You might have heard of the word “blogging” but it just did not catch your full attention during those times. Blogging is a hot trend now and will become the dominant new media in no times. Since it started at early 1990s, blogging has already affected how we work or even how we live. Hence, it is worthwhile to spend some time and learn more about blogging now especially for the mature professional. It could be an excellent tool that give your lacklustre career a power boost or who knows … you next career breakthrough!

What is Blogging?
First thing first, what is blogging? Blogging is a way of writing on a new media known as blog, it is actually a type of a website with additional new features. The word blog is shortened from web log which acts like a diary. People used to use web log to record their personal lives, hobbies and other activities but it gradually evolved and has now become the well-know blog which also used for business purposes. The person who writes on the blog is known as blogger. Bloggers love to interact with one another on the blogosphere, it is a term used to describe the interconnection of millions of blogs together in the internet world.
 
Different Types of Blogs
Different bloggers write different things or topics for their blogs. As a result, there are many types of different blogs in the blogosphere but basically they are categorized into the following types.

• Personal or Rant Blog
• Business Blog
• Politics Blog
• Directory Blog
• Forum Blog
• Non-Profit Blog
• How-to, tips and review Blog
• Informative Blog
• Educational Blog

Blogging Platforms and Blog Services
If you are wondering where the blog located? Basically there are 2 ways: it is either self-hosted or using third party free blog services. In technical term, it is known as the blogging platforms. Some popular blogging platforms include WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Blogger, Movabletype, Tumblr, Posterous and Typepad. Some of them are free while some require you to get your own domain name and pay for your own hosting fee.

If you are interested to try out blogging, you can always try out at wordpress.com or blogger.com. They are free and great blogging platforms to start with.

Why Mature Professionals should Care?
Blogging has gradually become the new-age career for many people. There are companies who are hiring full-time, part-time or freelance bloggers for their websites and blogs. If you are interested on what type of jobs are available for blogging, check it out at BloggerJobs.biz , Problogger.net, BlogWork.com and Blogging4Jobs.com.
 
Bloggers are rarely called bloggers for their official job titles but there might be more now due to the strong demand and increased awareness of blogging. Another reason could be the blogger’s job is not just limited to blogging but also a combination of other work duties. Thus, these bloggers are also known by other job titles such as writer, reporter, marketer, virtual assistant, editor and webmaster.

The blogging career is considered one of the hottest and popular careers today. Many people have already created new career opportunities just by blogging, see successful stories here. Blogging is also considered an excellent career choice for mid-career changers or retirees now. It is not because it is low risk and an easy-to-pick-up career but it could be your next career breakthrough. Why? Because it is a tremendous platform that could lead to many other job opportunities. You can check out some of the successful examples in my previous posts. These bloggers have not only found great career success from blogging but also fame and fortune that blogging has brought.

I believe that mature professionals like you can find equal success in blogging career because of your accumulated knowledge, hard-earned expertise and in depth experience. If you are technical person who are well versed in your industry, market niche and product, your ideas, opinion and perspective will even be highly sought after. Some companies might overlook or not value such assets but it will definitely value by the industry community and blogosphere.

In addition, mature professionals who know blogging are seemed to be a more tech savvy and dynamic individual. A well-focused and written blog will help to position you in the industry and market as authority or expert. In another words, blogging helps to market your expertise, experience and skills to your future employers, business partners or even customers.

---

Therefore, mature professionals should keep a close eye on the new development on blogging. Learn more about blogging and get into it soon. You never know your next career breakthrough could be through blogging or it could be, you need its platform to help you to bring your career to the next new level.

What do you think?
Can blogging make an impact to your career? You are welcome to leave your thoughts in the comment box below.

In my previous post - Laid-off Professionals: Discover Your Lifetime Goldmines, I talked about the several goldmines that the laid-off professionals might possess but do not know how to fully utilize them. In this post, I will highlight some of the ways that you can use to convert them into life-time goldmines which might become your next satisfying career.

