Google Adsense has been around for a while with lots of people using it. It is easy to use and fast to integrate into your web site and that is what makes it so attractive in general.

Many web site owners use it to monetize their web sites. Some people make lots of money through it, others don’t make money at all. What is it that separates these two types of people?

I hope to uncover this question in this article.

New to Blogging?

Adsense seems to be the tool that everyone uses when they start out as a blogger. To be honest I don’t believe that it’s a good tool for beginners to use. I think that Adsense is way harder to use then most people think it is.

And yes I agree Google Adsense has the huge advantage of being easy to set up. Once you have set it up you also don’t need to worry about having to manage the ads. These are definitely all advantages that make people use Adsense in the beginning. But still most people don’t make money through Adsense anyway.

What Separates Those Who Make Money and Those Who Don’t?

Generally speaking the people that make money in the long run are those that are not afraid to try new things out. I have made the mistake myself when I started blogging. I simply added Google Adsense to my blog and thought I would easily start to make money. Since then I have made $0.63, and that’s within over a year.

Once you have your website running test different things. Try to monetize it using affiliate links, Google Adsense, Kontera, text links or whatever you find suitable. If you find that Adsense is performing pretty well, stick with it but try to optimize it further.

Anyway I think I drifted a little bit away from the topic I wanted to talk about. So why are some people making money?

Usually the key is your niche but also the kind of content you present on your website. If you own a web site centered around web hosting than Google Adsense might work rather well because it’s a market that a lot of people choose to advertise in.

Internet Marketing Niche

The biggest reason why people are not making money through Google Adsense is because they usually write about Internet marketing or how to make money online and simply add an ad unit to their post or sidebar. I think that Google Adsense works particularly bad for Internet marketing websites. Maybe I am wrong but have you seen Google ads on huge blogs like Problogger, John Chow or Copyblogger? You haven’t, have you?

That may be because it’s not such a good way to earn money through your Internet marketing blog. That’s why earlier on I said that you need to do some testing. Test different ways to make money through your blog. There are so many ways you can make money on the Internet, simply try them out.

The reason why Adsense tends to perform poorly with Internet marketing as a niche is there are not a lot of advertisers willing to pay a lot for your visits. Usually internet marketers rely more heavily on word of mouth or social media to promote their products. They don’t spend a huge amount of money on advertising.

Web hosting, on the other hand, is a very commercial topic. Thus there will be lots of advertisers available that use Google to send people to their web site. For this web site, the ads are highly targeted. Therefore people who come to that web site are also more likely to click on that kind of advertisement and the advertisers are also willing to pay more for visitors.

Highly Specific Niches

Adsense works in general very well if the topic you, as a publisher, choose fits into the category within which most advertisers advertise. If you web site’s topic is more general, then your ads are not going to be as relevant and people won’t pay as much money per click, thus you will end up with comparably very little money.
Highly focused and specific niches can really make the difference once you try to make money through Adsense.

It’s Just an Alternative Way to Make Money

Again I want to highlight that Adsense is not the only way to make money through your web site or through your blog at all. I think that Adsense should be seen more like an alternative way to monetize your website, not as the main source of income. That’s the mistake most people make.

If you want to learn more about Adsense and learn about the different ways to on how you can truly make money through Adsense then be sure to read this Google Adsense article I have written at FamousBloggers.

What do you think? Have you made a lot of money through Adsense?

Let’s face it. There are a lot of ways to grow your blog. Writing articles for EzineArticles is one of these ways.

In this post I am going to cover how EzineArticles helps you to get a decent amount of visitors to your blog.

If you haven’t already signed up for EzineArticles then go ahead and do it.

About EzineArticles

For all of you who don’t know what EzineArticles is, let give you a little bit of information about it. EzineArticles is an article submission directory. That means you can submit your articles to Ezine and get them published there. The huge advantage is that you get to include two links in your resource box at the end of each article. That means you can get free traffic from it and you can also use it as an effective link building method.

EzineArticles itself is the most famous article directory. This is partly because of its age but also because it offer so many things to publishers. As a publisher you will get reports on your articles such as how many people have visited them and through which keywords and much more.

