1. Technical Skils – PHP, FTP, HTML
2. Trends on the internet – Social Media, SEO.
3. Writing Skills – You need to be able to write
4. Money
5. Patience -

I have so many posts in draft state, I decided to just go ahead and publish them no matter how complete they are. Enjoy! LMAO

Brent Ozar has a nice 4 part series on the whys/why nots, do’s and don’ts of creating a technical blog. Useful for people looking to start other types of blogs too.

Check it out:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/12/how-to-start-a-technical-blog/

Today’s tip for marketing your website involves being an active participant on other people’s websites and blog. Many blogs allow commenters to have a link back to their own website or blog. The more link you have back to your website, the higher your rankings will be on search engines like google.

So here’s what you need to do.

1. Find blogs/forums/websites where you can comment on content that someone has posted. Make sure it is in a niche that goes along with your site.

2. Leave good information and tips in your comment that others will find useful. This will increase the desire for someone reading your comment to check your site out.

3. Set a goal to do things on a regular basis. Perhaps one post per day. Also set a goal to find a new site to post on per week. This will give you a nice variety of sites to choose from when posing.

Being the marketing major that I am, and needed to promote my own websites, I am going to share with you a series of posts on how to promote your blog.

Today, we are going to start out by discussing web directories. Web directoriesare sites that are essentially a yellow pages for other web sites. There are quite of few of these web directories that don’t really specialize in one partucular area. However, many of the web directories specialize in a niche. For example, one might find a web directory on dogs. a good example of this would be http://www.i-love-dogs.com/directory/ or http://www.puppysites.com.

To find directories related to your blog niche, simply do some google searching. The above sites were found simply by searching for “Dog Directory”.

Once you find some direcectories, you will want to request the directory to list your site. Usually you will find a button on the directory that says “Get Listed” or “Add Site.” You will find that some sites offer listings for a price. There are many sites that also offer free, simple listings.

Once you have put in a request to get listed, it is always a nice idea to have a link from your site back to the web directory. This way you are helping each other out. 

In conclusion, it is a good idea to get listed in web directories. Not only does this help the potential audience find your site, it also allows you to have more inbound links, which helps your rankings in the search engines.

I installed the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It works great for getting your sitemap on Google and some of the other search engines. The only issue I’ve had with it is other plug-ins can set some parts of your Wordpress site as noindex for the robots.txt file. This is not a problem is you don’t used those other plug-ins, or you disable that functionality in those plug-ins.

I have noticed that one of my sites, where you can buy GPS Devices from ebay does not have all of it’s pages showing when I check the site in Google.

Hyperplanet.com uses Wordpress. I have a category for each GPS model. In addition, I have a posting for each model. Google is only picking one of the two. I thought it was a problem with my sitemap, but I realized it is most likely due to duplicate content. Since catgegory and the posting are pretty much identical.

Please excuse the mess. I am using this site as a lab for designing layouts for some other web sites of mine. The theme and layout may change unpredictably. The content however should not vary..too much.

Welcome to my blog. This is my kickoff post. Though I am not exactly sure what the hell I am going to post on this blog, I will make sure to post stuff that is interesting.

Enjoy,
Dave