Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com

What can you do to benefit from keywords if you already have a website and want to add a blog? You already have a name for your website, you already have a domain name, so how can you use keywords in the new blog in ways that will draw traffic?

You can set up a subdomain or simply a subdirectory on your website to put the blog in — and make the name of that subdomain or subdirectory some relevant keywords, instead of just “blog.”

You’ve seen websites with blogs I’m sure, and almost always the website navigation simply had a sidebar link or navigation menu link that says “blog.” Why not say something like, “Product News and Reviews” instead of “blog”? Chances are, if you are adding a blog to a website, you are going to use it for information or news related to the main blog. As a personal example, I have two or three affiliate marketing websites that display various merchants’ products and try to “entice” or encourage people to click product links on my website, go to the merchant’s website, and buy that product.

Since blogs are a good way to draw search engine “bots” to your website, I have set up blogs on some of my affiliate marketing sites. In one case, I named the blog “Newest Merchandise,” and I use it to post product reviews and links on individual merchandise I add regularly to the site. In another case, I named the blog “News & Reviews” and I do something similar there.

Of course, the full name of the blog isn’t just “News & Reviews” it’s “News & Reviews About xxxx,” but the link to the subdirectory I have the blog in shows on the main site as “News & Reviews.”

No, this stuff isn’t rocket science. (My son is a bona fide “rocket scientist” with an aerospace engineering degree, and he assures me it isn’t rocket science.) There are no rules that you must follow to set up a blog or a website. There are no guarantees that anyone will ever come to your blog or your website.

But if your writing life involves blogging and/or website content, you might want to consider some of these ideas and modify them to fit your particular interests and skills set. You’ll probably find ways to do far more and do it better than I if you just work at it.

Technorati Tags: Internet writing, blogging, keyword blog titles, writing tips at garyspeer.com

When you create a blog or website, try to use a name that people might search for in Google and it could pay off for you in free search engine traffic.

This is sort of related to the post I made last week regarding “long tail keywords” and their use to generate search engine traffic to your blog or website. The example I used there was creating keyword phrases of three or four words that are likely to be searched for in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other Internet search engines. I used the example of picture frames. I won’t post that all over again, you can read it here.

Another useful way to draw search engine traffic to a blog or website is to use a name that people might readily search for if they are looking for a product to buy online, or if they are searching for specific information that you will provide. Here’s an example from my own online efforts:

I recently started a blog on something I am interested in, feel a passion for, and have some expertise with — the history of the American West. When I decided to start the blog, I thought about what someone might search for if they were looking for stories or information about the history of the “Old West,” that period running from around the time of the Civil War or a decade or two before to about 1900, when the “Old West” was more or less populated and becoming tame. I wanted to cover legends, real-life history, information about the daily life in the American West, and even throw in some links to relevant merchandise I might make some commissions on.

The next thing I did, before starting the blog itself, was think about a name for the blog that people might think of if they had similar interests. After kicking some ideas around with my wife, Shirley, we settled on “Life in the Old West.” Then I went to the company where I register domain names for my blogs and websites and did a search. I REALLY lucked out. The domain name “lifeintheoldwest.com” was available, so I grabbed it.

The results? I have had that blog going for about three months exactly. If you type “Life in the Old West” (without the quote marks) into Google, you’ll get a list of “1 - 10 of about 21,700,000,” according to the stats at the top of the Google results page. My blog front page is number six. As a result, I get several dozen visitors a day, and I’ve made just a few bucks selling affiliate merchandise for a company that sells supplies and books for gold prospecting and “rockhounding.” (Disclosure: My “earnings” have been less than $20, and it costs me money to host the blog and time to write the posts, so it isn’t a big deal — yet.)

How do you choose your blog names? How do you go about naming your websites? Don’t be too cute or try to be too clever. If your site name is something clever it may be fun for you, but will people ever search for it? Why not research some keywords related to your blog/website and try to get those words into the site/blog name and the domain name you register to host it?

Technorati Tags: Internet writing, keyword site names, writing tips at garyspeer.com

Sometimes I assume, since I write a lot of content for my affiliate marketing websites and I write several blogs, that most people reading my writing understand and use concepts like “long tail keywords,” and wouldn’t be interested in what I have to say.

Then I remember that we all start — started — somewhere and probably some reading this don’t have the slightest idea about how the concept works or how it might help their online writing efforts.

If you want to draw traffic to your website through the various big-time, free Internet search engines (yes, Google, I’m talking mostly about YOU), you need to have some understanding of long tail keywords. “Keywords” as used in relation to people coming to an Internet site means those words related to your blog or website for which people search — usually a phrase rather than a single word. For example, if you have a website selling handcrafted picture frames, a primary keyword for your site would be “picture frames.” Another would be “pictures” another “frames” and another probably “handcrafted.”

