So you’re into blogging and writing your own posts. You’ve learned the basics on how to write, how to create interesting content, what your readers want to see, Internet Marketing tips and tricks, and the like. But do you really know what it takes to perfect your content as far as proofreading and correct grammar are concerned? We can’t all hire our own proofreaders, and we don’t all have the expertise of grammar teachers.

We’ve all seen the flame wars that start under even the slightest of spelling or grammar errors. Besides the basic grammar rules that everyone must keep in mind, there are things that just plain stand out: the most important grammar rules all bloggers need to know.

Spelling Rules / Word Differences

• I’m not even going to BEGIN on spelling correctly. Spellcheckers galore, programs and utilities you can use to check spelling and grammar errors – even the most basic of free text editors have spellcheckers.

• If your word processor or spreadsheet doesn’t have a spellchecker, or you write in another language and can’t find the right plugin, use something else that will help you – just copy and paste your text into the utility and there you go! Plus, there are so many resources, websites and dictionaries that tackle the most misspelled words (one of them, in fact, is “misspelled” itself) that can prove totally handy when you’re writing.
• Another huge mistake we always see, are slight differences between words and use of the wrong one, like affect vs. effect, i.e. vs e.g. and who vs. whom. (Tip: use “whom” if you can answer the question with “him”!). The biggest mix-up we see most often is loose and lose, the one in place of the other. This happens mostly because of English pronunciation rules that get us so confused! Mistakes of this nature may not only tick red pens (like me!) off, but it can also make readers miss the point completely. Like the difference between “complimentary” and “complementary“, or “pretty” and “petty“!

Punctuation Rules

• Read up about the difference between punctuation marks, like the colon, semicolon, and comma. Just keep in mind that commas join two independent clauses, set off elements outside the main clause, and is generally used for clarity and convenience. Colons set off a list, and a semicolon, a cross between a period and a comma, connects two independent clauses that are closely related. Don’t be afraid to use these punctuation marks; they can really help you enhance your text. The comma is one of the strongest punctuation marks you should learn to use correctly! There are little tips like the Oxford comma you should be wary about. There are tons of articles that can help you learn about where to use commas, semicolons and colons!
• Where do you put punctuation marks, when you’ve got parentheses and quotation marks? Now, there’s a good question! First of all, let me point out that placement of punctuation inside quotation marks is different in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. For now, we’ll talk of the American Rules, which tend to be more complicated. To make a long story short, we put commas, periods, exclamation points and question marks inside the quotation marks when they are part of the quote. If they are not part of the quote, we leave them outside. Example: Should we believe it when she says, “I don’t feel like it”? compared to We can ask anyone, “what time is it?” We don’t need to follow with a period. Check out grammarmonster.com for the differences between UK and US quotation mark rules! The exact same thing goes for parentheses, but you need another punctuation mark, like a comma or a period, to follow and close it!

Capitalization Rules

• Read up about when to properly capitalize words. You’ll notice that lots of times, titles aren’t all capitalized, but just use sentence capitalization (only the first word is capitalized). As GrammarBook.com states: “Always capitalize the first and last words of titles of publications regardless of their parts of speech. Capitalize other words within titles, including the short verb forms Is, Are, and Be. Exception: Do not capitalize little words within titles such as a, an, the, but, as, if, and, or, nor, or prepositions, regardless of their length.“ Also, just like the capitalization of “GrammarBook.com,” be wary of camel cases, or capitalization of letters inside a word. You can see examples of camel cases in words like “iPod” and “LaForge.”

Tense Rules

• Tense rules in English grammar are about the use and consistency of the past, present and future tenses in sentences, when and how to use each one, and the use of indefinite, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous. What you really need to analyze here, and learn off by heart, is what time you’re referring to – which tense you are speaking in. Is it now? Yesterday? Already? Since? For how long? By the time? Stating guesses? It will take tons of practice and cheat sheets, but it will grow on anyone who chooses to read up and learn naturally. These mistakes are made mostly by people who use English as a foreign language. I’m not going to analyze each one – that would need many separate articles – but speakspeak.com has a wonderful resource on tense rules in English grammar!

Grammar Rules for Numbers

• If you’re going to mention single digit numbers, write the word – spell it out! If you’re going to mention double digit numbers, use the number! Be consistent if you have numbers in two categories (either spell them all out or use numbers for all of them). Simple fractions should be spelled out (and don’t forget to use hyphens), but use numbers for decimals. Percentages should be written in numbers. For years, you can spell it out, use a number, or a decade: “the nineties, the ’90s, 1990s.” They’re all correct! For time, you should spell out the time when it’s followed by o’clock, or doesn’t have A.M. or P.M. after it. Exception: Whenever a number begins a sentence, it should always be spelled out!
• Also, I bet you didn’t know this one about dates: when using full dates, we don’t use ordinal numbers (“August 12th, 2012″ is incorrect!). I must admit, that before writing this article, I didn’t know it either!

Plural and Possessive

• Here’s another huge grammar mistake: the difference between words that sound the same. Yeah, you’ve got it – like you’re and your, their, there and they’re, etc. The main difference is knowing when to use the plural and when to use the possessive. This is also where correct apostrophe use comes into play. We make most singular nouns possessive by adding an apostrophe and an “s” at the end! So, never use an apostrophe unless you want to make the word possessive! This Capital Community College page has a wonderful guide to using possessives. Also, if you’re making a noun already ending in “s” possessive, like “business” or “Mrs. Belkins,” all you have to do is add the apostrophe.

Was were where grammar rules

• Here’s a tough one: when do you use “if I was” and when do you use “if I were?” This is actually a case of hypothesis. When you use “if I were,” the past subjunctive, you’re speaking of something that is contrary to fact. This is best seen in the phrase “if I were you,” which can never be true. On the other hand, “if I was,” the past indicative, refers to a condition that is not certain. “You should tell me if I was doing a bad job.” And please, don’t use “where” in these cases – this has nothing to do with place!

Finally, when you’re not sure about how to write something, ask Google! It’s not a shame to not know something – besides, no one will ever find out! I mean, I consider myself a grammar Nazi, but we all forget what some words mean, or how they’re spelled. I check words all the time! We have a plethora of weapons for battling our forgetful brains!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about total nit-picking. It’s true, with the extensive use of the Internet, we’ve just plain forgotten how to write correctly. (I’m sure I’ll have more than a few grammar mistakes in this post myself!). I’m talking about the basics; the things that drive people crazy and will send them into a flame comment fury!

Just remember that there’s no excuse anymore. Bad spelling and bad grammar can be battled, even if English isn’t your native language. There are so many utilities and workarounds, that you can be virtually error-free! No flame from red pens anymore!

So, how many mistakes did I have in this post? Please, help me out and catch what I couldn’t!

