Make Money Online

Paidverts PTC that pays dollars - make 55% NET profit

2015-01-28T11:45:00.002-08:00

PaidVerts (paidverts.com) is new program which can be classified as being an awesome hybrid between a Paid-To-Click and a Revenue Share program. It was launched on March 31, 2014 by Jo Cook.

There comes the ask: Who is Jo?
Well, he is not only an experienced marketeer. He is also the proud owner of MyTrafficValue (mytrafficvalue.com) a crowdfunding platform which is online since early 2010.

In fact, PaidVerts is part of their portofolio products. The innovative and “built from scratch” script is the result of crowdfunding efforts and members suggestions collected over months.

PaidVerts pays you to interact with advertisers!

As quoted in their FAQ: “Advertisers purchase ads in our system. We then deliver those ads to proven valuable users, and provide those users with instant cash incentives to interact with the advertiser. Advertisers thereby pay for guaranteed communication of their products to proven valuable users.”

That’s for the company part.
But I’m sure your focus is about:
– How much you can earn (money)
– What are the other benefits (free direct referrals)

This is how to make money and earn more with PaidVerts:

There is two factors determining your daily earning:
1) The amount of BAP you got (group),
2) The total sales generated that day (yes… it’s not a HYIP! Money comes from genuine sales!).

Since you can hardly have an impact on total sales, your main focus is to grow your BAP. But how?

You are going to purchase advertising (Click on “Buy Ads” on your navigation panel, then “Create a campaign”).
For each $1 spent on advertising, you will receive 3100 BAP.

Those 3100 BAP will convert into $1.55 ads value available to be clicked in your view ads section (and this as fast as your BAP level and total sales allow it!).

To sum up you make 55% NET profit again and again!

Sound cool, right? But keep reading it turns even better! :)

About the BAP: groups/tiers:
Depending how much BAP you have you will have different value and amount of advertisements available to click in your “View Ads” section. For example, on the 10 June 2014, the first group was earning $0.04 by clicking their advertisements while for top group it was… $84!!!

The group are those:
Group 01: from 100 to 1599 BAP.
Group 02: from 1600 to 12000 BAP.
Group 03: from 12000 to 24000 BAP.
Group 04: from 24k to 48k BAP.
Group 05: from 48k to 96k BAP.
Group 06: from 96k to 180k BAP.
Group 07: from 180k to 360k BAP.
Group 08: from 360k to 720k BAP.
Group 09: from 720k to 1.5m BAP.
Group 10: from 1.5m to 3m BAP.
Group 11: from 3m to 6m BAP.
Group 12: 6m to 20m BAP.
Group 13: 20m BAP and up.

Set up your goals:
Divide the lower limit of a group by 3100 to find out how much you should invest to enter a group. For example, a $16 investment would give you 49600 BAP (16*3100) and make you enter the Group 05. Everyday at server reset, you will burn BAP (2000 per $1 value) to receive your advertising to click. Once you have clicked the ads, you will use a part (or all if you want to grow faster) of your earning to repurchase advertising in order to remain in your group. And the 55% remaining is your NET PROFIT (you can withdraw it!).

PaidVerts is your free direct referrals pool!

It’s now obvious: earning potential is great at PaidVerts. But there is a HUGE bonus!
You get free advertising by the same way. Not a bulk and useless 3 seconds PTC view, some great 30 seconds advertising shown to thousands investors and cheat protected by awesome captcha. This will probably get you some great upgraded direct referrals on your favorite programs! :)

PaidVerts is a transparent money making machine!

The good part with PaidVerts is that you can see a breakdown of every cent earned, and paid out to investors.
This comes handy to set up your strategy with accuracy! :)

Paidverts comes also with affiliate system.
Earn 10% on every purchases your referrals make and 5% on their clicks (You will love when they start clicking high-value ads! :D).

There is a lot more things to discover and enjoy. This blog post will be updated overtime to make it more complete!

SIGN UP NOW and start Clicking For $$$.

The Best Сloud Mining Opportunities Instant Bitcoin Mining

2014-01-03T02:59:00.000-08:00

CEX.IO provides the best Сloud Mining opportunities

CEX.IO is the first commodity exchange website, which allows trading of bitcoin mining facilities or GHS (GigaHash per second) Trading.

Before CEX.IO, in order to mine BTC, users had to solve and overcome the following problems:

    Collect information on the available mining hardware, and their peculiarities
    Wait up to 6 months for the hardware to be shipped
    Read a ton of guides and tutorials in order to assemble and connect the hardware to the pool
    Ensure proper power supply and hardware cooling
    Suffer from hardware breakage and power loss

CEX.IO is based on a brand new business scheme, where all mining hardware is installed in a data-center, and are safely stored and properly maintained. Users can buy/sell mining facilities in a matter of seconds, and receive additional income from mining, or from trading with other users.

All GHS purchased at CEX.IO become sole property of the owner without any time constraints or other limitations, until sold to other users. All users are able to sell their GHS at any time for the appropriate market price. The GHS keep mining BTC even when the GHS are being sold, up until they are transferred to the new owner’s account.

CEX.IO gives it’s users the following benefits:

    All GHS start mining right after purchase
    Collective mining, where the chance of getting a reward gets bigger proportionally to the overall pool capacity.
    Mining hardware is kept safe and maintained properly in our data-center
    No cooling or space-related problems
    No power or network connection losses
    0% pool fee
    Block reward includes transaction fees
    Minimum fee for electricity, hosting and maintenance, starting from November 1st. The approximate fee amount is $0.001 per GHS / hour.
    Hardware failure or downtime is automatically compensated with high precision.
    Powerful Trader API, which allows users to implement CEX.IO features on their websites, apps, etc.
    Helpful and friendly support staff, able to solve all mining related issues
    A vast community of miners ready to provide useful advice on almost any topic.

All hardware is already set up and ready for mining with the most optimal settings.

Trading GHS is as easy as trading currency pairs.

CEX.IO works with a private mining pool GHash.IO. It supplies the commodity exchange with GHS from authorised partners, who secure a constant maintenance of GHS. GHash.IO uses the PPLNS payout system, where rewards are distributed among shares in a window, starting with the last share submitted and going backwards up to some number N of shares.

CEX.IO offers a convenient “Redeem Hardware” option, where users can redeem mining hardware equivalent to their GHS balance, and get it delivered to a specified location.

CEX.IO provides an attractive referral program, where users can receive bonus GHS for referring active traders to the commodity exchange. The system adds 3% of referred user’s GHS balance to the bonus GHS balance for mining purposes only.

CEX.IO has already accumulated:

    40 TH/s (will be expanded up to 400 TH/s)
    6k+ commodity exchange users
    1000 BTC traded daily

To join please click the banner below

How To Make Money With CoinUrl

2013-07-08T13:01:00.003-07:00

Coinurl is a new site link shortening combination similar to Adf.ly and banner ads like bidvertiser, payment through your 
online account Coinbase.

Step 1. To make money with Coinurl you first need to have an account, click here to register

Step 2. Fill in your information:

Step 3. After that log in here:

Step 4. There are 2 items that can make money it's shortened link or banner ads embedded in websites/blogs.

For the shortened link you just have to Shorten URL and enter the link to any application below:

After recieve this link:

You just share the link as http://cur.lv/3h90 when someone click on will get the money.
How to make money Monday's banner Ads, you should have a website/blog has more hits.

On My ad Slots-Create Slot to get the code:

This is the form of banner ads 468 × 60 after add to blog:

This is the statistics dashboard click:
The click up to 0.0025-0.003 Bitcoint equivalent to 600 000-800 000/click, this is the highest price for the ad network banner ads Free now that I used to know.
I wish you success!

  
What is a BitCoin? (click here)

How To Make Money With Adf.ly

2012-09-14T03:23:00.000-07:00

ADF.LY TIPS- Make $180 per day online with ADFL.LY url shortening website. adfly url shortener is the best and easiest way to make money online without stress. You will learn the step by step details on how to earn money online with Adfly short url and also the tips and tricks I use to earn more than $180 per day online by shortening my url and referral link with www.Adf.ly.

Not only will you learn how to make money online with Adf.ly url shortener and tips on how to make $180 per day, you will also have the full list of all the high paying url shortening websites that are like Adfly clone which you can use to multiply that amount per day. These ADFLY CLONE also have the greatest and high paying referral programs you can ever imagine online, with this program you will earn a high percentage commissions for your whole lifetime without working.
Just register at adf.ly tips and apply the tips and tricks, then sit back and watch your money flow!

Get paid to share your links!

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH ADFLY
How Adfly works

adfly is a website that pays you when you shorten or shrink your referral link or any url address from their website.
With Adfly, you can promote any website, blog or referral link of your choice and still get paid for it!

Shorten you url at Adfly, post it on facebook, twitter, your blog, website, forums or any social network websites and make money everytime someone clicks on it. If you have a large number of followers on twitter and facebook's fan page, you can make more than $1000 per day. A friend of mine who has a large number followers on twitter easily makes that. Even Real madrid football club of Spain makes use of Adfly short url on their twitter account.

