With blogging, the most obvious things that we should all do are usually the ones we forget to. If you are looking to increase the popularity of your blog in 2008, here are some simple things you need to start doing:

Email Subscriptions – if you are using Feedburner, you are probably already using the email subscription service. What you may have not noticed is that when you use the Feedburner email subscription service, when someone gives their email to Feedburner to subscribe to your blog it doesn’t mean that they are a subscriber. They usually get a follow-up email from Feedburner verifying that they subscribed, but many people end up missing this email and never fully subscribe. So if you log into your Feedburner account and go under email subscriptions you will notice that some email address are not active. For those non-active email addresses, take them and re-subscribe them to your blog. This way they get another verification notice to subscribe to your blog and many of them will end up subscribing.

SEO – a lot of people claim that they are SEO experts or that their blog is already optimized for search engines. Yes, WordPress is not that bad out of the box, but there are still a lot of modifications you need to make to your WordPress blog if you want more search love. If you want to make sure your blog is SEO friendly, check out this video.

Participate on other blogs – if you are trying to make your blog popular, you are probably concentrating fully on your blog instead of other competing blogs. A great way to increase the popularity of your blog is to find all your competitor blogs and start participating on them. By placing valuable comments on them others will find you and most likely subscribe to your RSS feed because they are targeted visitors.

Share some love – don’t expect to be popular if you are not willing to link out. If you want others to link to you or start reading your blog then start linking to them. When you link to others they may end up linking back to you or they may end up finding your blog interesting and start reading it.

What’s your edge – if you want people to read your blog you need something that differentiates yourself from the competition. This could be your attitude, your content, or anything else like that. But if you don’t have something that differentiates yourself from the competition then it is going to be hard to grow your readership.

Although these tips are basic, hopefully they will come in value to you during 2008. Just think about them every once in a while and you will start seeing growth in your blog traffic.

Don’t you hate it when you write a great blog post and no one comments on it? Whether you have a few readers or thousands of readers reading your blog, it seems that many people are having trouble to get hundreds of comments. If you want to increase the number of comments on each of your blog posts, here are a few things you can do:

1. Bait your readers – make sure your blog posts end with an open ended question to your readers. If you want people to leave comments then invite them to do so. Sometimes that extra push can make people comfortable to pop the first comment up there or just join the rest of the discussion.

2. Leave room for discussion – instead of writing a thorough blog posts that covers everything from the moon to the sun, write short blog posts that allow the readers to add input. By not covering everything it makes it easy for others to contribute to the conversation.

3. Reward your top commenters – if you want to get creative this is probably the best area to do so. Shoemoney rewards his top commenters by linking out to them on every page in his sidebar. This is a great way to get new readers to comment.

4. Use threaded comments – the advantage of threaded comments is that it makes it easy to follow and respond to conversations.

5. Write opinionated content – the more opinionated you get the more comments you are going to receive. If you want proof of this, just look at Shoe’s post on President Bush.

6. Subscribe to comments – once someone places a comment you can give them an option that says “Notify me of follow up comments via e-mail”. By doing this they may come back when someone else posts a comment and then add another comment.

There are probably tons of other methods you can use to increase the number of comments on your blog, anyone have any other suggestions?

When it comes to money you probably want the biggest piece of the pie if not the whole pie. There is nothing wrong with it and I would even go as far as saying that if your first instinct isn’t to obtain the full pie then there is something wrong.

However, because of this attitude it seems that many people are running their businesses solo these days. It could end up working out for you but here are some reasons why you may want to consider finding a business partner:

1. Being solo all the time can get depressing, especially when you are starting out. Having a business partner will allow you to motivate each other and hopefully keep the business moving forward at a rapid pace.

2. You are not a jack-of-all-trades, so you need to find someone who can fill in where you lack. Just look at Shoemoney and Dillsmack. Shoe is a great marketer and Dillsmack is a great programmer. Because they both specialize in what they do best, they are able to crank out successful products like AuctionAds,

3. Networking is one of the things that is necessary for most businesses to be successful. Even if you are extremely talented, knowing other people that can help you is essential. The great thing about bringing in a business partner is that they may have a new network that you can tap into to grow your business.

4. What you think is a killer idea may not be a smart idea. If you are running a business solo, you are more likely to do stupid things since you don’t always have somebody you trust and believe to run things by. With a business partner you can both bounce ideas off of each other and figure out what is really worth pursuing.

5. Timing is essential when it comes to success. A good way to get things out faster is to add employees, but when you are starting out this can be expensive. For this reason it is wise to add a business partner so that you can get things out faster.

Hopefully this helps convince you that you need a business partner. If you have a business partner, care to share how you have found it valuable or invaluable?

In the last week or so it seems that everyone is talking about the Google PageRank update. The thing is, people need to stop worrying about their PageRank and start concentrating on their traffic. Nine out of the ten people I asked who’s PageRank decreased said that they did not see much, if any, change in their Google traffic.