Related posts:

1. Are images more important than text?

The Most Important Grammar Rules All Bloggers Need to Know is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

If you’re active in social media, and read tech blogs, you’ve already heard about Pinterest. In fact you can’t miss it, even if you wanted to! On one of our sites that heavily focuses on images, Pinterest is the number 1 referrer. bypassing Facebook by 40% (Disclaimer: We haven’t started promoting the site to StumbleUpon yet)!

For those of you who don’t know about Pinterest, it’s the marriage of Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Flickr all together. It’s a site that lets you create “pins” of all the things you like and categorize them into folders so you and others can easily find them. When someone logs in, they’ll be able to see what pins the people they follow have made and be able to re-pin them in their own folders, like them or write a comment. It’s 90% consumer-oriented.

The Media loves Pinterest, and it’s logical: when a website receives that much attention in a short time span, everyone tries to find something, a hook from where a breaking story can be based on and write the next 1mil-impression post that will go viral. Posts on Pinterest about copyright infringement? Check! Posts on Pinterest about being able to block Pinterest from getting images from your site? Check! Posts on Pinterest about its affiliate links? Check! You might even think that this post is one of those attention grabbing posts that were made only to catch some readers’ attention, and why wouldn’t you? But it’s real, we’ll analyze if Pinterest is really worth your time investment in order for you to create a powerful account and get traffic from it and why. But let’s start things from the beginning.

Pinterest is now at 41 Alexa rank (41th site in terms of visits on the world), and that’s a huge accomplishment and an extremely fast growth rate.

Its success can easily be explained by taking into account the following points:

• It’s one of the first social networks that focused mainly on women.
• It’s appealing to have a Twitter feed to look at, and not just read.
• The feature that lets you see who from your Facebook friends is on Pinterest, did wonders for the site because you can auto-follow all and then they all will get an email that a friend of them followed them back. After the few times they logged in to add their friends back, now they are used to checking on Pinterest. It’s all a matter of habit.
• The invitation system that Pinterest had for quite some time brought a lot of talking about it.
• The Snowball effect (everyone writing about it because it’s popular) has helped tremendously.
• It has not been yet discovered by scammers and spammer (Only some first signs).

Why the Pinterest Craze is not going to last

Don’t get me wrong, Pinterest is not going to be abandoned, at least not in the near future. But that’s what exactly what’s wrong with it, and that’s why its huge adaptation and growth won’t continue:

• Because its traffic has skyrocketed 10 times more than it should have. It’s like a mashup of features of many great services all together into one, but it actually doesn’t perform better than any of the features it has, in comparison to the services it took ideas from.
• It has a great visual display of posts but the search is as basic as it can get.
• Because it currently has many investors - that’s a lot of mouths to feed.
• When spammers figure out how valuable Pinterest is for them (we are already seeing the first signs of that), there will be no protection (at least until now) and no stopping them from overtaking the whole thing.
• Because it really “pushed” monetization, and valuation increased before its time and not organically. And that’s what I want to focus on the most.

Let’s say I have a blog that brings in 1 million visits per day.

If I make zero profit off of it (no ads, no banners, no nothing), and I try to sell it just like that, it’ll get me a few grand, about 100k perhaps.

If I have put 100 banners on it, and try to make money off of everything, I can sell it for 100k, with less than 100k visits per day, depending on how much I make off each visitor on average.

So Pinterest utilized its greatest weapon, affiliate marketing, from the get-go. Because of this, when traffic starts to decline (along with investors’ interest), there is no “secret weapon” to really reignite the interest to the project and strengthen the already huge valuation Pinterest had, but a small fall will create a declining curve that Pinterest won’t be able to stop. All successful tech startups leave monetization for the end, and use investor money from the beginning to cover running costs. If you show your true potential in the beginning, you can’t just come out and say “Oh hey, one more thing!”

This, however, won’t be the main reason for Pinterest’s slow decline (if it ever happens).

The problem is, if Pinterest falls even a tiny bit, big tech blogs will start scaremongering, and will find the chance to publish articles that will bring in thousands of people to their sites. Like, “Are you alone on Pinterest?” and such. This will cause casual users of Pinterest to slowly fade away, and when the ratio of promoters and users starts to sway, all the spam will float to the surface. And that’s when the hardcore users will leave the site too, just like what happened with Digg.

Should I invest time on Pinterest?

It really depends on what your web property and is what your goals are.

For e-commerse store owners: Pinterest is a paradise for you. Why? Because you can directly plug your products on Pinterest since it’s a consumer-oriented website. Most social bookmarking communities would not love to see a link directly to a product in your best store, and Pinterest is not only a site that accepts it, it also encourages it! For you, Pinterest is a must and you should really pay attention to it.

For bloggers: If your niche is product-oriented, like the Uncrate Blog, then you should really pay attention to Pinterest. Otherwise, no matter how many visits Pinterest brings you to your website, it will slowly decline. After all, it’s not a business social network and links about Internet Marketing and anything business will not perform well.

For news curators and trend makers: You should really devote time on social networks that have your target audience, and that’s Linked In, Google+, Twitter etc. – not Pinterest. You should have a profile and create some boards and pins on it, but don’t devote so much time building a powerful profile.

So that’s it, and I really hope I will be proven wrong (because after all, it’s a bad thing to be proven right about the decline of a social network or any service) but that’s what I think about Pinterest.

My best advice is to focus on where your audience really hangs out and try to become useful to them: don’t just jump on the next social craze and try to be everywhere. It won’t help in the long run. Focus is the key and that is what you should do.

Angel

Related posts:

1. So much to do, so little time

Should I invest time on Pinterest? Is this going to last? is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

When it comes to building a list, success doesn’t mean just a fixed amount of subscribers; you want the subscribers you have to open your emails and use your recommendations to better their business. If you have been gathering emails with Aweber for some time, you should have already went up in pricing tiers by now. That would be amazing if all the subscribers were responsive and active, but almost 100% that’s not the case.

There’s a great percentage of users who have never confirmed subscription, have never opened one of your emails for quite some time, or even unsubscribed from the list. All these people count towards your totals and might be a huge percentage of your list, just taking up space and increasing your costs.

Let’s see how we can fix that! :)

We’re going to remove all the people who:

• Don’t open your emails.
• Have Unsubscribed.
• Never Confirmed Subscription.

First, log in to your Aweber panel and go to the Subscribers section.

Remove people from your list that don’t open your mails.

Make sure that you are on the correct list and start adding the rules.

We want to see who hasn’t opened the mails we sent over the last month. Try to at least enter a month before the current date and make sure that you enter at least a month that you have sent 4-5 mails or more. We do this because if for the last month all you have done is send one email, many people won’t have opened it. You don’t want to erase someone just because they didn’t open one email!

The second option is to select the date added field because you need to select people that have joined at least a month before, because if they are a new subscriber, their stats are not always correct because they still haven’t received your followups after subscribing.