The problem with your keywords there is: There are probably MILLIONS of searches done every day on the Internet for such common keywords as “picture frames” and even “handcrafted picture frames,” so it’s unlikely writing articles or other web content crafted around those keywords will draw you any of that traffic.

Now here’s where the concept of “long tail” comes into play. A “long tail keyword” is a phrase closely related to the website or web page or article you want people to find that is, ideally, THREE OR FOUR words long. Hence the label “long tail.” By writing web content for your blog or website that contains relevant long tail keywords, you can draw search traffic that others might overlook. For example, “handcrafted picture frames,” though it’s three words long, would not be a good long tail keywords because it’s not really very unique. But “find handcrafted wooden picture frames” would probably be a better — maybe even not too bad — long tail keyword.

Enough of the keywords for now. It’s an important concept you need to know at least a little about if you are writing for the Internet. I hope to do some follow-up posts in the next week or so suggesting other important things to know about using keywords and using long tail keywords, although it’s probably pretty basic stuff for many of you.

Technorati Tags: using keywords, long tail keywords, Internet writing, writing tips at garyspeer.com

One of the ways you can make at least a bit of money through your Internet writing and blogging work is to use Google AdSense on your site.

If you haven’t yet heard of AdSense or signed up for an account, you need to go here to the AdSense site and find out all about the program.

If you’ve already got an AdSense account and use AdSense, you can spend literally hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours reading every “guru’s” eBook and special tips about how to make money with the program. In the process you can waste a ton of money and time — I know this to be true because I’ve been there and done that.

What’s the answer? Trial and error, and extensive reading on the Google AdSense site and blogs, as well as many free blogs and forums out there. Do NOT spend a ton of time or money on all the latest get-rich-quick-through-AdSense silliness.

Here’s a useful starting point to get some helpful hints about using AdSense to make money online. It’s a free video, and it’s done by the Google AdSense Australian team — not by the latest gurus-of-the-moment. If you get past the Australian accents (grin) there’s a world of helpful info that’s perfectly adaptable to any AdSense supported country/website. Hope you find something helpful here:

Here’s a short video from the WordPress people about the newly released version 2.6. I’m always personally a little hesitant to upgrade too quickly to any version of any software I own. I’d rather let other folks try it out for awhile to help get any major bugs out of it.

But this newest WP version, if you blog a lot, certainly deserves your consideration. It contains some improved features over version 2.5.1.

Take a look:

I posted here a couple of days ago regarding a writing project I felt compelled to abandon because of possible copyright problems. I “killed” the “Tales of the Old West” site which I’d never done much with.

But out of that death came rebirth (does the term “Phoenix” sound familiar?), and this new project is more exciting to me than the other. Take a look at “Life in the Old West.” This is my “new baby,” and it just came alive last evening, so be gentle, please. So far, I only have one post up, and I haven’t even gotten a “Privacy” page there. There’s only one post up, but it seems pretty explanatory of what I want to do with the site.

In many ways, my heart has long been in the “Old West” of fact and fiction. There’s really not much of a market anymore for Western novels, virtually NONE for short stories, but perhaps I can put something together that will grow in the way of a blog. I encourage you to take a look at it, and I welcome suggestions or comments.

But remember, it’s a new baby, so be gentle.

Now if you’ll excuse me, today happens to be my 41st wedding anniversary. St. Shirl and I have better things to do today than sit around plunking on the old keyboard. See you all tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Life in the Old West, new writing project, writing tips at garyspeer.com

I love reading and writing about the “Old West,” that part of American history related to westward expansion, settlement, and “rip roarin’” cowboys and the whole works. You’ll remember from some earlier posts on this site that I’ve even been working (irregularly) on some “Western” novels.

Just a few minutes ago, I had to kill a major writing project related to the Old West — and I feel a little like I murdered an old friend.

Almost exactly a year ago I purchased the domain name talesoftheoldwest.com. I had high hopes and dreams of creating a blog that would share snippets of colorful Western history, as well as showcase Western fiction. In keeping with the domain name, the obvious title of that blog was “Tales of the Old West.” I even had the software set up, a nice Western related blog theme in place, and a few posts made.

Then, just out of curiosity, I Googled “Tales of the Old West” in Google’s new blog search tool. I discovered there was a blog with a different domain but the exact same site name, “Tales of the Old West,” which offers podcasts of folksy stories and colorful excerpts of Western history. The name and the fundamental approach was exactly like MINE — uh, except this guy started his and has been developing posts and podcasts on the site since 2006.

Alas, should my project go big-time, it would only be a matter of time before the creator of the earlier, very similar blog would find out. In which case, he would be justified in smacking me with a lawsuit or threat thereof, I suspect.

