Guest Post - Our host is Matthew Barby, Matt has some tips for setting up a new blog from content to SEO.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

I took a little time out recently to recharge my batteries and explore a bit of the world by venturing across to East Asia. During my time out there I thought it would be a great idea for me (and a few friends) to set up a travel blog that would share some of our travel experiences and offer a useful resource for fellow travellers.

Due to the fact that this project was purely focused around pleasure, I didn’t put too much work in at the start but I soon realised that there was a good potential to make a bit of cash that could supplement my travel costs. With this in mind I decided to use my background in SEO to bring in some good levels of traffic to the website. Six months on and my blog traffic is growing exponentially month-on-month – I decided that it would only be fair to share some of my strategies with the community so that they can also benefit from this.

The content Strategy

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Guest Post - Our host is Garrett Moon, who has some interesting views on how you can profile your audience.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Many of us think that we know who we are writing to, but do we really? The problem with identifying and understanding our blog audience is that we resort to dated techniques that don't help us understand who they really are. Sure, our audience might be made up of 25-35 year old females, but who is that, anyway? What keeps them up at night? What makes them happy? How can we, as bloggers, motive them to read and share what we have to say?

What Really Matters

For starters, you need to understand what matters to them. I have been an advocate for completing basic audience profiles. The goal of these profiles is to get a sense of how your audience thinks, rather than just who your audience is. In these profiles, you will identify a few key things:

• What is their name?
• What do they do?
• What keeps them up at night? (i.e. What are they worried about?)
• What motivates them to read your stuff?
• What do they need most from you? How can you help them?

The goal is to complete several profiles and then use them as you write new posts. As you write, you should be talking directly to one of your audience members. You should have them specifically in mind. When we write TO someone rather than simple FOR someone we can do a much better job of relating to them on a human level. But, sometimes even this exercise isn't enough.Click Here To View Full Post >>

Guest Post - Our host is Logan Harper, in this post Logan looks at how to get traffic to your blog from the popular social network Reddit.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

What is Reddit?

If you’ve seen the front page filled with hysterical gifs and shared life-exposed memes to your friends, then you’ve Reddit. Not only have you read it, but also maybe used it to generate buzz for your brand or product or even as simple as having the quote of the day at your office.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, you may be saying: I haven’t Reddit.

Well, similar to most social media sites, with Reddit you create a profile, join a community, and start sharing. However, unlike sites like Twitter and Facebook, where content and descriptive text is presented to you in real time news feed, Reddit is focused on presenting you with the highest rated content. This community is unique in that it is a self-monitoring social network, where your upvotes are translated into “karma”, the headline is the hook, and the content is the punch line. “Trolls” beware: there is a downvote as well. In this democracy style platform, you want to get as many upvotes as possible.

How do you use it?

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Guest Post - Our host is Jasmine, Many bloggers now run Email newsletters connected to their blogs so we thought it was time to give you some tips to make those Emails more effective.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

When it comes to email marketing, there are two crucial numbers to keep track of - your open rate and your CTR or click-through rate. While your first task is to get people to actually open your email, your CTR is what really determines your results. It doesn't help you if people read your email only to delete it. If you want people to take action on your offers, you must find ways to increase your CTR.

Tip 1: Create Urgency or Scarcity

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Guest Post - Our host is Dustin Verburg, in this post Dustin make some very interesting comparisons between Punk and Blogging...Really...See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Before the late 1970s, it was nearly impossible for independent musicians to tour and release albums without major label backing. Punk came along and changed all of that in a few different ways. Kids saw that they could, in fact, play music without looking like rock stars or playing like virtuosos. Punk bands also set up concrete DIY models for releasing their own records and setting up their own tours that anyone could follow. The major labels were cut out entirely, and it actually became a case of “you can do this if they put the work in.”

The Internet, in that way, is in those exciting golden years. The infrastructure has been set up and there are several credible models available for reference. There are a staggering amount of resources available to independent bloggers so they can, in fact, do it themselves. That might seem obvious, but it also becomes a valuable thinking point when you start to incorporate the ethics of DIY, independent music into blogging.
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Guest Post - Our host is Sarah Villaflor, in this post Sarah makes the strange yet interesting connection between blogging and hunting.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

The Hunt

Getting Internet users to visit your blog is like sitting at the edge of a clearing in the woods, waiting for the arrival of your target.He comes eventually, stepping on the twigs, shifting, bowing his head for a drink on a little pool of water.

