Best blogging tools
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I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while but I had a good reason. This is always been a hobby to me and not something I really used to earn money but that’s about to change one thing that I’m going to do to make my life a little easier is to use Dragon Naturally Speaking in conjunction with live writer for my blogging activities I’ve tried Dragon Naturally Speaking prior to version 10. But I was never able to train it to my voice. Version 10 of Dragon Naturally Speaking is a little different. I just got it last night installed on my computer. My hopes were not high for Dragon Naturally Speaking as with version 8 I was never able to have it understand me with any level of accuracy. Well version 10 is a lot different.
At the moment I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10 to type this blog post. While it does make some mistakes he does understand what I’m saying for the most part. The cool part about this is that typing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a lot faster than typing normally. This is one of the reasons I have not really kept up with a site like I should have. I just don’t have the time to keep up with this site because it does not a lot of money and as a result I spend my time on other tasks which do earn me money. But with the increased time I say by using this software then perhaps I can keep up with this site as well as my many others. I’ve never been a fast typist and I’ve always wanted to improve my speed but typing fast is just not in my abilities talking fast is another story. While it may take get some getting used to as I realize I do not tie the same as I speak and it does make some mistakes which I must correct. The four were some instances and as I get used to it I should do a better job and things should flow better.
Of course Dragon Naturally Speaking is not going to help with SEO. So, I will still be forced to utilize my keyboard to perform SEO type tasks. Right now I’m looking at probably 80% accuracy rate as I speak this blog post. Which is not really really bad. The one thing is a kind of messes me up with my flow of writing in this post does not seem like a normal blog post from me. But regardless perhaps I will give it a shot anyway as this is really helping my speed with typing a blog post. Right now I spent less than five minutes on this blog post and from looking at it I have a couple hundred words maybe 250. At this rate I can probably speak blog post a lot faster than I can actually write them. Of course it means my process for writing blog posts will need to change I will need to put it in my heated prior to actually starting to speak the blog post. Well this is all for now I just want to see how this would work out and it looks okay I’m have to do a little editing to this post and I may change a couple worked around here and there but for the most part I’m very please with Dragon Naturally Speaking version 10. So what blogging tools do you use have you considered? Dragon Naturally Speaking it may be worth the money no matter what your accent I have a South Georgia accent and it understands me just fine now. Of course this was not always true with version 8 it was a total disaster. But version 10 is definitely an upgrade.
Building Blogs
I have not posted on this site in a while. Partly because I’ve been busy with other stuff, but mostly because I’m not into the genre of this site any longer. I’m probably going to change the focus of this site in the near future as Internet Marketing topics are not really something I care to blog about any longer.
Lots of you long time subscribers may be wondering why and I’m going to tell you. A site like this is pretty much a losing deal for most people including me. When I first started this blog is was not to earn money but because I was tired of all the crap out there about IM and how to make money online. The truth is most of the eBooks and other materials are a waste of time and money and I’ve attempted to explain why that is my opinion. Now I won’t say this is true across the board but the majority of products are crap and if you spent half the time just searching Google as you do looking for the next best thing you would make more money. The main reason the Gurus keep pushing porduct after product is that is their business, they sell you ways to make maoney and that is their business. The truth is if you do some searches in Google and find some of the sites by some of these gurus you won’t be impressed. Seems to me if someone new how to tell you to build a money making site then they should have one or two out there somewhere.
A few months ago I really started studying my methods of creating sites and while they do earn me some money its not where I want to be and I was thinking about things wrong. I had fell into a mind set of creating hundreds of sites on various niches, post a few articles try to get it ranking for a few searches a day and move on. Now while this strategy works its has a fatal flaw. And that flaw is the time this requires and the ongoing expenses of maintaining the domains.
Domain names are really rented not owned and for everyone you have you need to pay the yearly fee. If you have hundreds of domains just as I do then that adds up to a significant expense. Then you add all the time it requires to build a site, post some articles, do some article marketing or link building, etc.. Once you do all that you have a lot of time spent on building domains.
Would it not be a more efficient use of your time to only spend all your time on a couple of sites and build those into authority type sites. The only true way to build an authority site is to have a crap load of content. Now this content can’t be any PLR or other rehashed content. It needs to be unique and well written. Really the only way to get exactly what you want is to either hire fulltime writers( out of most people’s reach) or write it yourself. Writing it yourself requires a lot of time too, but its time well spent.
Of course one of the staples of an Authority site is the amount of content. You need thousands of articles or more and the articles need to rank. Not all need to rank number one for every term, but they do need to bring in some traffic every month to ensure your success. Now I know there are some people that are shaking their head and saying I’m a nut its not the only way. I’ll prove it to you if you will listen.
Now for a little exercise as this will be a multi post series in the end. Take a look at sites on the web which you consider Authority sites. Take a look at Wikipedia, About.com and others of the same size. Those sites are huge. How did they get huge? They bought the content or in Wikipedia’s case they talked others into writing it, but they are still huge.
Now lets get a little smaller. Take a look at Problogger.net and StevePavlina.com. Look back through Darren’s and Steve old posts. Listen to what they are telling you in those early posts and what they tell you in the posts that talk about their success with blogging. They have something in common. They did not start seeing success in their blogging until a year or two. They posted a lot during this time and then one day things started taking off. Why because they reached critical mass with the number of posts and those older posts where still bringing in traffic. This is the whole secret of building money making blogs. You need a lot of posts at least 500+ and then you also need to be blogging on topics that a lot of people are searching for. The monetization and everything else will just take care of itself once you take care of the critical mass issue.
well I thought this was going to be a series and I was going to go into a lot of detail, but I just realized I’ve said everything that needs to be said on this subject. Build a lot of unique pages and keep doing it and you cna’t help but to be successful with your blogging endeavors.
Now that I’ve gotten this out of the way you are going to see me change this blog’s theme. Not just the way it looks but the topics it covers. I have reasons for this change that I’ve already stated. This is a crap subject and not something I want to spend my limited time doing.
Problogger Book Review
I purchased Darren Rowse’s Problogger book a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to write a review on the book. Its a fairly quick read and has some fairly decent tips for blogging if you are starting out with a blog and even for people who have been blogging for a while.
The book follows a lot of the same context as you find on Problogger in terms of style and context. Of course you should probably expect this as Darren wrote a lot of the book. Overall I would say the book is a good read and has some really useful information. Its mostly theory and advice on things you should be doing when you build a blog. I would have liked it better if there where more explicit examples on some of the items the book covers mainly on stuff like revenue generation and private ad sales.
It would have been hard for them to give specific examples on a platform as the book’s focus was designed to reach a wide array of bloggers and not spend verbiage on any one specific platform. if you are serious about building your blog up, then I would say the book is worth the few dollars it costs and could probably help a lot of people learn to be better bloggers. I don’t really want to spoil any of Darren’s thunder so I won’t tell the specific tactics that are in the book, but I did pick up a couple of items that should help me a lot.
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ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett |