Adnan is a young entrepreneur from the UK and used to own the popular entrepreneurial blog Blogtrepreneur (link: http://www.blogtrepreneur.com). He is now the founder of a growing performance car (link: http://www.carthrottle.com) website called Car Throttle.

In this recession-hit economy, it is very easy to think that advertising spend from individuals, businesses and corporations has dried up completely and that there is no hope for a small-time blog looking to earn some bucks from the internet. Indeed, there was a time where any old Joe Bloggs (excuse the pun) could throw up a low-value and low-key website and draw in a handful of advertisers, enough to pay for internet bills and a meal or two out every month.

Those incidences may be harder to find today, but don’t be fooled into believing that you can’t have a slice of the virtual money-making pie too. Whilst it is true that a downturned economy does mean less advertising dollars in circulation due to companies cutting back on expenses, wise individuals will continue to spend money on ads due to lower prices, still great targeting and thus a potentially higher profit margin on their spend.

As a result, it should be your aim to target these individuals and lure them in to advertising on your own blog. It must be said beforehand that you should obviously have sufficient traffic to make it worth the advertiser’s time and money, and that your traffic should be as targeted as possible to the niche you are involved in – this will make it a win/win situation for all involved. Once you have accomplished the above, then it’s time to use the following tips and techniques to make sure you grab the attention of any advertisers and to make sure you don’t lose out on your share of the pie.

1. Become an authority in your niche

In some cases, particularly when you are a rookie blogger, you will want to actively seek out advertisers and will spend hours cold-emailing prospects hoping for that influx of income.  However, this will reverse as you become more of an authority and expert within your specialised field. Yaro Starak (link: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com) strongly advocates that you take steps to become this type of guru in his membership courses, and the best way to do this is to constantly bring out fresh, linkable and likeable content that spreads by itself over the net. This will ensure that advertisers find you and not the other way round.

2. Your reputation is everything

Sure, we’ve all heard of people who lie and cheat their way to the top, but if you want to maintain your business integrity and class, then nothing pleases prospective advertisers more than honesty and a clean reputation. Make sure that you are transparent in quoting your visitor count, and make sure that ad prices are not overly inflated just to make a quick buck. Pleased as punch advertisers will generally renew adverts if they are happy with results, and maintaining your online reputation is vital in helping you create these beneficial relationships.

3. Under-quote prices and aim for retention

One of the key statistics that internet marketers who own membership websites look for in a successful business is the attrition rate. Well-run sites will have high participation rates and small percentages of members dropping out every week or month. In a similar way, a blog owner should be looking to maintain ongoing business deals and should encourage the renewal of adverts. A good way to do this is to under-quote ad prices initially so you can start building these key relationships, and then to slowly raise prices over time. Often advertisers will stick with you as you raise prices due to the close bonds you have built.

4. Create a clear advertising page on your blog

This tip if probably one of the most vital, active things you can do to raise revenue. In fact, whilst I was in charge of Blogtrepreneur, having a defined advertising page helped me to make $506 blogging in July 2007 (link: http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2007/08/09/how-i-made-506-blogging-in-july-2007/). There are a few things that a well-structured and enticing advertising page should have in order to make the most of your screen real-estate:

• A general description of your website and the audience that you attract
• Unique visitors, pageviews and other traffic related statistics
• Twitter followers, RSS subscribers and any other relevant metrics
• Number of posts in your Archives and comment to post ratio (this shows the level of audience participation and reader loyalty)
• Methods of advertising and their descriptions, followed by pricing and timeframes
• Methods of payment
• And finally, any other terms and conditions to protect yourself should you decide to alter prices or to warn off any untoward advertisers promoting dodgy activity!

5. Give advertisers more than one method of advertising with different price points

Advertisers will inevitably vary in stature and levels of budget that they have available to spend on your blog. As a result, having only one advertising method with only one entry-level price-point, may deter some purchasers and means that you are putting your eggs all in one basket. You could start by offering 2 types of banner advert (perhaps one in the sidebar and a larger banner at the end of each post) and by offering RSS feed links. You should however be wary of selling text links as Google does not look favourable upon these and the money you get from this may not outweigh the penalties you will get from the search engines and traffic lost as a result.