HINT: Instead of selecting them and deleting them, create a segment and try to find out why they don’t open your emails. One amazing way to do that is by creating a survey.

You can create a free survey using Google Docs, or using WordPress and Gravity Forms. (Click the links for a guide on both ways.) Ask them what they like the most about your list and what they don’t, gaining a great perspective on how you can improve! This will not only increase your open-rates but at the same time make active some users that haven’t opened your emails for quite some time.

Last but not least, make them an offer they can’t refuse. ;) A free guide, a great discount on your services, you name it! This might draw their interest back to your services.

If the two methods above don’t work out, delete the people still on the segment.

Remove people from your list that have unsubscribed.

This is a no-brainer. If someone unsubscribes from your list, there’s no point on keeping them on the system.

Remove people from your list that never confirmed.

Again, this is a no-brainer but with a catch.

You have to set a date filter too because some people might not have confirmed because they log in once per week to check their emails. I always set it a month before the current date just to be sure.

So that’s it: three simple things you can do, not only to drop the cost of maintaining a list but at the same time, re-engage with your less active subscribers.

Ps. This is the beginning of a series about List Building and will all be included at the free list building guide that we are about to release. If you want to be one of the first to read it, make sure to enter your information on the widget on the right.

No related posts.

Pay much less on your AWeber Subscription with three easy steps. is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

You’ve read all about it. Working in Internet Marketing and having an online business so you can make money from home is the most promising thing you read about on the Web these days. There’s so much information on how to make it big out there, but what should you believe? What’s genuine, and what’s a scam? What is everyone saying, and how much of it is true? We’ve picked out the greatest myths about Internet Marketing that you’ll come across and analyzed them here.

And, the list goes to twelve.

1 – Having an online business is easy.

It’s strange how everyone thinks that Internet Marketing is the easiest thing around to do: it’s just like saying that winning in offline business is just as easy.

Of course, there’s a heavy dose of luck involved (just like in everything we do!) but it’s mostly hard work and precise strategic thinking that helps you get to the top.

2 – Internet marketing is free.

There are tons of freebies out there that will help you get started. These freebies can be free blogging services, free CMS templates, free stock photographs, free content, you name it. But have you ever seen any “serious” Internet Marketers working with free stuff? Check it out for yourself: we all tend to feel on the spot that a blog, business or online entity is more trustworthy when their owners have invested in a domain and email accounts. Plus, there are so many tools and services out there out there that are absolutely necessary for your online business to thrive, and they’re all too good to be free!

3 – Working in Internet marketing is too expensive

(the exact opposite). You don’t have to invest in absolutely everything out there. You can find hundreds of thousands of resources, from tutorials to web services to email marketing programs to paid seminars to templates – the list goes on and on. However, the prices on all these vary. If what you need boils down to creating, hosting and advertising a decent website for starters, you really won’t have to invest that much from the get go. You can check out our article on how much your blog will really cost to get an idea of what you’ll be looking at.

4 - You’ll have much more free time by working at home

making money online and being your own boss - you can put any amount of time in it you want. WHAT A LIE!! This is the reason for the exact opposite: Exactly because you work at home and you are your own boss, you have to put much more time into it. Productivity while working at home, may just be the hardest thing you’ve ever come across – even tougher than working for that old boss of yours! You’ll find that you’ll have to do your own research (and a bit of soul-searching) to find your own methods and times of working.

5 – Everything in Internet Marketing is a scam.

Yes, the market is crawling with Nigerians that want to scam you out of your hard-earned money. Yes, there are a lot of people selling sketchy products or using shady black-hat methods to steal your trust and your cash. But it’s not everything! With a bit of research, you’ll be able to find trustworthy products and services that will help you do exactly what you’d like to do with your online business. Plus, don’t think that the only way Internet Marketers make money online is through excessive spam or unorthodox methods. That’s not true! The most successful online businesses are perfectly legal, value-giving entities with products that help people in the best way. Not everyone’s a crook!

 6 – Creating and maintaining an online business is only for the tech savvy.

You don’t have to be an expert at anything to be great in your online business. There are myriad online tutorials and books to help you learn everything, from designing and creating a website, to advertising your valued content. I hardly knew how to handle a MacBook when I first started, and just look at me now! Besides, I still can’t code or program a darn thing besides my VCR! (And maybe my alarm clock.)

7 – Internet Marketing will help you make a ton of money in no time.

It’s guaranteed success… or not! Nothing in this world gives “guaranteed success.” Anyone that tells you that is flat out lying! The only thing that will guarantee you a level of success is your own hard work and methodical, strategic planning. That will definitely get you high, and the more hard (and correct!) work, the better!

8 – Spam is the way to go.

Tell everyone you know, your friends, your family, bug and spam everyone on your social networking list. What a mistake! If you alienate even your friends, no one will want to see the likes of anything you have to offer! The only way to bring followers onto your websites and your subscriptions is to offer quality content or products. Never send any unsolicited email, or anything that someone hasn’t subscribed to. It’s a surefire way to never get ahead!

9 – I’ll just write about whatever the heck I like, whenever I like.

Here’s one myth we read on this great article on Internet Marketing Myths from The Rating Blog, with another touch to it. This will get you places if you’re very, very lucky, like a few people (see Maddox) but most likely, you’ll have to be really special for you to get anywhere without writing quality, proofread content. In order to maintain and grow a successful online business, you will have to provide your readers and subscribers with value and quality, frequently enough to keep their interest. You may write a great article or blog post at one point, but if you don’t keep it coming, you’ll lose more subscriptions than you gain.

10 –  I can’t challenge the greats, so why should I even try?

No, you can’t challenge the greats! You can’t battle Dell, or Google, or Digg. You can definitely try (the sky’s the limit!) but don’t expect to rank up top with the giants without some totally hard work and endless hours. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t even start because everyone’s doing it or done it before. In that case, no one would ever open a shop or become a doctor or lawyer – there are so many of them! As long as you have your passion and hard work, you can choose to do anything you like, no matter what the competition. Like we keep saying, what you need is strategy, research and an appetite for success!

11 – Anyone can succeed at Internet Marketing.

This isn’t such a myth so much as just an unfinished sentence: anyone with a vision, passion and motivation for hard work can do it. If you’re not really into it, or just doing it for fun with no plan and no research, it’s likely that you won’t make it very far (you can always take luck into account, but it can’t be the only thing going for you!) You can’t go from zero to hero in a day with no effort. Keep trying, be hard working and patient, and you’ll see success in your online presence! I’ll re-post a story from a forum I’ve read recently: There was a guy who created a thread saying something along the lines of: “Yay! I’ve just made my first dollar!” After some replies mocking the guy for just creating the thread for this “accomplishment”, one guy replied: “Why do you mock the guy? He’s done much better than the 99% of the other Internet Marketers around.” And this is true: only a very small percentage of people involved in Internet Marketing will actually make it into a business. It requires a lot of patience and time devoted to it, and most people seem to become discouraged after the first few months.