HOW IT WORKS :

Visit Adfly website to register and after registration they will send an email comfirmation message to you immediately. Then visit your email and click on the link they sent you which will verify your account. Then Log in to Adf.ly website again with the email address and the password you used to register, update your profile and the payment method that you preferred to be paid with and then click submite button. Finally, copy any website url address of your choice eg www.twitter.com or referral link and paste it in the shrink box then click shrink, It will generate a shorter link that looks like this: http://adf.ly/6672 , then copy the new link and paste it on your facebook wall, twitter, forum, blog etc with a note attached to it and makes it look like this=> click and visit here=> http://adf.ly/6672 to join twitter.
Click here and view how people make use of Adfly short url on twitter.
Each time people click on the link it will show them an Ad from ADFLY and also redirect them to your website. And you are paid everytime somebody clicks on it.

Please don't sell this Ebook because there was no reselling right when I bought them. It's free to download, I only gain through your clicks:
adfly/Google Search Engine Ebook
Learn everything about google search engine and get your website high ranked on google. Download ebook=>
adfly/googlesearchengine

ADF.LY TIPS: HOW TO EARN $180 PER DAY WITH ADF.LY.

Adf.ly tip and trick - these are the ADFLY'S tips and tricks I use to get people click on my www.adf.ly links which earns me about $180 per day. But make sure what you are directing them to is what they might have a high interest in.

FACEBOOK'S ADFLY TRICK :

I have about 20,000 fans on my page on facebook and two facebook accounts with about 10,000 friends, so whenever I have an interesting product to direct them to or a website with an interesting article that might interest them, I copy the website address and shrink it at Adfly, then copy the shrinked link and paste it on my facebook's fan page and on my two facebook accounts wall with a descriptive short note attached to it urging them to click it and visit the product's website.

People who are interested in the product always rush to click the link and visit the website which earns me money each time somebody clicks on it to visit. Adf.ly pays you more than $4.00 per 1000 clicks on your shrinked or shorten link.

So when about 30,000 people on my facebook's fan page and friends from my two facebook accounts click on my short link i make up to $120. I also use ADFOCUS, another website which is similar to Adfly to double that amount, however Facebook has banned and blocked Adf.ly link on their website but i still outsmart them and post my links.

How it works :

After shrinking or shortening my link at Adfly, i copy it and then go to nulrefer.com and click the cloak option box then paste the link in the box and click generate, then copy the generated link which cannot be blocked again by facebook and paste it on my facebook fan page wall and my profile wall with an attractive short note directing people to click on it and visit the website i want them to visit. But it's better to use this trick on your referral link alone to avoid ban. You can use Adfocus on facebook because they are accepted.

TWITTER'S ADFLY TRICK :

Write an attractive but highly exagerated note directing people to click on your link eg: 'buy a car with just $10.00, click and visit from here: http://adfoc.us/126101' This is highly recommended if you want to earn big with Adfly. I easily earn more than $45.00 on twitter by applying this tip.

YOUTUBE'S TRICK:

Whenever you upload a video on youtube, shorten the downloading link in Adf.ly's shrinker, then paste it on your youtube account and earn money each time someone clicks and downloads the video. You can make more than $300 per day on youtube alone if you have a very popular and interesting video that can attract a large number of people.

FORUM'S ADFLY TIPS:

Put the exagerated short note in your forum signatures, this will make people to click on it each time you commented on the forum's post. However I earn little ($18.00 or less $15.00)on forums because I don't have much time to comment on posts.

OTHER ADFLY TRICK :

you can also visit other social network websites wherever you find a large number of people interested in a particular topic, search that topic on google then copy the website link and shrink it at Adfly then copy and paste the link on the social network website and direct the people to click the link and visit the website for their favourite topic. The more they click on the link the more money you make!

ADFLY ALTERNATIVES

Websites Similar Adfly

These are the lists of top paying url shortening Adfly clone (url shortening Websites like Adf.ly). The websites are similar in the sense that you can use the same pattern of registration and earnings for all them, but the only difference is the amount of money each pays to its members and also the percentage of earnings from their referral programs.

ADFOCUS - is a url shortening website
adfly clone that will pay you $6.00 per
1000 clicks on your shorten url. You can Also refer
your friends and earn 20% of their earnings for life. Their payment is quick and consistant.
$5 is minimum payout through
Paypal Or Alertpay. It's legit and very popular. CLICK HERE TO VISIT AND ADFOCUS FOR FREE

LINKBUKS - is the best and most legit url shortening
service website similar to adfly, earn $6.50 per 1000 clicks. You can make one dollar per day with just 8 active referrals. They also have a nice to earn through pay per survey completed. $0.6 per survey. Also
refer users and get 32%
commission. $5 is the minimum.
payout through Paypal and alertpay. It's legit.

Make Money With Imagetwist and Adf.ly

2012-09-13T02:27:00.003-07:00

Hi Friends..in this post i am gonna share some of my imagetwist tips and tricks that i am using to increase my imagetwist earnings. As we all know that imagetwist is a free image hosting site that pays you for views that your uploaded images generates. The concept is quite similar to adfly. Adfly pays you for views that your shrinked links gets whereas it is images in case of imagetwist. i am working with both of these(adfly and imagetwist). While using both of these services i found that it's easy to make money from imagetwist as images speaks louder than words...lol.

Following are the three reasons for this:-

There are very few places where you can post your adfly links, but imagetwist images can be shared in almost any forum.
Adult content is not allowed under Adfly but you can upload adult pics on imagetwist..and those adult pics can be shared in almost all adult forums..and we all know the amount of traffic that adult forums gets...which means more earnings from imagetwist.
You can get more referrals in Imagetwist as its minimum payout is $1 only, It pays Via Paypal or AlertPay or MoneyBookers or WebMoney (WMZ). And Imagetwist also Pay 20% earnings of your each referral for lifetime. Pay Up to $3 For Each 1000 Image Views. And images normally gets more views than links.

Now coming on to the imagetwist tips and tricks. If you have not joined imagetwist yet..you can sign up now!!

Imagetwist tricks and tips to make more money from imagetwist

yesterday, i made 0.23$ from imagetwist

in just half an hour...here is the proof of it. Earlier i was getting only 0.04$ to 0.05$ from imagetwist in a single day but after using theses tricks....you can clearly see the results.

Some Basic tips and tricks for all imagetwist users

Upload controversial pics...you will definitely get more clicks.
Share imagetwist images on your own websites/Blogs.
Post your imagetwist images on reddit...there is a official community for imagetwist users on reddit.(real amateur)
Upload your adfly payment proofs on imagetwist..then share them on adfly forum in the payment proof section( if you are a adfly user)
You can always make a youtube video of some of your pics..andcan leave your imagetwist links in the descriptions as youwere doing in case of adfly.

Im going to tell you the General method how to make money with adf.ly and ImageTwist together so money making can NEVER STOP!

You might've noticed in my previous post that I mentioned adf.ly. adf.ly is a website that pays you to shorten URLs. They aren't the highest paying solution out there, but if you frequent forums or social network sites a lot, then this might be the site for you. If you have a website you think someone will like, shorten the URL! Have a link in a tweet but it puts you over the 140 character limit (which is really stupid), shorten it with adf.ly!! They make their money by redirecting the clicker (whoever clicked your link) to a full page ad (usually an iLivid download). They wait on the page for five seconds then a skip button appears in the upper right corner. They click on that and get redirected to the page you shortened. Their rates are $5.00 per 1000 page visits, or something. Not good, but not bad. You also get 20% of what your referrals make on this site. This site only pays out via PayPal or Payza.

How adf.ly works:

People pay to Advertise with adf.ly, and Publishers who shrink their links with adf.ly get a share of profit every time someone clicks on adf.ly shortened link.
When the adf.ly shortened link is clicked, there will be 5 seconds ad shown to the person who clicked the shortened link before they can go back to view the page they wanted.
Adf.ly pays up to $5.31 / 1000 visitors.
You can also earn 20% LifeTime earnings from your referrals.
Easy-to-reach $5.00 minimum payout.

SIGN UP WITH ADF.LY

Get paid to share your links!

Positioning your Adsense Ads

2007-11-29T04:20:00.000-08:00

The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something - relax).

It was 10.30am and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on at the time. I shifted the ad to a new position and then got distracted with something else and forgot about it.

A few hours later (I got very distracted) I again was thinking of bed but decided to check my Adsense stats for one last time before shutting down my powerbook - imagine my surprise when I found that my click through rate was 40% higher than normal (and so was the earnings for that time of night)!? At first I thought I was dreaming, then I considered that maybe Google had made a mistake, then I panicked that someone had been randomly clicking all my ads - and then I remembered the repositioning of ads that I’d done a few hours before.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake excited by the potential that I’d just unlocked in my blogs, inspired by the fact that I could make the same changes to all my other blogs tomorrow, kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier (what a missed opportunity) and wondering if there might be an even better spot to try putting my ads.

The following morning I lept out of bed and checked my Adsense stats again to find that my click through rate was even higher than the night before and that I’d stumbled upon a way of doubling my income - literally over night.

Once again the response to my post yesterday to Positioning your Adsense Ads has been quite amazing as people have emailed and left comments asking for further details of what the ’secret position’ is to place ads on a blog that will magically double earnings overnight.

Perhaps I’ve created a monster in the past week or so here in telling people how much I earn. Since then I’ve been quite overwhelmed by the attention - emails, comments, instant messaging - all on levels I’ve not experienced before from a post. I guess people want to make money from their blogs! I can’t blame them I guess - I’m obviously interested in that too.

