Writing words to get more readers. What is the point when they don’t know who you are. Internet is all about marketing yourself. Once people know you, they know who they can associate the site / product with. So you need to make yourself known to others. Specially people who read your site. In this post I am talking about the about page of the blogs. People want to know why their blogs never get anywhere. That is because so many of those don’t even bother creating the write about page.

I did a small search by copying this whole paragraph below. It is the wordpress default about page text. About 173,000 blogs found. Now that shows how many people never bother updating that page.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

173,000 Results found in Google

So How can you change it. I am sure most of you know it, but apparently about 173000 people don’t, so let me tell you how. Simply go to your wordpress admin panel. Hit Manage, and then go to Pages. Click on About and edit the text.

Now that is clear so let me tell you why you should have an about page.

Why an About Page

Having an about page let you engage with your readers. I know some bloggers write in a very vague style. Third Person. Why would you do that? It is your blog then own up to it. If you can’t own up to your words, then don’t write. I think about builds a connection between you and your readers. The connection that makes them trust you.

About page is usually the first page of the site that I visit. And I am sure most people do so also because About page is one of the highly visited page on Balkhis. So you want to set the good expression. So let your reader know some of the cool features they need to know about you. Cool articles, your income sources, etc etc. Anything you really want you can put it in your about page because you are directing the user into that direction. I want my readers to know about my web design firm that is why there is a link to Uzzz in my about page.

How to make an about page?

Pretty simple in wordpress. Click on the tab Write and select write page. Put together the information you want to put in there and then simply link to it from your home page. Another way you can do is when you start a blog write your first post or second post as in about you. I don’t know if there is any advantage of either one as long as you link the about page from the home page you should be fine.

How do you write an about page?

You can write it any way you like. I suggest you write it to make it personal. I chose to have it in third person. The reason for that is I didn’t write my own about page. I asked a teacher of mine to write it for me because it is better if someone else does it for you. But below are some features you need to have in your about page.

• Photo(s) – If your reader can stick a face to a blog it just makes the connection much stronger. They know how you look like. They know the person behind the blog. I absolutely dislike about pages without any image.
• Introduce yourself – Before you do anything, introduce yourself and give a little bit of your background. To show your expertise. It can show your credibility in the industry/niche you want to write in.
• Introduce your Blog – Explain the reasons the blog was formed, and what is the purpose. Introduce your ideals and so on.
• Contact Details – Make sure you leave some way that they can contact you. If you already don’t have a big button in your nav saying contact.

Now it doesn’t really have to be a 300 page book. Keep it simple and reasonable length. Make sure you make your about page prominent. Meaning link it somewhere where everyone can see it. Like mine on the top. Privacy is also an issue. While you are trying to be open. Don’t put your social security out there now. Use common sense.

What does your about page consist of? Let me know how you wrote yours.

So I increased a little bit more activity on digitalpoint to do an experiment. But while I am visiting it more often stupid threads with titles, make big money blogging. Where the guy ask a question how do you make big money blogging. Or someone saying start blogging if you want to make big money blogging. First I will say big is a very subjective word. Second I will show you how I make money blogging.

How Much Money do I make?

I will say it like this I don’t make any where close to how big blogger make from their blog. But I am averaging around 2300 – 2400 USD a month from Balkhis. Now you are wondering how do I make that money from Balkhis. More yet, thinking how do I survive from just that little income. Because that is only 28000 yearly. But you have to understand a good portion or a major portion of my income comes from my web design company, Uzzz Productions which puts me close to six figure marks gross. Now lets get into how do I make money blogging.

Google Adsense

Adsense is something that I don’t incorporate in all of my posts, but I put it in the posts that are popular. Or the ones that are likely to get tons of traffic mostly tutorials. Aside from that, I have adsense in the header banner that makes me a decent amount of money, but it is not the majority. I mostly use the size 336 x 280 and 468 x 60. So use those because they work the best.

Private Ad Sales

Private Ad sales are a good one. I have header banner for sale as well as sidebar buttons. Also paid reviews. Those account for some of my income, but this one is still not the majority. Mostly direct ad sales are a pain to manage, but I use OIO Publisher to do it myself. I don’t believe in giving my money to any of the companies like Text Link Ads or Review me because they take up so much of the commission, you won’t get the money that you deserve. So do it directly with OIO Publisher.

