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.

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

So you’ve created your channel, you’ve created lots of videos and still you don’t have any traffic at all. Sure you’ve told everyone you know (even that girl you had a crush on in high school) but still you’re just working more on promotion and bringing in one visitor at a time, rather than spending your time creating your next video.

Why am I not getting any views on YouTube?

Let’s analyze all the ways you can go wrong and what you can do about it. Being involved with video is not an easy task. Many people are even afraid to show themselves on a video. Let’s see what might have gone wrong with yours and let’s try to fix it!

1. Going off topic

This is my number one reason why I don’t subscribe to a channel on YouTube. When I like a lot a videos on YouTube, I always search what other videos this person has posted. If I find that most of their videos are relevant, I always subscribe so I can watch more.

The problem arises when someone’s channel is not focused. I might love your videos on keyword research and find them very helpful for me but at the same time I really don’t want to see your other videos of you racing your street bike (actually, I’d love to see those too)! If your channel loses focus, it’s not a channel anymore; it’s a personal video diary and most probably I wouldn’t subscribe to it.

Solution: Take for example what iJustine has done with her YouTube Channels. She has a main channel (the one with the link), one for Vlogging (video blogging), one for gaming, one that contains her iPhone videos (shot only with her iPhone), and one with gadget reviews. This is the best example I can find of diversification. You might have many interests but don’t put all your eggs in one basket: create a separate channel for your other interests!

You might say: But on my main channel, I am a YouTube partner and already making quite a lot of money.

If you are a YouTube partner, making your second channel a YouTube partner channel is a much, much easier process than your first one. Do create a new one now because the longer you wait the harder it will be for you to do so.

2. Your Videos Suck!

There, I said it! Happy now?! Let’s see why.

i. When we create videos we most of the time get so overwhelmed by the whole process that we cannot easily put our thoughts together (especially in the beginning) and we can’t pass the information we need to our audience in the best possible way. The best solution for that is to have a script. I am not saying that you should write down every word that you will say in the video but even having some bullets will help you tremendously!

ii. Trying to be funny too much. You can’t be all about business especially at YouTube. You have to be even a bit funny to be able to engage your viewers in the best possible way. The best example of the finest mixture of being funny and at the same time teaching people new things is Frank Kern (and if you’re not subscribed to his newsletter, do so, amazing content there), where he’s funny but at the same time teaches you amazing internet marketing stuff.

Warning: Don’t try to be TOO funny because it’s much worse than being all serious. People might think you’re a joke and not take you seriously.

iii. You’re Afraid! Well, we all are, get over it! Especially in the beginning we’re afraid that everything will go wrong, that we will look ugly, that we won’t be able to speak naturally and everything will look bad. It’s natural to feel that way because with text you’re safe. No matter what you do, no-one will think bad about your bunny pajamas, or that you have been awake for the last 36 hours and look terrible.

Solution: If you don’t have enough time during the week to get a good rest and be the best you can be, just use those days to plan and organize your upcoming videos as well as promoting your previous ones. On Saturday or Sunday shoot all the next week’s materials and you’ll be much more confident.

iv. You think you look ugly on camera.

We all do, don’t worry. If you keep cultivating that thought you will eventually look bad on camera no matter what. Try to get over it, read something motivational, have a good sleep, shoot an episode with a friend.

And if you still can’t shoot a video: Many, many people do screencasting, if you’re not confident about your looks or just don’t want to “expose” yourself on camera, do create screencasts!

With screencasts you will be able to show your viewers your screen (very important for instructional videos) and create a presentation in order for you to teach them something. It’s a very good way to eliminate your fear of video and at the same time it looks really professional.

I have tried quite many screen capturing video programs but have finally concluded that for Mac the best one by far is ScreenFlow, and for Windows Camtasia.

Camtasia is a bit expensive but it’s really worth it. As for ScreenFlow, it’s the best software purchase you will ever make.

Last but not least, if you still think you look “funny” or strange on video, ask your very close friends for their honest opinion, they’ll know what’s best for you.

3. You haven’t done your research

Your ultimate goal is to help as many people as possible and with video you can do that 24/7! The only problem is that in order to do that, people have to be able to find you. Before creating a video you should do some research to see how you will name your video in order to be able to rank easier in the search engines (both Google and YouTube).

