Just copy paste this CSS file in to the “chrome” directory under your profile.
in my case, Windows XP
“C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\USER.default\chrome”
1. Click the Windows Start button, and select Run….
2. Type in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ then click OK
3. Select your profile, open the Chrome directory
4. Download, unzip and Paste this file.

here is a video for windows 7 and vista

Download now.

Getting Started: Self-Traders

Your first step should be to educate yourself about the market and trading in general. Read books, take a course, learn strategies, and practice, practice, practice! Most brokers offer demo accounts which will allow you to practice trading without risking real money. The downside of that is that you often don’t trade the same way that you would if you were trading with real cash! For a general background on the foreign exchange market, see the Forex Market Snapshot.

Trading Tips

Rule #1. Learn or Develop a Profitable Trading Strategy
This is rule #1. Without it, you are not going to go anywhere! For strategies and system ideas, please visit forex ebooks, forex courses, forex books and manual forex systems sections.

Rule #2. Use Low Leverage
Using excessive leverage may be the most common reason why many traders blow out their accounts. A good rule of thumb would be not to leverage your account more than ten times its value. For example, if you had a trading account of $1,000, you would not open trades worth more than $10,000. For a more detailed explanation of leverage, see forex basics.

Rule #3. Only Use Risk Capital
What this means is that you should only use money that if lost, would not affect your lifestyle in any way. Though it has been said many times before, this is a simple rule that can avoid any harsh lessons being learned further down the track if learnt now.

Choosing a Broker

Surprisingly, this may be one of the most important decisions you make outside of developing or learning a profitable strategy and not over-leveraging your account. You need to find an ethical broker who will not play tricks with their pricing and stop you out of your trades in order to fatten their wallet. This is typical behaviour of unethical market makers who have an economic incentive for you to lose when they are on the opposite side of your trade. Not all market makers behave in this way, so it is a good idea to do your research on all market makers and brokers before opening an account with them. Visit the Forex Broker Ratings section of this site for some useful assistance!

Managed & Semi-Managed Investments

Some market participants may prefer not to take the self-trading route but instead opt for a managed forex account, automated trading system, auto-trading platform or trading signal provider. Each one of these approaches doesn’t require much input from you, as most of the decision making process of when to open and close trades is left up to others. Your decision making rests with choosing a system, adjusting your leverage, placing trades, or determining which trading signals to take. If you choose to open a managed account, find out how much leverage they use when they trade your account. Excessive leverage could lead to large drawdowns that could wipe out your account.

If you decide to use an automated system, autotrading platform or forex trading signal provider where you set the level of leverage, be sure to keep it to a manageable level. See rule #2 above for more information.

It is a good idea to diversify your investments amongst several managed account providers and/or systems to even out your returns – When one account is up, the other may be down, and vice versa.

There are of course many other factors and questions to consider when opening a managed forex account or choosing an automated system or signal provider, however, these ones should hopefully help you avoid any unforeseen circumstances!

With those ideas in mind, this site has been arranged in a way to take you through many aspects of the retail spot forex market so you can learn at your own pace and visit the sections that interest you most.

Rui Cruz asks:

I’m done updating some blogs because I’m not motivated anymore. And I can’t find why, I just don’t want to. Any idea or tip on how to get motivated for something we really do for MONEY? Just “money” isn’t motivating enough.

There are different angles involved in that question. If you are not motivated at all to update your current blogs then you probably did a couple of mistakes. First of all you probably have chosen niches that you were not passionate about, but you went ahead anyway because you saw other people making money in those niches, and you figured you could, too.

This approach works if you are planning to outsource the content writing part. If you’ll be the one writing the posts, however, you must have an interest on the topic, else you’ll lose motivation sooner or later.

The second mistake is to have started too many blogs at the same time. Finding the time and motivation to update and promote one blog is already tough, let alone several of them at the same time.

The solution to these problems is an easy one. Start a blog on a niche you are passionate about, and focus all your emerging on that single blog, until it reaches the desired level of traffic and profitability. Once you achieve that you’ll be able to start a second blog without losing momentum on the first one.