Affiliate Marketing

The biggest Chunk of Balkhis Income comes from Affiliate marketing. How do I do it? Well I use Commission Junction for the most part, and Market Leverage as a secondary earner. Commission Junction have the most offer then you can imagine. So if you use them you are most likely to find offers that you want. I usually use hosting and other different sorts. If I am writing a post, and I think that I can find something that would be a good product. I head over to Commission Junction and run a search. And sometimes I write posts entirely based on the products, and it works very well also. So now if I just embed the CJ link it doesn’t do it. So I use WP-Affiliate Plugin that lets me make urls like balkhis.com/refer/xxxx so that helps me track the urls and see how it works. Now some people say Balkhis why people buy the products from your site and not from mine when I place the affiliate codes. And I will say, I really don’t know. I will probably say read the post How to make sales from your blog and earn profit. That have a little bit of answer. But that should cover that.

My costs of running / Advertisement

How much does it cost me to run Balkhis. Time and hosting fee. I switched to host gator reseller which cost me $25 monthly, and that is about it. I buy ads on a few sites thats it which is not very expensive. Rest is just social media. I am not one of those people who spend a lot of money.

I don’t think I will write this sort of post again unless I add new ways of making money. But if you are interested then head over to my make money online page.

One of the many goals that bloggers have is high subscriber count. Now I am not famous like Darren Rowse who can start a new blog out of the blue, and have 1300 subscribers in less than a week. So it took me more time to get to the number where I am, but I know that a lot of people have a hard time getting to this point in this short amount of time. So I thought I should share some of my techniques that I used over the past that has contributed to the number of subscribers that I have.

Set a Goal

Set yearly goals, or quarterly goals. Don’t make your goals seem unrealistic. Make it seem some what realistic. So My goal was by the end of the year of 2008, I want to have 2000+ subscribers. Which I think is possible. You need a goal in order to be motivated and inspired. And I believe motivation plays a big role in your writing style.

Write Quality Content

Have you noticed, everyone say that. Even people who just start their blog and have no idea what is going on in the industry. Self-proclaimed experts tell you to write quality content. But what the heck is quality content. In my eyes, Quality content is resourceful content. Content that helps your user. Content that attract your users. So every time you write a post think twice before you write it. Think how your users will find this article helpful. That is all I am going to say about quality content.

Care About Users

Caring about your users always help you get more subscribers. I get crazy amount of emails. I know that I might not be able to reply to all, but I try to reply to as many as I can. I try to help the users if they have questions on one of the tutorials that I posted. So how did I show that I care about my users? [Read the whole post]

Every blogger want to be successful, or as I like to say every blogger have a vision for success. Success is very subjective. For a blogger it can mean a lot of subscribers, tons of traffic, a lot of quality articles etc etc. To achieve any vision of success, bloggers give digg a try. Now whether they succeed or not is out of a question, but they give it a try. Now I talked to a few people, they didn’t know how to function digg. A lot of people are clueless on how else you can use digg other than promoting your own article. So I will give you guys a brief overview of what is digg, and how a blogger can make use of it.

What is Digg

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.” (Digg’s About Page) Now in a simple terms, Digg is a place where people submit articles that they like, and if others like it. They vote it also called digging it. The more people digg your article, the popular it gets.

How to make use of digg as a blogger?

• To Stay Updated – A lot of bloggers use digg to stay updated. I am one of those bloggers. I often check out Digg to see what is going on around the world. I mean there is so much going on, you can watch CNN one hour and won’t find out, but you can see digg and you would know. So I use digg to stay updated.
• Get Ideas for Post – Well as I am reading and staying updated with the world. I often find interesting things that I can blog about. Interesting articles that I like and I can share on my Sweet Monday Link Roundup. A lot of tutorials that I can use for myself and post on my blog. So I use digg as an inspiration as well.
• Digg to Connect – It does get a bit hard to connect with anyone on digg, but digg is the way you can find new people. There are so many people that become a fan of yours, and you can add them as a friend. Check out their website and so on. That is why my digg profile page have a few of my important links. Make more mutual friends because they will be the one who see the articles that you digg.
• Advertise your articles – It becomes spam if you submit all of your own articles, but if you submit your own articles once in a while it doesn’t effect you. Although having a power digger digg your article will get you a lot more diggs. But you can use digg to increase traffic on your own site. If you hit digg’s home page, you will get insane amount of traffic.