The Different Stages

Just to let you know there are different types of authors. At the beginning you are in the basic bracket which means that you are only allowed to write ten articles. After that you will automatically become a basic plus author. Again this gives you another 15 articles. The last stage is the platinum bracket which basically allows you to submit as many articles as you want.

The further you climb up the ladder the faster your articles will also be approved. If you are in the platinum bracket then your articles will be reviewed within a few days.

Establish Yourself on a Personal Level

It’s important to cover over as a nice person but also someone who knows what he is doing. So this is what this section is all about.

Create a Biography

If you want to get a lot of traffic through EzineArticles then I can truly recommend writing a biography about yourself. The reason behind this is that lots of people will take a look at your profile. And the best way to persuade people that you are legitimate and that you are not the standard type of person who simply wants to sell something.
In order to establish a relationship with these visitors you need to have a nice biography.

Upload a Picture of Yourself

Uploading a picture is essential too. If you want to create even more rapport people need to see who offered this kind of advice.
Creating a biography and uploading a picture is also important to get your profile page presented on the homepage. This is a huge opportunity to drive a lot of traffic to your articles and ultimately to your web site. Also note that the picture you have uploaded will also be placed at the author resource box in every article you have written. This is a huge advantage as it will massively increase your click-through-rate of your links.

Resource Box

The resource box is the part of your article where you are allowed to put your links back to your websites. Thus this is one of the most important parts of every article. If you mess up here then this can mean the different between getting hundreds and hundreds of visitors or simply none at all.

I have done some major testing throughout my articles to see what the best resource box is going to be like. And the by far best converting box has been one that established you as a person. These were resource boxes where I simply said “Hi, I’m Julius and …”. You can write basically anything but be sure to mention your name at the beginning as it establishes a much more friendly atmosphere and thus will make your CTR shoot up.

Writing Articles

Obviously the most important thing about article directories are your posts itself. In this section we talk about all the things that will make you a much better article author.

My Article Marketing Routine

Article marketing can become quite easy once you have found a routine that you stick with. I, for example, always write articles in Wordpad. The reason is that Wordpad doesn’t add any formatting to it whatsoever. That way you can easily copy and paste all the things you have written in it.

Another reason why I don’t write articles on Ezine directly is because there is too much distraction whenever I am in the Internet. That’s why I prefer to write offline.

I usually write multiple articles in one session, I can write around 5 articles in an hour. Then I go and visit EzineArticles and go to the member section. There I simply copy and paste one article after each other.

The strategy that proved most useful is to first copy and paste your article. Then what I like to do is to simply copy and once again paste the top of the article into the description box. Now based on your article you come up with a keyword rich headline. Then also add the category to which you want to submit it. Then go on to add keywords. Be sure to use the already generated keywords that Ezine offers. The last step is to simply select one of your resource boxes. Then you are done, simply preview it and hit submit.

Format Your Article

A lot of people are writing articles for their web site so you need a way of standing out from the crowd. Simply the best way to stand out on EzineArticles is through some nicely written articles and the use of formatting.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t use all of the possibilities they have for their articles. You can create articles with italic or bold text. You have the option of using ordered and unordered lists. You can further use blockquotes when you quote someone. All these options give you an opportunity to stand out. So use them to your advantage.

Headlines that Get You Traffic

As EzineArticles points out itself, it is important to put keywords in your article headline. According to the web site the headlines should be structured differently than most people do.
Normal Blog Headline: How to Make More Money Online through Your Blog
Ezine Headline Recommendation: Make Money Online – How to Earn More Money through Your Blog
If you actually think about it, then it does make a lot of sense. Simply think about it from a SEO perspective. Generally the first keywords in your title are the most important ones. That means that by using the Ezine headline you are probably going to get a lot more visitors to your articles. These visitors will in turn visit your web site. So ultimately you end up with a lot more traffic yourself.

I have also tested this with my EzineArticles and you really do get a lot more traffic that way. Simply always put the keyword that the post is generally about at the beginning and then explain what the article is specifically about.

Keep On Writing

Many people make the mistake of writing only a few articles and then think all the traffic will start to automatically follow too. But that’s not the way it works. You need to keep on creating new articles.
The more articles you write the more people will visit your sites in the long run.