12 – More traffic means more money.

In the time of meta keywords, where you put all your keywords hidden on your front page (remember those?) Internet Marketers tried every way possible to bring hundreds – hundreds were a lot back then – visitors to their websites. This was successful, because there wasn’t much competition for traffic back then. Now, users know for a fact that if a website dissatisfies them for a second, they can turn to thousands more. You can bring hundreds of thousands of people to your websites, without making a single sale! You need to gain your readers’ trust, and their purchases! You need to offer your readers quality products and content so you can successfully sell your stuff (or yourself) to them and gain profit.

These are just a few of the myths about Internet Marketing we hope we’ve debunked today. Have you any suggestions of how growing an online business can be misread? We’d love to hear about it!

Related posts:

1. How do Internet Affiliate Marketing Programs work?

The top 12 Internet Marketing Myths you should avoid is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

Social Bookmarking is a way to organize and share your bookmarks on the Internet. Apart from being able to store your bookmarks categorized, helping you find what you search easily, it’s a very effective way for webmasters to promote their website.

The two most important positive effects of using social bookmarking sites are the increased number of direct visitors if the story you submit gets voted and appears on the front page and the link value that they give to the article. Submitting your articles to social bookmarking sites will help each post get “link-juice” and rank much better for its main keywords.

There are two types of Social Bookmarking sites: general bookmarking sites and niche bookmarking sites. In general you can submit almost all your posts in whatever niche it belongs to, excluding of course adult oriented posts, gambling, etc. Niche social bookmarking sites have less traffic than the general ones but are much more focused, helping you spread your message in a much more efficient way. Getting on the front-page of a niche social bookmarking site often can also help your branding tremendously.

Let’s start by mentioning the general ones first and then go to the niche ones.

General Social Bookmarking Sites

Delicious is the first social bookmarking website that went live on the Internet and remains one of the most important of its kind. If you want to use only one site and you just need to organize your bookmarks, Delicious is the way to go. Its tagging system will help you organize everything according to the tags you specify and you can access it from any device connected to the Internet. Delicious can bring a lot of traffic if a story submitted reaches the frontpage but mostly that has to happen organically: you just submit your article to it and that’s it.

Digg is one of the first social bookmarking sites set up that still ranks in the top 5, whose popularity suffered a small decrease after its redesign (which I’ve actually found to be pretty great). Don’t get me wrong though, getting on the front-page of Digg will bring you thousands of visitors to your post and hundreds of backlinks. It’s an asset for your promotional efforts. Stories that work very well for Digg are world news, technology, and humor posts. If your website niche is close to one of the aforementioned, your chances are increased.

StumbleUpon is not only my favorite social bookmarking site, but the guys who created it sold it to eBay and after two years of steady drop in traffic, they bought it back in order to resurrect it, and they did! Now StumbleUpon is more powerful than ever.

StumbleUpon is heavily based on its toolbar that Firefox and Chrome fully support. After the registration, the system asks you to enter your interests and hobbies and then starts to show you relevant sites to your interests when you press the Stumble button on your toolbar. By liking and disliking the pages you visit, you “train” StumbleUpon for it to serve you pages much closer to your taste, making it the perfect tool for missing your deadlines :P As you can imagine, it is an amazing tool for you to promote your own pages as well. You can discover a page in stumble upon, set its category and hope that the users who stumble upon it will like it too, creating a snowball effect, bringing even more traffic. Needless to say that in my 7+ years in Internet Marketing, SU is by far the number one referrer to my sites.

But beware: It’s not a tool to shamelessly promote your web properties. You must first be a user and then a promoter. Stumble doesn’t like it when the same account discovers pages from the same domain all the time and there’s really no way to fool it. If you like using stumble on your free time, you might do very well when submitting your own content too, otherwise you’re out of luck! This Social Network deserves a proper full review and how-to post that’ll be published really soon.

Reddit is a love-hate relationship for me. If you’re looking for a site with the best community that will sometimes help you, sometimes troll you, hey, that’s what Reddit is for! The most powerful user driven site on the net.

For simple users it’s heaven but if you want to promote a story, there comes trouble. A ban can come as easy as adding a post in a sub-reddit. To see if you are banned, copy your username page url inside reddit, log out and then refresh it to see if it is visible. If not, you’re banned and there’s no point in submitting new pages.

Reddit has what it calls sub-reddits, something like a social bookmarking comminity inside a social bokmarking community. Each subreddit has its own rules that submitters and users have to follow, and it’s self maintained by the users. Every subreddit has the url structure of http://www.reddit.com/r/subredditname, and when you submit a story, you have to type that name where you want your story to appear. People vote up or down a story and then you have a chance to make it popular on that sub-reddit. If it becomes that popular and the subreddit is big, many people will start seeing it on the main page. And that’s where you’ll get amazing traffic!

So to make the long story short, Reddit is not somewhere you just go to submit your posts and leave: it’s a one way road, and that’s to actively participate in it, engage in conversation, help others and at the same time promote your properties too.

Pinterest is the new social media craze. While being a new social media website, it already has managed to become one of the most visited websites on the internet (Alexa Rank: 53). While the majority of the traffic comes from a female audience, lately and after the thousands of posts that spread on the Internet everyday about it, its male audience started to get an increase in numbers too. I don’t know if this climbing in traffic will continue, but if it does it’ll be something that I won’t be able to explain.

If you’re promoting products that heavily rely on images and design, then Pinterest is your heaven. You should create new content with amazing product shots and images and promote it on Pinterest.

While Facebook is not even close to a social bookmarking site, it would not be fair not to include it in this list because it plays such an important role, even in organic results in Google. In Facebook you have two ways that you can promote your articles: one is to submit your articles in your personal feed, and the other one is to create a fan page, and while promoting that to your friends and readers, distribute your article links there. In the long run, creating a fan page is the best thing to do and what we do with our in-house projects is to always buy some Facebook ads in order to gather a good amount of links to the fan page, increasing the initial likes by a bit every time we post something on it. It’s not something you should ignore, no matter what type of site or store you have.

While Twitter as well, is not a social bookmarking site, it really has to be in this list too. We both added Facebook and Twitter to this list because they are both part of your social bookmarking efforts. When you submit a post to social networks and social bookmarking sites, you hope for mentions, links and visits and both Facebook and Twitter can help you in that. In Twitter, you create an account and have a stream where you post interesting links that people who follow you can see. It’s great for any niche because when someone follows you it’s sure they will love to see more from what you’re posting and that’s why you shouldn’t go off topic a lot.

