Marketing Tips For Business Success Through Blogging

A Blogger’s Dictionary: 25 Terms You Cannot Live Without

Posted on November 10, 2007 - Filed Under Blog Tips

Since I started going pro on blogging, my life (and lifestyle) has significantly changed, and I have grown and learnt so much about the developments within the blogosphere. It seems an exciting time when marketing mediums and opportunities are just exploding all over the world wide web. It has been a steep learning curve, and I have since gathered quite a few tips and tricks to get me kickstarted into blogging.

I remember when starting out that I wished someone had some sort of tutorial or guide for a quick launch (and I’ve come across some since then). Like me, I’m sure there are many bloggers out there who wished there were some sort of chit sheet to help them understand the terms that are being thrown out there for which you are totally clueless on. Therefore I have created a list of a blogger’s “dictionary”, if you will, to help you get up to speed on what people are really talking about when they use the terms below.

1. Blog Platform. This is the publishing software that is used to host a blog. Popular blog platforms are Blogger (owned by Google), Wordpress, Moveable Type, Typepad and Joomla. For business owners who are selling products online like jewellery or who are planning to run portals, Joomla will be a better choice.

2. Google Analytics. A program by Google that reports on the amount of direct, indirect and referred traffic to your blog. It also helps you analyze your traffic data to let you know which posts were popular with readers, and which are your top referring sites. This data is important to help you know how you should promote your blog. For example, you might want to deconstruct popular posts to analyze why it was popular with readers, and if you know what your top referring site is, you would want to spend more time there and getting more involved with the community.

3. RSS Feed. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds allow your readers to subscribe to your website. New posts are automatically sent to their email or favourite readers automatically. This is a useful feature for your readers, and ensures that they are kept updated on your latest posts and that they do not forget you. As much as possible, put inbound links into each article so that readers will be directed to your site when they click on the links. This helps to improve the Page Rank (PR) for respective pages of your site, and improve the number of page views.

4. Feedburner. This is a service that manages your feed subscriptions and reports on the number of subscribers to your site. It provides five functions: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize. Analyze reports on the number of subscribers that have read your feed for the day (including new subscribers), and how many new visitors you had. Optimize allows you to add reader interaction into articles received on a feed by allowing them to email the article, add comments and submit articles to listed social networks on your feed. Publicize enables you to provide email subscription of new posts, and lets you announce the number of subscribers there are to the site through the use of a chicklet. I will not advise this until you have at least 100-150 subscribers to your site. Monetize is a new function that lets you integrate Adsense with Feedburner and deliver ads via your feeds. Troubleshootize provides ping and sync function to check if your feed is valid, and to ensure that your articles are being delivered on time.

5. Google Feedfetcher. Google Reader is used by 50% of blog subscribers, and Google feedfetcher is the service that fetches feeds from blogs to the inbox of users. Feedburner reports on the number of feeds fetched by Google Feedfetcher along with other feed providing services.

6. SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is a very hot field, and SEO consultants can earn as much as $500 per hour helping businesses to significantly increase their Search Engine hits through a variety of methods and techniques. To maximize your SEO stats, you should visit the SEOMOZ blog for tips or buy the SEOBOOK by Aaron Wall.

7. Link Baiting. This is the art of getting other (big) bloggers to link to your blog. Methods of link baiting are doing reviews of a popular blog (and tastefully asking for a link to the article from the blog owner), asking to do guest blogs at popular blogs, or asking to be added to the blogroll. Be sure to do your research and target popular / authority sites that are in the same field that you are.

8.Plugins. These are packaged modules that can be added to your blog platform to integrate important functions like Recent Comments, Top Commentators, Recent Posts, Popular Posts, Social Network submissions, embedding YouTube movies, displaying photo galleries, etc. Go here for a complete list of Wordpress Plugins.

9. Google Adwords and Adsense. These programs are offered by Google to help you 1) advertise your blog through Adwords, and 2) earn money through using Adsense by publishing targetted advertisements and refferals on your blog.