Miscellaneous

Test and Compare

Testing is very important especially since EzineArticles makes it easy for you to compare different articles against each other. For example I have one article where every third visitor clicks on the link to my blog. With other posts only every 11th visitors clicks on my link. So in order to find out why the one article is doing so much better than the other one you need to compare them.

Then test one variable which you think might be causing this.

Building Links the Right Way

I also see that some people use links wrong. They link back to their page this way http://andbreak.com/. The problem here is simple. You are not using the your anchor text very effective. You are referring to your web site as http://andbreak.com/. That’s not really helpful. Helpful is something descriptive that also contains keywords that you want to rank for. Let’s say I would want to rank with this blog for the keyword Internet marketing blog. I would then link like this: Internet marketing blog.

Many People Look at Your Profile Page

When I started out I really didn’t pay too much attention to the stats of my articles and how many times they were visited. But what I have recently found out is that I had 1500 article views and, here is the important part, 500 views of my profile page. That means that your profile page is a fantastic opportunity to get readers interested in your articles and your websites.

That again makes it that much more important to write a good biography and to include a good picture of you.

What do you think? Was this helpful at all?

The only reason I usually hate contests is because it means that you are competing against other people. I believe that life is much more about competing and challenging yourself, not others.

Also contests usually imply that there is only one winner and the rest are losers somehow. I don’t agree with that either. The thing is that you can organize a contest in a way that there is no winner and no loser. And I hope that that is what is going to happen in this contest too. So far this seems to be the case.

Contest Sponsors

This is the FamousBloggers ComLuv Contest Sponsors, feel free to check them out, also check the Online Contest page for more information. Special thanks to Gail our Social Media Marketing Strategist for the great work.

$300 SPONSORS

The ComLuv Network

Claims.com specialists in road traffic accidents Claims and Compensation

$150 SPONSORS

• FamousBloggers ~ Group blog about how to start a business, making money blogging and blogging for business.
• Brian Longest ~ GoDaddy Coupon UKTop10 30% Off
• Executive Gift Shoppe ~ Personalized gifts including Money Clip
• Social Implications – Exploring the impact of Social Media ~ Social Media
• Local Proud ~ Start Your Own Discount Card Business

$100 SPONSORS:

• FiddyP. Personal blog of Andy Bailey
• FiredWok Chinese Takeaway & Delivery ~ Chinese delivery in Lancaster
• GoodMillwork ~ Florida Based Architectural Moldings
• Andrew Rondeau Ltd ~ Blogging Guide
• Marc Duquette ~ Scribnia Blogging Directory
• The Happy Guy Marketing ~ Professional SEO services
• The Online Recruiters Directory ~ Search Firms
• Monster Auto ~ Car industry news
• Bill – ANS Gear ~ Paintball Guns & Gear
• Cori Padgett- Big Girl Branding ~ Business Marketing Strategy
• NowRelevant.com ~ Google alternative search
• The Internet Time Machine ~ Trends and new product ideas
• Joe & Colleen ~ Richland Wa Homes For Sale

$50 Sponsors

• DiTesco ~ Home based business resources
• DennisEdell ~ Direct Sales Marketing Coach
• Firas ~ WP Worx – WordPress Services
• Kiesha ~ Blogging Tips & Tricks
• Melinda ~ Simple Home Organization
• Dan Keller – TycoonBlogger ~ Promote Your Blog
• ProjectCenter ~ Club Flyers
• PPI Claims ~ PPI Claims
• Free Gifts ~ Free Gifts
• Zoomit Canada ~ Social Bookmarking just for Canada
• Fence Houston ~ Houston fence contractor
• Fence Philadelphia ~ Philadelphia fence company
• Location Villa Espagne ~ Location Villa Costa Brava
• Lube Oil Sales ~ Buy Amsoil Motor Oil
• Olympic EyeWear ~ Designer sunglasses
• Miss Wise Law ~ Law & Legal Information
• Michelle Mangen ~ The Social Media Virtual Assistant
• Chris Guthrie ~ Make Money on the Internet

Tips for the Contest

I think that one of the most important things to writing a good article is to have passion. Whenever you see someone who has been able to somehow change the world you could immediately feel the passion that person had in everything he did.