At the end of the day, does it really matter if your PageRank decreases and your search traffic stays the same (other than the purpose of selling links)? What you need to do is start diversifying your traffic so that you aren’t as reliant on Google. Google may convert better but it would be a terrible mistake to let your businesses faith rest solely on Google alone.

So, now that you don’t care about PageRank or hopefully a little less, here are some things you should think about doing:

1. Look at the other search engines out there. Yahoo and MSN may not drive as much traffic but something is better than nothing. If you think you are getting no traffic from Yahoo or MSN, it is probably because your rankings aren’t as high on those engines.

2. Start leveraging the social web. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, MySpace, and Facebook are just few of the social sites you should consider leveraging. The traffic may not be as valuable but with enough quantity it will be worth something. Three of my clients get more than 100,000,000 pageviews from their Facebook application every month and if these non-marketers can do it, then you as a marketer can as well.

3. Build partnerships with other websites on the web because this is a great way to expand your traffic as well as business. This is easier said then done but if you spend enough time on it then something will happen in your favor.

Anyone have any other recommendations when it comes to diversifying your traffic?

Last week I discussed how you could make money by talking shit and it seems it was actually successful for Joe Tamargo. Joe talked some productive shit to a potential client and it was so effective that they actually asked him to send over a proposal.

The other day I read a great post you had on shoemoney.com about “talking shit will get you work“. I read that post and applied it to my field and passion and BOY it worked like a charm. See, I have been doing development and seo for about 3 years now, but always for other people and so on, and I decided to do my own “passion” site abut three months ago. So now that I have “talked shit” and got the work, ( Guy , told me to send him a proposal ).

What is my next step? Selling online “consulting” is a bit different for me. Sure, I know what to do once he pays me, BUT my problem is that the guy is not to “tech savvy” and I am afraid if I make the proposal to “tech” he won’t understand and I will lose the job, I am used to just dealing with other webmasters that know what “seo” or “serps” are.

So now the question is, now what?

First, you need to figure out their company goals and how you could potentially help them achieve those goals. When doing this, you will also need to figure out how much it is worth to them. The easiest way to figure this out is ask them directly what their budget is. If they are not willing to tell you their budget, keep on asking them in different fashions until they tell you. And if they still don’t say anything, try and throw out some ranges, but make sure they aren’t too low because many people try and negotiate from your lowest number in the range.

After you get their budget you need to craft a proposal that discusses what they need in detail as well as the price. Try not to put anything in the proposal that could potentially hinder your success like non-compete clauses unless they request it. Also if the proposal is a bit techie try to dumb it down a bit. Just don’t dumb it down too far or it may seem that the work you are proposing is easy.

Lastly, hope that they sign the proposal and you can start working with them. If they ignore you or don’t respond back right away, give it a while. A few days later you can call to make sure that they received it and if they had questions, but don’t push the potential client. Remember it is in their best interest to hire you and if they can’t see that then it is their loss.

Whether you want to admit it or not, you care about money. You probably make the majority of your income working nine to five or doing some sort of Internet thing, but why not try and make a few bucks by placing some ads on your blog?

You may hate the idea of placing ads on your blog and may find it a bit cheesy, but there is really nothing wrong with it.  The only caveat to that is if you start a brand new blog and start throwing up ads from day one, people may start hating.  However, after you grow your audience you should definitely start popping up ads. You won’t loose any traction by throwing up ads after you are established; just look Shoemoney, John Chow, TechCrunch, and Engadget.

None of these blogs lost any traction by placing up ads and if you’re worried about it just keep in mind that many blogs even have too many ads. The thing is, I have not seen any blogs lose traction by popping up ads and if you feel that ads have lost have lost you some readers then you are probably doing something wrong besides the ads.

So the question I have for you isn’t whether you should be placing ads on your blog, but instead when should you start placing ads on your blog and how many ads should you place?

If you are looking to make more money, an easy way to do so is to start picking targets and email them about why they are making a mess of themselves and/or company (hopefully in a nice way).  Just for a second think about all the people with money that you want to get to. Chances are, they have thousands of people kissing their ass and asking for their money.  If you take the same approach you are going to blend in with all the other ass kissers, so try talking a little shit instead.

If you are unclear on what I am talking about, hopefully this example will help clarify.  I am an SEO, so if I want to gain big SEO clients the first thing I do is find the contact information for someone who is a director of marketing of that company. After I have a big list, I don’t cold call them or even try and pitch them, instead I send them an email which outlines how they don’t know how to do their job.  I try and be very productive with my email by only calling out all the things they are doing wrong in regards to their search marketing campaign. The most important thing to keep in mind when doing this is to lay everything out and never worry if they take you advice and never pay you a dime.

By doing this to all the big fish you are trying to reach, you will gain some decent accounts. Keep in mind that this won’t work if you just talk out of your ass, if you actually know what you are doing you will be able to raise some very good points and challenges from the right perspective.  Quality trash talking is what’s necessary here.

This is how I got a lot of my clients and I highly recommend you trying it out if you want to make money.