The Real Blogger Status

Many people who publish blogs also have FaceBook pages - and one of the easiest ways to get traffic, to the blog, is to share the blog to a FaceBook page. Some people want money for publishing their blogs. AdSense is a very popular way to earn from publishing. AdSense produces the best results, with lots of readers to read the blog, click on the ads, and buy the products and services advertised. FaceBook, and similar social network sharing services, is not the best choice for advertising a blog that uses AdSense ads.

Making a blog searchable is the first step in getting search traffic, and readers, for our blogs - when we want them visible to the public. Not all blog owners want their blogs visible to everybody. Complementing the ability to publish a blog, and have it visible only to invited readers, Blogger gives us the ability to make the blog invisible, to the search engines. If we want readers for a blog, and do not have a private reader audience in mind, we first make it visible to the search engines.

Some blog owners do not understand why ads do not display, on their blogs. We see a frequent complaint, in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger, YouTube, Partner sites . I installed ads to my blog - but the ads are not showing. It has been several months already - and I have received no feedback, from AdSense. Too frequently, the blogs in question turn out to be computer / tech blogs - many offering free downloads of various commercial products.

One sign of confusion, in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger / Host Partners , involves new blog publishers, who want to immediately add ads, after starting their blogs - and need reassurance, about how soon they will be seeing income. What is the actual qualification level, for AdSense? This is a question, from somebody who probably does not understand the AdSense approval process . If AdSense is run properly, final approval is not based on any fixed minimum. There are too many different blog / website subjects, and advertising targets, to have a consistent minimum across all product lines.

Anxious blog owners ask the question periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Is affiliate marketing allowed, in Blogger? And the truth is that there is no prohibition against affiliate marketing, by name. If the blog content is legal, you can do anything. The question is, can you make a Blogger blog, and use affiliate marketing, and not run afoul of Spam and TOS guidelines?

Some new blog owners put a lot of effort into designing a shiny template with lots of features, but omit blog content - or spend time carefully tuning their blogs. Eventually, they will add content, to the blog. Later, they may discover reality. This looks like crap! or Why do I have no readers? Different blogs, with differing content, may look better using different templates. And some sections of the dashboard should be left alone.

We've been exploring bogus redirection of reader traffic , for a few years. Similar to dubious awards and web rings , we have "traffic exchanges". Traffic exchanges are similar to "affiliate marketing", where readers of one blog are randomly shuffled to another blog , then to another - all the while, lighting up ads on each blog.

Blog owners use many techniques for getting new readers - and for keeping existing readers happy. Some blog owners use techniques which work inconsistently, because they are not designed to work the way they are being used. Some blog owners becomes concerned when their blogs, listed in blogrolls on other peoples blogs, don't seem to be updated as regularly as they would expect. Blogrolls are good tools for getting new readers, in a casual manner. They may not be as good, for predictable, scheduled visitor activity.

One challenging question, that we see from time to time in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is about one of the neatest Blogger social networking features, Following. How do I find blogs to Follow? And that is a simple question, with not such a simple answer. What came first - the chicken, or the egg?

This year, we are finally seeing the beginning of the end, of one problem, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Spam reports - both righteous and spurious - are steadily slowing down. They are not at zero level yet, but there is a distinct decrease. Now, we are seeing questions from people who actually can do something, about their personal contributions, to the problem - borderline spam blogs, with blog owners possibly able and willing to clean up their act. I look in Google Search, for my blog, but it's not listed. Please help me, what is the problem - how can I get my blog listed? This blog owner has the right attitude - if not the right training.

One of the more intriguing questions, that we see in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , involves the Blogger / WordPress dichotomy . Should I migrate my blog to WordPress, where they provide SEO optimized themes, and various plugins? My answer to that question starts with the suggestion, that the blog owner should ask himself Why do I publish a blog? This question has many possible answers - but I will focus on two possibilities.

Similar to starting a blog and immediately focusing on making money , we sometimes see people who start a blog, and immediately start designing the template, with custom features. A beautiful, shiny design is useless, if your readers don't like it. Different blogs will attract different reader populations , who will respond to different designs.

We've known of resourceful scammerspammers, for years. One long known scam, popular with home / small business blog owners, has been to award a badge for a "Most Excellent Blog" - and encourage the badge recipient to award the badge to friends with "Most Excellent Blogs". The recipients of the "award" would proudly display the badge on their blogs. The "Most Excellent Blog" badge, of course, contained a link back to the scammers blog. Recently, a spammer in a foreign country hosted an "SEO Contest" for other blog owners, where everybody participating was again, encouraged to put the "SEO Contest" badge on his blog or website. Again, the badge lead back to the spammers website.

Too many blog owners start their first blog - and the first step is to drop into the nearest online publishing forum - such as Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , and ask the question of the typical marketing expert. I want to start a blog. What should I write about, to make the most money? And there is where many spam blogs start. People who are making money, are busy making money. They do not hang out in forums, waiting for you to ask how to make money, so they can tell you how to make money - probably, some of the money that they want to be making.

Too many blog owners have been listening to spammers, who tell them lies, and encourage dodgy publishing practice . You can make lots of money - just start a blog, scrape content from other blogs and websites, and add ads! This is wrong, for many reasons.

Occasionally, we see a report in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , that reflects on the reader audience - not necessarily only the blog content. Why is my blog behind a Content Warning? Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is objectionable. Occasionally, a quick eyeballing of the blog in question may turn up some dodgy content, which may be suggested, in the forum, as problematic. This story may not end immediately. But, I've had that picture gallery, for years! Why did I just get the Content Warning? Here, the blog owner is not considering changing standards - or the possibility that the blog, becoming more popular, may be adding readers who don't appreciate a photo gallery started years ago.

Here's a great investment idea. Everybody who needs money (which is most likely, everybody reading here) can invest $10 each. Everybody, reading this, can send me $10. Surely, each of you have a spare $10, to invest. What will I do with the funds received? I will, immediately, take 10% off the top. That's for my retirement account. I will let my friends (don't you wish that you were my friend?) take 5%, each, off the top. As I get investments from more blog owners, I'll send you - and the other initial investors - a token payment. At the end of a week, you, and the other investors, get to divide up the remainder. Isn't that a great investment idea?

We see evidence of confusion, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . How do I move an established blog to WordPress (or any other platform), while retaining the history, reader interest, search engine reputation? Some blog owners think blog readers are cattle (to be herded from blog to blog) - or monkeys (to be attracted by shiny things). We've known for some time, that Blogger blogs cannot be used as gateways, with traffic automatically redirected from one blog to another - or from a blog to a non Google website . Use of traffic redirection scripts is a known cause of blogs classified as malware hosts .

As the frustrations about the CC TLD aliases continue to be reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , and some of the details are discovered and resolved, we are seeing suggestions of other, more subtle problems. Some blog owners claim that their page rank / search engine reputation has taken a nose dive, because their readership is spread out over many different countries. Apparently, canonical resolution by the search engines does not work, for all "blogspot.com" published blogs. Older blogs, including those with Classic (HTML based) templates - and possibly some older Layout templates - seem to lack canonical resolution.

If you publish a public Blogger blog, and have a FaceBook and / or Twitter account, then you have an audience for your blog updates, waiting to read your blog posts. Any Blogger feed (which eliminates private blogs ) can automatically post, to FaceBook and / or Twitter.