If you are passionate about a topic people will feel it. The greatest things in life are created through passion. For the contest I wrote about a topic I had passion for and then tried to find a way on how I could apply it to the contest’s topic. I hope it worked out.

One last thing you should keep in mind is that you should give without expecting something in return. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can have as a person. Especially in contest people tend to only comment on articles if it helps them to get to the top of the list.

But believe me, you will get that much further by simply giving and helping other people.

If you get a chance be sure to check out my article at FamousBloggers. It talks about how we could build a community at FamousBloggers, I hope you like it.

Also you still have the chance of entering the contest since Hesham has extended the contest for another week.

Have you participated in the contest? Why or why not?

It was extremely interesting and I must say that I have learned a lot. In this article I want to share the things I have learned from twittering actively for 31 days.

Things to Do

At the beginning of the experiment I jotted down what I wanted to do to get more traffic from Twitter and to also get to know more people. So here is what I did:

• follow more people
• retweet other people’s tweets
• ask question and engage other people
• post quotes

So these were the things I planned on doing. One last thing I did was to comment on articles that were retweeted on Twitter.

Twitter stats before the experiment:
Following: around 400
Followers: around 250

From the first day on not only did I start to become more active in Twitter but also on other websites such as Blog Engage or MMO. It was awesome because I did end up reading new articles from blogs I have never visited but it consumed a lot of time.

Nine days after starting my Twitter challenge I had to change my Twitter mail settings because my email inbox was getting flooded with follower mails and direct messages.

Unfollowing Tweeps

What is interesting is that I have gained around 50 followers within one single day. The reason is probably because I started to follow more people these days. But the reason for this many followers is that I hadn’t unfollowed people up to that point.

On the next day I started unfollowing people and almost didn’t get any new followers. Few days later I unfollowed more people and the number of my followers fell again rapidly.

So once you start to unfollow some people that aren’t tweeting interesting things or that are simply spamming you tend to get a lot less followers. That in turn might mean that most people on Twitter are using automated software to follow new people. These new people are the ones who simply don’t unfollow other people.

This kept me from unfollowing too many people. The day after that experience I decided to simply follow the people that are tweeting interesting stuff and to unfollow lots of people once I have finished the experiment.

Twitter Analytics Stats

To be honest I haven’t gotten that much traffic through Twitter while doing the experiment. My theory is simple. The more active you are in any community (or social media site) the more traffic you are going to get from it.

Even though I was active on Twitter I didn’t spend too much time on it. I think that if I had spent more time on it then I would have gotten a lot more traffic.

Anyway below are the stats from the Twitter referral traffic. As you can see there is an increase in traffic but it’s not that high. This can also be of course because some analytics software has trouble measuring traffic from Twitter.

The green line is the traffic from the month before and the blue line is indicating the time frame of my experiment.

As you can see below the traffic increased at 150% according to Google Analytics though the number of visits are still quite low. The interesting thing is that you can see that everything that measures reader interest has increased too.

All stats increasing

The average time on site has increased by 2689% along with the pages/visit. And especially the bounce rate was reduced by 60%. That means that the visitors I gained through Twitter were a lot more interested in my content. I also believe that the people who visited were also more likely to know me because of the 23% decrease in new visits.
Twitter stats at the end of the experiment:
Following: around 620
Followers: 400

The number below show that I have gotten around 5 followers each day which I believe is not too bad. Of course you can take this experiment to a new extreme and get even more followers by simply mass-following people. But I wanted to keep this experiment as natural as possible.

What do you think? Was this helpful to you?

I have to warn you though. I haven’t quite mastered the art of building mini sites but I hope that this article will still prove useful to you.

For everyone who thinks about creating a mini site I can only say: Simply try it. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of things while creating these mini sites and that’s why I will keep on creating more of them. The most important thing you shouldn’t underestimate with building mini sites is that you gain lots of experience especially concerning SEO.