So what is the magical, secret position to put your Adsense ads? Someone even emailed me tonight offering to pay me to reveal the secret. Hmmmm - maybe i should hold an Ebay auction and offer the information to the highest bidder!

No - I’m a nice guy - you can send cash if you want to but I’m not into secrets and am always (well usually) happy to share what I know. The ’secret’ was simply to move my ads down from the banner position into the actual post itself. At the time Adsense only allowed one ad placement per page, these days they allow three (like I have on my blog here) - so now you can actually keep your banner ad and also put one inside your content.

So why do ‘in content’ ads work better? The answer is pretty obvious - in fact its quite literally staring you in the face as you read this…..you’re reading this….your eyes are trained upon the content of this post. What better place to put ads than the place your reader is pretty likely to look? Now keep in mind that different websites and blogs tend to have different results when it comes to where their readers eyes are drawn to (see this fascinating blog for some studies on this) but it is generally accepted that the first paragraph of content is generally reasonably well read of most pages.

Of course there are some who argue that this isn’t an ethical thing to do - putting text link ads into the content of a blog - I’m not going to get into that argument here except to say that in my opinion blog readers are usually smart enough to tell what is content and what is an ad (the Ads by Goooogle lable is enough for me). All I’m saying here is that in my opinion and experience, the positions that generally get the highest click-throughs are within the main body and content of your blog.

I’m not really telling a massive secret here - if you look at most of the top earning blogs out there you’ll find that most of us are using the same strategy with our ad placements. There are slight variation on the theme between us but check out some of these blogs use of ads within content and you should see what I mean:

Engadget - ads placed after a post and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
Digital Photography Blog - ads here are within content at the top of posts. Another ad can be found at the bottom of posts before comments.
Mobile Tracker - ads at the end of posts and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
Gizmodo - ad at the base of each quote on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
Of course they are all variations on a theme but there is a pretty common theme there i think.

I will say this however - not all blogs are the same and each one of my blogs vary in degree to which they prove this point. Sometimes the click through rates between blogs vary incredibly despite the fact that the ads are in exactly the same position. Obviously its not as simple as just sticking an ad into the content of your blog - its worth experimenting and tracking your results. What works on one blog will not always work on another.

In my next post on this topic I’ll answer the question - ‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less?’

In a previous post in this series I asked the questions:

‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less with adsense?’

There are probably two main ways of answering these questions. The first one is from the point of view of aesthetics and the second is about cold hard cash and whether it will earn you more money to have more ads or less.

1. Aesthetics - probably the most common complaint I hear against Adsense (and other types of ads) is that advertising is an eyesore and ruins the design of a page. I’ve read post after post of people complaining that they do not want to be exposed with ads and especially offensive to their sensitivities are pages that have ads all over them.

I have some sympathy for this view and its something that always weighs heavily on my mind as a blogger - how many ads are too many ads? The beauty (probably the wrong work in a paragraph about aesthetics) of Adsense is that it is customizable and ads can be made to blend into or contrast the design of a page. Even so, the more ads you put on your page the higher the chance you have of offending the those who are advertorially (I know its not a word - I’m being post-modern) sensitive.

Related to this is the theme of your blog. I have some blogs that I only serve one ad per page (or even no ads) simply because I don’t feel its appropriate to commercialize the blog at all.

2. Financial Considerations - believe it or not - but having more Adsense ads on your site can actually mean you earn less income from them! I know this sounds stupid and some of you think I’ve finally lost it - but its true, I found out for myself last week. Let me tell you the story.

Last week I decided to ‘tweak the ads on one of my blogs’. The blog in question had two ads per page, one in a banner ad at the top of the page and the other in a position within the content section of my blog. The ad within the content was my primary ad - the one that performed best (as previously discussed). Adsense allows three ads per page so the logic in my mind said ‘three ads will perform better than two’. So I cleverly decided to ad a small ad to my side bar (similarly to the one I have on this blog at present over on the left). I added it (with a label saying it was an ad) and smuggly went to bed imagining that I’d just earned myself a few extra dollars a day.

The next day I noticed that the Click Through Rate of my Adsense ads was lower than normal overall - so were earnings. I was not too concerned because it does tend to go up and down from day to day. The following day I noticed the same thing - lower CTR and lower earnings. Day three and I was starting to worry a little that something had gone wrong as the trend continued and I had little idea why. At first it didn’t even cross my mind that the new ad might be having any impact.

I checked the channels feature of Adsese at this point and realised that only one of the many channels that I track was lower than normal. It had halved its normal rate! Of course the channel that had decreased was the primary in content ad from my blog (my cash cow of the blog).

It only took me a few moments to work out why this had happened. You see the ad that I had added to my side bar was stealing ads from my primary ad in the content and leaving it with few, if any ads to serve. Let me explain.

The way Adsense works if you have more than one ad running on a page is that it will serve ads to the ad that it finds first on your blog. It fills up the first one first, the second one in the code second and the third one in the code third. If at any point it runs out of relevant ads it stops serving them and you either end up with a public service ad, an empty space or an alternate ad (depending upon how you configure your set up).

On that particular blog the code was in this order.

- 1 Banner ad

- 2 Side bar ad

- 3 In content ad

You can see what was happening - the banner ad got first priority and was always served ads. The side bar ad almost always got ads and the in content ad got them some (50%) of the time. Of course this left my primary position empty half of the time (not a wise move).

You can probably guess what I did faster than a speeding bullet - side bar ad was gone very quickly and the banner ad didn’t last long either. Now the in content ad is always full and I have moved a secondary ad further down the page. CTR and revenue are back up to normal (in fact they are up a bit).

So - take home message time. When designing the ads on your page rank your ad positions in terms of priority. Which spot do you want to get the first ads and always be full? Which are secondary spots that don’t matter so much if they are empty from time to time? Then check to see which order they appear in the code on your site. This is easily done. Simply select the ‘view source’ option in your browser. This should open a window that shows you the back end of the page you’re viewing - find the google adsense code and work out which is which (you should be able to tell by the size of the ad). If your primary ad isn’t the first one you might need to make some changes either to where you place your ads or to how your blog is configured and serves the code.

Big Fish, Small Pond Blogging

2007-11-29T04:14:00.000-08:00

I just checked my email and found three requests from readers to have a look over their blogs and offer some tips. I’m happy to do this from time to time for free - but am unable to do it individually for everyone in depth without having to charge a bit of a consulting fee (mainly due to the numbers of requests I get. So I thought without mentioning the blogs who’ve asked for help (I don’t want to cause any offence or embarrassment) I thought over the next few days I’d write a few random tips that come to mind as I’ve surfed each of them.

Define Your Niche

The temptation when you first get into blogging is to write everything that comes into your head whether its about the movies you’re seeing, what you’re reading in the newspaper, your work, your latest techy toy etc. Whilst this might interest you and give you plenty of posting ideas it actually can make it difficult to write a profitable blog for a number of reasons. These include:

You have a better chance of ranking higher in search engines if all your posts are on related topics that are interlinked. If you have 100 pages on 100 topics the search engine will not see you as an authority on anything, but if you have a collection of pages that relate to one another they’ll consider it a safer bet that you are an authority on that topic.
You have a better chance of finding an advertising income stream for your blog. This is the case both for ad systems like Adsense and if you’re wanting to get private sponsorship for your page. With Adsense - it looks at the content on your page to determine which ads to serve. If it looks at your page and sees many topics you’ll confuse it and the topic of your ads may or may not relate to your content. The danger is that if your content does not relate to your ads you’re not likely to have people click the ads. The ideal situation is that you write on a topic and your readers see ads for that same topic - if you get this happening you increase the chance of them clicking and therefore of you earning an income. Likewise with private sponsorship deals you’re unlikely to find a company willing to pay you money to put their ads on unless their product relates to what you’re writing about. It wouldn’t be good business practice for them to do so.
You run the risk of confusing your readership if you blog on too many topics. Yes you might find a few people who are interested in the eclectic mix of topics you write on, however the more things you write about that they are NOT interested in the less chance you have of them coming back to your blog.

Of course there are exceptions to the ‘niche topic’ principle of successful blogs - there are of course successful blogs that cover many topics, but most at least have a loose theme whether it be politics, technology, news, etc. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard given to web entrepreneurs is ‘try to be a big fish in a small pond’. Define your pond (a topic) and work at having the most comprehensive site on the net on it.

If you want to write about more than one topic I’d recommend you start a second and third and fourth blog rather than try to put it all into one.

I know that this tip can be difficult to hear for some bloggers - but its not just me that is saying it. Virtually every profitable blog that I can think of is carving out a niche for itself - some are smaller than others, some are more profitable than others, but they are niches nonetheless.

10 Steps to Guarantee You’ll Never Make More than 0.14 cents per month with AdSense

2007-11-28T03:44:00.000-08:00

Every day I come across and courses which promise to teach people how to make thousands of dollars a day with AdSense by following a few easy steps - so I thought it was time for one that shows you how to guarantee to keep your blog from making money with AdSense. Here’s my top 10 tips for a guaranteed earning of 0.14 cents or less per month from your blog:

1. Position Ads Out of Sight - Ensure that you put any ad units that you put on your blog below the fold where they’ll be sure not to annoy your readers. If you do choose to put your ads above the fold (why you would I’ll never know) make sure they are placed in the white zones in the diagram to the right. Obviously the bottom of the page is best but the top right corner and right hand skyscraper positions can also work against you very well. Do your best to keep the ads away from the areas that people’s eyes will be drawn to (ie away from content, pictures etc). This helps keep the money from rolling in quite well.