Google+ again, is not a social bookmarking site but if you are serious about your website and especially if your niche is business oriented, Google Plus is the place to be. And I’m not talking about just pushing your links to your stream; that won’t do anything. You have to become active and network with other like-minded people and players in your niche. It’s actually the best social networking tool you can use to build your reputation. One tip goes a long way and that is to try to get into the most shared circles you can (relevant circles with your niche, ofc). There’s only one way to do that and that is to share amazing content with the network. The force is strong with this one.

LinkedIn is the most popular business social network. While Facebook has many more times the traffic that LinkedIn does, with LinkedIn you can build a brand and reputation while at the same time explore new job opportunities and partnerships. You can also use LinkedIn to promote your latest posts by sharing your posts’ links on your timeline and in groups you belong to and are relevant to that post’s theme. LinkedIn is one of the best referring sources of traffic for this site and works amazingly well for all business types of blogs.

Bloggers is a social network for bloggers but it can also work very well for social bookmarking too, and without the need to manually submit your posts to it. All you have to do is to add your site to the bloggers platform and add their banner to your site. Then, when you publish a new post, it will automatically get it and show it as your blog’s latest post and others will be able to vote for it. If it gets enough votes, it will be promoted to the site’s main page and get much better exposure. The key is to make friendships with other users so you will be able to mutually vote other people’s posts that are worthy and at the same time get votes on the good posts you publish too.

While FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook for quite some time and its feed is displaying the links with a nofollow attribute, it’s still a powerful website to post your links to. It works like twitter mostly and it’s very fast to submit a link; so why not utilize FriendFeed to get one more link to a post you have created? I wish it was still being actively developed, but well, you can’t have everything, they still have the site up and running well. :)

Pinboard is very close to Delicious and gained a lot of traction when there were rumors that Delicious was about to close. It’s a paid website but giving close to $10 once is nothing when you’re in it for the long run. It’s a great and fast way to bookmark your links so if you haven’t already registered, do so now. ;)

TiltZero is the brainchild of this team and just got released to the public. You might think, why the heck does the world need one more social bookmarking site? And the answer is that if everyone thought of that, the Internet would have less than 1000 websites. Social Bookmarking is something we actively do and we thought that creating our own social bookmarking community would benefit both us and all the users of the site. Being one of the first people that use a website has its benefits (having a powerful account when the site goes mainstream), so jump in the bandwagon with us and start submitting your useful and inspiring posts with the rest of the world. It’s a general social bookmarking site that accepts links on many categories. Check it out. ;)

BlogEngage is a well established social bookmarking website with good traffic and a well established community. It’s a general bookmarking site that prefers business and motivational articles, but anything goes. It’s one of the sites that are worth your attention because its results can be quite good for your website. The key is to participate in the community and make friendships. Give it a try, you will most probably like it.

BlogInteract is the brainchild of Bryan Hollis, and while it had some uptime problems in the past it has now become more stable than ever. Bryan is heavily involved with it and we’re expecting many great new features for it in the future. BlogInteract accepts all kinds of posts and if you haven’t already got an account there, give it a try, we’re sure you’ll love it.

Chime is one of the new players in the Twitter competitor list and while maintaining good traffic levels, it hasn’t yet become a great threat for Twitter yet. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t promote your posts there. In fact it’s a very good site to ping with your posts and updates and the use of tags is very well thought.

Whenever you add a new “chime”, you should add the most important tags for that specific post and that will help other users find your post within their most preferred categories. It’s a great promotional tool to use.

Diigo works like Delicious and has quite some traffic: you should submit your articles to it but more than that, I can’t find any other reasons than link value to be more involved.

Fark is the strangest of ‘em all! A social bookmarking site to submit funny, strange and amusing posts. If you have a site with funny images, it would be a great site to submit your posts to. Or any other offbeat news to be honest!

ZooTool is a great social bookmarking website that also has an iPhone application. You can create folders and submit your articles in a folder, making their retrieval later on a breeze.

While Folkd seems to have a lot of traffic, it does not have a strong community. Just submit your links and you’re good to go. One day I’ll study this site more but until that day comes, that’s what I would suggest.

NewsMeBack has decent traffic and from the quality of links seen on the frontpage, should be moderated, so send your links to it without being afraid of being blacklisted without reason from the search engines. Other than that, I can find many more reasons to be more involved in other social bookmarking networks. It’s a great place to enter a link into but not a community site.

Tagza is a good place to bookmark your post but that’s it; no reason to stay longer on the site since the community there is underdeveloped. That’s what you get when you focus more on promotion and less on the community. And we’re not saying this to blame them, we’re just trying to repeat it so we never forget it. ;)

Business social bookmarking sites

BizSugar is the most popular social bookmarking website for business articles. They’re heavily promoting it using all kinds of online promotion but most importantly, banner retargeting. This gives BizSugar the traffic it needs to be the number one social bookmarking site for business blogs and sites. Getting on the frontpage of BizSugar will give you many benefits. While the traffic to your story is not that big (approximately around 200 visits), top stories are distributed via their newsletter; plus, the link value benefits are great. If you’re in the appropriate niche, BizSugar is one of the websites you should first submit your articles to.

Inbound is a brand new website, but being created by the CEOs of SEOmoz and HubSpot, we’re sure that it’ll soon be the most popular bookmarking site when it comes to sharing Internet Marketing posts. It’s mostly for Internet marketers, but will gladly accept anything about blogging, startups and business too. And in the Internet marketing space, this is the front page you should be looking at every day for all your link building and Internet marketing news and updates. It’s a tool that shouldn’t be missed.

My SEO Community is a social bookmarking community dedicated to search engine optimization posts, but also focuses on blogging and design too. It’s a great place to start your bookmarking efforts because it’s a moderated community and if your social media profile is not that powerful, it’s a great place to submit your good content and you will have a good chance for inclusion to the main page. The moderating team is great and the articles accepted are 99% frontpage worthy.

MMO Social Network is focused in the general niche of making money online but also accepts articles about blogging and web design. It’s also moderated so it’s a good place to start submitting your helpful articles if you think that they belong to what the site wants in terms of content category.

Blokube is a Social Media oriented social bookmarking website that accepts everything from SEO to WordPress, design and technology articles. It’s traffic is quite good and you should invest some time and connect with its members.

Serpd is all about Internet Marketing and Blogging. If your website is about something related, Serpd is the place to be. While not having the best traffic on the planet, Serpd has a very strong community, in fact one of the best, and believe me, that makes up for the lack of amazing traffic. One other thing that I haven’t seen on any other social bookmarking site is that when you try to submit a second link from the same domain it won’t let you, forcing you to submit something else first and then something from the same domain again. This forces spammers to leave the site without submissions from the same site again, and at the same time, Seprd wins because of new quality content that they wouldn’t otherwise have. When I need to submit something from my domain again, I just open my RSS feed, get something from my favorites that has provided me with something useful and submit it, waiting 2-3 hours before I submit the next one.