6. Communication is King

OK, so I’ve twisted the above statement a little from the original “Content is King” mantra. However as mentioned above with the transparency point, constant communication will mean peace-of-mind for the advertiser and will lead to deeper relationships developing. Make sure that you are prompt in responding to emails and that you act courteously and professionally at all times. Provide a contact form on your blog or a place where potential advertisers can get in touch with you and it should show that you are a full-on businessman, which will help money-spenders to help take you more seriously.

7. Be proactive

There is nothing worse than a beach-bum-blogger who thinks that no effort is required in running a successful blog. Whilst a very small minority can safely say that advertisers have contacted them and that they have a smooth automated system for handling everything, chances are you won’t have that luxury and instead will have to kick your blogging butt into gear.

Spend time cold-emailing prospects if you have spare inventory, offer advertising deals for bulk-purchases, offer discounts for multi-month buys, maintain a network of interested individuals who you can contact about new deals and be on your toes. Passive income is not something generally related to blogging and you may find yourself doing behind the scenes work more than you are actually typing!

The key to cracking open the money tree is to keep looking for improvement, as there is always improvement to be had. Never settle for the current level of income you are receiving, and if you are currently making a loss blogging (by paying authors and shelling out on expenses) then create a leaner blogging business and use the above tips to help you to find your break-even point and to shove your blog back into the black.

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Ideas are behind every successful article sale.  Ideally we will have an abundance of them in reserve, so we will never be short of articles to write.

Here are some pointers to ensure you’ll never run out:

1 – Where to find writing ideas.

Answer – everywhere.  But the best and most convenient place to look is in your immediate vicinity.  You can get ideas from friends, family, your own experiences, work, hobbies, your daily newspaper, magazines, problem pages, and so on.

The key is to start being aware of your surroundings, and opening your eyes to the possibilities of the things you see.  Asking yourself ‘what if’, ‘why’, ‘how’ and so on, is also a good way to get ideas, but you need to train yourself to spot what’s all around you.

2 – Developing article topics.

It’s not enough to look at something and think you want to write about it.  You need to develop that idea.

What angle do you want to approach it from?  If you’re writing about teabags, to pick a mundane subject, are you going to write about a specific type, or how they are made, or how tea was discovered, or how many people drink it compared to coffee, or is it good for you?

Writing about teabags in general is too unfocused to make a knock-em-dead article.  Narrow the focus – specifics are more interesting.

3 – Angling your writing ideas to a specific market.

Ten different magazines could do an article on the same subject, but they would all be vastly different, because they would all be angled to a different readership, and this is the rule to bear in mind when offering an article for sale.

Sometimes the article idea will come first, and you can look for a suitable magazine to target; other times you will find a magazine you would like to write for and think of an appropriate idea for it.  Whichever way you approach an idea for a market, make sure the angle is specific to that market, and can be written for that audience.

4 – Make article ideas unique to you.

Ever heard people say, ‘only so and so could have done that’?

Well you can aim for this in your writing too.  Make your approach or angle something that editors won’t see from anyone else.  This is harder than you might think, but if you can make it unique in some small way, it will stand out and get you noticed by the editor.

This will develop in time, this way of looking at an idea from your unique point of view, but it’s a skill that’s well worth developing.

5 – Matching writing idea to article length.

Again, this is a skill that will come with practice.  Obviously, if you want to write a piece on the history of the American elections, for example, you’d be hard pushed to cram it into a 500 word piece.  You’d be better off concentrating on a single aspect or election for a length like this.  Conversely, if the article length is 2000 words, you know you can fill it with much more information.

A word of warning here – don’t offer a long article until you’re sure you’ll be able to get the information you need to fill it.

6 – Different types of article from the same idea.

This is a good multiple sales technique.  Gaining the most out of each block of research is one of the secrets to fast sales.

Let’s take dreams – I sold an article on erotic dreams, another on naked dreams, and I have more ideas for precognitive dreams, animals in dreams and their meanings… and so on.

You can also do a humorous article, a practical article on dealing with nightmares and bad dreams, a first person piece on your own dreams, and what you’ve learned from them… the list goes on.

7 – Maximum article mileage from a single niche.