And I’m saying before, because even what you say on your video is important on what keywords you will rank for. But we’ll see about this in a bit.

First of all, you really want to use an actionable keyword as your title and by that I mean search queries that people type when they mostly want to view a tutorial video on a subject. Most actionable keywords have videos in the top of Google because how-to’s are amazing using videos. Do a search for the term that you want to use in Google and see if there are already some videos on that keyword. Unless you want to create a new market, this will increase your video ranking chances tremendously. After all, if that query doesn’t show any video results, you can’t rank!

The second step is to do some keyword research and see if that keyword is hard to rank for and most importantly if that keyword will bring any traffic if you rank well.

Doing some keyword research is essential for you to understand your market and at the same time not doing it is like shooting a weapon in the dark! There are two ways to see your keyword competition. The best free way is to go to the Google Keyword Tool, type your keywords and see what Google suggests and what has the most benefit for you, with the least competition.

The Keyword tool is an amazing tool but the second I bought Market Samurai I saw a huge increase in the visitors I’m getting for my blog posts and videos I do for clients. This happens because Market Samurai digs deep into your selected keywords and suggests exactly those that are fit for you. In a keyword phrase, even changing a single word can have a huge difference.

Top Tip: Check out Market Samurai’s Video Tutorials on how to use their application, it’s so essential I can’t stress it enough! Even if you don’t buy their tool, go ahead and watch their videos, they will provide you with amazing knowledge no matter if you’re a beginner or a pro.

To sum it up: First find if there’s a video market for your keyword and last but not least, analyze the keywords you have selected to see if it easy for you to rank on them with your video.

4. Your videos are not optimized

Next on our guide comes video optimization. Even though it’s the most important aspect for video promotion, most people just ignore it! Let’s change that once and for all, shall we?

The following are the things you should focus on when it comes to video optimization.

i. Video Title. As we discussed in the previous point, the title is the most important aspect of your video page. It will help you rank on search engines and at the same time, you can create your title so that when someone looks at it, they will want to click on it even out of curiosity. Remember, it’s not only about where you rank, it’s also about how many of those that will see your listing will click on it.

ii. Video Description. The second most important element on your video page! This is where you will write what your visitor will learn after viewing this video and also include links to your business blog and/or where this video is posted on your blog. You want to add links there because if you don’t you won’t be able to tell your viewers what you want them to do next. You should also include your main keyword in your description as it will help a lot with your ranking efforts.

iii. Video Tags. You should use tags, it’s one of the best ways to categorize your video and one of the few ways for YouTube to understand what your video is about. Tags play a very important role when it comes to related videos (videos that are suggested from YouTube on the right side of the page or after a video ends) so use them but don’t abuse them.

You should add all the relevant keywords that your video is about and if you are out of ideas, do see what others with almost the same title and content have used.

The more impressions you get, the more YouTube will suggest relevant keywords for you to use on each one of your videos.

That takes us to the next point that could easily be included here but it’s so important that should be a whole category by it self.

iv. Video filename. I haven’t split-tested this personally but there are so many people stating that your video filename should be optimized that I have to include it here also. What they mean by that is that when you upload a video to YouTube, you should rename it before in order to use your main keywords. For example you shouldn’t upload a video named sally004.mp4 but rename it into something like sally-cooks-ravioli.mp4 so that even from the filename, YouTube understands what it’s about.

I would perform a split test to see if that theory actually works, but to tell you the truth, it’s an action step that requires so little time that I always do it no matter what.

5. Video Transcription

When you upload a video to YouTube, it automatically tries to understand what you are talking about inside your video. As you can imagine, this doesn’t work that well for the moment, and it gives back strange sentences.

This text is used by YouTube in order to rank your video for the content of the actual video and it’s a really powerful strategy for YouTube to show it’s visitors much more relevant results. So you can utilize something that 99% of the other YouTubers don’t do. Upload a transcription of your own. It will be without mistakes and most importantly, YouTube will rank you for what you’re actually talking about, not just what it thinks you’re saying.

I can’t stress enough how powerful this method is especially for business or instructional videos. If you haven’t done that before, just give it a try! And if you don’t have enough time to do it yourself, you can easily and cheaply outsource it to oDesk in order to gain all the benefits that transcription offers. Navigate to virtual assistants and find someone that can do what you want at a reasonable fee.

