My blog gets 80-90% of its traffic through search engines. When I started my blog I didn’t know the meaning of SEO. I just wrote articles and over time these articles got high places in search engines. Now I get tons of traffic everyday from Google, Yahoo, Bing and many sites that I haven’t heard of.
Now if you don’t know what the heck does SEO means, S.E.O. is Search Engine Optimization. A type of internet marketing where you optimize your pages so that it will appear higher on search (Google).
For an example when you search “BlogKori” my blog will come up on top of the search results. This is because my blog is optimized for this term. I will write a brief guide in the upcoming weeks on blog SEO, for now let us continue.
So when it comes to getting traffic for new blogs, it is a very painful to get new people to visit your website. As blogging is like a business, things take time to mature. In this post I will give you some examples of how blogging helped me get search positions and how I get extra visitors every day. Continue reading Case Study: Attracting More Blog Traffic with Long Tail Keywords
Feedburner is a free blog RSS service and it is a must when it comes to setting up your blog. Feedburner has a free email delivery service and people can sign up for your blog posts through email. We can use this as a method to deliver your ebook and for your ebook you can get more blog subscribers.
So here is what you have to do. Go to feedburner and sign in to your feeds. If you don’t have feedburner, then use this guide on feedburner to set it up. Now go to your blog feed.
You created your ebook, now it’s time for you to host it somewhere so that people can have it as a free or paid download. Having a downloadable PDF ebook is a great little bonus you can provide to your readers. It can also serve as a way to share useful documents to your clients or customers.
When it comes to delivering an ebook to your user, you can achieve it in many ways such as:
Emailing it to your subscriber
Third-party ebook hosting services
Self-hosted solution
Emailing the PDF ebook directly
This is no brainier when the PDF ebook is just under a few megabytes. It’s also convenient when you just have to mail it out to a few recipients every now and then. But this approach is not scalable and you are left with a chore to manually send out emails to your interested parties.
You can solve this issue with the use of an email auto-responder system but even then they will only do the delivery part and not the hosting part. You will be left with the same issue as before.
Third-party ebook hosting services
These are services that offer both free and paid solutions. But I would want you to stay away from these services because oftentimes these services put advertisements alongside your ebook. This does not look professional if you are profiting from the ebook or from your blog. Also, even if you pay them to serve your ebook, your customers are still going to be in their system. So the best option for a blogger to host their ebook would be the self-hosted solution.
Self-hosted solution
Your web hosting company allows you to host the ebook directly under your website brand. This is the best solution because you can keep your blog branding and not sending your users to third-parties. It is also the most convenient and cost-effective solution because you can host the ebook directly on your blog hosting and no need to pay for an extra fee.
For the rest of this article, I am going to show you how exactly you can take advantage of your hosting account and set up the self-hosted ebook option.
No matter which option we choose below, we are going to:
Upload the pdf ebook
Get the public link to that PDF
Copy the link and use on the download page
Preparing the ebook before uploading:
Have the ebook ready on your computer.
Make sure the ebook is a PDF file.
Rename the ebook to make the name of the ebook easy to read and understand.
Don’t use any spaces in the ebook name, replace spaces with hyphens (-)
Host Ebook on WordPress Media Library
Login to your WordPress dashboard and choose Media > Add New
Now click on the “Select Files” button to find the ebook from your computer or drag and drop the file from the folder to this window.
The ebook will be uploaded and you can see it below. Click on the Edit link to open the file properties page:
Now copy the public link from File URL field and put the public link in a text file for future use.
Some caveats to this approach:
WordPress limits the maximum file size for file uploads. Depending on your WordPress installation and server configuration, this value can be high or low.
If your ebook happens to be larger than the allowed file size shown, you will have to have it increased by a server administrator. Don’t worry, if you are using a modern web hosting company such as Bluehost, you will find that the upload file limit is 256 MB. However, if for some weird reasons you find the limit is too low or the file you want to upload is crazy large, then you can ask their support staff to increase the WordPress media upload limit.
Also, when you upload this way, the public file link is not very pretty:
If you would like to have an easier to memorizable link to the public download file, follow the next option below.
Host Ebook on File Manager
Instead of having an ugly link to your ebook file, you can make it pretty and professional like this: yourblog.com/the-ebook.pdf when you upload it directly to your website file manager.
This can make it convenient to share with other people. For example, I have uploaded my web developer resume on my site like this. Whenever someone asks for my resume, I can just point them to this pretty link: tamalweb.com/resume.pdf
This is easy to memorize and makes me look professional.
In order to get a sweet link like this, you will have to upload the ebook directly to your website root folder. And for that, you will have to log in to your web hosting control panel.
I am using Bluehost as an example of how to host your ebook directly but the steps can be similar if you are using a different hosting company.
Log in to your web hosting control panel (Bluehost makes it a much more friendly user interface) Click on the “Advanced” menu:
You will be now directed to the control panel options. Click on File Manager:
This will open the file browser of your website. Click on the public_html folder:
Locate your website root directory. When you see wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes, you will know that you are in the right folder. Click on Upload button to upload your pdf ebook in this level:
You will see a new window where you can upload your PDF file. Select the file and choose from your computer.