2. Only post to your blog once every few weeks - Lull your readers into a hypnotic trance decrease the chances of them ever visiting your blog.

3. Unclear Post Topics - If and when you do choose to post make sure that your posts have as little focus as possible in terms of topic. Write about multiple topics in every post in an attempt to confuse the AdSense bots. Never blog about anything with a commercial aspect to it and attempt to keep your posts as uninteresting, unoriginal and as useless to readers as you possibly can.

4. Poor Post Titles - Never use the keywords that relate to your post in your post’s title. In order to get lower paying (and irrelevant) ads use the word ‘blog’ as much as possible both in your titles and posts. Also try to find topics to write about that AdSense has no ads in their inventory for. Do this by simply adding keywords into Google.com until no ads come up next to the search results.

5. Never set your ads to show Alternative Ads - If you do your readers will see ads that might make you money when Google can’t find any of their own to show (something that ideally you will have if you get #4 above right). A much better strategy is to just allow the PSA (public service ads) to appear which will guarantee you earn nothing at all.

6. Click your own AdSense ads - This might make your AdSense total go up for a little while but the chances are that you’ll never see the money because you’ll be banned from the system. You might even go into negative earnings if Google decides to get their lawyers onto you!

7. Break Other Rules - If clicking on your own ads doesn’t get you banned fast enough try breaking some of the other AdSense terms and conditions like blatantly encouraging your readers to click your ads, using obscene language, writing constantly about violent and adult topics, labeling your ads with things like ‘free prizes if you click here’ or by putting flashing arrows pointing at the ads etc. Another good one is to add YPN ads to the same pages that AdSense ads are on. This has the double bonus of possibly getting you banned from both programs in one hit! If AdSense do contact you to make a change to some rule you’ve broken it’s best to ignore these emails, or if you decide to write back be as argumentative and uncooperative as possible.

8. Make your ads stand out - Set your AdSense ad design to completely clash with the rest of your blog’s design. Blending your ads is for sissies - be bold! In essense what you’re aiming for is to make your ads look as much out of place and as ad-like as possible. Here’s a few of my personal favorites (keep in mind I’m not a very good designer - I’m sure you could do worse if you put your mind to it):

9. Never track your AdSense ads performance - Definitely do not use channels to monitor how your different ads perform. This way you’ll ensure that if you do happen to fluke some well performing ads - you’ll never know which ones they were and will never be able to reproduce the results elsewhere.

10. Lower your Traffic - Ultimate the probably one of the best ways to ensure you never make much money from AdSense is to work hard at maintaining as little traffic as possible to your blog. You can do this in many ways including:

Ignoring any readers that do happen upon your blog
Practicing black hat SEO principles to make sure you get banned from Google and other Search Engines
Writing the worst content possible
Stealing other people’s content (and other unethical practices)
Post as infrequently as possible (I know I’ve said this already - but it’s worth repeating
Never promote your blog in any online or offline forums

If you do have an occasional surge in traffic you can always remove the ads from the page that is getting the most traffic. Some bloggers do this well by only showing ads on certain pages (like their front page) and not showing them on other pages that get traffic.

Bonus Chitika Tip - If you want to branch out from AdSense and not earn much from other ad programs you might like to join up with Chitika and try many of the above strategies also. Another good one with Chitika is to use the default settings and keywords. If you really want to push it with Chitika you should target keywords that are as irrelevant to the topic of your blog as possible. In fact you can use this strategy with many money making strategies for your blog - especially affiliate programs. The more irrelevant they are to your blog’s topic the less chance they will convert!

Run a SWOT Analysis on Your Blog

2007-11-28T03:40:00.000-08:00

Today is the last day in the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project and as a result I want to make your last task a little reflective and forward looking.

Your task today is to run a SWOT Analysis on your blog.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic tool that has been used for many years in business (and many other fields) to look at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that that business might have or be facing.

Much has been written about SWOT analysis and how to carry it out (I’ll let you do some searches on Google for it if you’re not familiar with it) however let me write a brief description of how to apply it to a blog.

1. Define Your Mission and Goals

Before you carry out your SWOT it’s important that you know what your blog’s goals are (otherwise the exercise is a little pointless as you’ve got nothing to review your site based upon). As a result you’ll want to have done Day 28’s task - Define Your Blogs Mission Statement.

2. List Your Blog’s Strengths

What attributes does your blog have that will help you to achieve your blog’s goals? What does your blog have going for it? What are you good at as a blogger? What resources and assets do you have at your disposal? What do you do better than anyone else?

3. List Your Blog’s Weaknesses

What attributes does your blog that are holding you back from achieving it’s goals? What skills do you not have as a blogger? What is ‘broken’ on your blog or in your workflow? What could or should you improve about your blog? What should you probably avoid in your blogging? What is distracting you from your goals?

4. List Your Blog’s Opportunities

What external things could/are helping you achieve your blog’s goals? What trends are their in your blog’s niche that you could explore on your blog? What tools and technologies could you use to improve your blog?

5. List Your Blog’s Threats

What external things could or area hindering you achieving your blog’s goals? What are other blogs in your niche doing that could be hindrance to your own blog’s growth?
note - Think of Strengths and Weaknesses as internal factors while Opportunities and Threats are external factors.

6. Analyze Your Reflections and Generate Strategies

Take some time out to work out what you can do with your findings. How can you utilize your Strengths? How can you bring your Weaknesses to an end? How can you make the most of your Opportunities? how can you fend off the Threats?
As my old Marketing lecturer used to say - ‘doing the analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats is only half the job. Working out how to turn Weaknesses into Strengths and Threats into Opportunities is the key part of a SWOT analysis’.

7. Plan to Do Something and Do It

Translate your findings into an Action Plan and begin to implement it.

Doing a SWOT analysis is something that I do periodically on my individual blogs and on my overarching business also. Have you ever done one on your blog? What tips would you give to others wanting to do one?

Relevant Ads

2007-11-26T02:07:00.000-08:00

Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.

Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.

Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).

How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.

Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.

Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.

Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.

Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.

Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.

Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!

If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

High Paying Ads

2007-11-26T01:59:00.000-08:00

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.
As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.

The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.

Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using Adsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign.
If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.
Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.
I’m told Keyword Sleuth is a similar program to Word Tracker however I am yet to trial it.

Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

Increasing Traffic

2007-11-26T01:49:00.000-08:00

have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense Revenue

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content - What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ’scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
Link to others - be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
Comment on others blogs - Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
Update Frequently - There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
Interact with Readers - Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
Optimise for Search Engines - I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
Add a signature to your outgoing email - Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
Web Rings - There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
Add an RSS feed to your blog - more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
List your site on Portals - There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
Blog Search Engines and Indexes - Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
Start a Newsletter - Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this - hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog - every week!
Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
Get involved in other web forums - Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
Promote your Posts - If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on - be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts - make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.
What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?
Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads - the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

An Equation for Success

2007-11-26T01:41:00.000-08:00

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….

Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased. For example earlier in the week when Slashdot linked up to this post I had an influx of 50,000 visitors in 24 hours to my blog - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what this did to my Adsense earnings that day! Work on increasing your traffic levels and you should see an increase in your Adsense Revenue.

High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.

Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.

Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.

Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.

Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.

How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

2007-11-26T01:37:00.000-08:00

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.

If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.
Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.

Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).

It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.
The next posts in this series will expand upon these aspects of successful blogging with Adsense with our Adsense Equation.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers

2007-11-26T01:23:00.000-08:00

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

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

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do You ‘Sell’ Your Blog?

2007-11-26T01:14:00.000-08:00

am no stranger (nor are you, probably) to how the wider media sometimes depicts bloggers: as closeted wannabees who add to the rise of ‘faux journalism’. Books are currently being published on the subject.

This could understandably contribute to any beginner blogger’s self-consciousness; especially those who are staring at their ad revenue reports, wondering if any money is every going to start showing up.

I used to be bashful when I talked about my blog. Not anymore. Why should I be? I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what it catalogues; thoughts, my goals, even my ambitions.

No doubt you feel the same about yours, too. But any hint of shyness, or pause, when you talk of your blog is hardly going to attract readers. Or advertisers.

Recently, I migrated from Blogger to Wordpress; a rather stressful time for me, for I was deathly afraid that over a year’s worth of work and effort would somehow evaporate into nothingness (luckily, it didn’t). I had several reasons for the change; the main ones being I was a little tired of the limits of Blogger, and I wanted a purer control of my own writing and ‘brand’, for lack of a better word.

When I discussed my plans with non-bloggers, they all asked me “Why?” Why change? Why bother? What’s the difference?
I replied, “I just felt like it was time. It didn’t feel comfortable anymore.”

Granted, this was rather a drastic change. It needn’t be. Standard templates only need to be tweaked slightly to give yourself the opportunity to individualise (and hence ‘validate’) your blogging status. This mightn’t be important to some people; for others it just might be the chance to assert their creative will, and this newly found confidence can lead them on to loftier plans.

And sometimes stamping your own blogging status begins with how you speak about blogging in the first place.

Here’s my challenge:
Put your blog’s URL as part of your signature in your email (if you haven’t already).
Mention it in conversations.
Enter blog carnivals.
Do what you can (short of spamming, naturally!) to spread the word of your blog.
What are you waiting for?
Help sell your blog to the world. Isn’t it worth it?

