Ever since Microsoft’s initial Bing release, the search engine is becoming more popular every day. More users are searching Bing.com for answers.

As of December 2008, Bing’s shares went up 2.4% by December 2009, as well as search growth increased by almost 50% while Google’s search growth increased by 20%.

Although Bing is definitely a threat to Google, as of now, Google still remains the world’s top search engine. As Bing’s search growth grows, Yahoo search growth, on the other hand, is steadily declining, bringing concern to all Yahoo investors.

What is Aweber?

Aweber communications is by far the best email campaign management software available. Aweber lets you quickly and easily create powerful email campaigns to maximize your earnings.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, Aweber got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.

Aweber Features

Place Signup Forms – Start turning your traffic into profits. Use the simple to use Web Form wizard to create customizable forms and place them on your websites.

Create Autoresponders – Build a relationship with your subscriber the moment they sign up. Educate them about your product and send them back to your site without lifting a finger.

Unlimited Email Campaigns – Create a countless number of campaigns, send emails to as many people as you want as often as you want.

Ready Email Templates – Want to enhance your emails with rich and colorful templates? Select from tons of ready templates to enrich your messages.

Why Should You Get Aweber?

Email marketing is one of the most profitable aspects of a niche blog. Without an email list you are wasting traffic when you could be converting and making sales. Aweber is the top notch email marketing available, and you can try for only $1. You have absolutely nothing to lose.

As we start off the 2010 year fresh, reviewing your goals, or changing goals to something more sustainable may be required. Ask yourself the question, how many times did I post a day in the past year?

Maybe you posted once a week, twice a week. As long as it was on a consistent basis, you would see tiny noticeable changes. But maybe it wasn’t what you were expecting. Let me break it down why you didn’t see the results you were expecting:

Inconsistent Posting Frequency – Once or twice per day may not be enough. If you’re serious about building your blog, keep your posting frequency around 1 post per day. That’s the minimum I would personally suggest.

Unrelated or Boring Content – Your content must appeal to your readers. Regardless of what your niche is, providing fresh and genuine content is vital. Are your writing skills holding you back? Perhaps reading a bit more would help you improve your writing style and help you develop your very own.

Social Networking & Connecting – If you haven’t joined any social networks, forums, or simply been actively reading relative niches, it may be time to do so. Start off by signing up for 1 relative forum, create a twitter/facebook account, and consistently read and post.

Connect With Your Readers – Discussions with your readers is important. Try to answer any questions your readers may have. Provide email support for any kind of inquiries.

2010 is here, but are you satisfied with your progress so far? Have you achieved your short term goals? Long term goals? How well did you do in 2009? If not too well, how much improvement are you expecting in 2010? What are your 2010 resolutions?

Those are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself. If you don’t find yourself satisfied with the answers, maybe you should get more serious about blogging, or perhaps set more realistic goals. I’ll share some tips on how to progress your blog to the next level.

How Frequently Do You Update?

Maintaining active readers is all about fresh new content. When your readers visit your blog on several occasions and notice that you haven’t updated your content, they might not come back for a long period of time, if ever. Infrequent postings is the recipe for a dead blog. Posting frequency is just as important as consistency.

How Consistent Are You?

Being consistent with your posting is vital. Readers want new content on the daily basis to keep them informed and satisfied. If you can’t provide that satisfaction they will look for it elsewhere. Maintaining active readers is all about consistent and frequent posting.

The long awaited WordPress version 2.9 has finally arrived! Aside from being the world’s best blogging platform software, WordPress version 2.9 offers many new great features that are not previously available in any other versions of WordPress, so you should consider upgrading right away.

WordPress 2.9, also known as “Carmen”, was named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae. You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org. Watch the video below to view some of the cool features of WordPress 2.9:

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The new coolest stuff about WordPress 2.9 upgrade are:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

A commonly question asked by new bloggers. So Nick, how DO you get traffic to your blog?

Getting traffic is important, but converting and maintaining that traffic is just as important. It won’t do you good if 99.9% of the people that visit your site never come back. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. I will talk about the steps that you need to take to actually get that initial traffic in the first place.

Search Engines

The search engine is a powerful tool, and with its help you can generate extra traffic to your site. If your website content is unique, interesting, and helpful to others, Google will place your site at the top.

Some may argue that you need to build backlinks in order to rank your site higher. I disagree with that statement. I believe that if your site contains quality content that your visitors enjoy, your site will naturally gain backlinks.

Social Sites

Social websites are great for communication, but also to share some of your knowledge and link back to your site. It’s important not to spam and not post anything where it’s not wanted, however, it’s a great service that you can take advantage of.