Blog
Thanks to the information technologies, you are now given many new and various platforms of finding new career opportunity at the comfort of your home and the blog is one of them. Blog has become very popular these days as it allows you to share and showcase your knowledge, skills and expertise to the public easily. If you are not aware what is a blog, check out the video here.

The blog is generally used to share passion, hobby, knowledge, experience and solutions to problems so there are many specific blogs created for specific topics. The blog is a convenient platform to attract customers; easy to set up and cost little compared to a physical shop or office – it is also like a virtual shop and a knowledge sharing center. Blog has interactive interfaces which allow you to connect with your visitors easily and it also has comment features that allow visitors to leave comments and interact with one another.

This is an efficient platform that you can utilize to generate life-time goldmines by sharing your insights, experiences, common problems and solutions faced in your profession. Format them into interesting and inviting content then put it on the blog. The main benefit of the blog is it will help to draw visitors from all over the world which may eventually become your loyal fan. This will not only help to raise your profile but also build your reputation as a thought leader. You can then leverage your reputation and expertise to become a paid consultant or coach.

Affiliate Maketing
Once you have a blog with an inviting content, you can further monetize it with affiliate marketing. If you want to find out what is affiliate marketing, check out the successful internet entrepreneur Joel Comm’s video on its definition.

This is an excellent way of getting life-time goldmines because it does not require huge investment in inventory, customer services, logistics or billing to sell product or service at your side. How the affiliate marketing works is that you just find some relevant products or services from the affiliate merchants that would complement your blog’s content then refer them to your visitors. If any of your visitors bought any products or signed up for any services, you will get commissions from the merchants. It is probably one of the easiest and safest ways to find your life-time goldmine when compared to other methods.

Information Product
Information or digital product has become a highly popular product in this information age; this is a good news for you as you have a wealth of knowledge, skills and expertise to share. You can now convert them into highly desired information or digital products that people demand such as an eBook, how-to guide, tutorials, home-study course, online course or continuity programs. This is by far the most popular and new way of earning in the new information age.

Creating an information or digital product may take considerable times but it is definitely worth the effort and times as it will give you the long-term income just like earning royalty from a book.

Online Video Training Course
Similar to information or digital product, online video training course has become another great way to market your expertise. It is considered more effective than a normal eBook because of its multimedia elements. People generally learn faster and better though multimedia elements such as animation, images, audio and video as it engages all senses while learning. Furthermore, reading static information product like an eBook on the computer can cause eyes strain so using video as an online training course is a preferred choice by many people now.

Online Membership Site
To achieve life-time goldmine, you have to have life-time recurring income and one of the best ways of achieving it is through building an online membership site. You can build an online membership site based on the knowledge, skill and expertise you already know and offer continual membership subscription to your blog visitors. It can be a monthly or yearly subscription but in order to make your members stay forever, you have to ensure constant stream of new contents from your membership site.

Packaging the online video training course into the membership site can be a good idea. You can break the course down into several modules and let your members choose to learn at their paces. Once you have established a reasonable base of members, you can add in a discussion forum so that members have a venue to discuss what they have learnt and exchanged ideas. If the discussion forum can grow into a active online community, it can become your another goldmine as it helps to generate content, feedback and ideas for your future training courses.

---

The above are some of the ways that you can use to convert your skills, knowledge and expertise into life-time goldmines. You can use the above methods individually or combine them together to achieve your objectives. I hope the above will also give you an idea that a new career opportunity can be created without the need for another job hunting. Now you already know the methods of achieving it, the next step will be knowing the exact steps of achieving it.

As each of the methods is quite a specialized topic; I will discuss each of them in details in future posts so remember to check back for more.

In part 1 of this article series, I have already showed you the first five bloggers who have not only made a successful career just by blogging at home but have made a major breakthrough in their financial status. In this post, let’s continue to see who are the other five bloggers who have achieved equal success from their blogging career.

Please note they are not ranked in particular order.

#6. Jeremy Schoemaker
http://www.shoemoney.com/

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: March 2000

Blog Topic: Deals with valuable tips and guides in affiliate marketing and how to further increase one’s online presence and earning.