How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond

2007-11-26T01:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve had a lot of requests to detail how I got 100,000 visitors (now past 150k as I write this) to Free Money Finance. While the topic is not clearly in the subject area of personal finances, it can be part of how you increase your income (and thus improve your net worth), so I’ll cover it. Plus, this will serve to help out other bloggers as well as remind me of what else I need to do to grow this blog. If this isn’t your cup of tea, simply ignore these posts. I post frequently enough that a new, money-related post is not far behind this one.
I’ll over this topic in a series of “steps”, each one presenting a simple, unique step I took to get to 100,000 visitors. I’ll also try to keep the steps in the order I did them, though several happened simultaneously, so that won’t be easy.
That said, here we go.

Step 1 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Pick the right topic.

This might seem to be a simple step (and maybe even counter blogging — can’t I just blog about what I want?), but it’s critical. To me, the right topic is one that:
You’re passionate about — If you’re not passionate about it, you won’t post regularly, you’ll lose interest, and your readers will be able to tell your heart isn’t really in it (and they’ll go away). If you are, your readers will identify with you and get to “love” your personality. And they’ll come back. And tell their friends to stop by.
You’re knowledgeable about — You don’t have to be an expert on the topic, but you need to know more than most people to get a lot of people to your site. Otherwise, why would they stop by (or come back)?
Is it popular — Let’s face it, if you want to write about the exercise habits of your hamster, not many people are likely to visit your blog. You have to have a topic that many, many people want to read about if you want to get to 100k. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t write about your hamster (or anything else a large group wouldn’t want to read about). If you blog for your own pleasure, then go for it — make Hammy a star. But if you want to get to 100,000 visitors, you need a topic (like personal finances) that many people what to know more about.
Watch out for the rest of FMF’s series later in the week at Free Money Finance.

26 Steps to 15,000 visitors a day

2007-11-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

The following will build a successful site in 1 years time via Google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyones favorite: a self starter.

A) Prep Work:
Prep work and begin building content. Yep, long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a 100 page site. That's just for openers. That's 100 pages of "real content", as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright/tos...etc fluff pages.

B) Domain name:
Easily brandable. You want "google.com" and not "mykeyword.com". Keyword domains are out - branding and name recognition are in - big time in. The value of keywords in a domain name have never been less to se's. Learn the lesson of "goto.com" becomes "Overture.com" and why they did it. It's one of the powerful gut check calls I've ever seen on the internet. That took resolve and nerve to blow away several years of branding. (that's a whole 'nuther article, but learn the lesson as it applies to all of us).
[via search engine world]

C) Site Design:
The simpler the better. Rule of thumb: text content should out weight the html content. The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers. eg: keep it close to html 3.2 if you can. Spiders are not to the point they really like eating html 4.0 and the mess that it can bring. Stay away from heavy: flash, dom, java, java script. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them - there is little reason to have them that I can see - they will rarely help a site and stand to hurt it greatly due to many factors most people don't appreciate (search engines distaste for js is just one of them).Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit.You can also go the other route and just throw everything in root (this is rather controversial, but it's been producing good long term results across many engines).Don't clutter and don't spam your site with frivolous links like "best viewed" or other counter like junk. Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability.
Learn the lesson of Google itself - simple is retro cool - simple is what surfers want.
Speed isn't everything, it's almost the only thing. Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even 3-4 seconds delay until "something happens" in the browser, you are in long term trouble. That 3-4 seconds response time may vary for site destined to live in other countries than your native one. The site should respond locally within 3-4 seconds (max) to any request. Longer than that, and you'll lose 10% of your audience for every second. That 10% could be the difference between success and not.

D) Page Size:
The smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can - I trust you are getting the idea here. Over 5k and under 10k. Ya - that bites - it's tough to do, but it works. It works for search engines, and it works for surfers. Remember, 80% of your surfers will be at 56k or even less.

E) Content:
Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggestor and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

F) Density, position, yada, yada, yada...
Simple, old fashioned, seo from the ground up.Use the keyword once in title, once in description tag, once in a heading, once in the url, once in bold, once in italic, once high on the page, and hit the density between 5 and 20% (don't fret about it). Use good sentences and speel check it ;-) Spell checking is becoming important as se's are moving to auto correction during searches. There is no longer a reason to look like you can't spell (unless you really are phonetically challenged).

G) Outbound Links:
From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).

H) Cross links:
<1>(cross links are links WITHIN the same site)Link to on topic quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links it to the apples and veggies page. Specifically with Google, on topic cross linking is very important for sharing your pr value across your site. You do NOT want an "all star" page that out performs the rest of your site. You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do NOT want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day. If you do find one page that drastically out produces the rest of the site with Google, you need to off load some of that pr value to other pages by cross linking heavily. It's the old share the wealth thing.

I) Put it Online:
Don't go with virtual hosting - go with a stand alone ip.Make sure the site is "crawlable" by a spider. All pages should be linked to more than one other page on your site, and not more than 2 levels deep from root. Link the topic vertically as much as possible back to root. A menu that is present on every page should link to your sites main "topic index" pages (the doorways and logical navigation system down into real content).Don't put it online before you have a quality site to put online. It's worse to put a "nothing" site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start.
Go for a listing in the ODP. If you have the budget, then submit to Looksmart and Yahoo. If you don't have the budget, then try for a freebie on Yahoo (don't hold your breath).

J) Submit:
Submit the root to: Google, Fast, Altavista, WiseNut, (write Teoma), DirectHit, and Hotbot. Now comes the hard part - forget about submissions for the next six months. That's right - submit and forget.

K) Logging and Tracking:
Get a quality logger/tracker that can do justice to inbound referrals based on log files (don't use a lame graphic counter - you need the real deal). If your host doesn't support referrers, then back up and get a new host. You can't run a modern site without full referrals available 24x7x365 in real time.

L) Spiderlings:
Watch for spiders from se's. Make sure those that are crawling the full site, can do so easily. If not, double check your linking system (use standard hrefs) to make sure the spider found it's way throughout the site. Don't fret if it takes two spiderings to get your whole site done by Google or Fast. Other se's are pot luck and doubtful that you will be added at all if not within 6 months.

M) Topic directories:
Almost every keyword sector has an authority hub on it's topic. Go submit within the guidelines.

N) Links:
Look around your keyword sector in Googles version of the ODP. (this is best done AFTER getting an odp listing - or two). Find sites that have links pages or freely exchange links. Simply request a swap. Put a page of on topic, in context links up your self as a collection spot.Don't freak if you can't get people to swap links - move on. Try to swap links with one fresh site a day. A simple personal email is enough. Stay low key about it and don't worry if site Z won't link with you - they will - eventually they will.

O) Content:
One page of quality content per day. Timely, topical articles are always the best. Try to stay away from to much "bloggin" type personal stuff and look more for "article" topics that a general audience will like. Hone your writing skills and read up on the right style of "web speak" that tends to work with the fast and furious web crowd.
Lots of text breaks - short sentences - lots of dashes - something that reads quickly.
Most web users don't actually read, they scan. This is why it is so important to keep low key pages today. People see a huge overblown page by random, and a portion of them will hit the back button before trying to decipher it. They've got better things to do that waste 15 seconds (a stretch) at understanding your whiz bang flash menu system. Because some big support site can run flashed out motorhead pages, that is no indication that you can. You don't have the pull factor they do.
Use headers, and bold standout text liberally on your pages as logical separators. I call them scanner stoppers where the eye will logically come to rest on the page.

P) Gimmicks:
Stay far away from any "fades of the day" or anything that appears spammy, unethical, or tricky. Plant yourself firmly on the high ground in the middle of the road.

Q) Link backs:
When YOU receive requests for links, check the site out before linking back with them. Check them through Google and their pr value. Look for directory listings. Don't link back to junk just because they asked. Make sure it is a site similar to yours and on topic.

R) Rounding out the offerings:
Use options such as Email-a-friend, forums, and mailing lists to round out your sites offerings. Hit the top forums in your market and read, read, read until your eyes hurt you read so much.Stay away from "affiliate fades" that insert content on to your site.

S) Beware of Flyer and Brochure Syndrome:
If you have an ecom site or online version of bricks and mortar, be careful not to turn your site into a brochure. These don't work at all. Think about what people want. They aren't coming to your site to view "your content", they are coming to your site looking for "their content". Talk as little about your products and yourself as possible in articles (raise eyebrows...yes, I know).

T) Build one page of content per day:
Head back to the Overture suggestion tool to get ideas for fresh pages.

U) Study those logs:
After 30-60 days you will start to see a few referrals from places you've gotten listed. Look for the keywords people are using. See any bizarre combinations? Why are people using those to find your site? If there is something you have over looked, then build a page around that topic. Retro engineer your site to feed the search engine what it wants.If your site is about "oranges", but your referrals are all about "orange citrus fruit", then you can get busy building articles around "citrus" and "fruit" instead of the generic "oranges".The search engines will tell you exactly what they want to be fed - listen closely, there is gold in referral logs, it's just a matter of panning for it.

V) Timely Topics:
Nothing breeds success like success. Stay abreast of developments in your keyword sector. If big site "Z" is coming out with product "A" at the end of the year, then build a page and have it ready in October so that search engines get it by December. eg: go look at all the Xbox and XP sites in Google right now - those are sites that were on the ball last summer.