Think of all the different articles you could write from a single idea – and think of as many angles as you can.  This is more of a case of the same type of article (practical, for example) slanted towards different markets.

This is especially good to do with a familiar subject, like your hobby – try and think of as many different magazines you could slant your hobby towards.

8 – Brainstorming.

A fantastic way to come up with ideas, and also to develop them.  Pick up a magazine at random and open it to the first word you see.  Use this as a starting point, and see where it leads you.

Alternatively, write down as much as you can think of to do with your work or hobby, and see where it leads you.  Write down everything you can think of, however silly – it lets your mind wander and encourages creativity, so let it express itself.

The silliest idea can often trigger something else, or generate an article idea that is within your grasp to write, and is worth writing about.

9 – Try word association and other methods.

Word association can generate lots of ideas for subjects to write about.  This is an easy way to start with some fresh ideas.  Reading news stories, problem pages and surfing the net are other fast ways to get the initial germ of an idea.

You will still need to develop it, but writing non newsy articles that are inspired by news stories is a great way to take advantage of using ready made news stories as a springboard to some original material, using the original story as research.

10 – Knowing what to reject.

Unless you know you can get an interview with a world famous star, it’s probably not a good idea to develop an article around that.  An idea that is workable must be one you can research without too much difficulty.

Either that, or find an angle on a subject that you know you can do.  Sometimes it can be a case of just altering your focus, or narrowing it, to get the article idea to a size you can write about.

Provided that doesn’t ruin the whole drive of the article, that could be your best bet.  So recognise whether or not your enthusiasm matches your ability to write the article… before you offer it.

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Passion = Authority

If you choose a niche market that revolves around one of your passions, you are going to be able to choose the best products to promote. Subsequently, you will be able to sell more of them because you are an authority on the subject upon which they’re based. This is common sense. Basic Affiliate Marketing 101.

If you find a winning niche - stick with it until profits no longer improve

Problems can arise, however, when you focus too much on one niche. Though you should give every marketing campaign your best in order to achieve the success that you want, you should not give any one niche your all for too long. Diversification is a crucial aspect of effective affiliate marketing. Not just diversification in niches or products, but diversification in marketing as well. What you should aim for is having several areas from which you are receiving income. This way, if one of these sources “dries up” then you won’t suddenly be faced with such a drastic reduction in income that you are scrambling for ways to replace it. Have you ever been laid off from a job and then spent sleepless nights wondering how you were going to pay your bills until you found another one? This is the feeling that you want to avoid with your affiliate marketing business.

You might say that this is all well and good for those who are firmly established as successful blogging affiliate marketers, but what if you are still trying to make your first dollar in this field? Of course, you don’t want to start off by going in twelve different directions. That’s a surefire formula for failure. Once you get established with a certain niche and the related affiliate products and then find a successful marketing strategy, though—which can admittedly take a while at first—don’t assume that you’ve arrived.

Use your first success as inspiration to not only market in different niche categories, but also to be creative about future marketing. If you are successfully promoting digital products through article marketing and PPC advertising, consider promoting web hosting as an affiliate using the same techniques that enabled your prior Adwords and Yahoo PPC successes.

Forgive me but

To blatantly use two clichés in one sentence; instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket, have a few irons in the fire. Do it gradually, though. Only add another branch to your affiliate marketing when you’ve made sure that the last branch is strong. Plus, don’t go crazy with the diversification. Make sure that you don’t diversify so much that you can’t handle the upkeep on all of your marketing ventures. Unless you are that type-A personality who lives to work, you don’t want to exhaust yourself putting in long hours every day of the week. Every time that you add a new branch to your affiliate marketing, see how things go for awhile before starting on a new affiliate adventure. Diversity in your affiliate marketing should always be about working smart

Here’s the Gold

Thanks for reading this far now here’s a tip to make it worth your while: As a successful affiliate marketer I can tell you that you may have to test-market hundreds of products just to find one where you can be profitable in the Adwords arbitrage game. So here’s the shortcut-  choose a product to sell that you absolutely know will be successful. How do we do that? Well lets brainstorm here, which products and affiliate networks do we think are likely making new millionaires all the time? Im waiting …

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How to Avoid Search Engine Optimization Scams

You may have received emails from Search Engine Optimization companies who are offering to have your website placed on the first page of search listings, or even within the top 10 sites in the rankings. This sounds like a great offer, and would be an excellent boost to anyone who has recently developed a website and wants instant results.