Tip’d is a social bookmarking site that is different from all the rest. It’s focused on a sub-niche, sharing financial posts. While most of us would easily bet that the site wouldn’t have a lot of traffic, Tip’d showed us that it can happen, having a lot of traffic, more than the most social bookmarking sites out there. If your niche is finance and economy related, not only this is a great opportunity for a good amount of visits to your blog but also a great source of information laser-targeted to your niche.

Programming Social Bookmarking sites

Hacker News is the number one source for programming, geeky, and startup material. Its community is very helpful and will many times go to great lengths to help a person who has a technical problem. Even some types of business articles go very well in hacker news because let’s not forget, programmers also need to promote themselves, their startups and their projects too. Personally I’ll check Hacker News at least once a day to see anything new interesting to read, most of the times spending more than 30 minutes reading great content found on the site.

DZone is an amazing website for any type of developer out there. You will find anything about tutorials, videos, cheat-sheets plus help from the community. If you are a programmer, not only you should submit your posts there, but also participate in the community and often check out their hope page for programming gems that can help you in your work.

 Web Design & Development Social Bookmarking sites

Design Float is the most popular design oriented social bookmarking website on the Internet. It’s a great place for Designers to get feedback on their creation and showcase their work or templates; plus it loves programming tools that will help designers make their life easier.

If you’re a freelancer and trying to find more ways to get new clients over the Internet, you should really start promoting your designs and create freebies for other designers and start distributing them through social bookmarking.

The Web Blend is a web designer community that was recently re-designed and has went live for the public. It’s one of the best social bookmarking sites to promote your articles and designs, plus it allows news about advertising, Apple and programming too. It’s by far the best designed social bookmarking site and that’s how it should be, because being a site for designers, it too should have an amazing design! Kudos to the guys who redesigned it.

Design Poke is a design oriented social bookmarking site, but also focuses on marketing, usability design, programming and WordPress too. It doesn’t have that much traffic (compared to the two previous sites) but it’s a great place for you to submit your link to. After all, you never know how well it’ll do, plus, when you are promoting your articles, posts or designs, you should think that whoever does the most work will win in the end. (This is not a life lesson, nor an Internet marketing one: please don’t sue me for giving advice that didn’t work out for you. ;))

DeziNews is another design oriented social bookmarking site and a great place to find freebies for your own designs too! Traffic is close to DesignPoke but as we said before, the links are permanent and you want the extra exposure. In addition, you never know which social bookmarking site will be the dominant one in two years from now, so why miss the chance to have an account in great standing on the site?

This is not a complete list of the social bookmarking sites that exist on the internet. And it shouldn’t be! The rule “the more the better” doesn’t apply to social bookmarking too. Stay away from services that will submit your website to 1000′s of social bookmarking sites, because most of them are not moderated and you really don’t want your links to be placed together with God knows what else. You WILL see an increase in your ranks, but that’s only temporary.

I’ve tried to add all the best social bookmarking sites that I could think of and am using, and it took me more than 10 hours to write this article. If you think that I’ve missed a network that is worth mentioning and will give value to other people, it will not only help me, but will also help the thousands of others that will read this post. Help me help them!

And on that bombshell it’s time to end…. see you next week!

Related posts:

1. Link Building by buying relative sites
2. Amazing social sharing wordpress plugin – Sharedaddy
3. Why You Need A Professional Social Networking Avatar

The Top 35 Social Bookmarking sites list that will help you raise your site’s rank is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

Points, coins, experience: gathering all these gives us a sense of satisfaction, of achievement, of gratification. It’s all call gamification. Gamification is applying game-like concepts to just about anything, especially on the Internet. Tons of productivity applications, service subscriptions, social networks and job-seeker websites and communities use gamification for entertainment and to keep users and visitors coming and interacting with the various aspects of the website or application.

But why is gamification so awesome? What makes it so helpful and unique for its users?

- If you’re a boomer baby, a part of Generation X, and in your late 20s like me (and most probably an avid geek as well), you probably grew up with games that granted experience points, like computer role playing games, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons board games, and adventure games. We now have the feeling that whatever we have to do will give us, as we all still call it, “xp”. By actually applying this experience gathering to things we have to do, it actually gives us a feeling of achievement, as if we were playing similar games. So, if you remember how rewarding it was to level up and gain points, you’ll love any application of gamification.

- We as humans love being appraised for achievement. We also love seeing progress on whatever task we partake in – if only there was a progress bar on top of every single thing we work on! Not having a picture of how much we progress on things can muddle our heads and mess with our motivation. Gamification actually takes this principle and uses it for measuring productivity and task completion. It actually shows us that – a progress bar on things we have to do.

- Productivity gamification applications provide a nifty to-do list in game form, which makes it all the more fun. Gamification can actually make us proud for doing our everyday mundane tasks – come to think of it, we actually deserve to be proud of them! Not only are users reminded of their everyday tasks in a fun and creative way, but it’s so much more rewarding when you attach experience points to them. Check out this Gamification of task productivity of Epic Win for the iPhone, which is the perfect example of business or home-related productivity gamification. It’s a great application for your iPhone that assigns experience and points to just about any task possible.

- Visitors are much more bound to click on something or subscribe if it gives them points or experience. Gaming websites like Gamehouse use gamification heavily and wonderfully provide their visitors with incentive to click on their offers, subscriptions and game trials in the form of coins, points and levels which visitors can then trade for special prizes. Social networks like LinkedIn and Monster have progress bars and percentage points assigned to each action, especially profile completion – which, come to think of it, is the most important thing a subscriber needs to do!

Can you think of other examples of gamification you’ve come across? How does it affect you?

No related posts.

Gamification: Why gaining points is so appealing is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

So, you’ve decided to start up your own online business. You’ve made the decision to be your own boss, and work at home as an Internet Marketer, or professional blogger or copywriter. Well done, we wish you the best of luck :)

After you get through reading the basics, the pressing question remains: you’ve found out what you have to do in order to be successful at Internet Marketing and making money online. But how much exactly will it cost?
We’ve broken down the main things you’ll have to pay for when maintaining an online presence, whether a blogger, photographer, marketer, reseller, you name it. Keep all this in mind when thinking how to budget your your soon-to-be-booming business.

1. Registering your Domain Name.  There are a few ways to have a website or blog for free. All of these ways mean that you won’t have your own domain name, though. Think about it yourself: doesn’t it look so much more professional when you see a website with its own domain name? Websites that have Blogger, WordPress or Blogspot domains don’t look so catchy or serious. Of course, there’s no shame in having free hosting for your own personal website or blog (heck, you can even have just a free fanpage on Facebook!) but it’s professional murder if you want yourself and your business to be taken seriously.
Check availability for the best domain name for you and your business or trade. You can search on the internet for domain names you like, or check out services like GoDaddy. You’ll need to “rent out” a domain name.
If you want to buy a domain name off another owner then the cost of the domain range according to its popularity. In a nutshell, a new domain name will cost you around $10 per year.