Blogger Profile:
Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Jeremy Shoemaker) is a web entrepreneur, founder of ShoeMoney Media, and co-founder of the AuctionAds service.

In March 2007, Jeremy and his business partner - David Dellanave launched AuctionAds, an eBay affiliate marketing service that serves eBay auction ads on contextually relevant sites. The service won an eBay Star Developer Award (it was named the “eBay Most Innovative Application – Buyer”) at the eBay Developers Conference. In July 2007, performance marketing company – MediaWhiz purchased Schoemaker’s majority ownership in AuctionAds.

Jeremey’s ShoeMoney blog was named the Best Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2006 by Search Engine Journal, and in 2007 he claimed that his blog was generating $10,000 monthly with the sale of direct ads. He is a frequent speaker at search engine marketing and affiliate conferences, and co-founded the Elite Retreat conference.

Main Income Streams:
Affiliate marketing, blog maintenance, video marketing, social media, sales of advertising and marketplace listing.

Annual Earnings: $120,000

Blog Traffic per Month: 5,619 (from Alexa Rank)  / (No free sub-domain stats from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#7. Joel Comm
http://www.askjoelcomm.com/

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: 2003

Blog Topic: Blogs focused on reaching the masses with the money-making power of the Internet. Helpful tips can be gathered from the sites.

Blogger Profile:
Joel is an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for over twenty years. In 1995, he launched WorldVillage.com, a family-friendly portal to the web which enjoys thousands of visitors each day. He is the co-creator of ClassicGames.com, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997, and is now known as Yahoo! Games. Joel has launched dozens of web sites, including the popular bargain-hunting shopping site, DealofDay.com, SafetySurf.com and FamilyFirst.com. Joel is the Internet Revenue Expert, speaking and writing on topics that help people make money online. He is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, “The AdSense Code”, and Host & Executive Producer of “The Next Internet Millionaire” which is the world’s first competitive Internet reality show.

Main Income Streams: 
Adsense, Sales of online merchandise, eBook and books, Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships, Speaking Fee, Hosting from Reality Show.

Annual Earnings: $281,501.52 

Blog Traffic per Month: 22,836 (from Alexa Rank) / 95,105 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#8. John Chow
http://www.johnchow.com/

Nationality: Chinese Canadian

Year Started Blogging:  1999

Blog Topic: The blog includes personal ramblings, how-to tips, secrets, and pertinent reviews on affiliate marketing, stories of Internet marketers, and others.

Blogger Profile:
Before discovering the Internet, he was a partner in a local Richmond printing company. After over a decade of running a print shop, he decided it was time for a change, and then turned to the Internet to stake his claim.

On April 1999, he started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has risen to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day.

Main Income Streams: 
Adsense, Blog maintenance, affiliate programs, ad networks, sales of advertising space, product review, ads sponsorship from advertisers.

Annual Earnings:  $140,400 (equivalent to $11,700/month) 

Blog Traffic per Month:  8,002 (from Alexa Rank) / 116,505 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#9. Yanik Silver  
http://www.yaniksilver.com/

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: 2000

Blog Topic: Business lessons and tips for the young future entrepreneurs (ages 13-23).

Blogger Profile:
Yanik Silver is a serial entrepreneur although he still considers himself a ‘techno dunce’. Starting from his one-bedroom apartment and with just a few hundred dollars, Yanik has built multiple 7-figure businesses. He is a serial Internet entrepreneur and self-made millionaire. He is recognized as one of the leading experts on web marketing even though he still considers himself a ‘techno dunce’.

His story and businesses have been featured on the cover “Millionaire Blue Prints” magazine, inside Business 2.0, Fox Business News, TIME.com, USA Today, and SmartMoney.com, MSN Money, Entrepreneur.com, The Boston Globe, Denver Business Journal and many others.

Yanik is a highly sought after speaker addressing groups ranging from the prestigious Wharton Business School to international audiences of 3,000 and up.

He is the author, co-author or publisher of several best-selling marketing books and tools including Moonlighting on the Internet, Instant Sales Letters and 34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs.

