and you’ll be able to spot it when I’m done. I’ll make it at least 1000 words, probably broken up into multiple parts with as much useful information as I can put in it.

My idea is to put it in public view as a sticky post or perhaps a page on this site, as I think I’ll gain more from SEO and indexing that compiling it as a free product and asking people to sign up for my newsletter.

After all, I’ve already got one of those anyway.

Well better get started, lots of work to do.

-William Lee

How To Use The All In One SEO Wordpress Plugin

William — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:27:41 +0000

Here’s a short tutorial on how to use the All in One SEO wordpress plugin after you’ve written your posts.

By default, just having the plugin installed is a good thing because it rewrites your web page titles and helps restructure your URLs to be more search engine friendly.

1) Login to Wordpress

2) Add a New Post

3) Write Your Post

4) Copy and paste your post title and select roughly 160 characters of text that you would like to appear in your ‘description’ when Google indexes your site into the All in One SEO Pack

Your Site Title and Your Google 'Description'

5) Paste it in the All in One SEO Pack plugin that is located below your text input window like so (remember to add a few tags you would like to include in your meta tags of your page):

6) Click ‘publish’ or ‘update post’ to save your changes and add these descriptions to your page.

Installing A New Plugin In Wordpress 2.7

William — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:16:29 +0000

Installing a new plugin is so easy now in Wordpress 2.7.

Things you’ll need to know before starting:

Your username and password for your wordpress blog
Your username and password for your web server

That’s all you’ll need to install any wordpress plugin listed on the plugins directory of Wordpress.org.

Here are the steps:

1) Login to your WordPress blog at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

2) Scroll down the page until you see the tab labelled ‘Plugins’ and click it.

3) Click ‘Add New’

4) If you know the name of the plugin, type it in. If not, search for what kind of plugin you’re looking for, e.g. ‘Comments’ or ‘Popular Posts’ etc.

5) Click the plugin that you want to install or find out more information about.

6) Click ‘Install Now’

7) This is where you’ll need to type in your web server username and password to allow the plugin to install automatically. Then click ‘proceed’.

If all things went well, you should see a message like this. Click ‘Activate Plugin’ and you’re done!

So now you know how to install plugins to your WordPress blog.

N/B: Remember to read through the details provided by the plugin creator, as some plugins require a little bit of modification to the .php coding of your blog.

How To Add A Gravatar Image To Your Comments/ Blog

William — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:05:15 +0000

Adding your picture to your comments with the Gravatar service is a great was to feel more ‘connected’ with your readers, or as a reader yourself.

When you leave a comment, do you look like one of these icons? Do you wonder how come the other people have a little screen shot of their face, logo or some other cute picture next to their name? While you are a blank silhouette of a man or a spectacled smiley face?

Well that’s because they’ve set up a Gravatar account which is linked to their email address. Whenever you leave a comment (with a Gravatr linked e-mail address) then your selected picture will appear in the box next to the comments section.

To setup a Gravatar account follow these steps:

1) Go to http://gravatar.com
2) Sign up for an account

3)Login to your new account

4) Click ‘Add an Email Address’

5) Type in your e-mail address that you use to leave comments (or the admin e-mail address you use for your blog) and click ‘add’

6) Click ‘add a new image’

7) Upload a picture from your hard disk, a website or straight from your webcam.

Choose an image for your email address

9) Select the image that you just uploaded

10) Click ‘confirm’ when it asks you to

It’s as simple as that! Leave a comment with your new Gravatar picture below to test it out.

But what if you don’t have the little box next to your comments on your blog? How do you install it?

This only works if you have a Wordpress blog.

1) You need to have access to the files on your server. For that, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how to get them. I use Dreamweaver to get to my files.

2) Find http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/comments.php (where yourdomain.com represents where you installed your blog and yourtheme is the theme you are using for your Wordpress blog)

3) Open comments.php in Dreamweaver or notepad if you don’t have it.

4) Find this line:

Anything under this line is for the comments section of your blog.

5) If you want to put your Gravatar icon above your name in the comment box (like my comment box below) then search for this line.

and ABOVE it paste this line:

where the number represents how big you want the Gravatar image to be. Default is 32 (i.e. 32×32 pixels big) but I put mine a little bit bigger.

6) Save your file and upload it back to your server.

7) Refresh your page and the box for Gravatar images should be there.

Please remember that not all themes are the same and this method may or may not work for you. But it should work for the default and more popular themes out there.

Share this article if you liked it!

Thanks,

-William Lee