As with most things in life, however, if it sound too good to be true, it probably is. Use the following guidelines to avoid signing an expensive contract that may not deliver quite what you expect.

Check References

Whether you want to have your home painted, rent a vacation villa, or have your website optimized, it makes sense to ask others about the services they use and what their experience has been. Ask the SEO company for references which will include sites they have optimized, and the keywords they have optimized those sites for. Follow up the references by contacting the site owners and ask them if their SEO company has provided the results they promised. You don’t know whether the sites provided for reference are owned by friends of the SEO providers, so search for the company name in a search engine and see if they are mentioned in forums etc.  A little research at this point can save a lot of heartache later on.

Make them Work

Verify what keywords the SEO company will optimize your site for. Any company will be able to have your website achieve a top ten ranking for ‘hairdresser in myverysmalltown’, but they’ll have to actually work (and be good at it) to achieve a similar ranking for ‘business’ or ‘US loans’, Their guarantee will be useless if they are based on optimizing for keywords that have little or no competition.

White vs Black

White is hard work and will have them talking freely, Black is highly secret and you’ll get a quick short answer.

Ask the SEO provider what techniques they will use to optimize your website. If they are guarded about giving you this information, it may be because they are using techniques that will provide short term benefit, but will give you major problems when they are discovered by the search engines. Avoid companies creating doorway pages that redirect visitors to your site, or buys links to your site on other sites.

Some companies will use your payments to buy advertising or sponsored listings on search engines. They will say they are fulfilling their contract, however they are using your money to buy advertising space you could have bought yourself. They have not truly improved your search ranking.

Any Additional Services

Find out what ongoing services the SEO company will provide, usually for a monthly fee. Will they carry out a link exchange program? This is valid where links are exchanged between related sites, and provide true added value. Ask whom the link exchange will be with. Avoid link farms and other sites set up purely as a link exchange utility. Search engines see these sites as disrupting the delivery of true search results, and consider them to be bad company. It takes time to manage the exchange of links with reputable sites – will they do it?

“Me and Google are like this.. XOXOXO”

Don’t believe an SEO company has a special relationship with Google, or special openings into other search engines, no matter what they say. Search engines guard their objectivity jealously, and would not want to lose their reputation by promoting your site unfairly. If the Search Engine Optimization company promises you special treatment, stay away from them.

Achieving and maintaining good ranking positions in search engine results takes continued time and effort. It is not a once-only exercise that can be charged for, and then forgotten about. Search engines promote sites which show evidence of long term continued development and organic growth. A site that makes a big impact and then sits unattended will not have a long term future.

Search engine optimization is achieved by hard work and long term commitment to building a website. Only work with companies that will use fair and reasonable means to promote your website. Any other quick-fix options will damage the reputation of your website, and cost you money to have that damage carried out and then put right.

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Blogging is all the rave these days. There isn’t a day that goes by without the words blog, blogger or blogosphere appearing on the front-page of a widely-circulated newspaper, or in a mainstream article on your favourite media site.

But there’s a reason why this has happened.

Blogging has enabled ordinary Joe to write about his life, his passions and his business and makes his thoughts accessible to anyone surfing the web – which could potentially be millions of visitors. Such a marketing tool along with the rise of social media has not gone unnoticed and has resulted in a huge wave of new blogs being created daily, and with that has come a new generation of blogging superstars, experts and professional “bloggers”. You only need to read Darren Rowse’s brilliant Problogger to see what I mean.

Whilst creating a blog has become a lot easier over the past few years thanks to the rise of open-source content management systems such as Wordpress (and their famous 1-click-installs for those of us technically challenged), there are still many assumptions that the general public hold against the blogosphere. I wanted to go through a few of these and comment on them based on my own experience in the world of blogs, in part to warn new writers entering the ‘sphere but also to serve as lessons which can hopefully help you get a leg-up on your competitors.

