Cameron Olthuis

Of course they can. But I want to point you to a very good debate between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.

Jason is arguing that bloggers can make a decent living and Alan doesn’t think they can. The one thing they do seem to agree on is that it takes a decent amount of traffic before that’s possible.

My Take is that you can make money from blogging. But I don’t think that’s the reason 95% of people blog in the first place. There’s a hundred other reasons someone start blogging besides making money, a hobby being one of them. I will agree though, if you do want to make money it will take a lot of traffic before you can replace your daytime job.

There’s a lot of things that you can get from blogging besides getting rich. The networking and contacts I’ve made through my blog alone have been priceless, and I’ve only just scratched the surface.

So who wins they debate? I vote it’s a tie. It’s true that if you want to make money blogging you can, but for the majority that will never happen. I agree with Jason that the industry is still young and ad dollars that go towards blogs is only going to increase. With that the number of people making a living off blogging will go up as well. If you do want to make money from blogging it’s possible, but like anything be prepared for lots of hard work. Let’s not forget the money a person can make indirectly from blogging as well. I’m sure Alan wouldn’t write a blog if it wasn’t tied to making money somehow, I guarantee he doesn’t do it for fun.

Blog, Blogging

Yes and no. There’s been some discussion today about whether or not SEO is easy. In my opinion SEO is easy, or at least understanding the basic concepts are easy. It’s common sense. Implementing the concepts and techniques is a whole other story and that’s where it becomes difficult. It’s the reason why there’s professional SEO’s and why it’s often a very costly service. Just like anything SEO takes years of experience to become good at. Sure the basic principles are easy to grasp but there’s more to it than that.

So why do I think it’s easy? Maybe SEO is just one of those things that comes easily for me. But I personally just think it’s just something that’s really simple to grasp. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that anyone can just go out there today, create a website, and appear at the top of the SERPs. But I do think it’s something that anyone can learn if they put in the time and effort. The concepts are easy but the devil is in the details.

There’s 4 basic principles for SEO; research, content, links, and spiderability. If you effectively implement all of these into your SEO strategy you will have a great shot at giving your website high visibility in the search engines. We’ll go into detail on these 4 principles in another post.

There’s a lot of really cool things that can be done using CSS and I’ve found some of the following resources to be very helpful to inspire ideas and learn new techniques. There’s a lot of good CSS tutorials out there so it’s pretty hard to narrow it down to only the 10 best. So instead of taking this list as the top 10 consider it as a collection of 10 great tutorials. I recommend having a good working knowledge of CSS/HTML before trying any of these on your own site.

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In order for your brand/website to be successful you need to build trust and credibility with your target audience. Without it, people will take their business elsewhere. Building trust and credibility takes open communication that goes both ways. It takes to time to develop but will only take seconds to lose. What takes years to build can be lost over night. Here’s a few tips to help you build trust and credibility online.

Website
What impression does your website give? There’s a good chance your website will be the first time a potential customer comes in contact with you or your company. Needless to say it’s pretty important that it makes a good first impression. You wouldn’t setup a retail store in an old dirty building, so why would you even think of doing that with your website? Would you meet business associates for the first time wearing grubby clothes? I sure as hell hope not.

Your website is not a place to skimp on your budget, yet some many people still do it. They think saving a few bucks asking their nephew to design their site is a smart decision, when in fact it probably ends up costing a lot of money in lost business down the road. A professional looking website is a must.

Marketing
What kind of marketing messages are you sending? Are you annoying people with spam such as; unsolicited email blasts, pop-ups and pop-unders, spyware, or other in-your-face sales techniques? If you are and you want a credible brand you should stop, immediately. These do nothing but piss people off.

How visible is your site? When people search for your company or keywords relevant to your website are you easily found? The more someone sees your brand around the web the more they will trust it. It’s important to invest money and time into your search engine marketing. Not only will this bring an increase in business, but it will build the credibility and trust. How can your customers trust you if they can’t even find you on Google?

Build alliances with other credible third parties.

Assurance
This is one that also deals with your website. There are little things you can do on your website that tells customers your are a trustworthy company that can easily be contacted if something goes wrong. So with that said, make the contact info prominent on your site, don’t try to hide it and don’t even think about leaving it off altogether. Make sure you have a well written ‘about page’. Let your customers know that you’ve been around awhile and you know what you’re doing.

There’s plenty of other little things you can and should do as well. For example, display your security certificates in prominent locations. Make it easy for your customers to see that you take security seriously. Are you a member of the BBB? If so then you should display the logo on your site and link it to your profile. Ask for testimonials and proudly display them on your site, often times customers are happy to do this, especially if you’ve pleased them.

You’d be suprised at how far these little things go, they really do give peace of mind and comfort to your customers.

Communication
Communicate early and often. You must be willing to admit(and take responsibility for) mistakes, deliver bad news, and openly share information. Don’t be afraid to apologize if necessary . Acknowledge and listen to what your customers have to say, let them know that you care and value their feedback. Speak in a language that is easy to understand. If problems arise then take care of them.

Bottom line: Don’t let you website fall victim to a crisis in consumer trust. Build and maintain trust and credibility and keep the lines of communication wide open. Building trust after you lose it is a hard thing to do and takes time, make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

Do you have anything you would like to add that you’ve found helps build trust and credibility.

branding, user interface, marketing, branding

Jeremy Zawodny throws SEO and Google Base into the boxing ring.

Is my money better spent on Search Engine Optimization techniques and advertising, or should I be paying someone to build tools that make it easy to get my data loaded directly into Google Base (and kept up-to-date)?

Personally I don’t care much for Google Base but I am prepared for this to happen. You should be too, chances are Google Base results will be showing up in the SERPs soon. I sure hope it doesn’t happen though, it will plague the results.

Rand says that links are taking awhile to get credit.

On a recent project in which SEOmoz did some serious down-and-dirty link building, we found that it was not until 10 weeks after our efforts had begun that the rankings showed progress.

I’m tracking this right now with my recent digg, I got a ton of good inbounds from it. I’ve noticed a lot more people coming from MSN and Yahoo, but haven’t noticed much from Google. Then again I’ve only had this blog since last November, I could still be slightly boxed. That and haven’t done a minute of seo work on it. I’ll keep you up to date on what I notice as time goes on.

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