I have a few suggestions for the bloggers who want to make better money off their blogs when selling links and blog posts…
Use the tag system in the blog program use!
While I’m more familiar with Wordpress, I know other platforms use tags as well.
For those that don’t know what tags are, they are the words and keyphrases you see in “tag clouds” on blogs. The more often a word or phrase is used on that blog, the bigger the text for that word or phrase gets. And that is a guaranteed at-a-glance indication on what the blog is about.
Why are tags important to bloggers?
If you are monetizing (making money on) your blog, or want to, the frequently used keywords and keyword phrases matter very much to those of us looking to buy links on such blogs. We are far more interested in blogs that already have the keywords (or similar) on the blog. And that’s why general content blogs don’t cut it and are rarely used (at least by me).
For SEO purposes, your blog will likely rank better in the long term as well - if you use tags. Every tag works like an additional category on your blog, and each is indexed by the search engines.
Furthermore, as soon as you sell mass amounts of outbound links in your sitewide sidebars you’ve ruined your blog for future use. The more links you sell, the more you leak “link juice” like a stuck pig.
Lastly, if you want to accept the higher paying links to pharmaceuticals, gambling and adult content, make a blog for that purpose ONLY. Most of us cannot use blogs with such links. So your otherwise fantastically niche blog on fitness equipment (for example) that has blogroll links to male enhancement products is no good for the vast majority of potential purchasers.
Food for thought. And some free advice.