Being very cowardly about potential legal threats, and since I was still in the planning and development stages on the back-burner project, I knew the best thing was to kill the project. Even if I had renamed the site, given the domain name identical with this fellow’s website name — well, it wouldn’t be worth all the hassle and possibly losing legal battles.

So, I’m headed back to the drawing board, or at least back to Google to do some serious searches. I’d still love to keep the fundamental premise of the project, only this time I need to be sure the domain and site name are very far away from what someone else is already doing.

Who know there was still such a market for Western history??

Technorati Tags: writing projects, publishing laws and options, blogging, writing tips at garyspeer.com

For all you bloggers out there who use WordPress, have you switched to the new 2.5.x version yet? It’s been out now about a month — a few days ago they issued a security upgrade so the very latest version is 2.5.1 — and I’m still getting accustomed to the new look and functionality of the administrative “dashboard.”

I don’t really like most of the changes they’ve made. I’m pretty “techie” about a lot of things, one of them being WordPress, and I really wanted to love the changes. But for the most part, I don’t.

One feature they got really “right” is the ability to quickly update WordPress plugins. You can do it pretty much with just a single click. Used to be you had to go to the plugin website, downloaded it to your computer. often unzip the file, then upload it to your server and reactivate it. That hassle’s been eliminated. The dashboard alerts you under “plugins” when one has been updated. You have the choice of going through the hassle on your own, or clicking for automatic updating. Works pretty well.

I do NOT like the way they’ve totally messed up Widget management and made it harder to add, move, and edit widgets in your WordPress theme. They’ve just done so much wrong regarding widgets that I won’t even go into it here.

So, those of you who blog with WordPress — and I know you’re out there reading this, aren’t you? — what do you think about version 2.5x? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Let us know.

Technorati Tags: WordPress 2.5 review, blogging software, writing tips at garyspeer.com

I don’t know how many of you build websites or write content for websites that are not blogs, but I’m sure some of you do such things. If so, you may already have a template or a method that works well for you, but I don’t know whether you’ve thought about this idea: WordPress, the software that powers this blog and about a zillion others, ALSO works for “non-blog” websites, and has some real advantages over a standard website template.

I mention this because I now use WordPress almost exclusively for building just about any website, and those I have made with some other templates I am converting over to WordPress. Here are some reasons how this works and why it has advantages:

1. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands, of free WP themes available to easily find and change just the appearance you want for your website. Do you want something with a wide column on the left and a narrow sidebar column on the right? How about putting that sidebar on the left? How about a sidebar on BOTH the right and left? Or perhaps you like a wide content column with two narrow sidebars on the right? Looking for something in a basic black and white? How about every possible combination of red, blue, green, yellow, orange, etc.?

You get the idea.

2. WordPress is so easy to install your trained monkey can do it. Okay, maybe not quite that easy — and my apologies for the lame humor if you DO have a trained money. Many webhosts, however, offer a service called “Fantastico” which makes WP almost a one-click install. Even if you do it on your own by downloading the software from WordPress.org, it’s really pretty doable if you build on maintain any sort of website.

3. WordPress is so versatile you can have easily editable pages set up and published in a flash. You can add content to your website as easily as writing a blog post. You can also have pretty much “static” unchanging pages, as many as you like, in the form of WP pages instead of posts.

4. You can use WP “as is” or you can pretty easily modify a WP theme/template so that no one will see “date,” “time,” and “author” information and other stuff that makes your website look “bloggy.”

5. WordPress is generally much easier to learn than the more popular Content Management System (CMS) software packages out there. And it can do most of the things such CMS heavyweights as Joomla and Drupal can do — only it does them in, I think, simpler fashion. If you’ve learned to use Joomla, Drupal, or any of the other CMS installs, good for you. I have tried repeatedly to learn those two in particular and had no luck. No matter what I do and how I do it, I can’t figure out how to add modules, modify modules, make them visible or hidden, and just generally get through all the other mayhem to make anything look good. With WordPress, there are only four things to learn and you can use it as a CMS: posts, pages, permissions, and themes.

Anyway, if you’ve only thought about WordPress as blogging software, think again. You can use WP to put an entire, complex website together with just about any content you wish to write.

Technorati Tags: Internet writing, WordPress, CMS, using WordPress for websites, templates, writing tips at garyspeer.com

I had a private response to my post of a few days ago, with one of our readers asked me how to get a blog into the Yahoo “modules” that you set up on a Yahoo home page. Getting into that system is relatively easy, and it can be a nice source of readership.

You can always simply wait for Yahoo to index your blog, which could be like waiting around for anti wrinkle cream to take effect. Or you can use your Yahoo home page to get your blog into the system quickly and relatively easily.