W) Friends and Family:
Networking is critical to the success of a site. This is where all that time you spend in forums will pay off. pssst: Here's the catch-22 about forums: lurking is almost useless. The value of a forum is in the interaction with your fellow colleagues and cohorts. You learn long term by the interaction - not by just reading.Networking will pay off in link backs, tips, email exchanges, and in general put you "in the loop" of your keyword sector.Take Giacomos first post in the other thread mentioned above - he could have lurked, read, made his judgements, learned, and went off to write up his thesis. However, the step forward and the interaction has probably taught him far more about what he is concerned with than if you would have read the forums front to back. In the process he met some people that may in turn be useful resources in the future.

X) Notes, Notes, Notes:
If you build one page per day, you will find that brain storm like inspiration will hit you in the head at some magic point. Whether it is in the shower (dry off first), driving down the road (please pull over), or just parked at your desk, write it down! 10 minutes of work later, you will have forgotten all about that great idea you just had. Write it down, and get detailed about what you are thinking. When the inspirational juices are no longer flowing, come back to those content ideas. It sounds simple, but it's a life saver when the ideas stop coming.

Y) Submission check at six months:
Walk back through your submissions and see if you got listed in all the search engines you submitted to after six months. If not, then resubmit and forget again. Try those freebie directories again too.

Z) Build one page of quality content per day:
Starting to see a theme here? Google loves content, lots of quality content. Broad based over a wide range of keywords. At the end of a years time, you should have around 400 pages of content. That will get you good placement under a wide range of keywords, generate recip links, and overall position your site to stand on it's own two feet.
Do those 26 things, and I guarantee you that in ones years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. If you build a good site with an average of 4 to 5 pages per user, you should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in one years time. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but that is more than enough to "do something" with.

How to Choose a Niche Topic for your Blog

2007-11-26T00:53:00.000-08:00

The approach I’ve taken to build a business around blogging has been to build multiple blogs around niche topics. I describe the reasons for this in my post One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs? but I regularly am asked about how I choose my niche topics to blog about. In this post I’d like to outline a few questions that I tend to ask myself when considering a new topic. I hope it helps:

Are You Interested in the Topic?
A friend of mine explained it this way recently:
“Probably the best place to start thinking about what your blog should be about is to consider what YOU are about.”
Perhaps that’s a slightly awkward way of saying start by identifying your own interests, passions and energy levels for topics. While it might be tempting to start blogs based on what other people are interested in or what makes commercial sense there is little logic in starting a blog on a topic that you have no interest in. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly if you want to grow a popular and well respected blog it can take considerable time and you’ll be needing to take a long term approach to building it up. As a result it’s well worth asking yourself ‘can I see myself still writing on this topic in 12 months time?’ If you can’t I’d suggest finding another topic.
The second reason is that you readers will quickly discern if you are passionate about your topic or not. Blogs that are dry and passionless don’t tend to grow - it makes sense really as no one wants to read something that the author doesn’t really believe in.

Is the Topic Popular?
While the blogger’s interest is important it’s not enough on it’s own to build a popular blog. Another crucial ingredient is that people WANT to read information on the topic you’re writing on. The law of Supply and Demand is what most business students are taught in their first semester of of studying economics and it comes into play here also. You might be interested in your topic but unless others are also you’ll always have an uphill battle in building a highly read blog.
Of course keep in mind that you are writing in a medium with a global audience of many millions and as a result you don’t need a topic that everyone is searching, just one that some people are searching for because even it’s something that even a small percentage of people have an active interest in it can be a lucrative area.

Is the Topic one that is growing or shrinking?
Also keep in mind that popular topics change over time. Obviously it’s great to get on a topic before it becomes big rather than when it’s on the decline. This is not easy to do of course but predict the next big thing that people will be searching for and you could be onto a winner.
Get in the habit of being on the lookout for what people are into. I constantly ask myself ‘what will people be searching the web for in 6 to 12 months?’
Keep an eye on what people are into and what the latest trends are. Do this online but also keep an eye on TV, magazines, the papers and even the conversations you have with friends.

What competition is there?
One of the traps that some bloggers get sucked into when choosing a topic is to go for the most popular topics with no regard for the competition that they might face in those markets. The chances are if you have identified a niche that you think is ‘hot’ at the moment that someone else will have also. It’s demand and supply coming into play again - for any level of demand for information on a topic there will only be a certain number of sources of that information that will be needed on that topic.
The web is becoming a more and more cluttered place and sometimes it feels that there are no niches that are left open to blog about. While this is true in some of the more popular topics - remember that you don’t have to go for the topic that everyone is searching for. In fact sometimes it’s some of the less popular topics that have little or no competition that are the best earners.
I have one friend who after years of attempting to do well writing about gadgets swapped to ‘ride on lawn mowers’ (a topic he’d been researching for a purchase he was making). He was amazed to find that after just a couple of months of writing on his new topic that it was doing significantly more traffic (and making quite a bit more) than his gadget websites ever had.
As I’ve said many times before on this blog - become a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.

What is the competition neglecting?
This is a great question that is obviously related to the last one on number of competition. It attempts to find ‘gaps’ that are not yet filled. While your competition might have the advantage of an established audience, you have the advantage of flexibility and can position your blog very quickly to fill a gap in the niche that you might observe - in doing so you create a sub-niche within the larger topic.

Will you have enough Content?
One of the key features of successful blogs is that have the ability to continue to come up with fresh content on their topic for long periods of time. Conversely, one of the things that kills many blogs is that their authors run out of things to say.
Answering the question regarding whether there is enough content can be done on two levels:
1. Do YOU have enough content within YOU as an author? This really comes back to the question we asked above about your passion, interests and energy for the topic (so I’ll leave it at that).
2. Do you have access to enough other sources of content and inspiration? There are many web based tools around these days that can help you in coming up with content. Some places to check out on your topic to see what news is about include Google News, Topix, Yahoo! News, Bloglines, Technorati and Blog Pulse (among others).

Are there Income Streams on the Topic?
Not everyone will need to ask this question if their intention is not to build a blog that has an entrepreneurial edge to it but as this blog is on the topic of making money from blogs I’ll address it.
If you are interested in earning an income from blogging you will need to also factor in some investigation of whether the topic that you’ve chosen has any obvious potential income streams. As I’ve written previously, there are many ways of earning money from blogs - however the problem is that not every topic is going to be suitable for every potential income stream. For example, contextual ad programs like AdSense and YPN work really well for some topics but hardly earn anything from others (you might like to read my post on finding high paying ads on AdSense to explore this topic). Similarly some blogs do fantastically out of affiliate programs (the key is to find affiliate programs that match your topic closely) and others are better suited to impression based ads (those with high traffic levels).

Choose a Niche
At this point it’s time to choose a topic for your blog. It’s probably unlikely that you’ll find the perfect topic on all of the fronts above. While it’d be great to find a topic that you’re passionate about that just happens to have massive demand and no competition - but the reality is that most topics topics that you come up with will have at least one weakness to them. Don’t let this get you down - there comes a time when you just need to make a decision and start blogging. The key is being aware of what the weakness is so that you can work to overcome it.

What is blog?

2007-11-26T00:50:00.000-08:00

So what is a Blog anyway?
It’s a good question to ask at the beginning of a Blogging for Beginners Series as it is a question I am asked every week.
There are a number of ways I could answer this question ranging from the broad to the highly technical.

Here are a few definitions from other much wiser people on the ‘what is a blog?’ question to get us started (and once you’ve seen what they have to say on the topic I’ll share my own thoughts):
‘A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.’ Source

‘A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.’ Source

‘From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘ Source

‘A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.’ Source

‘A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly.’ Source

‘A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.’ Source.

The 5 fool-proof strategies to promote your mini-sites.

2007-10-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

Promoting your mini-site doesn't have to be expensive and cumbersome. As a matter of fact, if you stick to these 5 strategies you'll get more than enough traffic to your mini-site to create a pretty healthy income.

Here are the 5 strategies I use:

Strategy #1.- Place classifieds in high-circulation ezines.
This simple but highly effective strategy can easily jump-start your business the very same day the classified is run. Ezine ads (when crafted properly) can bring in large ammounts of pre-qualified traffic to your mini-site... and using the killer mini-site formula you learned from this course, you'll be converting a large percentage of those visitors into paying customers.

The trick is finding high-circulation ezines that target your niche. An invaluable resource I use for this task is Jerome Chapman's TopEzineAds.com. If you've never heard of his site, visit it right now. Of course, his service costs a little bit, and you can do your ezine research on your own when starting out... but trust me, the price is well worth the time you'll save by using it.

Strategy #2.- Start an affiliate program
Starting an affiliate program is another great way to generate thousands of hits to your mini-site. And the great news is that you don't *need* to have your own merchant account to do it anymore... you may use a third party processing system like iBill.com or ClickBank.com and still be able to do it.

You need to keep in mind one thing. If the product or service you are offering from your mini-site has a high price (Usually $100 is a high price for mini-sites), you can offer a 40-60% commission for it... however, if your product has a low price within the range of $20-$40, you'll need to offer affiliates an ever higher commission payout -- you'll earn big money trough the volume of sales you'll generate and your program will be very popular. A good but not very used practice is to open up your affiliate program to your paying customers only... it's up to you to decide wether this would work with your mini-site.