My Experiment

I created my two first mini sites 2-3 months ago and simply wanted to see whether it would be worth it and whether it’s easy to make money through them.

Travel Mini Site

My first mini site is a travel related site. On it I simply offer information on traveling. This includes pictures from trips I did and lots of other things. With my travel mini site I haven’t tried too much out yet and to be honest the only way I am trying to make money through it is by using Adsense in combination with Amazon’s affiliate network.

To say the least I haven’t made any money through it. Not through Adsense and also not through Amazon’s program. The reason might be one of very obvious thing: Not enough traffic.

I haven’t really put much effort into building links for this web site. The funny thing was that the mini site immediately started ranking number one on Yahoo, probably because of the domain name. Still this doesn’t mean anything since I haven’t really gotten a lot of traffic from Yahoo and other search engines.

Here are some details about the site:
Backlinks: 9
PR: 0

So you can see that I haven’t really created a lot of links back to the site. Thus the traffic is … well you can’t really call it traffic Here are the analytics stats:

You can see that there is not a lot going on. Still I think it’s a great way to see that the visitors are highly interested in the content because of the high Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit. Note that you have to take into account that this mini site has only around 6 webpages.

Public Speaking Mini Site

I create this mini site because I wanted to create a site where I would simply focus on promoting a product. Much like Glen has done it with his Bookmarking Demon mini site.

My site is solely focused on selling a product within the public speaking niche. The website itself only has two pages and the main page solely focuses on getting people to want to buy the product.

I haven’t made money through that site either (seems like I am not very good at). Again the reason can be multiple things. Maybe the people I am driving to my website aren’t really interested in buying the product. On the other hand it could still be the problem with the low traffic. The last excuse I know of is that I am doing a poor job of selling the product.

The reason why I haven’t done anything about it is that I wanted it to rank well in Google before doing any major testing or changes. That way I would get enough traffic to be sure that the data I am collecting is reliable. That’s why I have done some more link building for this website:
Backlinks: 50
PR: 0

As you can see from below the website gets around 150-200 pageviews per month. This is not much but again I am not promoting this website and all this traffic is solely coming through my link building efforts.

The interesting thing to see here is that this mini site differs completely from the other one. You can immediately see that the Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit are way lower than the ones of my travel mini site. The reason is of course is that it’s built to sell a product. Keep in mind that this mini site has only two pages so the maximum Pages/Visit would be 2.

So this is all I can really tell you by now about my mini sites. As you can see I haven’t been that successful but that doesn’t matter that much to me because I have learned so much along the way.

What do you think about this experiment? Do you think it’s worth it to build mini sites? Was this useful to you?

Well I have to say that I have found the perfect tool.

Alexa

If a website is within the top 100k in Alexa you can get all sorts of information on the actual website which is great if you are trying to analyze it. Even if the website isn’t within the top 100k you can still gather useful information about it, even though it will not be as accurate.

The greatest insight I believe you can great through Alexa are the keywords through which the website gains most of its traffic. There is nothing that is more helpful in my opinion. And that’s exactly what Alexa gives us.

If, for example, we take a look at Copyblogger which is a great and unique blog. You can easily see what kind of traffic it is getting through keywords and which keywords are the most relevant to the site.

Copyblogger's most important keywords through which it gets search engine traffic

As you can see from the picture above the main sources of traffic for Copyblogger is from the keyword increase web traffic. The second highest being increase traffic and so forth. This will easily give you an idea of what kind of search queries are relevant to the site.

If you click on one of the keywords it will give you an indicator as to what site is getting traffic through these keywords and how much percent they get of the overall traffic. If you combine this insight with the Google External Keyword tool information you get for the chosen keyword, you get a pretty clear view of how much traffic the site receives from this keyword alone.

In the above example, the Query Popularity will give you an indication of how often people are searching for these particular keywords. The QCI is an indicator of the advertising competition for that keyword. The higher the number (of Query Popularity or QCI) the more traffic or the more competition.

The much more interesting aspect about Alexa is that it offers SEM tools at the bottom of each of these pages. If you install the Alexa toolbar you will instantly get access to the information for SEM strategies. Especially if you are relying on PPC campaigns then it might be well worth the effort to install the Alexa toolbar to get some details on the kind of competition you face when placing advertisement.

