Earning Money

Professionalism…That’s a word that can scare a lot of people, but it’s one of those words that people take for granted. To be a professional, there are certain things that you must do. In the business world, wearing a suit and having a business card for whatever it is you do might give you that professional look. Showing respect to your employer, following certain rules, whatever you may call it, all of these are signs of professionalism. However, how do bloggers keep a certain professionalism alive?

That is a bit more difficult because all the reader gets is what we give them: our words. But, there is a way to differentiate one blog from the next. It’s not what you write about or who makes more money. What you will find is, 9/10, the blog that has the better written content is going to have the most money earned. And, in my opinion, better written content goes hand in hand with grammatically correct content. But, one of the problems with people is that they type really fast. I, for one, make tons of mistakes and have to go back time and time again to correct the mistakes I make because I am such a fast typer.

Because of the speed of many typists these days and because people just don’t know what to pick up, I compiled a series of simple tips. They may appear to be tremendously elementary, but I had a professor on Thursday say, “I am very pleased with the lack of grammatical errors in your presentations. In previous years, they have been littered with errors.” I’m in college and people are still making the errors.

Dealing with the three 2’s:

• To: Used when describing where you went or what you are going to do, for example. “I walked to the store. I went to the mall. I am going to write a blog post. I want to own that television.”
• Too: When you, as well, are going to do that along with another person. “I walked my dog too. I spent my money too. I wrote a blog post too.”
• Two: That’s the number two.

Dealing with those Blasted Nouns:

• People, Places, Things are obviously going to be capitalized. “Anthony Smith. Washington D.C. Airplane.”
• You also capitalized titles. For instance: “President Bush. Prime Minister Blair.” When it goes with a name, capitalize it. But, if you’re saying “The president of the club,” that does not get capitalized. It has to be specific to get a capital letter.

Periods, Commas, Semi-Colons and Colons:

• A period ends the sentence. Simple as that. But, you may see people use ‘…’ That is a way to trail off a thought. “I really want to go to the zoo…” Almost as if you are thinking at the same time. I sometimes abuse this myself.
• Commas are used in lists. “I want a new bike, a helmet, knee pads, and a water bottle.”
• Semi-colons are used to connect two similar thoughts into one big sentence. “I am going to go to the zoo; although, I am very scared of the lion.” Another thing to keep in mind is the use of words like: although, though, yet, etc. It goes: first thought; (although, yet, though, etc), second thought. That exact set up.
• Colons are used when you’re listing something. “Here are the three points I want to discuss: point 1, point 2, point 3.”

A Few Simple Tips:

• If all else fails, throw it into the spell check.
• Read it over…If it sounds choppy, fix it.
• Take the time to proof read your stuff. A simple re-read can make all the difference. And my best advice is to read it backwards. Your mind sometimes thinks something is correct because you wrote it; however, if you read it backwards, your mind will catch the errors.
• One final pet peeve of mine has to do with punctuation and quotation marks. Punctuation goes INSIDE the quotation marks, not outside the quotes. “I am going to the zoo!” yelled Maria. “I want to eat some candy,” said Mark. As you can see, the punctuation is on the inside. That’s where it belongs.

These are just some tips on grammar. Tomorrow, I will write another post on other tips that I think are really important. One of the biggest ones for tomorrow is one that I break all the time and I really need to fix. But, if you take these tips and you start to learn basic grammar, you will find a tremendous change in your blog posts. I know that if a blog post is written with above moderate grammar, I will stick around and read it. So, take the time and really make sure your blog posts have good grammar. Keep the professionalism alive.

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At one time, the biggest thing that people were always on the search for was people to ‘bookmark’ their websites because if they were getting bookmarked, chances were, the person would return. A return in people meant an increase in profitability. But, when RSS appeared, bloggers suddenly jumped from the use of a ‘bookmark this page’ to a ’subscribe to this RSS feed.’ And, it was for a good reason. Rather than you having to go to each site on your bookmarks, you could just check a feed where all your subscriptions were and it consolidated everything.

And thus, bloggers went on an epic journey trying desperately to get people to subscribe. People did whatever it was that they could to get people to subscribe, but in the end, it did not prove easy. I can say from personal experience that it is quite difficult to get people to subscribe. So, how do we do it? How, as bloggers, do we get people to subscribe to our feed and increase our popularity? Those are things that many bloggers have asked and here are a few of the ways that I have collected and believe work wonderfully.

1. First and foremost, write good content. If your content is not enjoyable to read, why are people going to look forward to reading tomorrow’s post? If you write content that benefits the people, you will get more subscribers.
2. Make the RSS subscription button very obvious. If they can see it at the top of the page, they may be more willing to click and subscribe. If it’s hidden, they won’t go.
3. At the end of your post, put a “click here to subscribe” link that leads to your RSS. Since they are reading the content, if they see this link, chances are, they may click on it and that’ll be your increase RSS.
4. Set up an e-mail RSS feed. For some people, they’d rather get an e-mail update when your blog is updated. Best part is if people subscribe to a reader and to the e-mail update, it makes your blog look even more popular.
5. Hold a contest and make it mandatory that people subscribe to your feed via the e-mail. Just say that they need to subscribe via e-mail and that is how they can win. Since they have to give their e-mail, that is your way to send the winners the ‘you won’ e-mail. Sure, some may leave, but not nearly as many as you think.

Getting people to subscribe to your feed is nothing easy, but I think that the first step is probably the most important. People want to read good content and they want it to be interesting. If it sucks, they won’t come. I know that I have a hard time subscribing to a feed if I can’t stand the content.

Another thing to keep in mind is the displaying of a feedburner counting widget. I used to put the counter up and then I took it off because my count was low. I don’t believe in putting it up unless it is very impressive and in my eyes, impressive is very high, so that’s why it’s still not up. Who wants to subscribe if no one else wants to subscribe? People hate to be the only one doing something, so if hundreds have already subscribed, others will gladly follow much faster than if only ten subscribed.

Increasing your RSS subscriptions is incredibly important. You are looking to get constant readers because that looks good for advertisers. And, if you work effectively on your interlinking of posts, it will not only keep your RSS feed high (since it only is counted if someone reads it), it will also get people to your web page because they are clicking a link to another blog post. More traffic is more money.

The point is very simple, really. If you can increase your RSS feed subscriptions, you will see an increase in earnings. You can make more money selling paid reviews and you can increase the sale of RSS links. And it naturally looks good because if you have a high RSS feed, chances are, you have a lot of traffic to your site and advertisers obviously love that. So, try and get people to subscribe to your site. Try and increase the RSS subscriptions because it will help you to appear bigger and better and that just allows for even greater growth.

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