When you finally have a clear view on the target, you quietly and patiently aim your gun, lowering it in an angle, not breathing, careful not to produce even the littlest sound that might startle the creature.

And bam! You missed the deer just near the ear.

Off he runs out of the clearing and beyond the thick woods. He leaves behind not even a cloud of dust, gone as if he had never been in the clearing at the first place.You just stand there, your chest hurting from the recoil.

You are the huntsman, the web developer. The clearing is your site. The gun, your web host provider. The bullet your SEO schemes.The deer, the Internet user.

What happened? How did the deer escape ?
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Guest Post - Our host is Kimberly Harrison, One wa to build a following for your blog is to research your target audience and write with them in mind, here Kimberly has some tips to do just that.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

You want your readership to grow, and seeing numbers increase is a great sign. That doesn't mean your readership is "everyone." Your content writing needs to be targeted to a specific niche, and these 10 steps will help you find the right readers for your great content.

1. Who would want to read your content?

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Guest Post - Our host is Alicia, here she looks into using Facebook to help your blogs traffic and sales.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Is investing time and money on Facebook really going to help increase your traffic and sales?

Or is Facebook as a social media marketing leader overrated?

I’m sure these were some of the questions that had come across your mind before, regardless of whether you have used Facebook as a social media marketing platform or not.

Is the ROI really worth the effort we put into Facebook?
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Guest Post - Our host is Rachel O’Riordan, just in time for Halloween Rachel looks at the how you can use horror films as inspiration for your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

It’s the season of ghosts and general spookfulness. The time of year for us all to check for monsters under the bed and wonder what’s out there in the woodshed. But whilst we’re wondering whether or not to go and check what that noise is down in the dark cellar (it’s just a mouse - don’t go down there) is there anything bloggers can learn from the season of the witch?

I’m going to look at some horror films to see what inspiration we can take from their perennial popularity.
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Guest Post - Our host is Tony Lee, here Tony looks at some of the advantages in running giveaways on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

I'm a huge believer in doing blog giveaways (hence I've done at least 5, giving away a total of $1200). Not only is it nice to give something back to the readers, doing a blog giveaway can really benefit your blog! Here's how:

Giveaways aren't for building long-term blog readership or traffic.

Before I get on with the rest of my post about how giveaways are great for building social proof, I'd like to say something first. Many bloggers host giveaways, hoping that by doing so, they can increase their blog readership. In reality, that doesn't happen: people aren't going to keep coming back to your blog just because you hosted a giveaway. True, out of 100 giveaway participants you might get 2 or 3 people who find your blog interesting and keep coming back everyday, but the majority of giveaway participants are what I call "the professionals" - people who scour sweepstakes forums for giveaways to take part in and won't come back a second time.

So what are giveaways great for?

For Building Social Proof

Social proof is exactly what it sounds like - proof from social sites that your blog has followers. In other words, social proof is what I like to call, your "numbers". These include the number of Facebook fans you have, the number of Twitter followers, the number of RSS subscribers, etc. So what's so value about having the right "numbers" (a lot of fans, followers, subscribers)?

Social proof is valuable in 2 ways:

1) Social proof encourages visitors on your website to "Like" or "Follow" you, creating a positive snowball effect. Let's look at 2 examples. Tom went to Site A, and saw that the site had a grand total of 17 RSS subscribers. What does this tell Tom? That the site isn't very popular! Thus, Tom might not want to come back to the site, thinking that something must be wrong with it (since it only has 17 RSS subscribers). Now Tom went to Site B, and saw that the site had 319 RSS subscribers. What does this tell Tom? That the site is pretty popular, and probably for a good reason! Thus, Tom is more likely to come back to Site B every day and "Like" or "Follow" it. Now if there are 100 guys like Tom coming to Site B, that really creates a positive snowball effect that drastically boosts up Site B's social numbers and traffic.