The script I use to handle my affiliate programs is called "The Ultimate Affiliate". It is an excellent script developed by Steve Miles and I'm very happy with it... You can find more information about it at www.groundbreak.com.

Strategy #3.- Give away a freebie
Giving away freebies is one of the most effective ways you can make your visitors come back to your mini-site. The best freebies are special reports or booklets that provide useful information to the user... and contain links back to your site of course.

Giving freebies away can benefit you, but there are smarter tacticts for giving away free stuff. Here are the four that I like the most:

Start your own newsletter and offer the freebie to new subscribers. This gives you a chance to contact your prospects any time you wish and make announcements of your other products.
Use one of those "Tell a friend" scripts and ask them to tell two or three friends before getting the booklet. Using this technique may cause your traffic to explode exponentially.
Get them to bookmark (or even better, to create a shortcut) to your site in exchange for your freebie. This is done with an *excellent* product I just found out exists called "See you again shortcuts". Visit their site now and sign up for a free trial... you'll soon see why this will soon become a well-known killer strategy.
Ask them to enter their email address and use it to send them your autoresponder sequence... this will raise your sales a lot.

Strategy #4.- Join and participate in discussion groups
In my opinion this is one of the most underestimated traffic-building strategies ever. When you join and participate in forums and discussion groups related to the niche topic, you are in the eyes of *everyone* who reads that group.

Just one good post with your signature file is all it takes to make hundreds of prospects interested in your site. Plus you've got to remember two things:
1) Forums are composed by hundreds, sometimes even thousands of individuals, but only a few of them participate... be one of the top percentage to take advantage of this interesting tactic.

2) Once you post your thoughts, your posting will remain there for months... so any newcomers to that group will still be able to read it. I can't think of any other advertising method that lasts so long online.

Strategy #5.- Create joint ventures
Find any online businesses that target your same niche but don't compete with you directly and talk to them. Create a venture where you are going to promote their products to your customer list and have them do the same for yours. Both parties can track each other's ads and see how profitable this kind of venture is.

The real power behind joint ventures is a personalized and honest refferal. You will tell your customers how the products of XYZ company have helped you out and offer them a few tips on how to use their products better. When a recommendation is personal and honest, people tend to pay much more attention... don't sell to your prospects... just tell them about it.

Where to host your mini-sites

2007-10-21T01:09:00.000-07:00

There are literally thousands of hosting companies out there. Some are good some are bad. And a crucial element is finding a good hosting company that fits our purpose: Hosting mini-sites and getting all the features we need (and want) while keeping our operation costs low.

The search for the perfect web hosting company is over for me. I've found the one that fits right into my needs. It's called ThirdSphere Hosting

I know that sounded like a shameless promotion. Well, yes it is. But for a good reason... it really *is* the company I would recommend you to hire to host all your mini-sites and I'm going to tell you which features are the ones that made me choose it over the other hosting companies.

1) They allow unlimited subdomain names that point to different directories. This means that you can purchase only one domain name and rent their services for only $25 bucks a month and host an unlimited number of mini-sites inside your domain... each pointing to a different directory!

Here's an example. Imagine you purchase the domain bonsai.com You could host these and each will be a different mini-site:
* HowToRaiseA.bonsai.com
* WhereToBuyA.bonsai.com
* TrimmingTechniques.bonsai.com

Can you imagine the money you'll save by getting one good domain name and fitting all your mini-sites in there? Of course you can have multiple domain names... but this is an extremely nice feature to start out with. Plus it helps a lot when trying to rank yourself in the search engines...

2) They provide you with 500 megabytes of disk space which is more than you'll ever need when hosting mini-sites. The average mini-site takes up only 150Kb (plus whatever your infoproduct takes)... so you'll literally have space for as many as you want to put up.

3) They give you a list of incredible infoproducts for you to sell. These products are hot sellers. I'm already selling a cool extra $1,200 per month just for opening a mini-site for each of their products... Those are earnings aside from my other online businesses.

As a suggestion. If you plan to do the same and open up mini-sites for each of their products, don't use their default salesletter. Create a new one with the information I've just given you... be original and you shall succeed.

4) Everything is managed from a pretty neat web interface, so you can literally run your business from *anywhere* in the world (including internet cafes).

5) They have tons of features that are sold elsewhere like: autoresponders, mailing list managers, password protected directories, web statistics, a shopping cart, they also have a great affiliates program...

You know what? I'm gonna stop now and let you take a look at their featuresby yourself. Click here to visit them now. Once you've done that, take a look at the "Discounts" section of this special report... I have a little something in store for you that you'll simply love!.

Selling other people's products

2007-10-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

Affiliate marketing has turned to be one of the most effective ways for content-driven sites to generate revenue without directly offering a product to it's visitors. It is only trough banners, endorsing texts and articles that the content site mentions the products he likes and uses. You can do the same with your mini-sites.

This type of marketing has an advantage for all of the three sides involved. It creates more opportunities for merchants to generate web sales, for affiliate sites to generate a lot of revenue and for consumers a way to find information about the products they want and need without being sold "in their face".

How does it work?
With Affiliate Marketing, a merchant recruits content sites to partner with them as affiliates in exchange for commissions. The merchant provides their advertising banners and links to their affiliates and assigns a commission for each click-through to their site, subscription to their service (a lead), or purchase of their products that is generated from the links.

Affiliates place the tracking code for these ads into their Web pages. Whenever a visitor to the affiliate's site uses these links to generate a click-through, lead, or sale for the merchant, that transaction is tracked online. If a product or service is purchased, the customer pays the merchant directly, and the affiliate is paid a commission for that transaction.

Why affiliate marketing works like a charm
Thousands of people all around the world would like to have an e-commerce enabled website. But most of them don't have the time, patience or will to go through the hassle of creating an exclusive product from scratch, learning every single detail there is to know about online advertising and e-commerce and then setting up a website to sell it.

Busy people like you and I have a very good alternative and opportunity in the affiliate business. Because you still can have a great website with as much content as you want and make tons of sales from it without having to go trough the hassle of building your own products. Plus most of the products you can sell from affiliate programs already have a proven sales record, they are high-quality products that people are already looking for.

It's all about the passion!
Affiliate marketing, just like any other type of selling is about the passion you feel for the topic you are building your website around. If you want to be truly successful with the affiliate programs you offer, you need to build a passion for your field (niche). The #1 mistake that most affiliate sites make is to think that they are selling products. It simply doesn't work that way... you don't want to sell products, you want to entertain them and you want to build a website that tells people about your passions, your interests and the things you like, you want to give them valuable information about the topic your site evolves around and then weave into that content and endorsement for a product or service that you like and use.

You want your visitors to know that you are just trying to give them good information about the topic that interests them (else they wouldn't be at your site in the first place). And if you feel a real passion for that topic, this will reflect in your writing... and if it does, people will perceive that passion and will be excited about it, and it will translate into sales for you.Writing about a product or service in the editorial content of your website is called writing an advertorial (this comes from the combination of the words "ad" and "editorial".

How to write a good advertorial.
Mass media channels like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers endorse products and services in their editorial content all the time. Creating a good advertorial is easy, all you really need to do is talk about a topic you like giving people all the information you know about that specific topic and weaving in a few words about a product or service that has helped you achieve in your area of interest.

Imagine that you know a lot about how to grow bonsai trees. You can easily set up a *great* website with all the information you have, giving specifics about how or why you grow your bonsai trees in a certain manner. You can also have information about the kind of clippers you use to trim your bonsai trees and why you use them, you can also tell your visitors about the top three books that have given you the most valuable information about bonsais.You can start a newsletter that gives out free tips and tricks about bonsai growing (we'll talk about this a bit later in this report).

That sounds like a great site to visit if you're into bonsai-growing doesn't it? When people find a site like this, they bookmark it and come back... they find this site useful and entertaining. Now let's imagine a second site. A site that's full of banner ads and graphics that are trying to sell some bonsai trimming clippers. Which of the two sites above do you think will get the most sales (even if they are both affiliate sites)?

You are absolutely right. The site with all the bonsai information will make the most sales. This takes us to the #2 mistake that most affiliate websites make: Building a mall.

Malls are an excellent idea in the brick and mortar world. They give you a practical way to shop by placing a lot of stores together in a single building... this way, you don't have to drive all around your town to look for a certain product. But it works a lot different on the internet! Here you don't have to drive all around to get to a certain place... everything is just a few mouse clicks away!

If you find yourself at a website that doesn't have anything of value to you, and it's just packed with banners trying to sell you everything under the sun: from shoes to computers to practical jokes... you just click the "Back" of your browser and you are gone from there. You wouldn't buy a thing in there would you? But for some strange reason, people think you will and they keep building sites like these.

That is exactly what you should not fall into! You want to sign in to only three or four affiliate programs that are related to your topic of interest and build a website that endorses those products.

Tips for building a good advertorial mini-site.
The first thing you need to learn is to work within your site. Advertorials don't look like they were coming from an outside source - like a banner ad (which is why banner advertising doesn't work). Banners and outside sources *sell* and people don't like being sold... at least not from a site like yours. If they feel like they are being sold, they will click the back button and you'll have lost them forever.

An advertorial is not a salesletter, don't fall into this trap either. A good advertorial is good information that encourages your visitors on something that you feel a real passion for. You want to fit the affiliate program (the ad) into the context of what you're doing. If you don't you're going to sound just like every other affiliate site out there... the ones that don't make any money! And you don't want your site in this category do you?