The second angle I wanted to talk about is the persistence one. Even if you start a blog on a niche you are passionate about and focus all your energies on it, there will still be times that you’ll feel tired, not motivated, without ideas to write and so on. But you got push it anyway if you want to succeed.

This is true for everyone. I love to write on this blog, but there are days I wish I didn’t need to write a post, moderate comments, promote it on social media and so on. And what do I do on such days? I force myself to write the post, to moderate comments, to promote the blog and so on. Why? Because I know I must, if I want this blog to keep growing.

So yeah choosing a topic you have an interest on is essential, but it is not enough. You’ll still need to push yourself if you want to stand out from the crowd.

This reminds me of a movie a saw a couple of weeks ago, titled “Great Debaters.” One of the kids in the movie was reluctant to do his homework, so his father told him: “We do what we have to do in order to do what we want to do.”

This development process is pretty much the same exact steps that I’ve taken on every single post on Site Sketch 101. I’m going to take you from the concept development phase all the way to hitting the publish button.

Honestly, I usually have about five or six different articles that I am putting through this process at the same time. For some people that might not work, but for me it allows me to save time.

Sometime I get in the mood to develop topics so I create five or six ideas. Other days I want to go through my topics and create their key points so I list the main points for those five or six articles. Working through several articles at a time allows me to rapidly develop quality content for each day of the coming week.

1. Develop a topic

As soon as an idea comes to me I write it down before I forget it. I hate it when I think of something that I want to write about when I’m in the shower because it seems that half the time I forget the details of it by the time I get out and get dried off. So if your not in the shower when you think of your topic right it down right away.

2. List the main points

At the moment that I write a topic down on a piece of paper and type it into my computer, I begin developing the main points. If it is going to be a list post I begin by writing down as many items as I can think of. If it is going to be an essay style post then I try to think of about three to five main concepts that can be discussed.

The key here is to let the topic determine the number of points. You want to come up with enough ideas to provide a comprehensive look at your subject without creating overkill.

3. Develop an exciting introduction

Once I’ve determined the main concepts that I plan on discussing in an article I have effectively established the direction the article is going to go. This allows me to create an opening paragraph or two. The goal here is to sell the article. While creating the introduction you should have a sentence or two that describes what the entire article is going to develop into. I often create a sentence like this and also end up using it for the meta description.

First impressions are lasting impressions. If you can’t pull the reader in during the first paragraph or two then you are probably not going to get them to read the whole article.

It’s important that your first paragraph be powerful so that you can make a strong first impression and draw the readers in.

4. Expand each point to a couple of paragraphs

After I have an introduction paragraph and a list of points that I plan on using then I move on to developing each point. First I add a line after the heading for that point. I usually then convert that actual point to an h3 tag which displays the orange titles above every few paragraphs in most of my articles.

I then move to that line that I created after the subheading and begin typing. You don’t even have to start on your first point. Pick out whichever point you feel is the most important. Sometimes I choose point 3 or 4 and sometimes I go in order. There’s no rule at this point. Just work through until you have a paragraph or two that describes each of your key concepts.

At this point just write what comes to you. Don’t focus on spelling or grammar. Just take your thoughts and ideas and get them into the post.

5. Illustrate Your Article

After the bulk of the article is written up I head over to Flickr.com and begin searching for images that I can use to illustrate my article. I click the ‘advanced search’ button and opt to only search through the images with a creative commons license that allows me to copy and modify the work.

Make it your goal to select a picture that is beautiful and on topic. If you are writing an article about horses then don’t show a picture of a starfish. Try to find something that will correlate with your article’s title.

I always position my image at the top of the article so that it can be seen while reading the headline. I want to draw people in with my headline, my first paragraph and my picture. These are three highly important areas to draw people into your article.

6. Revise the post

If your blogging software has a preview feature that allows you to view the article in your blog’s theme as it will be seen by your audience then I highly recommend that you use it for this step. This is also why I illustrate it before I revise it. I want to be able to look at it in every way seeing it as my readers will see it.

It’s important now to read through your post from beginning to end. Remember before when I said that you didn’t have to develop each point in order. During this step you should be checking to make sure that each step logically follows from the point before it. If it doesn’t then tweak it up a little bit until it does.

