This article is guest posted by Shaun Connell.

I’ve been professionally blogging for a little over a year now. In June of 2009, I was working full-time on my blogs for the first time. Whenever people ask me what the key to me going full-time was, I always give them the same answer: passive search engine traffic.

Search engine traffic is, for the most part, consistent and passive. Once you get about a thousand visitors per day, you’ll get about a thousand visitors per day. Every day. Whether you post or not. Search traffic is also valuable traffic — searchers are more likely to click advertisements, buy products, subscribe to newsletters — they’re more likely to make money.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a common myth in internet marketing and blogging circles that implies that you have to choose between making your readers happy and making Google send more traffic your way.

This article is guest posted by Xavier Lazos and Alex Jon Alavi.

If you’re a niche blogger like myself then you need to arm yourself with the right tools to make your online equity a success from the get go.

So everyone has been advising you to switch over to WordPress pronto because if Google would have a mistress … then WordPress would definitely be #1 ;-)

So you’ve installed WordPress (the best decision you could ever make).

Now what?

Well.

The next step is to get the following WordPress plugins installed and activated to help you start on the right track straight off the bat.

I’ve listed the following 8 plugins I use (via priority as I see it), which you can also use as a checklist, the next time you set up your blog.

Plugin #1: Cbnet Ping Optimizer

Advantage: The last thing you want, is for your blog to be listed in the spammer twilight

Last month I was able to speak to a 70ish crowd of marketing and sales people about blogging, how it can help their business and a cool Google Suppression Attack that they can do after the seminar.

It was fun and sort of funny because in that small crowd, 2 of my classmates’ parents where there – and I didn’t even talked about it in school, actually I don’t talk about it at school.

Anyway, here are some spy pics…

(btw, download link to the presentation is below)

Telling the story of how I started online. With the disclaimer “I’m not really good at telling stories or ‘teaching’ stuff so please bear with me” which I think is true :-)

Click here to continue reading

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This article is guest posted by Mike Ndegwa.

The SEO Method that is going to explain below in detail, is a surefire method proven to rank you #1 on all major Search Engines listed thus: Google, Yahoo Search and MSN.

On this post we will learn how to Rank #1 on your Primary Keyword regardless of how competitive it is.

Before we deep our feet to the SEO method, you need to first set some objectives for your site. Otherwise there is no need of Ranking #1 for the sake of it.

The two main objectives that any internet marketer should have in mind are:

a)     Drive traffic to their $$$ Money Site i.e. if you have a product that you own and sell.

b)     Drive traffic to a squeeze page i.e. if you are building an email list where you can promote your affiliate products or can use for future launch of some product

This article is guest posted by Mike.

If you are going to try to make money online by affiliate marketing or if you have products to sell, or if you have a content website, you will need to ensure that your SEO is completely up to scratch. Without SEO any website online will fail to bring in a reasonable income for a variety of reasons. SEO is fundamental to the growth and development of an online business.

What Does SEO Mean?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. That means making websites that search engines can not only find and index properly but also see the website as a highly valuable resource online. The more valuable your website is to search engines the higher your website will be ranked on searches. SEO determines in essence how valuable your website is. SEO includes such techniques as link building, keyword optimization and more to ensure