10. Monetizing. Monetized blogs are a term given to blogs that are used to earn money online. Methods of Monetizing are through providing ad spots on a blog, selling text links, selling referrals, affiliate marketing and selling a product, ebook or service. John Chow’s site is a great example of a monetized blog with multiple monetization channels.

11. CPM (Cost per thousand impressions). This is an online advertising term where you (the publisher) are paid for 1000 impressions of an ad or banner rather than by CPC.

12. CPC (Cost per click). This is the next advertising term where you (the publisher) are paid based on the number of clicks for each ad / banner. This is typically more expensive than CPM.

13. Affiliate Marketing. Most monetized blogs participate in affiliate marketing, which means that you represent a company in helping them to resell a particular product or service for a commission. This is a potentially viable opportunity to earn money online, and helps you diversify your source of income.

14. Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads (TLA) are another way of monetizing your blog, where advertisers pay you to provide a link to from your site to theirs. However, Google penalizes blogs for selling TLA by downgrading your Page Rank, so you have to be careful should you decide to monetize your blog through TLA. Read my article on the war between Google and TLA sellers.

15. ReviewMe. ReviewMe is a company selling sponsored reviews. Advertisers look for blogs that are appropriate for their business and sponsor a review by the blog on a product or service provided by the advertiser. This is another lucrative way of making money online especially if you have high number of subscribers.

16. Social Networking. This refers to a number of online communities where people of similar interests can connect and share what they found online with others. It is a way of getting to know friends, and discovering news or sites on topics you are interested in. It is also a great way of getting traffic to your blog, and many submissions to these social networks have resulted in the articles / videos becoming viral. Popular social networking sites are Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, My Blog Log and Facebook.

17. Guest Blogging. This is when you write a post to be published on another blog. It is a great way to build visibility and branding for your blog (especially if the post is published on an A-list blog) and will bring you traffic from a target audience.

18. Tags and Tag Cloud. For each post that you create, you should be adding tags that describe what the post is about. For example, a post on how to monetize your blog will contain the tags “making money online”, “affiliate marketing”. This helps people to find your article by following links for those tags. A Tag Cloud is a presentation of all the tags in your blog, with the most popular tags appearing largest, and least popular ones the smallest.

19. 30D Challenge. A program that teaches bloggers how to make their first $10 in a month without any cost. By the end of the program you would have learned how to promote your own blog to earn money, as well as test out the different market niches without any risk.

20. Wordpress Loop. This is the term used to describe the coding in a Wordpress template that displays the posts in your blog. By understanding the Wordpress loop, you are able to make modifications to the display and appearance of posts in your blog.

21. Comment Spam and Akismet. Comment spam are unwanted comments left on your posts with links to sites selling products and services. You can moderate these comments using the comment filter available in Wordpress, or by activating the Akismet plugin. Akismet is a default plugin of the Wordpress installation and you should be able to find it easily under the “Plugin” tab.

22. Alexa Ranking. This is a ranking system used by advertisers to gauge the popularity of your site based on a number of factors including number of inbound links, Page Rank, and hit rates. Alexa.com reports on the site statistics of the top 500 sites on the web.

23. Page Rank. This is a term popularized by Google, and describes the link popularity of your site. It is the calculation of inbound links vs outbound links for a particular page on your site, and a form of indexing within the Google directory. The higher your Page Rank, the more likely your chances are of appearing in the first search page and first position for a targetted keyword / keyphrase.

24. Link Back and Trackback. These are different methods of notifying you when someone has made reference to a post on your blog. If you have enabled Trackback functionality in Wordpress, they will appear in the comment board of the referred post, with a link to the referring site.

25. Firefox. If you haven’t already heard of Firefox, this is the recommended browser for bloggers, and is used by a large percentage of the blogging community. IMHO, it is a more stable browser and interprets CSS stylesheets of PHP templates better than any of the other browsers. It also comes with a number of tools for bloggers, including the SEO tool which reports on the PR web pages.

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