You should also be looking for spelling and grammar errors. There is nothing more irritating to an educated reader than to read an article from someone who writes as if they are illiterate.

It is also during this revision that I look for places to add dynamic adjectives. I look for places where I can spice things up just a little bit or make sentences sound just a little bit more exciting.

7. Optimize and Intensify the Headline

Check out my post 10 Tips to Awesome, Eye-Jerking Post Titles for more information on how to effectively market your article by developing an intense, creative title for it.

Here’s how Darren Rowse from problogger puts it, “Many bloggers pour a lot of effort into writing engaging and interesting posts, but then just slap any old title onto it without realizing that in doing so they might be ensuring that their post is never read.”

8. Create Meta Data and Tags

If you are using Wordpress or a blogging platform with tagging enabled then create between 8 and 10 tags that directly describe your article. Use those same tags as your meta keywords. I have Site Sketch 101 setup to do that automatically. Whatever I put into the tags automatically goes into the keywords. I manually create tags and they then automatically become keywords.

I experimented with some automated keyword generators and decided that they are generally useless. These plugins would scan the article and attempt to automatically create tags based on the content. Usually they would pick words that really were not important to the topic so I quickly got rid of those and I now take the time to develop my own tags.

Also be sure to create a meta description for your article. If you were really good you would be able to find a sentence in one of the first three paragraphs that would work for you. You want this description to be more than 100 characters long and less than 160 characters long.

9. Revise the Post…Again

Go over your work one more time. Make sure that your thoughts and concepts flow smoothly between points. Make sure everything is spelled correctly and that you don’t have it laden with poor grammar.

I always assign a future date to most posts before I hit the publish button. I use future dates because I want to have a couple of days to read it over and revise it again if necessary. The more you go over it the better it will likely be.

10. Publish

Push the publish button. This one is was easy.

Find a way to take this process and make it work for you. If you need to mix up the order of a step to help you think and be creative then go for it. Do whatever it takes to get your creative juices flowing.

People who argue about the importance of content, in my opinion, is complicating the issue. My argument is simple. Blogging is writing and writing produces content. People always go online to peruse some kind of contents. What I agree on is that, content by itself worth nothing. It needs consumers as much as a blog needs readers.

Currently contents are not only limited to text and image, but also audio and video. Consumers have more options to choose from. Not only they may choose which content to consume, but also the channel they prefer it to be delivered. This is a huge opportunity for bloggers, which should now label themselves as content producers or information publishers.

Content Production and the Success of Your Blog

Content production is so important that you should spend quite a significant portion of your time for it. By content, it doesn’t mean random page of text that lure the search engines and visitors to come to your site. That may work in the past as people who want to click away choose to click on ads, resulting in revenue for the site owners.

As search engines become smarter, and if you want to build long term readership, you should focus on creating strong, interesting and engaging content so not only the consumers are eager to read, listen or watch it, but also looking forward for more.

RSS and email play a significant role in building your audience. In fact, this may be your major goal when it comes to content promotion. More about this later.

Again, with so many blogs nowadays, the last thing people want is just another blog. On the other hand, people are always looking for fresh and unique content. As a blogger, you should create content that people look forward to consume. That’s the first step to building a successful blog.

In my experience, content creation accounts for 40-50 percent of total time spent on the blogging business. That includes writing content for the blog and producing various articles as a guest blogger on other people’s blogs.

Bloggers who extend their content beyond text to include audio and video spend about the same amount of time doing so. Your experience may be different, but the point is that content production should not be overlooked. Spend as much time as you need to produce really solid content.

Remember that for a blog, content is conversation. The quality of your conversation depends on the content and people you attract to your blog.

The Role of Content

During hard times when people tend to cut down cost, content remains a solid strategy for bloggers because anyone with even no budget can afford to create content.

One of the latest buzzwords is content marketing. There really is nothing new about it but strategically put content into use is one of the evolution I was talking about in previous post.

Your content strategy should be tightly integrated to every move you take. That way, you already make a focused effort with your content. By targeting on one or a handful of goals, you are more likely to gain results.

