While most bloggers create personal blogs to express themselves and generate income, other bloggers use their blogs to promote a cause. The latter become advocates of a social or political cause: their opinions are targeted towards seeking social change. As a consequence, most of these blogs face more criticism than blogs that tackle lighter themes. Nonetheless, blogs that focus on social commentaries are effective in getting the bloggers’ messages across. If you want to use your blog to promote a cause, here are two steps to become an effective online advocate:

Step 1: Choose the right cause

Selecting a cause may be extremely easy or difficult. The relative ease or difficulty depends on the preferences and beliefs of the blog owner. For example, if a blogger has a strong political conviction or has already committed himself to a specific cause, deciding is easy. For the undecided, here are factors to consider when choosing a cause:
Select a cause that you are either knowledgeable about, or willing to research on. You will post information on this topic regularly; your entries must be accurate.

Choose an appealing cause. Choose a topic that will be interesting to your potential visitors. Then, you must convince them to agree with the points you raise. It is not possible to influence all readers, but you must strive to be convincing at all times.

Step 2: Promote your blog

When you have decided which cause to promote, the next step is to draw visitors to your blog. There are many ways to do this, but here are two of the most effective and easy ways:

Search engine optimization: In this method, and most of you already knows, the blogger try to increase the rankings of the blog in search engine results, so that readers are directed to the blog whenever they type a particular keyword related to the cause. You can do this by putting appropriate keywords in the posts, including title or image tags, and creating back links to the blog. These increase the blog’s ranking, which in turn will generate blog traffic.

Forums and message boards: This is a common method too, participating in forums related to the cause will establish your stand on the issue. You will also gain the respect of other members. In your forum posts, offer information about the cause and include a link to your blog in your signature. You may even incorporate links to your blog in the message body, but be aware of the message board’s posting regulations.

Just follow these two easy steps, and you are on the right way to become an influential advocate of your chosen cause.

With thousands of blogs being created everyday, It’s becoming kind of hard to make money blogging. In fact, I noticed that there are many bloggers who still believing in some myths that has been popular several years ago. Here’s five myths about blogging that people still believe in, but unfortunately they are wrong:

1. Blogging will make you rich: It’s almost impossible if you work alone, most large blogs that bring in big cash have team of writers that can provides the blog with many articles in various niches and subjects  everyday, in addition of a team of marketers that take care of all the marketing and advertisement work.

2. Easy to get traffic: Absolutely false, getting traffic to a blog requires great content, professional SEO work, good marketing strategy, advertisement and hard work! So, in order to succeed a blog you need to believe on what you are doing and you need some cash to invest on it. 

3. RSS subscribers are the key: Most of blogger thinks that the more RSS subscribers they have, the more successful they are, and that’s not completely true, I can’t say that RSS subscribers will not help your blog, but they aren’t the key to success. Most of big blogs with large counts get these numbers because they end up as a default option in RSS services such as Netvibes and so on…

4. You can blog from the beach: Yes, it’s somewhat true and I was blogging from the beach many times but it was summer time and I was blogging ( hard work ). You will never enjoy this activity whiles working, so you have to expect that you have to do what everyone with a normal 9-5 job does: dedicate yourself to a full working day.

5. Blogging is easy: I believed in that too until I started blogging. It’s not because you can use a computer and string two words together that you’re going to make millions. Successful bloggers work hard, really hard, and often work longer hours than most would in normal jobs. Just checking your post again and again for unexpected spelling mistakes will drive you crazy =P 

It might that this post shows the negative points only, but you still can makes something of blogging. I’m blogging this to show you how much you have to be serious and conscious if you want to get into the blogging game.

Many bloggers thinks that the “About Page” is not something important and they ignore it or they don’t give it the importance that it deserves. In fact, I think that the “About Page” is a necessary page which have to be included in every blog, especially on personal blogs. So, every blogger should create a professional ”About Page” that will satisfy all readers curiosity. You can notice that I just updated my About Page recently, It tooks me about 5 hours to complete the page, I made some research on how this page should look and what are the things that should be included. That’s what I came up with:

The About Page should be clean, simple and well organized in a way that allow your blog readers to find out what they want easily. If you can add some pictures of yourself, It would be nice ( more friendly ).

There are five main questions that readers want answered on your About Me page:

1. Who you are
2. What’s your blog about
3. What’s your expertise and how it addresses
4. What are your goals
5. What are your hobbies and interest

You want to see a sample “About Me” page that answers these questions? Check out my updated About Page.

What keyword would you choose if you could pick any keyword to be on page 1 of Google?

What if there was a way to actually make your fantasy become a reality….?  Ever heard of a little something called SEO or link building?  

Achieving page 1 rankings for your blog is not rocket science like most new marketers may want you to believe.  There are plenty of websites on page 1 of Google and they all did something to get to that spot.  So what is it that makes their website so much different from yours?  Most of the time the only difference is really in the way that they build links to the site.

There is a way that you harness the power of squidoo to help improve your rankings on Google and other major search engines, for your targeted keyword! 

Targeting One Keyword at a Time

Ok, so if you are somewhat familiar with squidoo, you know that you can build your own mini site which Squidoo likes to call a “Lens”.  So how do you use a squidoo lens in the most effective way to improve your search engine rankings?

You should start out by targeting one specific keyword.  You should locate the exact page on your website that is optimized for your keyword.  Once you have established the page and the keyword from your site, your next step is to begin building your Squidoo lens.

When choosing your lens title, be sure to include the keyword into the name.  You also want to use your keyword as the URL for your Squidoo lens.  By placing the keyword in the title and the URL of the lens, you are beginning the first and most important steps of optimization.

Optimize All Titles & Tags

Next step is optimizing the actual content that is going to be used for the lens.  You should make sure that the content is 100% unique and not copied, and also that it is keyword optimized for your target keyword.  If you are writing the content yourself, try to use your keyword throughout the lens about every 100 words or so.

Another good idea is to put a bold tag around your keyword every time that it is used throughout the content in your lens. 

To add a bold tag to any word just put the following tags around the word:

<b>KEYWORD GOES HERE</b>

Example:

<b>Keyword</b> = Keyword

The tag above is a basic HTML code that can be used anywhere that HTML code is allowed to make font bold.  It is a good idea to make your keywords bold throughout content on your site as well, just a little tip!

Use Keywords In Content For Links

Once you have built your squidoo lens and all your content is created, the next step is linking up your lens to your main webpage which is the whole point of this whole process.  Your main goal is to improve the rankings of your main website or blog. 

So your lens is built, now you need to take the bolded keywords from the content and turn them into hyperlinks that point back to your website. 

So what you want to do is take the keyword from the content, which should have the <b> tag already, and you then put a link tag like this:

<a href=”YourSiteURL”>Keyword Here</a>

If you have the bold tag already then it would look like this:

<a href=”YourSiteURL”><b>Keyword</b></a>

By placing that tag around your keyword you are making it a link to your site.  Try to just use 1-3 links to your site for each lens that you build.

Now that your site is linked up to your lens, the next thing is to promote your lens and then let it fly!