Main Income Streams:
Blog marketing, affiliate marketing, copywriting, sales letters, writing and selling books, video tutorial, eBooks.

Annual Earnings: $20,000 to $50,000 for his annual seminars

Blog Traffic per Month: 83,039 (from Alexa Rank) / No Data for Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#10. Yaro Starak
www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Nationality: Australian

Year Started Blogging: 1998

Blog Topic:The Entrepreneurs-Journey.com is a blog containing various how-to tips on blogging and doing Internet business as a web entrepreneur.

Blogger Profile:
Yaro is a very successful online entrepreneur from Australia. Combining all his ventures he makes a 7-figure income yearly. He operates part time from home multi-tasking with several online businesses that generate $2,000 – $8,000 per month. He has been involved with Internet marketing since 1998. He runs a popular blog called Entrepreneur’s Journey which teaches people who to succeed with an Internet business and provides the latest news in the industry. He is an expert in blogging and focuses on teaching others how to build an income by blogging. His training courses – “Blog Mastermind” and “Membershp Site Mastermind” are the the most popular and wanted entry courses for new online marketers.

Besides his expertise in blogging, Yaro has been able to connect with many readers by sharing what he’s been through in order to become successful. He shares his experiences starting different businesses and how he approaches Internet marketing to build his now successful blog.

Main Income Streams:
Affiliate marketing, Sponsorship, advertisement, Online membership site, E-Book Sales, Private Coaching.

Annual Earnings: $38 million

Blog Traffic per Month: 8,987 (from Alexa Rank) / 133,104 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

---

Hopefully, after reading this post, it will give you some inspiration that great career prospect does not necessary has to come from the corporate world. It is possible even from your little home working as a blogger. However, you must have the right attitude and be mentally prepared as it requires extreme hard work; there is no silver bullet to great career success. All the bloggers here have gone through great pain, persistence and patience to achieve what they are today so there is no overnight success. Their persistence have not only brought them a great career they love but also help them to achieve early retirement, freedom and happiness in their work-life.

Personally I think blogging is a suitable career choice for mature professionals as they have wealth of knowledge and skills to share. What do you think? Do you think blogging has any career prospects for mature professionals?

Please share your comments and thoughts below.

In my previous post on “The New Age Career Options for Mature Professionals”, I mentioned blogging is one of the excellent career opportunities for mature professionals. However, not many people believe that starting an online business from home just by blogging has any career prospect, let’s alone any financial security and stability.

So in this post, I’m going to highlight some of the successful bloggers who have not only made a full-time living just by blogging but also achieved great career prospect and financial success from doing so. They are truly a testament of creating your own successful career with your own hands.

The list of bloggers highlighted come from different background and industries, they all have different reasons of starting a blog but all of them are passionate about blogging. After all, one of the most attractive aspects of blogging is that it gives writers the opportunity to speak on the things which they are most knowledgeable or passionate about. This could range from personal hobby, interests to software development, game or even specific technical product reviews. Their humble little blogs might be an incidental passion, hobby or learning but have grown exponentially and now generating six-figure income for them annually. Their blogs have not only brought them massive income but also lead to other career opportunities like speaking in conferences, publishing their own books, setting up new business and others.

These bloggers may have different expertise but they have one thing in common, they all started from home and even till today they are still operating at home despite their tremendous success. Below is a list of them and they are not listed in any particular order.

#1. Darren Rowse
http://www.problogger.net

Nationality: Australian

Year Started Blogging: 2002

Blog Topic: Problogger.net focuses on tips to help bloggers how to blog and earn money from their blogs.

Blogger Profile:
Darren is a full-time blogger making a living from this new and dynamic medium from blogs like Digital Photography School, TwiTip and ProBlogger. He was interested in blogging when he saw an article about “Blogging” in 2002. Within 24 hours after reading that article, Darren started his own blog – a personal one which dealt with various topics like Pop Culture, Spirituality and Blogging. Gaining much knowledge from that initial blog, he decided to start other blogs, which grew in popularity through the years, and have begun to generate income. From a mere hobby, to a part time job, to a fully fledged business in recent times, Darren had established himself as credible blogger in blogging arena.