Scattered effort on contents yield random result. While that still works to certain extent, in the long run, that will be more of a noise rather than signal.

Let me elaborate a bit about integrated content strategy. An Indonesian idiom goes as “Rowing once to surpass two or three islands at a time.”

Integrated content strategy is like rowing smart. It allows you to gain the following benefits at the same time:

• Drive traffic. From returning RSS subscribers to referral traffic from other blogs or sites, social media, search engines and others.
• Extend search engine visibility. Optimized content for specific keyword helps you get found in search engines.
• Engage with your audience. Each new content is potential communication with your audience, which in turn is good for you, whether you are selling products or providing ad space.
• Build community. By providing a platform to interact with each other and give feedback — a blog is perfect for this — new content drives the audience back. Regularity turns them into a community.
• Extend your brand. For a blog, the blogger’s identity is the brand. By getting in front of the readers regularly, you are extending your brand recognition.

One big thing about integrated content strategy is that it is an orchestration to achieve a purpose. At the end of the day, your content needs to cater to your target market and grow your business.

Diversify Content for Your Blog

As said before, nowadays, consumers have choices. If they prefer to listen rather than read, not having audio content (podcast) sometimes means you are losing audience.

Diversifying your content formats is necessary if you want to capture a wide spectrum of audience. Also remember most people don’t stick with one format or channel. For example, personally, I subscribe to RSS feeds and browse web sites and blogs, but also watch online videos regularly, visit discussion boards and am active in Twitter. For audio, I still listen to a few, carefully selected, audio podcast during weekend.

What does the above scenario show? Two things:

• If your message is all over those places and I am your ideal client, you have more opportunities to reach me and deliver your message.
• Quality is no longer a unique value proposition. It is compulsory. With so much content and so little time, I become very choosy about what I consume. For me, this is especially true for audio podcast. I only choose to listen to two or three shows per week. Unless your podcast is really good, it will be deleted from my iTunes subscription faster than you can say, “Opps!”

With that said, here is a list of content formats and channels you should consider. Note that you don’t have to adopt all formats / channels for your content distribution to be effective. In fact, you should not try to put too much on your plate when you are just getting started unless you have the resources to do so.

1. Web site content. This includes articles, blog posts, tools and resources you create and publish to your web site or blog.
2. Image galleries. The sky is the limit when it comes to using images to convey your message. Flickr and other image hosting make it very easy to host images.
3. Audio podcasts. Podcasting isn’t dead. People want the candy, they don’t care about the vending machine.
4. Online video. Most people find it hard to believe that 60% of online video viewers are over the age of 35, according to Nielsen Online. One in two Americans, or 154 million people, watch a video at least once a month in 2008. The number is still expected to grow. A personal note to myself: you’re crazy if you don’t tap into this opportunity.
5. Micro-blogging. Nowadays, Twitter is the de facto standard for micro blogging. Like blogging, it is not the proper place to solely distribute promotional messages. Become resourceful and your followers will just grow faster than the number who decides to leave.

Some bloggers find that they prefer to record their voice because writing simply is not their cup of tea. That’s fine. There are ways to work around the diversification. Whichever formats you choose, ensure that you weigh in your resources and time commitment to content production.

It is better to do one thing very well than scattering your effort into multiple formats with little result. I know I’ve said it before but it is worth repeating because of its importance.

How can you shoot different content formats down different distribution channels? The next post in the series tells you how, including tips and strategies to leverage your content for online marketing.

You must know that in order to make some money , at least you should know what you are talking about and not post just crap in order to increase number of posts in your blog.
Many newbies on the internet doesn’t even know how to get a free blog online so in this article I wont tell you the secret to make millons of dollars on adsense, or whatever. I will explain step by step what you have to do in order to make some cash from your blog

There are 2 big blog providers online which are

* WordPress.com
* Blogger.com

- WordPress has a lot of templates and widgets so you can use for your blog , you can create categories and you can even purchase more space and other cool features if you upgrade
- Blogger was purchased by Google so the best part is that you can get accepted to Adsense through Blogger. The bad part is that you cannot create categories but you can give Labels to your posts as they were categories (Im doing it)

You must know that creating a blog is really simple but updating it everyday with new and unique content is really a hard work (its not so hard if you speak about your favorite niche like I’m doing) So content will be the judger whether you will be a successful blogger or not, if you will update it once a week chances will be very low but if you will post good and unique content every day then you will be in the right road

So ok so far , you have created the blog , you chose your template and you are posting some articles. You will ask how will you get the traffic ?