2. Website and Email Hosting. Just like above, you’ll need some space to host your website and have email addresses set up. No one really likes (or trusts) people that send them emails from public domains, like Hotmail.com or Gmail.com. Exactly like above, you’ll need to “rent out” a place to host your website. Check out several different website hosting services, and check out their prices. Normally, $5-$10 per month should be more than enough for a starting blog. Be sure to check out email and data storage sizes, so you’ll get what you need according to your niche (for example, if you need huge images, as in photography, you’ll need a lot of storage space. If your business is email intensive, as in help desks and support, you’ll need lots of email storage.) For a website with normal needs, a HostGator Baby Plan is more than enough. For a high traffic site receiving more than 10,000 visits per day, you will need a more advanced hosting environment. While we are not a hosting company, having had problems with hosting our high traffic sites for many years, we might be able to help you host your properties on our servers. While not suggested for small to medium sites, if you have trouble with your current host, contact us and let’s see how we can make things right .:)

3. Templates and Website Design. A wonderful professional appearance is crucial for your online presence. But who has time to learn web design? No longer are the days when you needed to be a web designer or programmer to complete your wonderful website or blog. Now, it’s easier than ever to create a beautiful, pleasing website that will catch your visitors’ eyes. This is magically done with the help of CMS (Content Management Systems). The most popular ones are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There are tons of templates or themes that work with each system, and many categories for each business or niche. If you’re a photographer, you can choose from the myriad photography themes available. If you have a magazine or news blog, you can check out the Best Magazine WordPress Themes on Best WordPress Themes. Generally speaking, going with WordPress is the best solution nowadays because you’re able to do almost everything that a website could do, fast and easy.
Even if you’re a newbie at websites, WordPress is tremendously easy to set up. The other two popular systems require a bit of coding and programming for that extra expert touch. Give it some good research, and find the best CMS theme for you and your business. WordPress Templates come in free and premium flavors, but for more flexibility and options, you should usually go for a premium theme for a one-time cost at about $35-$100. Of course, make sure you check out the free ones too; you might find something exactly to your liking for free.

4. Various graphics and logos. Every and any business (or even person) that respects themselves has their own personal logo. This is very important for branding your business, or even your own personal brand, so that your readers and subscribers can pick out and recognize your brand or website in a jiffy. We all know Coca-Cola’s brand, or Google’s logo. It’s a wonderful idea for you to have your own logo. This can be outsourced to a graphics designer in your neighborhood, a friend, or even online at outsourcing sites like oDesk or go to 99Designs and host a competition for your logo. 99 Designs is amazing to get even a hundred of design suggestions for a logo before you choose the one that fits your needs. Outsourcing for consultation and design of a brand logo can go anywhere from $50-$200, but that’s just depending on the source and the quality. Prices here will vary according to the designer, and your tastes!

5. Imaging and photographs. Especially if you’re into blogging, article writing or copywriting, you’ll want to enrich your site with image content along with your text. This goes without saying – it’s no surprise that powerful imagery is crucial for your website or blog. Read up about the importance of use of images for a blog. Besides, with all the hype about photo-intensive social media like Facebook and Pinterest, you’re definitely going to need pictures that tie in with the content you’re going to submit. There are lots of stock photo websites to choose from but I’ll suggest the new player in the market, PhotoDune. Since it’s a new service the average photo will cost about $1-$5 according to its size and resolution. Try to include at least one photograph for every article you’ll write, and don’t forget, if you have more than one online presence, you can always reuse the photographs you purchase. Just don’t get too redundant!

6. Advertising. This is probably the most expensive, and most important, part of it all. There are so many ways to advertise yourself and your websites online that’s it’s too easy! You can choose from banner advertising, Google AdSense, Pay Per Click efforts, paid Facebook ads, even good old paper written media like flyers, posters, ads in the newspaper and business cards. Let’s focus on online advertising.
On this website, you’ll find many articles on how to successfully advertise your online presence. For starters, check out the article on how to lower your AdWords campaign keywords’ average cost per click rate, so you are able to advertise your web property much cheaper, and the best link building methods so you can get more organic traffic. It all depends on your business and your budget. How much are you willing to spend for advertising? How much can you actually afford? There’s no limit to advertising: it can be from nothing to everything! There are even stories of people spending on Facebook and Google advertising more than $25,000 per day! What I would suggest though, is to start spending your time first, testing the waters and getting the word out before you start paying for visits.

7. Outsourcing. Sometimes (hopefully eventually!) you won’t have any time left to write and post your own stuff! This can be for site maintenance, graphic design, helping out with content, ghostwriting, social media promotion, advertising, etc. It’s no shame to outsource someone, like we said before in the logo design part, to create something for you. It’s giving someone else a job, as well! Like the aforementioned oDesk, there are so many online marketplaces you can find someone exactly for the job you want, that it’s crazy not to take up on contractors’ offers when you really need it. The price of each job really depends on what you’re interested in, and whether it’s a one-time job or a contract, so it all boils down, once again, to how much you’re willing to spend on outsourcing. Remember, your own time is money as well.

8. Affiliate Marketing. This could have gone into the “advertising” part, but it’s actually a whole different story. If you engage in selling an online or tangible product, you can utilize affiliate marketing to help get a hugely wider reach of potential buyers. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is “recruiting” other webmasters, bloggers and people with online presences to help sell your product, in return for a commission that you’ll set. This may not exactly be a part of your monthly expenses, since you’re going to be giving a part of the sale price of your product, but it’s something you may want to keep in mind when you try to calculate your sales revenue. Just think that instead of getting the 100% of the market price on your product, you’ll only get the percentage left off after you subtract the respective reseller’s commission.
You can use an online marketplace like Clickbank. Read up more about getting started with Affiliate Marketing here.

Are you aware of any other budget-busting expenses for your blog or website? Share your experiences and ideas with us!

Related posts:

1. How to lower your AdWords Campaign Keywords’ average Cost Per Click rate
2. Is it worth starting an AdWords campaign for your website?
3. Having a website is not a Hobby!

How much will my website really cost? is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

Let’s step away from the technical part of having a successful online or work-at-home business. How about the basics of living as a freelancer?
Freelancing can be harder than we think. Working at home or making money online, being your own boss and regulating your own work hours can make you or break you! Who would think that the best part of freelancing can be the path to your demise?
There are a few things you should keep in mind when maintaining your own business at home. These tips are vital if you want to succeed both in life and in your business. After all, we’re in freelancing to live a better life, right? Take heed, freelancers everywhere!