In 2005, he embarked on three of the biggest blogging projects he’s ever managed – the b5media, a blog network of hundreds of blogs written by individuals from all over the world on a wide variety of channels/verticals. He is the VP of Blogger training at b5media. His site, ProBlogger was started in September 2004. His main reason for doing so is merely to keep a record of what he was learning about blogging for money. He has added over 3500 articles, tips, tutorials, and case studies to his archives ever since.

Main Income Streams:
AdSense, Affiliate Programs, E-Book Sales, Continuity Programs, Private Ad Sales/Sponsorships, Chitika, Amazon Associates, ProBlogger Job Boards, Speaking Fees.

Annual Earnings: $120K – $1.20 Million

Blog Traffic per Month: 2,117 (from Alexa Rank) / 589,513 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#2. David Risley
http://www.davidrisley.com

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: 2001

Topic of the Blog: Mainly deals with computers and tech on PCMech. Started the blog in order to talk about his passions on lifestyle design (which, according to David Risley, includes the things he wants to do that is empowered by his Internet biz) through the use of the Internet.

Blogger Profile:
David Risley is a professional blogger and Internet entrepreneur. He makes a comfortable living doing this, bringing in a healthy six figures yearly. He shows bloggers how to generate a full time income online and turn their passion into a solid, profitable business.

He is the founder and president of PC Media Inc. His most popular web project is PCMech.Com, a large technology blog visited by around 250,000 people monthly.

DavidRisley.com is properly entitled “Confessions of a Six Figure Blogger“. He has been making his living entirely on the Internet for many years now – starting straight out of college.

Main Income Streams:
Blog marketing, affiliate marketing, blog setup, social media, social media marketing, Online Membership site.

Annual Earnings: $204,173.56.

Blog Traffic per Month = 23,808 (from Alexa Rank) / 57,104 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#3. Gary Vaynerchuk
http://garyvaynerchuk.com

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: 1998

Blog Topic: Videos on TV appearances and keynotes on his talks about social media, business startups, and the future of advertising.

Blogger Profile:
Gary Vaynerchuk is a New York Times bestselling author and American businessman who was born in Belarus and immigrated to the United States as a young child. Gary’s entrepreneurial instincts took over at a young age, when he owned a franchise of neighborhood lemonade stands and made $1,000 a weekend selling baseball cards. Much to his dismay, his father Sasha pulled Gary into the family business, a local liquor store called Shopper’s Discount Liquors. Before long, Gary recognized that consumers collected rare wines just like people collected baseball cards, and he was off to the races. Gary transformed himself into a wine expert, rebranded the store as Wine, launched a retail website in 1997, and by 2008 he had raised annual revenue from $4 million to $60 million. In 2006 Gary achieved one of his life-long goals when he was caricatured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in an article about online wine sales.

As Gary’s career as a speaker and writer continued to soar, companies of varying sizes approached him for consulting advice. The consulting role agreed with him, and in 2009 Gary and his brother AJ co-founded VaynerMedia – a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups. Now, he is also an angel investor in various startups, offering sweat equity to the projects he supports in addition to financial investments.

Gary’s ultimate goal is to one day own a New York Jets. In spite of his ambitious goal and various business responsibilities, he always puts his family first.

Main Income Streams:
Blogging, Entrepreneur, Consulting, Online retail sales

Annual Earnings: $27,000

Blog Traffic per Month: 21,448 (from Alexa Rank) / 123,632 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

4. Jeff Walker
http://productlaunchformula.com/blog/

Nationality: American

Year Started Blogging: 1994

Blog Topic: Blogs mainly about the methods used for product launches  and case studies of how his students used his product.

Blogger Profile:
Jeff Walker has been engaged in helping interested individuals who are interested to launch his or her own products but do not have experience to do so. His “Product Launch Formula” is one of its kind in the internet industry. He was able to simplify complicated theory into easy to understand concept and many people had already benefited from his training. It has become a de facto standard for everyone who wish to launch their own products in the online market. He is also a great mentor for many big name marketers like John Reese, Frank Kern, and Mike Filsaime and had helped them with their major products launches.

