Squidoo

Today I will talk about a fairly new blogging service called "Squidoo". Like Blogger Squidoo is free but it has a lot less functionality. There are some advantages that squidoo has over blogger. For instance on squidoo you can manage your own group and from your management you can select what "Lenses" (Blogs) can enter your group. Through the management of your group or groups you can insert a link to your site or blog at the bottom of the lenses that were created just for your group. You can also copy the same information from your blog or rewrite it to your lens and have links to your site within the information. Squidoo also has a ranking system based on blog traffic, how often you post, and amount of information, so if your ranked high your going to get a higher amount of traffic.

AdWords

You can follow this link to advertise on this page.

If you have the $$money$$ you can try to advertise your site through Google AdWords.

You begin by following this link Google AdWords to get started with your AdWords account, after following the link you have a choice Starters Edition or Standard Edition. Since your a beginner I would recommend using the Starters Edition which if you don't already have one will help you make a webpage of your own.

After choosing Starters Edition it will ask you where your business is and the telephone number of your business (Optional). Click Continue.

After clicking continue it will ask you for your country or you can target your ads to a specific area code, choose which one you want.

Next it will ask you for your businesses web page enter the URL then write your ad.

After writing your ad you need to choose the keywords you want your ad to be associated to. Ex: I want to write an ad for the Wii, so i would use keywords like Wii, Game, Game System, and Nintendo.

Choose your currency. Then choose your budget ( 30 100 or 500 Dollars) Per month (Or choose how much you want to spend per month. Min. amount is $30) . Do you want Google to contact you with helpful information like surveys? Then check or uncheck the check boxes and click next. Didn't understand check out the Screen Shots.

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After clicking next it will take you to a page asking you if you already have a Google account, if so click I have an email address and password I already use with Google services like AdSense, Gmail, Orkut, or the personalized home page if you click this it will ask you if you want to use the same username and password as your other services or if you want to create a username and password for AdWords. If not then click I do not use these other services if you click this button it will prompt you to create one. If you want to use the same username and password click I'd like to use my existing Google account for AdWords and it will prompt you to enter your username and password.

After imputing your username and password it will tell you your done, but it wont display your ads until you provide your billing information to do so click the hyperlink that says "Sign into your AdWords account.

Then Select your location, Choose your form of payment, Agree to the terms, and Provide your billing details. There is also a $5 activation fee.

You can follow this link to advertise on this page.

Disney Affordable?

According to Adam Gartenberg adding a link to www.disneyworld.com/affordable can greatly increase your blogs traffic. Although im not so sure about that you can try it out for yourself. Anything to increase my blogs traffic I'll tell you if it works or not it will take some time for the search engines to index the disney material.
Make sure to check back for the anwser!

Edit: So far this has not worked for me, but try it your self.

How to set up a blog

I found a good post on How to set up a blog on blogger. The adress is below.
http://weblogs.about.com/cs/blogcreatetools/ht/blogger.htm

Increasing Traffic

I was recently reading a great post about how to increase your blogs traffic.
It discusses 21 ways to increase your blogs traffic through minor changes, how your readers react to posts, and effectiveness of post timing. Check it out, below is a link to the site. http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1347

Blog Carnivals

A blog carnival is a terrific way to promote your blog, open your information to a wider audience, and an better way to get more one way inbound links.

A blog carnival is type of blogging community with many different types of blogs and topics. In blog carnivals you add your link to blogs with a topic matching yours pointing to certain articles of yours. It's usually a weekly event but it can also be monthly.

Here's a link to blogcarnival.com

New Blogs

Building blog traffic to new blogs

Before you release your blog to the rest of the world wright a few posts.

Ping your blog to other blogging sites. For this i use a site called Pingoat which will ping your blog to over 50 other blogging sites!

Submit your URL to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
(MSN is the fastest to index your site)

Add your URL to posts and comments on other blogs and sites, but be sure to wright good quality posts and comments or they might get deleted.
(This is the better than exchanging links with other sites, because this way you don't have to post their URL on your site.)

(Only exchange links with Sites or Blogs that match your Blogs content!!!)

Ask other sits and blogs to exchange links with you, most would be glad to help out other bloggers. (This requires putting their link on your blog too.)

This post is for new blogs be sure to check out my other posts for more techniques.