How to get crazy amount of traffic from Digg?

Digg can bring enormous amount of traffic if used correctly. If not directly from digg, then it will be from Search Engines because people see digg articles rank higher than your own article for extremely competitive keywords, so read the tips below to find out how you can get crazy traffic from digg.

Write a Killer Headline

If you ever take a quick look at Digg’s Homepage notice the way how the titles are constructed. They are not exactly the title of your post. They are different, unique, and most of the times use competitive keywords. Most importantly they are catchy. So write creative headlines. You will not get this on your first time, so keep practicing.

Get a Lot of Diggs

Sounds hard, but it is doable. All you have to do is write a quality article. People who visit your article, and if they like it. They will digg it. If they don’t like it then they will bury it. So the better resource your article is, the more you are likely to get more diggs. Getting a lot of diggs at once is the key to get on the homepage, so you need to spread the word around fast.

Use the Share button. Go to Shout it, and then shout the article to all of your friends.

But if you have more then 200 mutual friends, then you can only send it to 200 at one point. So you might have to manually select them. It can take time, but it is worth it.

Next thing you need to do is ask your friends to digg the article on other social media networks such as Twitter and Plurk. If your article is extremely useful in your opinion, you might as well share it on forums and more people will digg there.

Search Engine Ranking

See how your blog is doing with Search Engines such as google and which keywords you are ranking for. Try to use some of the powerful keywords in your digg title and you will rank high in search engines. Which means high indirect traffic from digg.

Disadvantages of using Digg

There are too many advantages such as high traffic, ideas, serps, connections. But with good there have to be something bad as well. One thing that Digg can really hurt bloggers is beating you for a Search Engine Ranking Position. Digg tend to rank higher then your own article, so if you were number 1. Now digg will take that spot most likely unless your website have more authority then digg. Another problem with using digg is waste of time. Sometimes people get crazy over digg, and the effort of becoming a power digger takes the best of them. People waste too much time digging useless stories in a hope that one story will hit the top page and they will become power diggers. So you can technically waste a lot of time.

Bottom Line

I am telling you guys to begin using Digg. It will bring insane traffic to your site directly or indirectly. It will get you more connections and gain you more readers. Digg is well worth your time if you use it effectively. Remember use it don’t abuse it

BTW: If you like this article then feel free to digg it

Last week was a busy one. Life is getting busier and busy. I have to fight for every spare minute. But I am trying to do the best in getting school work done, having fun as well as working online. Aside from the normal boring routine, this past week I went to Lake Wauberg. We cooked on the grill, throw some football around. Climbed the rock and played Frisbee golf.

Other than that, I read some good posts on the forums. Helped a few people setting up their site and I enjoyed seeing my subscriber count increasing crazily. Can’t wait till it gets to 2k. Maybe it is time to add a newsletter. What do you guys think?

Well while you are thinking of that check out some cool posts that I liked.

Mike Kelly, my affiliate manager at Market Leverage wrote an awesome blog post at my friend Nabil’s blog talking about the Importance of the Affiliate / Affiliate Manager Relationship

A proof of how email subscription boxes really work is pretty obvious at Yan’s blog. He increased his blog email subscribers by 60 in 7 days. So if you don’t have email subscription box you might want to think again. Read this tutorial to find out how you can add one to your site.

One of the few blogs that are in my daily feeds is problogger. Darren always write quality articles. So check this article that tells you how you can improve your blog even when you are not online.

Past week on Balkhis

If you haven’t checked out all of my posts well the four below are a must read for you.

How Social Media made me from a nobody to a somebody

How to Save Time when you Edit Wordpress Posts and Comments

Display the Last Modified Date for your posts on Wordpress

How to move to a new Domain without losing Search Engine Rankings and Traffic