2) Now this is the big one. Having the right "numbers" gets you PRIVATE ADVERTISERS (drum roll please). Many sites who have good traffic just can't get PRIVATE ADVERTISERS because their Facebook Fans, RSS subscribers, or Twitter followers are too few. To an advertiser, having, for example, 300 Facebook fans shows that your site is popular and deserves their attention. For example, I hosted a $500 Giveaway on my blog, which resulted in me gaining an additional (approximately) 100 RSS subscribers, 150 Facebook fans, and 130 Twitter followers. A few days after the giveaway was over, I started getting emails from private advertisers left and right.

Now that you see how powerful giveaways can be and how the social proof gained from giveaways can help your blog, here's how to successfully host a giveaway.

What kind of prizes to give out:

Last year, I was in Beijing, and at the subway station I noticed 2 very different advertisement styles. One company bought every third ad space at the metro station (the long corridors where subway riders walk by every day). Another company bought 3 ad spaces (one next to the other), skipped 9 ad spaces, and bought another 3 ad spaces one next to the other. I remember thinking that day I'd rather be the second company than the first. Why? Because by heavily bombarding viewers at one moment by putting 3 ads next to each other, the second company is creating a lasting impression on viewers that the first company's way of advertising can't.

So what does this have to do with hosting giveaways?

It's better to host 1 giveaway for $300 than it is to host 10 giveaways giving away $30 each. Through extensive testing via giveaways on A Young Investor and my other sites, I've noticed that the total number of giveaway participants in a big giveaway exceeds that of all the small giveaways combined.

I've found that cash giveaways tend to be the most popular among all giveaways (for obvious reasons, because if you're giving away a specific product, people who don't like that product most likely won't participate in that giveaway). Would you have $500 or an iPad? Obviously $500, because with that money, you can either buy an iPad or something else.

So when hosting a giveaway, make sure you're giving away cash and make sure it's for a large sum of money (remember, it's better to host 1 giveaway of $300 than 10 giveaways of $30 each).

How to get sponsors:

Now I understand not every has enough money to host a large giveaway (neither do I). Thanks in large part to the sale of my previous sites, I was able to give away a few hundred dollars out of my own pocket. But eventually, I had to get sponsors to help pay for my giveaways. For my $300 Cash Giveaway - Elections Style, I was able to get 1 sole sponsor who provided most of the funds for the giveaway. So how did I do it?

Contact websites related to your blog's niche. Since my blog is about investing, I Google searched "investment brokers" and contacted all the investment brokers to see if they'd like to sponsor my giveaway. In return, YOU MUST make sure that the sponsor gets something valuable. Since my site has never had any advertisers before and has quite a lot of investors who read it, a few potential sponsors emailed me back. Eventually, I let them bid up the price, and the winner got a link (nofollow) back to their site and a banner ad on the giveaway page. Try this method, and I'm sure it will work for you. Even if you don't have a lot of traffic, potential-sponsors will likely want to sponsor you because they know that giveaways get a LOT OF TRAFFIC.

How to promote giveaway:

In general, I tweet about my giveaways and post them on my Facebook fanpage. I also make a giveaway entry option as "Tweet About This Giveaway". Thus, a snowball effect is created, where giveaway participants tweet about my giveaways, drawing in even more giveaway participants.

But by far, the best way to promote a giveaway is to submit it to sweepstakes directories. By far. Without submissions to giveaway directories, my giveaways would only have had 20% of the participants that they did have.

How long should the giveaway last ?

Through extensive testing, I've found that 2 weeks for a giveaway is the best lenght. Any longer, and participants won't want to participate because they don't like waiting that long. Any shorter, and you're not maximizing the full potential of the giveaway. I like to start giveaways on a Saturday and end them on a Sunday. The reason for this is that the first and last 2 days of a giveaway are usually the days that get the most participants. By starting on Saturday, the first 2 days are Saturday and Sunday, days when most people are off work and have time to participate in my giveaway. By ending on a Sunday, the last 2 days are Saturday and Sunday, days when most people are off work and have time to participate in my giveaway. For example, an ideal giveaway would start on Saturday, September 15 and end on Sunday, September 30.

Guest Post - Our host is Doug Glaston, In this post Doug looks at some successful blogs and how they got there.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

If you're on Spice Up Your Blog, then your interested enough to learn more about what you can do to make your blog better. The Internet is loaded with perhaps tens of thousands of blogs that deliver articles and content for a specific audience. Many are great, some of them are not really that intriguing. Maybe yours has gotten a lot of talk and shares within a small community, which is great.

