I’ve used Yahoo Answers off and on for a while to promote my websites. It can be a bit tricky finding good questions to answer, but it does drive traffic and help me to appear as an authority.

However, you do need to pay attention to quality. Of the answers I’ve given, about 25% have been selected as the best answer. A few were the only answer, but often they competed with other answers of varying qualities.

The trick to this is to genuinely have a good answer. Do not just throw up an affiliate link and think your job is done. Give some good information, and point to still more good information on your website.

Do not just make a sales pitch. People asking for information on Yahoo Answers are not looking to immediately purchase something in most cases. They want information. Give them a good taste and help them to trust you. They may not be ready to buy right away, but you can give them the chance to become interested in what you are offering.

Technorati Tags: yahoo answers, website promotion, site promotion

One of the things I want to do on some of my blogs is get them translated into other languages. Expanding your audience internationally is a great way to build traffic. But paying a translator can be expensive.

However, if you aren’t worried about perfection, using a translation plugin for your WordPress blogs can be a great idea. The plugins won’t do a perfect job, but they will get the idea across, and bring your message to entirely new audiences.

There are a few plugins available. You may have to experiment to find the one that works best for you. You want something that will make indexable pages.

In my reading, one of the most important things I’ve read about is to control the cache time. If you don’t cache for long enough, your site can get banned for a time from Google’s translation services, resulting in your visitors not being able to see your translated pages. The advice I’ve seen says to cache for at least 10-20 hours. It’s something I’ll have to watch for, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

Photos are something I probably use far too little on my blogs. They aren’t a big focus for me, and I often can’t think of a photo I would like to use. Yet they can add tremendous visual interest and really help to draw people in. They’re something I think I should use more often.

One of my favorite free resources is stock.xchg. Plenty of royalty free photos to be used, and the quality is generally wonderful. It can sometimes be a little hard to find just the right picture, but I can generally find what I need within just a few minutes. Sometimes it can be a matter of deciding which photo I like best.

Flickr also has great photo resources. You need to pay attention to the terms attached to each photo. “All Rights Reserved” pretty much means hands off… although if you really want the photo you can try contacting the photographer and asking.

A Creative Commons license may put certain limitations, depending on the exact license. “Non-commercial use only” means that if you have any advertising on your blog or earn from your site in any way, you cannot use that image. You will need to include an attribution with a Creative Commons license.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, logged onto Technorati today, and such changes. Really was surprised by the new look:

You can read on the Technorati blog about the changes. This was apparently the result of six months of work, and completely changes how you search on Technorati. No more messing around with searching by tags vs. keywords vs. the blog directory. Read the rest of this entry »

In light of my discussion the other day on using other people’s content, I also wanted to cover the topic of duplicate content. Many people worry that any duplicate content on their site will trigger a massive search engine penalty.

Good thing it’s not so, eh? At least not if you have plenty of original content on the site as a whole as well.

If you’re doing something like taking a quote from someone else’s blog to illustrate a point, that is a valid kind of duplicate content. It is also likely to be a small part of the page text, so certainly not likely to trigger a penalty.

Besides, penalties don’t generally happen for duplicate content. It can just be hard to rank over those who are using that same content, unless you somehow use it better.

Even using an entire article, say, from a free article site, won’t trigger a penalty as such. You may have better luck if you add your own touches to the page, but it will not penalize the entire site. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming up with inspiration for your blog every day can be really tough, even for the most determined blogger. But with so much potential inspiration waiting for you out there, writer’s block doesn’t have to last for long.

The first thing to do is to look around at other blogs in your niche. Maybe someone has a post you could share your thoughts on. Link to their post, write up your perspective. You may even get a link to your site in return from the trackback. You can include short excerpts from their posts to make your points clear.

If there’s a really hot debate going on across many blogs, you could take the controversy and go over the various sides. Once again, link out and share your own opinions. Controversy is also great for stimulating comments on your blog.

Another trick I use is to just read titles. They can be from articles, blog posts, anything on the topic I am interested in writing on. I skip reading the article in most cases, but start writing my own based on whatever thoughts the title brings to me on my topic. I can get some pretty good articles or blog posts written this way. And of course I come up with my own title.

Similarly, you can wander forums on your topic. Look at the questions being asked. Answer them on your blog. Forums are a great way to do research on what people want to know in your niche.

Technorati Tags: blogs, writing, blog posts, getting ideas

Working at home requires a great deal of dedication. It’s easy to slip up and just not really work hard enough. Or you start allowing your distractions to take over. But there are some good habits every home business entrepreneur should develop.

1. Read regularly.
   Reading allows you to learn about new developments in your industry, learn new things or just relax. All kinds of reading are important when you work at home.
2. Keeping up with your business.
   Whatever you do, work at it every business day. Do not be afraid to take days off when necessary, but the more time you spend working the more likely you are to succeed. If you blog, post every day that you work. If necessary, have prewritten posts ready to post for those times that you lack inspiration.If you provide services for clients, be ready to keep to your deadlines. Know how many hours you are going to need to work each day. Spend some time in marketing daily as well.You probably get the idea. Work hard every day. No matter they hype about a given home business, hard work is involved. The harder you work the more chance you have to succeed.
3. Take breaks.
   Make time for your family. Make time for yourself. Overdoing the hard work results in burnout. Get out, work out, take care of yourself.
4. Make friends online.
   Participate in forums, comment on blogs, use instant messaging; whatever you find works for you, do it. Online friends can keep you from feeling excessively isolated.

Technorati Tags: work at home habits, wahm, home business

Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say. Read any internet marketing forums and you’ll see people talking about big changes at Google all the time.

Looks to be true this time, though. According to Marketing Pilgrim they’ve made changes to their interface and algorithm. I did a quick search on “home business” to see how it looks:

In this particular case, you can see that Google is offering both web and group results easily available. But if you go to something more concrete… Read the rest of this entry »