1. Blogging is not a make money overnight solution. I am yet to find an example of a blogger “making it big” overnight without having put in hours of work beforehand for little or no compensation. The truth is, bloggers can and must spend a lot of time tweaking their designs, writing pages of content, contacting other sites hoping for a link-out or marketing their site in order to try and create a revenue stream, especially if they are a newbie starting from scratch. Perseverance is vital, and the efforts you put in today will hopefully pay off tomorrow.

2. It’s lonely at the bottom. Whilst the famous saying quotes the opposite, it can be very lonely trying to raise the profile of your site whilst starting out as the billionth blog in the blogosphere. When I started Blogtrepreneur I rarely got comments, traffic was in the 10’s not the 1000’s and others around me felt that I was wasting time building something which had no present value. Believe in yourself and what you are doing and you will have something to show for it in the near future.

3. At the beginning, having good content is not the only thing you should be worrying about. I once heard a very good analogy about sites; a new website is like owning a shop in the middle of the desert. The internet is a vast place but unless you tell people about your creation, you can’t expect to have any customers. Sure we’ve all heard the mantra “Content is King” but without a decent marketing plan, you have failed to prepare and thus are preparing yourself to fail.

4. Blogging can have significant start-up costs attached. Everyone knows that a blog can be built for free on platforms such as Blogger, or close to free with a cheap domain and hosting, but many fail to factor in our most valuable resource; time. Every hour that you spend working on your new blog could be spent on an income stream or working in a coffee shop, all of which could be putting more money in your pocket. Calculating your opportunity cost of starting a blog is important and could save you from running into a financial hazard early on in your blogging career.

5. Blogging is difficult. That is a bit of a downer of a statement but nevertheless a true one. By owning a blog you must stay on top of the latest news in your niche, you must brush up on your HTML and Photoshop skills in order to hack away at your theme, you must manage authors and pay-outs and above all, you will be responsible for your blog and everything that comes with it. A lot of people out there don’t mind this responsibility but in the 2 years I have been blogging, I’ve seen writers come and go as they find the blogosphere a hard place to keep up with – make sure you can stick it out and success will seek you out.

All in all, you may think that this has been a pretty pessimistic outlook on the ‘sphere and the financial, emotional, psychological and physical strain that comes with owning and starting a blog. However my goal is not to discourage you from starting your website, as I believe owning one is vital if you want to keep up with the technological progress that is being made every day.

When you do decide to open the doors to your weblog though, remember what I have written above as it will surely make you a better blogger and hopefully, one of the bigger winners.

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The contests section on Digital Point Forums is where I recommend doing this.

If you’ve never started a logo contest and you are in need cheap good looking logos then it’s something I highly recommend (unless you can make them yourself or decide you want to learn that skill of course). Looking down the Digital Point contest forum there many contest holders offing similar prize money but some contests seem to get more and better quality entries than others despite the same prize money on offer. Why? Because some of the contest holders don’t give enough information in their description for what they are looking for.

Essential Instructions to Include in Your Logo Contest:

• Size of the image in Pixels (e.g. 925 x 150)
• What it needs to say. Clarify whether you want some bigger writing as a title and smaller writing as a slogan.
• The style you want.

You may have no idea of what you would call the style you are imagining or you may not even be imagining a style, but if you are launching a new blog (or re-designing an old one) you must have a good idea of what kind of readers your blog will cater too.

A few questions to think about when describing what style you want

• Should it have a modern and slick cutting-edge look?
• Should it be big and fun or more serious?
• Should it contain images and if so what of?

I also find it useful to say something like “feel free to be creative”, which helps designers not worry about you thinking their design is wacky and also encourages more to take part as its more fun for them if they feel free to be creative with their work.

The one vital piece of information to go in in the title of your contest is how much money you are offering as prize money or you will find yourself with considerably less designers even visiting your contest page at all, yet alone entering a design.

If the rest of your site is set up in terms of colour schemes then you can provide a link to it in the contest and ask for the colours to match those already on the site.

It’s easy to feel like the longer instructions you write the less entries you get, but it its about quality not quantity. If someone cant be bothered to read your instructions they probably wont take much time over the logo.

If you don’t want to wait forever (who does!) then something like “quick entries greatly appreciated!” in the content of your post is effective. It’s not worth playing games saying “need urgently contest will close in 24 hours” to try and push designers to enter your contest, it doesn’t work.