There are tons of ways to drive traffic to a blog , I will explain some of the techniques I’m also using

* Register at FeedBurner.com
* Register at TechnoRati.com
* If you are a member of DigitalPoint Forum add your RSS Feed to your profile (it will be shown under your username everytime you post a new reply or thread)
* Write some unique articles and upload them at Article Directories (See this post for more explanations)
* Register at MyBlogLog.com
* Add your blog url to your signatures in every forum you are (if possible add also an avatar with your blog’s address)
* Add your blog url to high pr directories

So with 7 easy and free ways you can start seeing some increases in your traffic (Note that if you dont post regularly your traffic may decrease again)

Now I know that all of you are thinking , how will we be making money from our blogs ? Its really simple but I would strongly recommend use just 2 or maximum 3 advertisments and do not put the advertisements from the beginning (wait until you have some traffic then you may add them) Make sure your advertisements and other widgets are like your template so you wont have a lot of contrast.

Here I’m listing the ways how you can make money from your blog once you have some decent traffic and some readers

* Adsense (CPM & PPC which pays differently for each niche)
* Text-Link-Ads (Get Money if someone buys a link to your site from TLA)
* ReviewMe (Get paid for different reviews you make , more traffic you have more you will earn)
* PayPerPost (same as ReviewMe but it has more advertisers in their network)
* Money4Banners (Doesn’t matter if you have a small or big blog , you get 10$ when you sign up and 5$ every month just to display their advertisment
* WidgetBucks (this seems to be most promising program which pays very high rates but nobody has received any payment so far as its a new company)

So I’m listing just these 6 ways but if you would be interested on others feel free to contact me and I will share my experience with you.

Make sure you use proper keywords for each article and make sure your blog structure is like :

http://yourblog.com/this-is-how-yourl-must-be.html

and not like :

http://yourblog.com/Post.php?id=2007-2425 (SEO Purposes)

Share your comments for this article if you found anything special !

With the recent change in policy of Google against sites selling paid links to pass PR, it further highlights the issue that Google PR is an arbitrary and insignificant measure. Ironically, Google’s solution for paid links is an abuse of W3C standards in its own right. This policy that has been well argued for months now, with a great commentary from Andy Beard, a venting from James Morris and speculation that Yahoo are happy with paid links.

I won’t argue the issue with paid links here, but here are some reasons why Google Pagerank is not important.

1) Pagerank means nothing!

Google PR is a measure of how important Google considers your site to be (i.e. not the general web community). The detail of the calculation has been speculated for years. However, it roughly translates to the number of high quality websites that link to your website. What “high quality” means is also speculated, which helps to support my idea that its worthless. Pagerank only has real value to Google.

2) What he shall provide, he can taketh away

Google Page Rank is calculated, owned and controlled by Google. Do something they don’t like, and you lose it. I intentionally said what Google doesn’t like, as opposed to something that is actually wrong.

Paid links are a matter of debate, but they are certainly not wrong. Paid links can contribute to how important something is, though it is open to abuse. But then everything is open to abuse to some degree. It needs control, but Google is not the one to enforce it. Sorry, I said I wouldn’t debate paid links!

3) Focus on Pagerank, lose sight of your visitors

Making the assumption that Pagerank doesn’t matter, then any effort or time dedicated to PR is being wasted. That time should be focused on your website visitors, clients, customers or whoever your target audience is. Unless you have visitors to your site, there’s no point having a website really. Time could be better spent on content, design, or even improving your advert placements to boost your earnings. Even focusing on your adverts is better than pagerank!

Conclusion

So my reasoning that page rank doesn’t matter is because its an arbitrary measurement that you have no real control over that doesn’t realistically improve your earnings or website traffic.