Jeff used to have tons of excellent customers’ case studies in his blog but due to the FTC regulations initiated last year, he had to take down the case studies to comply with the FTC guidelines.

Main Income Streams:
Online marketing, product launching, workshops, content marketing, stock market publishing, information marketing.

Annual Earnings: $250,000 and higher

Blog Traffic per Month: 56,944 (from Alexa Rank) / 22,666 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

#5. Rosalind Gardner
http://netprofitstoday.com/blog/

Nationality: Canadian

Year Started Blogging: 1998

Blog Topic: Rosalind Gardner publishes content on her blog about affiliate marketing, blogging, business strategy, traffic generation, and the blogging development.

Blogger Profile:
After working for twenty years as an air traffic controller, Rosalind was sick of working long and shift hours so she decided to find an alternative as she knew she would have to make enough money to live comfortably and pay for her retirement.

In 1997, while she was still working her day job in air traffic control, she slowly got together enough knowledge to launch her first website. It was devoted to gardening. When she was approached by a banner ad company that wanted her to advertise a dating site, she realized the opportunity available for profits with affiliate marketing. In her first month, she earned a whopping $10.99, but by the end of her first year, she was making $5000 each month. By the time she started clearing $10,000 a month in 2000, she was ready to bid farewell to her day job.

The title of her most famous marketing manual, “The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online,” says it all. That was her annual income in 2002 and great breakthrough in her life. In a short time, Rosalind learned how to make online marketing work for her.

Today, she is the CEO of Webvista, Inc., as well as an acclaimed author, public speaker and business consultant. She is very sought after for her wisdom and knowledge about affiliate marketing. Her column, “Affiliates’ Corner” is published in Revenue magazine, and she often speaks at industry conferences like the Affiliate Summit and the Affiliate Convention, AdTech and more, despite her initial fear of public speaking which she learned to overcome. Her internet marketing blog is available at www.netprofitstoday.com. It is down to earth and informative.

Rosalind has other personal blog too like www.roamsters.com as she is also passionate about travel, and she also enjoys hiking, yoga, fine dining and top-notch beer.

Main Income Streams:
Affiliate marketing, online sales, eBook marketing and publishing, online auctions, online dropshipping, product and software creation, merchant and manager coaching, online membership site.

Annual Earnings: $436,797

Blog Traffic per Month: 27,893 (from Alexa Rank) / 46,293 (Unique Visitors per month from Compete Online Traffic Estimator)

---

Hopefully by now, you are convinced that blogging has a great career prospect if you could put in enough hard work, patience and persistence. Some bloggers mentioned above had to struggle with no or limited income for a period of time before they see their blog career flourish. The “no pain no gain” theory still applicable to every careers regardless of where you are working.

I will be covering the other 5 six-figure bloggers next week so please stay tune for the next post.

Have you experienced your blog being crawled by search engines but not indexed? You can check this out by using Google Webmaster Tool or other Analytics software. I had always no problem with installing new blog and got it indexed but unfortunately not this blog …

Blog is favored by search engines and it can almost indexed immediately in most search engines if there is good content. I remembered I had helped one of my clients to install a new blog with only one post and surprisingly, it was indexed the next day. That was the fastest record I ever had, I had tried installing other blogs for my other clients using wordpress and similarly, never encountered any indexing problem. However, I’m just clueless why I have no luck with this blog – ehomepreneur.com, it is already 4 months old but still not being indexed in any search engines. This kind of worries me as I’ve never experienced this before so for the last few months I was trying desperately all kinds of methods to get it indexed.

… Check my robot.txt
The first thing I checked was my robot.txt as I afraid I might accidentally block the search engine spiders without realizing it. I went through it line by line and there was nothing wrong. The most important line is the content and it is not blocked, it is stated as “Allow: /wp-content” so robot.txt is not the problem.