- Especially when starting up and getting our businesses off the ground, we tend to get carried away and work 18 hours a day, or more! (It’s funny; weren’t we trying to get away from overtime at the office?) Start at an easy pace and scale up. If you start with a standard 8 hour work day, you’ll see how much time you need for every task and you can bump up from there.

- Lots of times, we work at home all day. At the beginning, (much like myself!) we thought that we could balance chores at home and be able to keep our workplaces and homes neat, tidy and clean. However, paradoxically, we tend to make excuses for ourselves, saying that we can do them later. Procrastination runs free! Never leave out your part of the chores. Take some time in the morning or in the middle of the day to tend to your things. Hey, you could even do 15-20 minutes of chores every couple of hours. That will help you get things done, and you won’t be sitting down all day! It can even help you with your health!

- Make sure in your 26-hour work day to take some “you” and “family” time. This quality time is needed for you to relax and spend time with yourself and your family. In no case should your family feel that you’re not giving enough time to them – this also goes for normal office jobs, as well! Also, take time out for you to relax and get away from your desk a while. You can go out for a walk or run, or even plop on the couch for a movie or such. The main point is to back away from the computer!

- Don’t overwork yourself. Like we said, it’s a double-edged knife, working at home and being your own boss. You can’t make yourself work so many hours a day – just because it’s “easier”, it doesn’t mean you have to wear yourself out. The point of being a freelancer is to feel better about yourself and your job, and make a living on your own terms. If you lose more than half your life working, it kind of cancels itself out, right?

- Make up a standard schedule. This is very good for productivity. When we’re at home, it’s so easy for us to decide to have a couch day or stay in bed until 12pm every day. This will not work or help you at all! Set aside the times you’ll be working. Make it a standard 8-hour day (or however many hours you’re set on working every day) and keep to those hours. Many morning people have found that their best productive times are 9 am-5pm or 10am-6pm, and some night owls like to work from 11pm-5am. Whatever works for everyone, that’s their best time!

Have you figured out your own tips and tricks on living as a successful freelancer and being your own boss? Feel free to share with us!

Related posts:

1. How do Internet Affiliate Marketing Programs work?
2. Organize your life with Evernote

How to balance work and life as a freelancer is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

This should be the most important rule of Keyword Research you should always remember:

Don’t copy your competitors’ keywords!!!!

I really can’t stress this enough, and since I am guilty of repeating this mistake over and over again with my own projects, I’ll elaborate on it as much as I can!

How copying your competition’s keywords can ruin your SEO efforts

Don’t get me wrong: when trying to rank for a keyword, it’s a great practice to see all the top websites that rank for that keyword and see what other keywords they’re focusing on. It gives you more ideas to run campaigns, ideas for new posts, and so on. It’s a valuable tool and great knowledge to have, but focusing your SEO efforts on particular keywords just because your big competitors do it is not a good practice.

Let me tell you my story (it won’t be long, I promise!). Six years ago, I created an arcade site (site with flash mini-games). I used all the promotional methods I could use at that time (no Facebook or Twitter back then), reaching traffic to1-6 thousand visitors per day. Since it’s a very cheap niche, I wasn’t making enough money from it, and wanted to increase its traffic substantially in order to benefit from the ads that the site hosted. That’s when I turned to SEO in order to rank better.

The first thing I did was to check out what all the big players in the niche did and following their example, found out that they mostly target the keyword “free online games“. After finding out that this keyword is searched more than 24,000/day I was sure this was the keyword to go for! Since all the big players do it, who am I to target a different keyword?

And thus begun my hunt: hunt for links and on-page changes in order to outperform the big guys. After six months of optimization I was able to secure a position οn the third page of that keyword (I am still amazed by that achievement) and get 200-300 people from that keyword alone, every day! If I was able to move to the first page, that would be a huge boost for my traffic!

But everything stopped there. I couldn’t move past the 25th position no matter what I did. The second I went to 24th, someone else went and took the position back. As it turned out the top websites in that niche had 100 times the funds I had in order to promote my website and had staff dedicated to SEO rather than a do-it-all guy. The final blow was after my summer vacation. I returned back to Athens only to find out that after a month of being absent and not actively promoting the site everyday, my position went back to 65! You can’t begin to imagine how angry I was!

Lesson Learned: When you begin promoting a website, you shouldn’t select the most competitive keywords as your main keywords. Those keywords will only bring you traffic if they are close to the first page of Google and by the time it will take you to reach that, you will have lost all the thousands of visitors that could have found you and link to you as a worthy source, from a less competitive keyword. Most of the times the use of long tail keywords can work like magic until you have enough “power” to move to a more competitive keyword on your main page.

“We’re all excited when we start a new project and think that we can reach the stars, but some keyword research and some logical thinking can help in the long run.”

Angel

Related posts:

1. How to use Long Tail Keywords to your advantage
2. How to lower your AdWords Campaign Keywords’ average Cost Per Click rate

How copying your competition’s keywords can ruin your SEO efforts is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.

Many people are very scared of raising their prices. In fact, so scared that they try everything they can do to save their declining business and doing every possible kind of promotion and modification to their sales and business procedures, closing in the end without even trying to raise their prices even a little bit.

Raising your prices can be the most efficient way to increase your total earnings in a matter of seconds and you can even split-test it! You can show some of your visitors a page with your normal price and some others your increased price, looking to find how the new increase will affect your conversions. Take a brief look at the following picture.

Let’s say you have an email list of 5,000 people. What you can do is the following: when you are sending a broadcast message with Aweber, you can send one version of your message to half your list and then another version to the rest. This way you will be able to send them to a different page for them to order, and you will be able to measure the results effortlessly.

What you need to do to increase your product’s price

1. Find what you will give to the increased price buyers in order to justify the price.

You can offer them one-on-one consulting, a report, a mini-course, anything that can justify the increase of the price.

2. Create two different packages in your billing system in order for your visitors to be able to pay.

3. Create one more (almost) identical landing page with the same information as the original, but explaining the value added bonuses of the offer.

4. Create two broadcasting messages for your list and send one to the first half and the next to the second.

5. Measure responses and conversions and see if the increase in price will help your business.

Note: When measuring the overall success of your price increase, take into consideration what increased expenses you will have by providing your members with the increased valued package. For example, if you have added one-on-one consulting, you should take that into account to be able to figure out if you’re profitable. As the image we’ve used before explains, examine the difference in sales and see how much more money the additional benefits to your “advanced” members will cost to you. If the additional sales money is more than your expenses, you SHOULD raise your prices immediately.

Related posts:

1. Experiencing an increase in traffic at your web site? Here’s what to do next
2. How to increase your website traffic with blog commenting

How to Increase your Sales Revenue by Raising your Product’s Price is a post from Moneytized Internet Marketing Blog
Follow @Moneytized on Twitter.