This is a guest post by Dan Schawbel. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

There are far too many people who are creating blogs (hundreds of millions at this point), without truly understanding their own personal brands. The end result is a blog that has a life expectancy of no more than a few months before it enters the R.I.P. blog graveyard.

Basing a blog off of what is the next hottest industry buzz word or something your friend is writing about is the wrong way to go about it. For a blog to succeed in 2009 and beyond, it has to be built on what I call the success triangle: passion, expertise and a support system.

The success triangle:

1. Passion

Without enough genuine enthusiasm, you won’t be committed to have a successful blog or career. Passion eliminates fear, obstacles and a short-term outlook for success. Since a blog cannot be built overnight, passion allows you to constantly generate content, while loving every minute of the process. You can tell, as a blog reader, who is passionate and who is in it to just make money.

2. Expertise

Most of you might not think your experts and that’s fine. You don’t want to call yourself an expert without a third party endorsement anyways or it comes off as superficial and self-proclaimed. Passion is the fuel that will make you invest the time to become an expert in your field. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours and the only way you’ll pull even a quarter of that time off is with the heart to do so. Expertise allows you fulfill customer of client needs, which in turn gives you a monetization system.

3. Support system

Blogs don’t just grow after writing a few entries. You have to be the chief marketing officer and get the word out. In order to do this, it’s all about networking and that will never change. The larger your network, the more resources you have to help funnel your blog and grow your brand.

Get feedback about your brand both directly and indirectly. Aside from asking your closest friends and colleagues about your strengths, interests and skills, there is a new way that you can measure perception. If you’re on Twitter, and I hope most of you reading this are, you’ll notice a new option called “Twitter Lists.” After tweeting several times, you’ll be categorized on lists based on how you represent yourself – your brand – on Twitter. This includes your profile page and tweets. The way people categorize you in lists is a reflection of the brand you’re presenting to the world. If you don’t like you you’re categorized, then you need to do something about it.

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He is the bestselling author of Me 2.0, as well as the publisher of both the award winning Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.

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This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Irman asks:

I want to know how many blog posts in percentage normally Google indexes from a blog. I have been running a blog for a year, and I noticed only 30% of my posts are indexed by Google. What steps should I take to improve that?

Provided that you respect some basic SEO guidelines, 100% of your posts should be indexed by Google. The basic SEO guidelines are:

1. All your posts must have unique and quality content. By unique I mean that the content of your posts should be found only on a single place (i.e., avoid duplicate content both inside and outside your domain). By quality I mean that the content should be useful to potential visitors. If you repeat the letter “z” one thousand times you would end up with unique content, but it would have zero quality so Google would probably not index that.

2. All your posts must be accessible through static links on your site. You need to have a sound site structure in place, else the Google bot might not be able to find some of your internal pages and posts. If you use a modern CMS, like WordPress or Joomla, this shouldn’t be an issue.

3. Your domain must have some backlinks. As you probably know backlinks are the search engine currency. You need some of them if you want Google to discover your website in the first place. Secondly, if you want to have all your pages indexed and some good search rankings, you will need to have a decent amount of backlinks. Keep in mind that there is a PageRank threshold that your pages must pass before they get included in Google’s index.

It is normal for a new website to have only part of its internal pages indexed. Over time, however, this should be fixed. If you have been blogging for around one year and still only 30% of your posts are indexed by Google you might have a problem. I would start investigating duplicate content issues. Once you are sure you don’t have that, work on getting more backlinks.

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Twitter is probably the largest Internet phenomenon we have seen in a while. Everyone is using it these days. Affiliate marketers are using it to promote their affiliate offers. Companies are using it to sell products and services. Webmasters and bloggers are using it to drive traffic to their websites. You name it.

There are even people making money directly with their Twitter accounts by tweeting sponsored messages.

Now you could be doing the same thing. The only detail is that you need to have a decent amount of followers on your account. A mere 200 or 300 followers won’t cut it.

Thinking about this problem I started developing a new product some months ago, and this week I am finally launching it. The website is called Twitfever.com, and it has a complete set of tools for people who want to get more targeted Twitter followers. Here is what is included on the membership:

• Multiple Account Management: You can add as many Twitter accounts as you like to Twitfever.
• Follow from Profile Tool: This tool allows you to mass follow the friends or followers of a specific Twitter user.
• Follow from Keyword Tool: This tool allows you to mass follow users who have recently included a specific keyword in their tweets.
• Auto Follow Tool: This tool allows you to automatically follow all the Twitter users who are following you.
• Mass Unfollow Tool: This tool allows you to mass unfollow all the users that you are following or those who are not following you back. It is useful to keep your profile balanced.
• Auto Tweet Tool: Once enabled, the tool will publish a famous quote, an interesting fact or a funny joke (or all three) on your Twitter account once a day.
• Retweet Club: The Retweet Club has the goal of helping the Twitfever members to get more retweets.
• Statistics: You will be able to track the detailed Statistics for each of your Twitter accounts.

As you can see some of the tools are completely unique and you won’t find them anywhere else on the web. I had 10 people beta testing the product for some weeks, and virtually all of them were very happy with the results.

If you are looking to get more Twitter followers, therefore, go to Twitfever.com and check it out.