But then you have to look at the blogs that really get a lot of attention; the blogs that speak to a large audience and are able to sustain themselves on the basis of its popularity. What kind of blogs am I talking about? I'm aiming pretty high, but think about the work of Mashable, Engadget, Perez Hilton; the big guns of the blogosphere.

The wrong thing to think is: “I'll never get to where they are. They've been in the game for a much longer time and their resources are way beyond mine.” Sure, they have a lot to back them up, but it wasn't always like that. The reason why these blogs are as widespread as they are is because they speak in a way the few can.

Whether you're starting up or are still trying to break into the scene, there are plenty of considerations to be made that might turn some more heads. Every popular blog does things differently, but there are some universal characteristics as well.
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Guest Post - Our host is John Geroutis, in this post John has some StumbleUpon tips for bloggers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog. How does Stumble Upon really works?

Stumble Upon is one of the most famous social bookmarking websites on the web, along with Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Buzzfeed. It's very easy and fun to use. You just select the categories you usually enjoy viewing ( marketing, photography, humor, psychology,sports, games, etc.) and then automatically StumbleUpon generates a page you might like each time you click Stumble. Whenever you click the like button on a page you stumble, then that page will gain more chances to be viewed by other StumbleUpon users. Consequently, getting your page stumbled and liked by several users will dramatically increase your pageviews. That's how StumbleUpon works, in general.
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Guest Post - Our host is Danielle Rodabaugh, In this post Danielle has listed fifteen blog tips to make your blog more engaging.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

If you've been managing your blog for some time, chances are you're looking for some ways to improve it. Whether it comes to content development, credibility or reader engagement, the opportunities for improvement are endless. To help you along your way, here are 15 great ways any blog owner can improve his or her publication.
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Guest Post - Our host is Matt Geer, In this post Matt looks at the dangers of information overload from the 'online pros'.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

There is no blueprint to making money online. If you've spent any time researching how to build an online business than you already know this.

However, what you do have access to are all the make money online blogs, ran by guys who've already made their thousands or millions of dollars online. They figured it all out, and now share it so that you can repeat their success. So while it may not be a step-for-step blueprint, it's really the next best thing.

That said, there are so many bloggers, gurus and magic money fairies posting their tips online that reading and following all of these blogs and their advice can actually be counterproductive, even prevent you from succeeding. If you're not careful, that is. Here are 5 examples to show you what I mean.
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Guest Post - Our host is Richard Franklin, in this post Richard looks at the advantages of LinkedIn for Bloggers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

There’s no need to sugar coat. When someone mentions LinkedIn, it does not elicit the same giddiness or excitement versus the more famous social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. In fact, for a novice social media company, LinkedIn may not hold any marketing value and may be perceived nothing less than a digital resume.

This is the uninformed way of looking at it. However, an experienced social media company may see LinkedIn from a different point of view. In fact, LinkedIn may serve a special role in a well-rounded online marketing strategy.

First, let’s look into some of the LinkedIn numbers:
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Guest Post - Our host is Clare Evans, In this post Clare has some useful blog tips for niche bloggers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

We’re all used to seeing post after post on how to grow your blogs readership. And while all these points are well and good if you blog about marketing, SEO, or design; are they really relevant to the niche bloggers amongst us?

A quick Google search will show you that there is a blog for pretty much everything. Whatever your weird, wonderful, or downright bizarre hobbies, there’s someone out there blogging about it. And these highly niche blogs all have a readership. So why are you finding it so difficult?

Niche Blogging Made Easy

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Guest Post - Our host is Jessica Simmons, Jessica looks at the fine line between making money on your blog and keeping a good reputation with your readers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Choosing between money and reputation is like choosing between meat and bread—there is fulfillment with reputation, but money offers a special kind of satisfaction.

It’s true that for a lot of blogs, the quality of the website diminishes when earning money is prioritized. Most of the site’s space that was once dedicated for relevant content is now replaced by random advertisements.

The problem though with standing up for a good reputation is that it may affect the availability of income-generating resources that are essential to sustain that good reputation. Without sufficient funding, running your site may be terminated.

To better weigh both options, here are actual blogging experiences that were once caught in this dilemma.