DoubleClick Ad Planner

If you combine this kind of information with the sort of information you get from the DoubleClick Ad Planner from Google you will then get a clear result of the kind of audience that the blog is attracting. But not only of the audience but also of the keywords that are popular. Keep in mind that the keywords that the ad planner displays are those based on the highest affinity, meaning those where Copyblogger is ranking extremely well, i.e. for the term copyblogger, copywriting etc.

The most important search engine keywords and also similar websites that were also visited

The only problem with DoubleClick Ad Planner is that it only offers information for big websites, you won’t even be able to find most blogs, Copyblogger seems to be an exception here.

So what could you do with this kind of information? Well you could use it to try to rank for some of these keywords or even better it will give you a way of understanding what kind of keywords you shouldn’t try to rank for at all.

Keep in mind that this kind of information might be also very useful for doing product or niche research such as when building mini sites.
What do you think? Was this helpful at all?

In this article I want to point out the mistake that too many people make when they start blogging.

Making Money

Most of the people are blogging for the sake of making money. And yes of course earning some money through your blog is great. But the problem the blogsphere has is that people are simply creating blogs because they want to make money.

And that’s the core of the problem. Let me tell you up front: You are not going to earn money through your blog.

Here are the reasons:

• Extremely hard to monetize a blog
• Most niches are extremely competitive, especially Internet marketing
• You are approaching this with the wrong attitude
• Oversaturated niches
• Hard to gain followers

I have tried to make money through this blog and I have made around $100 which is not much if you think about the fact that I have been blogging for a year and a half. But after a while I realized that money is not the reason I am blogging anymore.

Don’t get me wrong I am still trying to make money online but simply not through this blog. I am trying to make money through other web and mini sites.

Why Should You Start a Blog?

I think the best way to create interesting content and gain a huge readership is by trying different things out.

Why would you start a blog about making money if you don’t know how to make money yourself? Why would you create a blog about search engine optimization if you don’t know how optimize your web site for search engines?

My point is why not gain experience about making money online or search engine optimization first? Why not build several websites (and I don’t mean blogs) and try to make money through them?

Then you have interesting things to write about and also experience. You know what you are talking about and ultimately can apply this to your blog. The most interesting articles I have read are from people that have tried different things out themselves and then wrote about their experience.

Believe me no one is interested in hearing you repeat that “you should write unique content”, or that you need to “optimize your blog for search engines” etc. There are too many people already writing about it.

I have made the mistake myself and wrote about these generic tips and tricks. But no one is interested in them anymore and you are not going to be successful writing about them.

My Advice

If you want to make money on the Internet and maybe even through your blog then go ahead and start other websites. Try to make money through them before trying to make money through your blog.

Once you have gathered some experience and made money through these websites you can then start to create a blog about how you make money online.

What do you think? Was this helpful to you?

Do you know whether your blog is running the way you want it to?

It’s always important to be able to measure the success of your blog. To do that a lot of people turn to PageRank and other measures to find out whether their blog is truly growing. But that’s not the only way you can measure your blog. An even better method is to make use of ratios.

In this article you will find out how engaged your visitors really are. How much of your content do they consume? Are they really interested in your content? These are all questions I aim to answer in this article.

Using Ratios

To measure the success of your blog we are going to rely on some proven techniques from business administration and economics. If you have studied accounting then you might be used to ratios as they are quite often used.

What I want to do is to apply these ratios to a blog or web site.

Comments Ratio

Comments are one of the most important factors about blogs. If you don’t have any comments then your blog is not worth anything. Comments show how engaged your readers truly are.

In order to measure how many of your comments are real comments you simply divide the total number of comments through your own comments. This will give you the real comment ratio which basically shows you how many of your comments shouldn’t be counted as comments at all. Smaller blogs usually have a ratio of about 50%.

Another interesting ratio which you can calculate quite easily is the comments-per-post ratio. This will indicate how many comments, these are of course averaged, you have per post. It will further help you to distinguish how active your readers are and together with the last ratio it will give you a good idea of how good your blog is working.