Result: No Change        Next Action: Go Next

… Set up Sitemap.xml using Google Webmaster Tool
Even though Google stated that submitting a sitemap.xml will not guarantee indexing but it definitely help to inform Googlebot about the structure of the blog and its updated pages easily. Hence setting up a sitemap.xml in Google Webmaster Tool is a must, at least by doing so, I know those pages which could be ignored or not discovered will be crawled again. I was able to get my sitemap verified but unfortunately there was still no pages indexed after checking back 2 weeks later.

Result: Failed          Next Action: Good Try!

… Submit Blog to Search Engines
I tried submitting the blog to major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and waited patiently for them to crawl my blog. However, after 2 months, it was still the same … nothing happened.

Result: Failed          Next Action: Try harder!

… Back Link from High Ranking Sites
It was said that having back link from other high ranking blog will help to boost one’s indexing. One of the fastest ways to do this is to leave comments on some high-profile broggers’ blog. When I checked back using “link:” operator in Google few hours later, it was successfully listed. I was delighted and thought it worked this time but I was wrong, none of the pages was indexed even after a month.

Result: Failed          Next Action : Not hard enough

Then one day ….
 
I was trying to install a new plugin and suddenly the word “Privacy” at the WordPress Settings caught my eyes, I realized I’ve not been checking this since I installed this blog. And guess what? The blog visibility was set to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”. I almost fainted when I saw this. Immediately I knew this was the culprit, it had caused me fear and sweat for the last few months wondering why my blog was not indexed and this was it! I always thought that the default setting for the blog is “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” as I had set up numerous blogs for my clients without any problems. I wish someone can tell me why? At that moment, I wanted very badly to bang my head against the wall for such a silly oversight. Two weeks later, I checked again on Google, Yahoo and yes, all the pages were listed now. This double confirmed that it was my silly mistakes.
 
So if you ever wonder why your blog is crawled and not indexed? Please do check your wordpress setting first. I hope you can learn from my mistake so you won’t have to make it and waste unnecessary time.

From what I’ve learnt, one way for new blog to get index faster in major search engines is to submit it to Technorati.com. It is a blog search engines known for searching blogs so I decided to give it a try.

There were not much instructions on Technorati on how to submit our new blog at their site but luckily if you google on “how to submit blog to technorati“, there were many answers to it. If you are also interested in submitting your new blog to Technorati, follow the below steps to start.

Click on the “Join” on the top right hand corner and create your free account. Enter your profile and click on “Join” to proceed, you will be asked to activate the link via your email. Once activated you can log in and access your free account. You can update your profile further by updating your bio and uploading a photo.

Next scroll down to the page and proceed to claim your blog. Enter the URL of your blog and click on “Claim this blog” to continue. Click on the checkbox and select “Include this blog in Technorati’s Blog Finder” then fill in the keywords for your blog inside the tags box. Once you are done, click on “Save Changes” and then get the claim code. You can copy the code and paste it in your sidebar or footer. 

However, if you are like me who missed this step, you can still go back to your profile page, click on the “Check Claim” and copy the code which look something like this ”NY35QN4GQ7YS”. Paste this code in a new post such as this post then publish it. Go back and click on “Verify this URL” and you are almost done. Double check your email, if this is successful, you will receive an email with the following message.
 

This is an automatically-generated email.

Thank you for submitting your blog claim on Technorati. We have successfully crawled your blog and found the claim token, and your claim is now awaiting review.

Check back on Technorati after few days to see if your blog is being listed. If you are still getting “your claim is now awaiting review” message, don’t worry because you are not alone. There are many people facing the same problem but Technorati doesn’t seem to have answer why it takes so long to review a blog. There are already so many complaints about it but there is simply no solution given.

If you have success overcoming this step, please share it with us in the comments below on how did you get around it.

---

Update on 20 February 2010:
This blog has been listed in Technorati in mid of February, it has been about one over months wait, not too bad for a new blog. I know there are blogs that took longer than that so I guess you need a little patience and time if you want to be listed in Technorati.