Reputation Matters

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Although search engines will eventually find and crawl your latest blog posts there are some steps you can take to speed up the process.Simply sharing your latest posts on social networks can help as search engines can follow links on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ ect..One of the best ways to let search engines know you have updated is by Pinging them.

What Is Pinging

When you ping your latest blog post you are telling search engines directly that you have new content on your site.Most ping services will update among others Google Blog Search, Weblogs, Feedburner, Blo.gs and Icerocket.

Popular Ping Services

- http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
- http://pingomatic.com/
- http://www.pingfarm.com/
- http://www.mypagerank.net/service_pingservice_index

How To Ping

With most ping services you enter the page or post title and URL an ping.Some allow you to submit multiple URL's while some also let you add a description.It is important you only Ping your website or blog when you add new content as pinging when nothing new is there to crawl can be seen as spam.

So while Pinging alone wont necessarily help your sites search engine rank it will help your content get found by Google, Bing and others.

Drop Your Comments And Questions Below.

Guest Post - Our host is Jenny Rasmussen, who looks at Blogging and SEO in the wake of the Google Penguin algorithm change.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

With the “Penguin” update that launched on April 22, Google changed the search engine optimization (or “SEO”) game more significantly than ever before. Originally announced as a means to penalize webmasters who had over-optimized their webpages and link building efforts, the Penguin filter is now here to stay and ignoring its effects could cause your blog and website to plummet in Google’s search results.

So – what is the answer? How can a blogger continue to rank highly on Google and Bing without resorting to the SEO tactics of yesteryear? Let’s take a look at content – in the form of images, videos or written pieces – and how it can greatly improve your inbound traffic and where you show up in the search results.
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Guest Post - Today's host is Kate Croston, who explains and compares link building techniques.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Link building is a pretty well-known tactic around the world of blogs and websites for being a good way to help escalate your search engine rankings and direct traffic to your blog or website. However the term “link building” is also a little vague, and there is a vast difference between two of the more common link building techniques: organic link building and paid link building. If you’re wondering what the difference between the two is then read on:

Organic Link Building

What It Is:

In layman’s terms, organic link building is the act of getting your links placed on other people’s sites because you have provided good, quality content and people want to share your content and website with others.

How It Happens

You can get links placed organically through different tactics such as:

1. Writing high quality posts on your own blog or website that resonates with readers, causing them to share them on their own sites or through social media.

2. Social media is a great tool for sharing your links, and sharing them quickly. It’s easy for others to read your post on a social media site and then share it with their followers, making your link spread like wildfire throughout the social media world.

3. By providing well-written guest posts for other people’s blogs and websites that have a higher Page Rank than you do. When you provide an exceptional post for them they in turn include a link to your blog at the end of the post, which will likely cause their audience to visit your site.

4. Through leaving comments on other people’s blog. This will usually result in other commenter’s visiting your site, finding the content you have to offer, and then sharing it based on its validity and value.

The Results

Organic link building is the best way to build links throughout the web because it’s based on providing something valuable to the consumer. The major search engines look favorably on links obtained organically, and this will help increase your page rank, search engine visibility, and your reputation in your specific niche.

Paid Link Building

What It Is

Paid link building, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like. You pay someone else to place a link on their site. The link placement is based on the payout and not necessarily the actual quality of the content of what you’ve written.

How It Happens

It’s a fairly straightforward process; you find someone that is willing to accept money for link placement, something that is usually done on a recurring monthly basis, and then you pay them for placing your link. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding paid link building, however, and it’s a practice that’s frowned upon by the major search engines.

The Results

You will get some of the same benefits from paid link building as you do organic link building such as increased visibility and higher page rank, making it advantageous at first. But it’s important to note that you can also end up getting punished by the search engines if you’re caught engaging in paid link building because it’s seen as an unfair advantage. You didn’t achieve that link through providing useful content, but instead because you paid someone, and that can be seen in an unfavorable light because it’s unfair to the people who actually worked hard and provided well-written, quality content to achieve a link.

So do you choose one or the other?

If you’re looking for a way to build links then the safer, albeit slower, way to go is by honestly obtaining links through organic link building. Paid link building may give you an initial boost in traffic and page rank, but the consequences could result in an ultimately lower page rank, something that could be detrimental to your website. Organic link building, on the other hand, may take longer to establish but will end up holding its value over time.