There is a good rule of thumb for balancing your advertorial website: The 80-20 rule. This means that the content of your website should be at least 80% of valuable information and just 20% (or less) of sales content. This is not an exact rule, but if you follow it, your site will never be out of balance and fall into the ugly-online-mall category.

How to choose which affiliate programs to join.
A great rule of thumb is: People don't buy from an affiliate site, they buy from you! If you create good will in your visitors, they will trust you and from that trust is where sales are really made. Are you beginning to see the true importance of your website? Your trust is on the line!

Not everyone does this, but my suggestion is that when you are thinking about what programs to join and what products to endorse is... only tell people about products you trust and use. That way, you can really tell them about the product on a firsthand experience.

If you don't do it this way, you could be advertising a really cheesy product that doesn't work. Do this and your image will go down and the trust that you have built will be lost. I'm pretty sure you know that trust is something that you can only earn once.

A good advertorial site "focuses" on building trust, giving out good information and talking about great products. And it does it in a me-to-you, no-hype, straightforward manner. If you grasp and understand this concept, you've won half of the affiliate battle! Here it goes again (just in case you didn't get it the first time):

People don't buy from an affiliate site, they buy from you!

Now that you know that your business is built on trust, let's talk about how to build that trust from your visitors and how to keep them as friends and turn them into customers. The real secret of doing this is...

Build your own prospect list!
Remember I mentioned this in the bonsai site example? Having an in-house opt-in list is one of the most valuable assets any business can have. You want to start your own list by offering a free ezine or a newsletter... you want to have your visitor's names and e-mail addresses so you can communicate with them constantly and build your trust slowly.

Some people try to do this by offering a free report that will be sent to the visitor with an autoresponder. This works sometimes, but you don't want the permission to contact visitors only once... you want a full permission to speak with them and become their friend.

Only trough frequent contact with your list is that you will earn their trust. Giving them good information will make them see you as an expert on the subject and this will earn you their trust. Once they trust you as an expert a good percentage of those opt-ins will feel comfortable enough to buy the products you recommend (You are the expert after all).

And if you keep giving them good information and treating them good as your customers, they will repeat-buy the products and services you endorse. And that's where the real value of your business is.

When a user first visits your website she will scan through it for 8-15 seconds. And if your site caught her attention she will stay an average of only 3 to 5 minutes in total... that's not a lot of time you know? Certainly not enough time to earn someone's trust and sell her something.

It is crucial that you get their permission and their e-mail address so you can follow up with them and build credibility. A good way to encourage them to do this is by giving them a freebie (like an e-book or a special report). You should tell them that if they want the free stuff they will get both - the e-book and a free subscription to your newsletter.

Once you have them in the list, contact themperiodically to stay fresh in their minds.

Can you see the value of a good list? Your opt-in list is worth gold! If I was to be shut down today and could keep just one thing of my business, I wouldn't keep my site or my product, I'd keep my list! Having it with me can help me start a new business tomorrow and make money with it almost instantly. You can not replace the trust of people with *anything*!

The best product I've found so far to develop and manage an opt-in list is a cgi script called "Subscribe-Me" by CGI ScriptCenter (Click here to go to their site- a new window will pop up). This script creates a "Subscribe/Unsubscribe" form in your website and manages all the user handling automatically; it also allows you to send e-mail to your lists in text and html formats and all this is done via a very friendly web-interface.

Once you start developing your own opt-in list, you should always remember something: Give users good value and useful information. Many list owners fall into the mistake of sending only sales messages to their subscribers.

Sales! Sales! SALES! That's all they can think of. Remember that it's their trust you want, not their money. When (and only then) you've earned their trust it is that they'll feel comfortable enough to buy from you... not before.

Creating your own infoproduct to sell

2007-10-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

It is a known fact that more than an impressive 90% of all purchases people make are motivated by impulse. People make quick decisions to buy based on the benefits and solutions offered by the particular product or service they're interested in.

This information is vital when you are thinking about creating a killer mini-site. The key factor of selling in today's society is "Instant gratification"... and that is exactly what you should give them. Nothing else will do. The good news is that technology allows you to fulfill that key factor and deliver your products immediately after your customer purchases from you.

I know this is stuff you already know or at least imagined (else you wouldn't be reading this course). However, there are still thousands of 'so-called' marketers who are not taking advantage of this incredible technology... are you one of them? If you are, you are loosing more sales and money than you could ever imagine... and that is a terrible situation to be in.

What kind of products sell the best from mini-sites?

Yes, you guessed it... informational products (or infoproducts) are by far the highest sellers. This kind of product usually delivers a great deal of useful information or how-to knowledge to the user; they can be any of these types:

* E-books
* Digital audio feeds
* Digital video feeds
* Members only websites

Out of all those categories, the one I prefer are e-books. And I'll tell you why:

1) E-books are easy to produce. If you can convert your writing into html files, you can package it into an e-book.

2) Delivering e-books is done instantly and it takes the least amount of web resources and bandwidth. (Most web hosting companies charge you the extra bandwidth you use exceeding their quota). Maybe in the future, when broadband is the standard in every home, digital audio and video feeds turn into the best solution... but for now, keep it on the safe side and save your customers and yourself a lot of headaches in making everything work.

Even when broadband becomes the standard, you can pack your audio and video feeds into an e-book for easier distribution. Some marketers are already using this kind of technology in their publications. Check out this url as an example of a mini-site selling digital audio inside an e-book: http://www.MarketingTwister.com/

3) Unlike "Members only" websites, e-books are considered by most as a one-shot deal. People don't expect you to update your e-book frequently. This gives you more time to create even more infoproducts and add them to your cashflow... thus, increasing your monthly profits.

Here are the three strategies I use to crank outkiller infoproducts every time I need to make money.

Strategy #1.- Imitating Success

Pick up some copies of the New York Times (today's and a couple of past but recent- episodes) and find out what the top ten best-selling books are on each one.

You will notice that there will be a repeating pattern on the subject of some of these books. This tells you what topics are hot. You can also check out the top 100 best selling books at:

http://www.amazon.com

http://www.barnesandnoble.com

http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/leb.htm

Now, go out and buy 5 or 10 of the most popular books on a hot subject. Read them and summarize the findings into your own words in an infoproduct of your own. Don't just copy the information you find... that would be illegal. Instead, write your own findings and complement them with the information you got from the materials you bought.

You can then sell that product as a special report, a course or an e-book. As long as you market it correctly, you are guaranteed to sell a lot of copies, because based on the bestseller list, you know it is a topic in demand.

Strategy #2.- Use your industry

The easiest and more often overlooked ideas for an e-book are right in your current industry or in your favorite hobby or interest. If you are an engineer, a doctor or an attorney or just a plumber or a steelworker, you know your industry inside and out!

You know exactly how your industry works and what it's needs are. There is usually always an information product you can come up with that your industry needs or wants and information product that is in high-demand.

What do you know? What skills do you have? What could you teach others? These are all areas where you could create an information product. Don't dismiss this without giving it some thought. Really, almost everyone overlooks this, you should not.

If your hobby is horseback riding, don't you think you could come up with a product that helps others to learn your personal riding techniques? Could this be a periodical publication? A course? A single book? Find out what's best for you and do it. After all, writing doesn't really cost you anything but time.

Strategy #3.- Computer software

Do you use computers? What software programs do you use? Do you master any of these?

Create a tutorial for a popular software product you use. For example, you might be using a program like Corel Draw. This is a very popular program that many people have problems with, create a couple of tutorials for it and market them to Corel Draw users. Many of them will thank you for coming up with such a great product.

Another way to go is by visiting:

http://www.cnet.com

http://www.pcmag.com

http://www.download.com

http://www.tucows.com

http://www.zdnet.com

Find the top 100 file downloads on each site to see which programs are popular online. This information is very helpful when trying to find a large market for a software product to write a tutorial on.

Are you good at a popular computer game? Well, why not make a few screen captures and write down your secrets to beating this game? it's that easy! Doing a screen capture is as simple as pressing the "shift" and "print screen" keys on your computer keyboard. Then just go to a bitmap painting program and select "paste" from the "Edit" menu (this works on most programs, but it may vary on yours).

Using the same technique above, you could use the screen captures to produce an e-book consisting of the most impressive, important, resourceful websites for a specific topic.

For example, you could produce an e-book called "Top 10 websites every man should visit to know what women like". Capture the screens, make a link to each one of these sites using their own graphic and write down your thoughts on each particular site. Then market this product to male individuals (they are 60% of the total internet users).

People will not be buying the information on those websites but your thoughts and the findings of your research which took only a few days of websurfing to complete.

How to write irresistible copy for your mini-site and turn it into a cash machine.

2007-10-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

The following section is a collection of incredible copywriting articles made available to us by Miguel Alvarez (thanks!) and are published with his full authorization. Read each one of them to learn the exact techniques you need to know when writing the copy for your mini-site...

An introduction to copywriting
Knowledge is the key to success
The importance of graphic design in advertising
The most important element is your headline
The four functions of a headline
The 22 types of attention-grabbing headlines
11 tips for writing clear copy
Using the right tools in your writing
The motivating sequence
Developing a winning USP
The 22 reasons people buy from you
Writing for the web (short copy vs. long copy)
Words that make people buy
Scarcity can help you... use it!