Matt Cutts is one of the most respected software engineers from Google and occasionaly provides some great insights into the method behind the machine! This talk from Wordcamp 2007 is a great primer for SEO (Search engine optimisation) for bloggers… kindly videoed by John Pozadzides

Th video is one hour long, but is pretty easy listening, the actual powerpoint slides are available here from Matts Blog.

If you are serious about your blog, and want to optimise traffic to it, then there are a few extra features that you will need  or at least that you should have. There are, of course, hundreds of WordPress plugins available, so finding the right ones can be a daunting prospect. Well fear no more – we have gone through all the plugins and found the top 6 essential plugins ( in our view!) for your blog.

Akismet. Comment spam filter – Once your blog starts getting popular you will figure why you need this!

WordPress.com Stats. Easy view of you blog stats – of course you can still use Google analytics, but that can be a hassle – this plugin allows you to keep an eye on you stats whilst you are on your blog

Light SEO. All the essential SEO options you need in one light, well coded plugin

Light Social. Adds Social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post

Google XML Sitemaps. Generates Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask compatible sitemaps

WP-DB-Backup (WordPress Backup). Just in case – schedule and forget – will email you a backup of you blog database every week (or whatever you set it to…)

So that is the list of core functional plugins you should in our minds have on your blog. We will also be looking at the best plugins to help monetise your blog – things like adsense plugins and the like… stay tuned!

In this initial most I will outline the basic ways of monetising your blog – future posts will go into far more depths on each system and give some links to the best sites and services in our experience. You first need to understand the options to choose the best way to get paid for all you hard work! Depending on your blog content, audience etc you can choose from a number of ways of making money:

Sponsored ads. This is the standard pay per click advertising you see all over the web – predominantly from the likes of Google ( Google Adsense) You can add them to you blog and get a small commission everytime someone clicks on the Ad. – The ads are delivered by the ad server based on the content of the current page. Ads can be text based or banners and images.

Sponsored Links. Similiar to the above – but these are actual words in your copy that are normaly double underlined and look like hyperlinks – when the user clicks on them they either pull up a window or take the user to the destination page

Affilate marketing. This is when you advertise products on your site – either through text or image ads from which you can get a commission when the user clicks and then purchases the product. This can be used in a number of different ways – you could write full revues of products and then link to the site to purchase the product – or it can be a more traditional way of using an Ad…

Pay per post. You can get paid for writing a revue on a product etc and posting it on your blog, There are a number of companies that provide the network of bloggers and advertisers. We would alway suggest full disclosure of the fact that you are getting paid to post something – to be sure that you are not misleading you users.

Traditional Advertising. Getting paid to carry and traditional Ad – can be a graphic, text or even video, this can be for a one off fee – a Cost per page view ( CPM ) or a cost per Aquistion ( CPA )

Blog Sponsorship. Similar to traditional advertising but tends to be more highly branded

If you are looking at getting into blogging for the first time then one of the crucial questions you are probably asking yourself is What should I blog about? Believe it or not – despite the hype around twitter and facebook – people are not interested in what you had for lunch!

Try to blog about something you feel passionate about, something that holds your interest. You will find it easier to keep your blog up to date if you are living and breathing the topic of focus.

There are a number of blog platforms out there, both hosted services such as blogger and wordpress.org or a range of software you can install on your own hosting account. We prefer the later – it allows you to tie your own domain name to the blog which is important if you wish to monetise it and if also allows you some control and security on your blog content.

Our platform of choice is WordPress running on our hosting own hosting account, WordPress software is excellent, free and automatically allows you to update it – which is essential on any software platform so you can keep up to date with security fixes and code changes.