The last but most important ratio concerning comments is also pretty straight forward. It measures the length of your comments which is very important. The longer a comment the more valuable it usually is. To calculate the comment length ratio you devide the total comment words by the number of comments.

Reader Engagement

Followers are very important for a blog. But depending on your blog they might be active or not. To find out how engaged your readers truly are you take the comments (you got in a month) and divide them through the page views (for a month).

In return you get the reader engagement ratio which will help you determine how engaged your readers are.

If you look at this ratio and the comment length ratio from before, you get a clearer picture about how engaged your readers are, how many of them are taking part in the conversations and last of all the time people invest in sharing their opinion. Ultimately this leads to

What do you think? Do you think these ratios are useful for measuring the success of your blog?

I have previously talked about the theory behind mini sites. Basically what you are doing is promoting a product (or you could also just offer content). Through an affiliate link you then send your visitors to the sales page of the product. Once the visitor buys you make money.

That’s a really short description of how it works but since I have already explained the theory in detail I am not going to touch on this subject again.

Finding a Product

The first step to creating a mini site is to actually find a product you want to promote. If you already have one then make sure it fits all of the criteria I have mentioned below.

If you don’t know what you want to promote then take a short second. Think about what you like doing. Think about your hobbies.

Do you like to cook? Do you like to travel? Write all of the topics of interest to you down.

Now what you want to do is to find a product you really believe in. You might like to cook and you just recently bought a grater which you think is fantastic. That might be a great product to promote. Of course you don’t have to solely focus on products you already own.

For example what I did for my first mini site was to visit Clickbank, an affliate website. Clickbank offers a huge marketplace full of products, mostly digital ones. In the marketplace you can choose a category you are interested in and take a look at the product.

Now let’s say you are into golf. Then visit Clickbank’s marketplace and click on Sports -> Golf. Now there should be lots of products related to golf showing up.

To find the right product you can use the Clickbank marketplace. Usually what you want is a relatively high pay out which is almost always guaranteed if you use Clickbank. You can see this by the $/sale measure. Generally something between $10-30 is good but of course it depends on the product itself.

ClickBank's Marketplace Product: Simple Golf Swing Product Example

Future $ – Shows how much money affiliates earn from the product in the future. This applies only to products that offer a recurring payments like membership sites.
$/sale – This is the amount of money an affiliate earns when he makes a sale. From the picture above you can see that with this product you would usually earn around $31.64 per sale.
Avg %/sale – This shows you how much percent of the product price you earn when making a sale. In our case you would get 75% of each sale you make.
Generally with Clickbank, affiliates will get between 60-75 percent of each sale, as Clickbank is a high payout affiliate network.
Grav. – Stands for gravity and shows how many people are also promoting the product, i.e. How many people “gravitate” towards the product. The higher the number the more people are promoting it which is usually a good sign. But it’s also a sign that the niche is more competitive.

Let’s move on to the next step.

Take a Look at the Sales Page

Golf Swing Sales Page

The sales page of a product is where people are supposed to be convinced that a product is worth buying. That’s why you have to take a look at the sales page. A good and convincing mini site doesn’t help you to generate sales if the sales page is crap.

Take a closer look at the sales page. Does it capture your attention? Does it actually convince you into buying the product? How is the page designed? Are there things that could disturb visitors from buying the product? What happens when you click on the X to close the page: Does a button jump up asking you not to go and receive a special offer?

Answer all these questions for yourself. And then decide on whether you still want to promote the product.

Buy the Product

Why should you buy the product you are promoting? First of all that makes you a genuine person. You can’t really recommend something you haven’t tried out yourself. How could you?

Second of all buying the product makes it a lot easier for you to write about and promote the product since you know what it’s all about. You could even present proof that you have personally purchased the product on your mini site. It will make the mini site more convincing.

Refund Policy

One thing to note is that usually most of the products on Clickbank have a 60-day money back guarantee that means if you are not happy with the product you can always get your money back. I am not saying that you should use it often but if you have bought a product that is pretty much worthless then I would make use of the refund policy.

Inspect the Product

After buying the product take a closer look at the product. I wouldn’t recommend a product that is not useful at all. In the end recommending such products will bite you in the ass. That’s why you need to take a closer look at it.