So for what it’s worth to some of you, here’s my step-by-step “walk through” for anyone else wondering about how to do this:

1. Make sure you have the URL for your blog’s RSS feed. I only know how to do this with WordPress blogs and/or blogs which use the FeedBurner service. In WordPress, your RSS feed URL is usually just “http://example.com/feed.” It’s that simple to find your feed in WordPress. In other blogging software, I’m afraid I don’t know. But you can probably find some “help” or “support” links to identify your blog’s feed.

EASIER WAY FOR THIS: The easiest way to find your RSS feed and set up the URL you need is to go to http://www.feedburner.com and walk through their step-by-step guide to let FeedBurner.com handle your blog feeds. It’s a free service and I highly recommend it for all blogs. Take a look around their and you’ll see they offer you a wealth of services.

2. Once you have either your “raw” URL for your blog’s RSS feed or your FeedBurner feed URL, go to your Yahoo home page, and log in using your Yahoo ID. Then click on the drop-down menu bar near the top called “Personalize This Page.”

3. Select the drop-down choice which says “Add RSS Feed.”

4. Type or paste your RSS feed which you found and/or created in Step 1 into the box and hit the “Add” button.

5. The RSS for your blog should show up on the page. When you first try to go to it or use it, you may get a message that a new RSS feed has been added and asking whether you wish to keep it or not. Tell it yes.

This process has published your blog’s RSS feed and identity into Yahoo’s system.

Another method, which can become frustrating because of the overload of information offered, is to go to the Yahoo Publisher’s Guide at http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide. This is an excellent reference source and will help you learn about RSS. But by far the quickest and simplest way to add your blog’s RSS to Yahoo is to do it as I’ve suggested through your Yahoo home page.

And, let me emphasize, I highly recommend that you set your blog’s feed up at FeedBurner.com. They offer a wealth of free features to help you understand and use your RSS feed to build your blog.

Hope that’s all helpful. Feel free to ask questions and seek clarification through the “Contact Us” form and/or by leaving a comment. Happy blogging.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, adding your blog to Yahoo, Yahoo and RSS feeds, Internet writing, blogging, writing tips at garyspeer.com

Welcome back — to myself.

I guess the busy-ness of the season, the alternating cold weather and torrential, tornadic downpours — it’s a conspiracy, I tell ya, a conspiracy to keep me offline.

Okay, I’m not the victim of any conspiracy except the conspiracy of time and events we call life. Since I work at maintaining and doing chief writing for six different blogs, sometimes I lose track. In this case I honestly didn’t know it had been four days since I last came here to share some of my wit (half) and wisdom (?) with you. But here I am, so here we go.

I hope to appeal to your better nature with this one — tell me about your writing life. I’m inviting comments here because I really hope some of the experiences I’ve had as a writer and editor may be of value to you. But that can only happen as I know more about you who are reading this. What sort of writing do you do or do you hope to do? Are you more interested in writing short stories or novels? Fiction or nonfiction? Copy writing or poetry?

I have been looking for some good software that will allow me to post a poll or some similar multiple-choice feedback options so I can get to know more about you who read this blog with a view to helping me understand what you’d like to read.

I’m still looking for that software. Any of you who blog have any suggestions?

Talk to me, friends and regular readers. Talk to me, first-timers and occasional visitors.

The floor is open and I await your comments, questions, and suggestions. And if you’re most comfortable not posting a public comment, then use the “Contact Us” page and it’ll send email directly to me without making your comments or questions public.

Technorati Tags: what do you write, writing types, writing tips at garyspeer.com

Just a “heads up” if you blog with WordPress and are considering the upgrade to their newest version 2.5. I upgraded one of my blogs a few days ago.

They have totally messed up the dashboard for using widgets in the new 2.5. I mean wow have they messed it up.

The biggest problem is if you do much widget moving. (If you aren’t a WordPress blogger, this may all sound like Greek to you before I’m done.) For example, on this blog I use a WordPress theme which has two sidebars — sidebar 1 and sidebar 2. In past versions of WP, if I wanted to move a widget containing, say, the “Archives,” from sidebar 1 to sidebar 2, I simply went into the administrative dashboard which shows my two sidebars, did a quick drag-and-drop, and the job was done.

Now, there seems to be a way it CAN be done, but not easily. In fact, one blog I was reading earlier today gave a step-by-step “how-to” for moving a widget from sidebar 1 to sidebar 2 — it only took him 15 steps. It takes many more if you wish to move more than one widget.

I will say this, if you aren’t going to be moving widgets between sidebars in your layout, everything else about WordPress 2.5 works nicely. Some of the administrative areas in the dashboard look and behave very differently, but once you get accustomed, the software itself seems stable and seems much faster.

For those of you who aren’t bloggers, or those who don’t use WordPress, I thank you for your patience.

Technorati Tags: WordPress 2.5, WordPress 2.5 widget woes, writing tips at garyspeer.com