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This is a guest post by Vlatko. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

If your blog is on shared host but starting to get some serious traffic, then you are probably having problems with slow database queries, and in the future you might even be suspended because of exceeded CPU quota. The outcome will be frustration on your side and annoyed visitors on the other side.

The first reaction will be to file dozens of support tickets with the hosting company. After that you might consider moving to VPS or Dedicated Server, but before doing that you should try some tricks to improve the loading speed of your blog and survive higher traffic on shared hosting.

Important: before attempting to do anything with your blog please make a fresh backup of your database and WordPress files.

1. Use just few necessary plug-ins.

The less plug-ins you have, greater loading speed you achieve. So deactivate and delete the plug-ins that are not really necessary for your blog.

2. Use pure code in your sidebar instead of widgets.

This one seems radical but it’s very easy to implement. Make a research and you’ll find code examples for showing recent posts, categories, tags, etc. on your sidebar without use of any widgets.

3. Disable post revisions.

Post revisions are only building up your Database with records. The only thing you have to do is to put the following line in your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

4. Remove extra tables in Wordpress Database.

Login to your host, go to your phpMyadmin, open your blog database and you’ll see the table structure of your wordpress database. The default DB tables for wordpress are these ones:

• wp_comments
• wp_links
• wp_options
• wp_postmeta
• wp_posts
• wp_terms
• wp_term_relationships
• wp_term_taxonomy
• wp_usermeta
• wp_users

If you have some extra tables (which are not used by your plugins at this moment) delete them. They are there just because you’ve installed and uninstalled plugins in the past. Some of the plugins create extra tables in the DB and when you decide to remove them some of the tables are staying there. You don’t need them, so drop them.

5. Clean up your Wordpress Database.

For this step you’ll need one very useful plug-in. It’s called Clean Options.

Install it, activate it and use it to clean up your wordpress database. It will erase unnecessary, redounded, orphaned records. Then you are done with this plug-in, so deactivate it and delete it. After doing this, please test your blog and plug-ins for functionality. If some of your plug-ins stopped working, just reinstall them and you’ll be fine.

6. Repair and optimize your Wordpress Database.

Go to phpMyadmin again, select your database check all the tables, and in the dropdown menu select repair. Select the database again, check all the tables, and in the dropdown menu select optimize.

7. Change php code with html where applicable.

This tip is probably the most powerful of all these tips. The point is that in the header (sometimes footer and sidebars) of your wordpress theme you have php strings that every time when your blog loads they call your blog name, location of favicon.ico, stylesheet, ping file, feeds, charset etc.

All these php requests are slowing down your blog so why not changing them to static html code.

For example the following code:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” />

Can be changed to:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”http://your-domain-here.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme- folder-here/style.css” />

You can also:

• make your pingback URL static,
• make your feed URL’s static,
• you can remove the blog’s WordPress version,
• make your blog’s name and tagline/description static.

The easiest way to do this is to compare the actual header code of your blog with the outcome header code (right click, view source code in your browser). Look at the original php code and see what the results are in the outcome source code of your blog. By doing this you will realize which php lines you can change to static html lines. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

8. And finally use WP-Supercache plug-in.

Probably you’re already using this plug-in, but for the ones who don’t you should know that it will greatly speed up your blog since it saves and stores static html pages of your blog and serves them to the browser without any heavy impact on your host.

9. Bonus tip:

Optimize your files (CSS, Javascript, images, video) and don’t overdo it with external loads (CPM combo ads, scripts etc.)

The intention of covering these tips was not to give you thorough technical knowledge, but to inspire you to experiment and research. These tips will give remarkable results and you’ll be really stunned when you’ll see how fast your blog loads even on a shared host. I personally tried all of them and I can guarantee that they have truly amazing effect.

Vlatko is the owner of TopDocumentaryFilms.

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A couple of weeks ago I was negotiating with some freelancers who were interesting in writing for a new website I am developing. We were discussing what kind of articles I needed, the length of each article, frequency and the like. The main point of the negotiation was the pay rate, however.

Most of the freelancers were replying to me asking if I knew how much the market was paying for similar gigs, or how much I was already paying to my other writers. Initially I replied to these emails with a number, but that made me a bit uneasy, because the first person who throws out a number usually loses the edge on the negotiation.

After thinking more about the issue I came to the following conclusion: what does the market rate has to do with how much I will pay to that freelancer in particular? Even if the market average for writing gigs is $15 per article there are people out there charging $2 per article and people charging $100.

How do those freelancers come up with how much they should charge? Usually by calculating how much they make per hour doing similar or alternative jobs. For example, if a freelance web designer makes around $50 hourly from his normal activities and you ask him how much he will charge to design your website, he will calculate how many hours the job will take and multiply it by $50 (a bit more if his plate is full, a bit less if he is lacking work).

From this point onward I changed my negotiation strategy. Whenever freelancers asked how much I was paying to other writers or how much the market was paying for similar services, I replied asking how much would make the job worth their time. Any professional worth his salt will know how much his time is worth.

Most of the writers replied with a number, and then I was in a much better position to evaluate the expectations of each and to negotiate with them.

But I am curious to know what you guys think. Do you agree that it makes more sense to start with the earnings expectation of the freelancer in question rather than with the market average? What is your strategy to negotiate pay rates with freelancers? If you do freelance work, how do you negotiate with your clients?

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