How is it designed? Do you like the information? Is it useful to you? Does it have a nice layout? Do you get any additional products accompanying the product?

If you like how the product is put together then go ahead and promote it. Otherwise just keep on searching until you see a product that you think is good enough.

Conclusion

After taking all of these steps you should have been able to find a product that suits you best. You can also stick to several products if you want and set up multiple mini sites. One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t necessarily need to rely on Clickbank to find products.

You can also use websites such as Amazon and it’s affiliate network or E-Junkie to find interesting products. In that case I would still run through the whole procedure I have explained above.

That’s why I want to show you what websites I use on a daily basis.

Creating Better Content

We know that the content of websites is the key to being successful on the Internet. If you don’t offer good content then people will not stay on your blog very long. The websites mentioned below will help you to create better content.

Images

Finding images for blog posts is an important part of blogging. I have two major web sites I use for finding images. The first one is Sxc.hu which offers free images for everyone who signs up there. It’s a great resource and offer lots of good pictures. Be sure to check it out.
The second resource for me is Flickr as it offer some great pictures which you can freely (depending on the license) use on your website. I always use pictures with the Creative Commons Attribution license since all you need to do is to credit the author.

Quotes

If you include quotes in an article then this can make your article so much better. Of course it depends on how you use it but especially for blogs adding a quote to the end of the post can really engage your blog readers. Whenever I am looking for quotes to put in an article I visit Inspirational Quotes. It’s a great website with tons and tons of quotes.

Dictionary

Depending on which country you live in you will need a dictionary. I am German so sometimes I just have to look up some words which I know in German but which I can’t really translate. That’s when a dictionary comes in handy.

Search Engine Optimization

Every blog owners wants to rank well for certain keywords. Search engine optimization will help you just do that. Down below I have listed all the resources I use to rank better on search engines.

Keywords

Whenever I am doing keyword research for any reason I take a look at Google’s Keyword External Tool. It’s the tool I use most often. It’s a great tool for doing any major keyword research. This is simply a must for every Internet marketer.
At the moment I am using Google Adwords on some of my sites to drive traffic to them. Most of the time I end up using the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator. The tool basically shows you how much traffic you are going to get from Google Adwords based on your keywords and on how much you are willing to spend on a daily basis. If you are using Adwords then be sure to check it out.

Article Submission Sites

Article submission sites are a great way to get backlinks and traffic to your website and EzineArticles is my favorite one. There are of course lots of other submission sites but not even one comes close to the quality of EzineArticles.

Alexa

Most of the people know Alexa since it ranks every webpage based on the amount of traffic it gets. But you can also use Alexa to do keyword research and analyze other websites. The most useful tool of Alexa is the SEM tool which you only get access to if you have the Alexa toolbar installed. What this tool gives you is all the keywords that are related to a topic you chose. The keywords are for PPC campaigns and will give you a hint of what low cost keywords there are related to your topic.

Social Life

The Internet is full of social networks nowadays. I don’t necessarily mean sites like Facebook or Digg but also communities as you can often find in forums.

Forum

I have been active on a forum for some time. Bloggeries is the forum I use because it has a big blogging community. Forums are a great way to get some exposure and if done right you can drive highly interested people to your blog.

Twitter

Everyone knows Twitter by now. Twitter is a great place to get ideas or to catch up on the latest news or to simply check on your buddies. Depending on how you use it it also has the potential of driving tons and tons of people to your blog.

Making Money

There are lots of people trying to make money through the Internet. And there are lots of people who have managed to generate a decent income through it. No matter whether you are making money or not there are a few websites that are essential.

PayPal

There are lots of people using PayPal these days. If you are blogging and trying to make money then you need to sign up for a PayPal account. Most of the websites will only send you your money via PayPal that’s why having an account is indeed essential.

Affiliate Networks

There are tons of affiliate networks on the Internet. The one I like best is Clickbank because it offers tons of products and also high payouts for affiliates. If you haven’t heard about it then be sure to check it out.

What do you think? Was this list of websites useful to you? What kind of websites do you use?