It will upload…
Go back and you should see your ebook in the directory listing:
Now you have a sweet link to your PDF ebook or document you can share to your friends or interested parties. Visit: yoursite.com/my-ebook.pdf to verify that the ebook is loading correctly.
At the end of this process, you will have a download link like this:
https://blogkori.com/my-ebook.pdf
One downside of this approach is you have to do this process every time you want to make an update to your ebook. When the next time you upload a new ebook make sure you are overriding existing files from the file uploader:
How to Deliver Your PDF ebook
Now that you have hosted your ebook on the internet, it’s time to distribute it.
One way to do that is to make a “Thank You” page or a “Downloads” page on your website.
Once again, WordPress makes it very easy for you to create a page and offer the download.
Go to Pages > Add New:
Enter the copy of your page:
You can then make a link that will act as the download button. Just edit the page and link out that word or download button as your ebook download.
Select the appropriate text and click on the chain icon:
Now paste your public URL to the ebook file we created from earlier steps:
Click the Apply button to make it a download link:
The link is ready!
Save and publish your page
It’s a common strategy to have a download or thank-you page that we will redirect the user to after they perform an action.
You may also put this download link in an email auto-responder system. Just put this link in the welcome email when someone signs up to your email newsletter.
On this post I will write about how you can create ebooks to offer in your blog as downloads in PDF version. PDF files are very popular and it can be opened in mobile phones, smart phones, iphones and ipads as well as computers. In google chrome PDF can be opened and read right on the browser.
If you want to get more traffic from your blog and make money then you can offer free PDF downloads as a part of your content. Most internet marketers use downloadable ebooks as a hook to get email addresses. Such as I am doing with my blog, I am offering this ebook in my sidebar so people can submit their info and get the book. You may offer your blog articles as PDF downloads so people can read it offline and can print it. You can also sell ebooks and make money. There are endless opportunities with ebooks but first let us learn how to create a PDF ebook using google docs.
Which Program to Use for Writing an Ebook?
To write an ebook, open your word application such as Microsoft word or any other word processor you may have. You can also use open office to create your ebook. You can put your older blog posts and make up an ebook or you can write one from scratch. Continue reading How to Create A PDF Ebook Using Google Docs
Blogging is not like the old times where people would like to spend hours in a blog to read every word from the post. This is the late 2009 and social media is soon taking over on all of your online habits. When was the last time you had read a post from the beginning to end? New media blog readers scan those headlines and will only click on the link they are interested; after appearing on your blog they will start to scan your site and if they are in a mood, they will tweet your post or comment on it if they are trying to build links for their site.
So why don’t you take a different approach to get the attention from your readers; harvest some traffic and monetize it? Here are some great ideas which will replace your boring blog posts,
Post a funny pic!
Yes I do know that too! 90% of the pages being popular on StumbleUpon are funny or worthless pictures. Take your camera and shoot a picture. If you don’t have one, then search on flickr and get a good one. Be sure to credit the photographer for that! (pic credits: demonbaby.com)
Tell them the story they already know!
When there’s news, a lot of bloggers will be posting the story on their blogs. This is way of viral promotion and the way your readers will be benefited. The story doesn’t remains new but still people tend to promote the same story from different sites. This is nice way to get some juicy traffic from influenced audience.
By the way, did you know that facebook has aqcuired friendfeed for $50 million?
The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online. ~ff blog
Share a list of posts from the web!
This just works every time! You search the web for a topic and collect some very good resources. Then you list all of those links on a post and there you have your big list post. Not only your readers will love the collection, they will come to that page again and again to get to those articles.
Write a tutorial post
Figure out how you have connected the coffee machine to your power socket and write it on your blog! Here you have a great new tutorial: “How to connect your coffee machine.” Tutorial could be on anything and these are the most searched things on the web. Tutorials help the person looking for a solution and it will bring a lot of incoming links. Share it even if it’s a child’s play 🙂
Post a video
People just loves to see videos and even more if it’s funny or helpful. You can share a video from YouTube. The creator won’t be mad at you because you are promoting it.. just stay out of videos which are not there for sharing.
Show them your earnings
People are just crazzy about checking out what others are earning online. I found blogs with having only pay checks and nothing else! Just show your online earnings.
Tell them what you had in lunch
Yes, this culture is inspired by johnChow. When you have nothing to say, just show them what you had in lunch today!
My blog gets 80-90% of its traffic through search engines. When I started my blog I didn’t know the meaning of SEO. I just wrote articles and over time these articles got high places in search engines. Now I get tons of traffic everyday from Google, Yahoo, Bing and many sites that I haven’t heard of.
Feedburner is a free blog RSS service and it is a must when it comes to setting up your blog. Feedburner has a free email delivery service and people can sign up for your blog posts through email. We can use this as a method to deliver your ebook and for your ebook you can get more blog subscribers.
On this post I will write about how you can create ebooks to offer in your blog as downloads in PDF version. PDF files are very popular and it can be opened in mobile phones, smart phones, iphones and ipads as well as computers. In google chrome PDF can be opened and read right on the browser.