Forums

Sharing your knowledge on the topic you have experience with is valuable, especially to forum members. Look for relative forums and share your expertise with others. Your helpful posts will be rewarded with traffic to your site and reputation as a knowledgeable person.

Backlinks, now commonly referred to as “inlinks”, are links from any outer pages pointing to your site. Building backlinks is the essence of getting high PageRank. However, not every link that’s being pointed to your site counts. I’m going to list several things about backlinks that you need to learn:

1. Backlinks will count for a lot more coming from higher PageRank pages.
2. Backlinks relevancy counts. If website that’s pointing to your site is not relevant, Google may choose not to count those backlinks for much.
3. Backlinks with rel=“nofollow” attribute will not contribute to increasing your PageRank.
4. Build backlinks over time. Consistency is the key.

Now that you know some key points about backlinks, let’s talk about how you can check your or your backlinks.

First, navigate to the Backlinks Checker Tool. Type in the URL of the website you want to check the backlinks for, and submit. You will get a list of all the pages the point to the website, if any.

For the most part, bloggers fundamentally rely on organic search engine listings to receive traffic to the blog. However, in order to get above your competitor’s websites, you need to do what is called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). Search engine optimization is nothing other than optimizing your site in order to improve your rankings on organic SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). There are many parts of search engine optimization, and I’m going to cover the most important aspects.

Before I start getting into all the aspects of search engine optimization, please remember that you are not writing content for search engines. If you’re going to over optimize your content, people will not want to ever come back to your website. You have to find a balance between writing valuable content for people interested in your niche, and at the same time optimizing your site for organic SERPs.

Page Title – When creating your niche blogs, choosing the right page title is extremely important. Google takes your page title into consideration, as well as all the other SEO aspects. Try to keep your title simple, to the point, and relative to what people might be searching for. When writing blog posts, you will have the ability to modify your page title (with the help of a plugin that I’ll talk about later). Try to keep those titles as specific as possible. For example, if you’re writing a post about apples, titling your page “The importance of eating apples” will probably be more useful than “Eating fruits”. Over time, you will learn how to create appealing titles for both search engines and people.

Meta Description – Meta description is a piece of code inside a page that is only written for search engines to describe what the page is about. Try to place the keywords you’re trying to rank for inside the Meta description, as the search engines will rank your site higher.

Meta Keywords – Meta keywords aren’t as important as Meta description, and I would say it’s the least important factor when it comes to SEO. For Meta keywords, try to include single words or 2 word phrases that relate to your posts, separating by commas. As I said, search engines will not think too much of Meta keywords, and they’re not so vitally important.

Keyword Density – Even though some people may not agree on this, but in my personal experience, keyword density matters a lot. For example, if you’re writing a post about “Abyssinian kittens”, and you want to rank for the term “Abyssinian kittens”, then you would need to repeat the term inside your text a decent number of times. Make sure you’re not abusing this, because your text will not make any sense. Try to keep your density around 3-5%. To check your keyword density, use the Keyword Density Checker tool.

Domain Age – An often overlooked part about search engine optimization, and probably one of the most important factors. New domains will usually rank much less than older domains. Does that mean that your domain can’t ever outrank an older domain? Of course not, it can be done with proper SEO and backlinks. However, older domains do have an advantage just because they are older. To check domain ages, use the Domain Age Checker tool.

Domain Name – When you’re choosing a domain name, you have to understand the importance of including your major keywords inside your domain name. Google will prioritize your niche blog above others just for the mere fact that you have more relative keywords inside your domain name. I will go through this in details later on.

Sitemap – Sitemaps are vital for good search engine optimization, but luckily for you, you won’t need to create sitemaps. There are plugins that will automatically generate sitemaps. However, you still need to know that sitemaps are important so Google can crawl all of your pages easier.

Backlinks – This is by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Backlinks, also referred to as inlinks, are simply links that point to your website. Every page has PR (PageRank), and the higher the PR the site that’s pointing to yours has the more boosts it will give you. Google takes into consideration many aspects such as relevancy of the sites linking to you, how many links do those sites link to (the more links the page links to, the less boost you will get) and whether or not that link has rel=“nofollow”. For example, if you’re pointing to the site such as  <a href= “http://www.nickaviles.com” rel=“nofollow”>Make Money Online</a>, the website will not get a PageRank boost from that link. It will count towards backlinks count, but it will not boost the site. There will be a whole section devoted to teaching how to build backlinks. This is just a rough overview.