Blogging for Dollars Blog

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Writers, artists, designers and photographers are taking to the Web to become known via blogs. For little or no cost, not only can you set up a portfolio blog to show potential employers what you can do, you can also set up shop and sell your products.

Portfolio blogs are perfect for creative professionals. You can display your creative output to the world and get clients.

It’s all about getting found

Your aim in setting up your portfolio blog is to get known and get found in Web searches. You do that by using the appropriate keywords.

When a potential client searches for [hire a ______] and [find a _____], you want your blog to appear.

Target: remember your focus on your portfolio blog

The secret of creating an effective portfolio blog is targeting because your portfolio blog is a sales tool. Think about the people who hire you, and get into the mindset of a person who’s looking for someone to do a job. He wants a designer/ writer/ photographer for a specific task.

Target your blog as narrowly as you can - aim it directly at your perfect clients, not at the world at large.

Targeting means keeping personal and family information off your portfolio blog. If you want to blog in online journal fashion, you can certainly do that, but do it on another blog. Otherwise you muddy the waters for the search engines and you won’t get found for your primary search terms.

Resource or portfolio?

If you’re in a competitive industry, consider creating a resource site or blog, and linking it to your portfolio blog. A resource site can act as a feeder to your portfolio blog, because it’s easier for others to link to. And the more links you get, the greater your chances of appearing in the search engine results pages.

Creating portfolio blog is a no-brainer. If you haven’t created one yet, do it today.

To get up to speed on blogging, and make money blogging, read my blogging ebook, Blogging for Dollars.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, blogging, portfolio blog, get hired, resource, make money blogging

There’s a lot of pressure on bloggers:

“You must update every day.”

“You must have at least 1000 posts…”

“You must have fresh content…”

Blogs can be pretty demanding, right?

If you’re just starting blogging, the pressure of having to produce at least one blog post every day can put you off. And, if you already have a blog, which hasn’t been updated in three weeks, the pressure to blog can make you feel so guilty that you want to erase blogs and blogging from your mind completely.

Your blog doesn’t need constant care

Unlike an indoor plant, your blog doesn’t need constant watering. You can leave your blog alone for extended periods.

Some of my blogs are producing income, and climbing in PageRank to PR 4, with no more than ten posts in total, and very infrequent, or no, updates.

If your blog has original content which is useful, relax. It will earn income; it will grow - it won’t die. Make an occasional post and check the comments if you have time. If you don’t, your blog will happily wait until you do.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, pressure, content, PR

Meta blogs - blogs which blog about blogging - have a challenge.

Now that blogging’s mainstream, all that can be said about “you should get a blog because…” stuff has been said a million times in several thousand different ways.

So what do you blog about?

You can blog about:

* Blog design - experiment with your own design, and critique others’ designs

* Blog applications (WordPress, TypePad etc)

* Blog promotion and marketing, including Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

* Blog jobs and how to get them and keep them

* Monetizing blogs

* Blogs and static sites

* Case studies: get together with other bloggers and conduct some experiments on your blogs and write them up

* Challenges you have monetizing your blog and/ or getting traffic (do some experiments and write them up)

* Create another blog or two - niche blogs in areas which are easy to monetize

You can also search your referrer logs to see what people are searching for, and write posts to cover those topics.

You don’t ever need to run out of topics about which to blog. And you certainly don’t need to be bored.

Keep blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, meta blogs, monetization, how to blog, make money blogging