Generally speaking if you follow these instructions and offer a reasonable amount of prize money you are pretty much guaranteed to get entries. Wait at a few hours (roughly 5 hours) before considering bumping your thread as it takes time for designs to be completed and getting away with more than one bump without penalization is pretty lucky.

Ask that entries into your contest are posted openly in the forum thread so everyone can see each others designs and the feedback you provide to each. Give feedback to every entry, (even if you are sure you won’t use it) so that everyone can learn from each other to gain clearer idea of what you want. Always be friendly with positives and negatives included in your critique (or at least a “thank you for your entry”). There are plenty of other contests the designer could enter and so it’s all about making them feel inclined to enter yours.

Good luck with your logo contest!

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Gone are the days when you needed to pick up a newspaper to get your news, or wait for the 6 o’clock news to find out what’s happening in your town or around the world. Now more than ever, up-to-the-minute technology is fusing into our lives, enabling us to not only choose when to read out news, but what news to read and where to read them.

Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary feeds, more commonly knows as RSS feeds, is in great part, the source of that fusion. An application initially created for Netscape back in 1999, it has evolved into one of the most readily available methods of obtaining information quickly and easily.

In simplest terms, RSS feeds give the user a way to go to their favorite websites, subscribe to their content, and access their information as it is updated, setting it up in a simple, readable and accessible format, either on their desktop or on their browser. Some of us can’t honestly remember web browsing without the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, and it’s hard to imagine it being taken away.The RSS feed system, initially created as a tiny, seemingly insignificant companion piece to a popular browser, is now an indispensible tool in our everyday Internet life.

One thing that’s become increasingly evident is the role that RSS feeds — more specifically, online aggregated news feeds — have played in the growth of technology and, more specifically, information exchange. The use of RSS feeds grows as the demand for newspapers as a whole dwindles, and it makes sense; after all, why get dated information from a newspaper when you can get updates every minute or so on your computer?

Which is why sites like Techmeme and News Tracker are becoming more and more popular. These automated sites are linked to RSS feeds all over the Internet. When the feeds are updated, so is the page — it’s as simple as that, yet it is so much more vital than what its simplicity implies. For those of us that are subscribed to numerous feeds, it becomes hard to go through all of our updates and read.

RSS aggregated news sources eliminate the work of having to go through all of your live bookmarks and look for breaking news; these sites already have those feeds condensed for you, in an accessible, easy to use website. The difference between these sites and social bookmarking sites such as del.ic.iou.s is that RSS aggregated sites are automated, so they give you up-to-the-minute information, when you need it. The automation factor, in conjunction to the simplicity and accesibility found in these RSS aggregated news source websites is what makes them such an amazing new addition to the world of web surfing.

From its humble beginnings as just another browser application, RSS feeds have evolved by leaps and bounds, into the future of information exchange worldwide.

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Over time I’ve found myself “filtering” through these practices, supposedly leaving only the most time efficient ones left. I knew they all worked “a bit”, but just didn’t result in fast enough growth. The problem that arose is that I realized writing content is by far the most useful thing that can be done. This realization makes the other tasks seem pointless and ineffective, which left me in a constant struggle to keep creating new content all the time.

Despite the fact I’d learned a valuable lesson about how I should be spending my time, it was impossible to write posts all day long and I actually became less efficient than when I was a beginner. Writing all day is of course impossible for everyone (or at least its impossible to keep it at a high standard all the time) and resulted in feelings of burnout and wasted hours pondering starting even more blogs on topics I had ideas to write about.

Solution To The Marketing-Writing Balance:

Outsourcing content creation solves everything.

You can keep marketing all day long as long as there is enough new content to promote, but writing decent quality content all day long cannot be done. Therefore if you outsource content creation and only spend 20% of your time writing, the other 80% can be spent marketing what the hired writers have written. Personally I can write quite happily for about 20% of the day, but it would be crazy to spend the other 80% marketing what I’d written, that ratio needs to be flipped around! Outsourcing content so you have several blog posts each day to promote flips the ratio.

You could say that writing is effective when its enjoyable and marketing is enjoyable when its effective.  In terms of applying that to blogging, writing content should be the first thing to outsource and marketing can be done all the time by you as the main administrator of a blog network.

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