As soon as you start depending your business model on pagerank (such as paid blog posts or links), then you will eventually lose your revenue stream when Google penalises your site for selling paid links to pass page rank. If you do successfully sell links based on page rank, there’s only so many links you can sell before you run out of link space, and therefore a limit on your earnings. If your business model depends on visitors, and traffic building is your priority, then you will have a reliable revenue stream. And theoretically, there’s no limit to your earnings as the number of visitors to your site increases.

I’ve tried selling paid links and got caught out in the end. By focusing on traffic rather than pagerank, my regular revenue was massively increased.

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog – and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Free Templates Site is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense – blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs – and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert – there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense – however most of them are not telling their secrets – well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog – however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments – lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

Direct Sponsorship – this has paid off well for me. I sell different packages and have most sponsors pay a monthly fee through PayPal subscriptions. The bigger clients are invoiced regularly. Tip: put an advertising page on your website and a note in your signature about your special packages. Mine reads: Want to reach more small business owners? Reply to this email with ‘EC-Promo’ in the subject line and get a special discount off of our Advertising packages.

Exelate – this is a company that contacted me on behalf of a major client of theirs. They want to reach small business owners and we worked out a CPC arrangement. They have been great to deal with so far.

Kontera – they do inline ads. My CTR is just over 1% with them and I’ve found it to have very low payouts per click compared to AdSense. I have reduced my involvement with them but still have some pages with Kontera.

Chitika – I tested them out but found I was not getting a good CTR. My website is about small business and not products though so it may not be a good fit. I still have some pages with Chitika but it is not very prominent.

ReviewMe – I’ve tested this with one of my blogs and have had some success but not enough to make it meaningful – I will continue testing.

The other programs I have recently signed up for an am testing are: adbrite, adify, right media, auction ads. I read about them in business 2.0 or online. I have only done limited testing but so far none of them have brought in the kind of numbers I’m looking for to expand with them. Again, it could just be my site and the content I have on it.

I have also tested affiliate programs like ClickBank and CommissionJunction but have not had too much success here in compared to the other programs I have already mentioned.

The key is to test, try it out, optimize the best you can, see if it works, and if it doesn’t move on to something else.

Overall the web has been good for me. It supports me, my building, the people who work for me and lets me create my own work schedule.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else has to say about what works for them!

Here are a few things to work hard at:

• build trust - increasingly marketers are finding that people want to know and be in some sort of trusting relationship with those that they buy products or services from. This is particularly true for a personal service like consulting. Be open about your agenda and about what you do and don’t know. Talk both about your successes and failures. If all you do is use a blog for ’spin’ you’ll present as too good to be true.
• be personal – building on the last point – one way to make a deeper connection with potential clients is to show something of who you are. This doesn’t mean blogging about your personal life, but show you’re human injecting humor, a photo or two of yourself and showing your personality.
• use story – I find readers respond very well to story on blogs. Stories of my own experience, stories of other clients (shared with permission as case studies) etc. Using relevant stories can help build credibility in your niche.
• establish expertise – people won’t give you the ‘expert’ label without you earning it. Show what you know (without being arrogant), show how you apply it (it’s one thing to know a lot – but can you translate your knowledge into something constructive and useful) and be a thought leader in your niche (ie break some new ground and show people that you’re capable of original thought).
• be generous – some consultants use their blogs to talk very abstractly about their field of expertise but don’t actually give their readers much in the way of practical and applicable content. My approach is to give away quite a bit of information and to be quite generous with what you share. If you help someone for free I find that the next time they need something they’ll quite often be willing to pay for it. You might not want to give everything away for free but free reports, ideas and tips should feature pretty heavily on these types of blogs.
• establish relationships in your niche – while building relationships on your own blog with potential clients can be very effective – when another blogger recommends you it can be even more powerful. Get to know other bloggers in your niche and you’ll find they will add to your credibility with their links and mentions on their blogs.
• be consistent – while there’s no problem with changing, growing and developing in your ideas over time you do need to present some consistent messages over time. If you’re constantly chopping and changing what you’re on about and focusing on you’ll find that readers find it hard to connect with you and build a ‘relationship’ over time. Remember that every time you post you have the opportunity to add to or take from your reputation and brand