Tip: You don’t have to upload your text with the actual content of your video at the same time you upload the video. You can do it anytime you want and you can also use that tip to update your old videos with the actual content in text form. All you have to do is to go to your Video manager, click the More tag of a video and select Captions and Subtitles. Then select Upload and upload your text. And you’re ahead of the 99% of your competition!

6. Engagement. Use it!

Most of us are forgetting about this very important part. Don’t just finish your video with a thank you, use the most valuable time of your video in order to tell your viewers what you would love them to do!

The end of a video is the most powerful part of the video, because the viewer has already enjoyed all of your video, might have learned something, had a laugh or whatever. Don’t just end your video, ask a question, ask them to like the video, subscribe to your channel and visit your site. If your video has helped them, they can’t resist doing so. Ray William Johnson and Philip DeFranco are masters at this. Look how they use engagement without being thought of as needy or anything else. If they can use this method to bring millions of views and subscribers to their channel, you should too!

7. Approve Video Responses

Many people (including me) have been quite grumpy when it comes to accepting video responses. In order for me to accept a video response in the past it would have to be exactly in the same subject as my video and a real response to it. Otherwise it would get a decline. Not anymore ;)

The thing is that when you have many video responses, YouTube acknowledges that many people not only took time to see your video, not only left a comment, but they created a video response for your video and that counts a lot in their positioning algorithm, giving you many “points” if your video has many video responses. What you should do is to accept (almost all) video responses. In order for the last 3 that are actually shown to be as relevant as possible, add a video response too, from one of your videos from your other channels. It’s a great way to “recycle” your viewers from one channel to another without spending any more time!

8. Be everywhere!

When you have a YouTube channel, it’s like having an actual blog, you have to have niche authority. I’m sure that no matter in what niche you are, there are many YouTubers out there in the same niche as you. Reach out to them, connect with them, help them promote their videos and the most important of all, make videos with them! It will create authority for you and at the same time it will strengthen your relationship with your “competition”. And that’s the magic of the Internet… In the real world, a competitor is someone who is in the same market with you and always tries to gain your customers. Not on the Internet. When you cooperate with your competition you both gain value and at the same time create more views and sales for both of you! It’s a powerful thing to utilize and you should do it immediately.

9. Create links to your videos

For the last one I’ve left one of the most important aspects of your videos ranking on Google and YouTube: link gathering.

YouTube and Google both work in similar ways: you need links in order to rank for your article or video keywords. What you can easily do and and gain a lot of ranking power is to submit your videos to social bookmarking sites as well as share them to your social networks. This will not only give you immediate results (friends viewing your videos) but also will strengthen their power against competition. It’s what you always need to do no matter what.

The most important social networks you should pay attention to are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn (if your videos are business oriented), and Chime (a new player, competitor with twitter)

Social Bookmarking sites to pay attention to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, BizSugar (again if your videos are business oriented), Delicious, BlogEngage, HackerNews (for technology, programming and business videos), PinBoard, and Technorati.

My intention was to keep this less than a thousand words but the thing is that video is becoming so important that having a strong presence is becoming essential for your marketing efforts.

What you should do before closing this page is to share it with a friend of yours that might have any of the above problems and help them overcome them or any of your friends that you think this would help them in their business. This will help us too because we’d love to see some traffic in a post that took us so many hours to write. ;)

What you should do after closing this page, is to make things happen!

Angel

Why you don’t get enough YouTube views on your videos and how to fix it is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

YouTube is a powerhouse when it comes to video. Everyone who’s spending more than five minutes per day surfing the internet, is going to visit YouTube. Why? It’s simple! Thousands of people upload videos to YouTube every day! And supply eventually creates demand.

Looking at the infographic below (found on Techcrunch) you will be amazed with the the 48 Hours of Video uploaded / Minute figure but what’s more important is that there are 3 Billion views per day!

If we assume that the average video is 4 minutes long, everyday there are One Million new videos on YouTube!

So why it is that YouTube is not used excessively by and for marketers?

People until now used to think that YouTube was just a playground for kids to play and a platform for musicians to distribute their music videos. And that’s why there wasn’t enough of a business audience on YouTube. Well, not anymore! People are beginning to understand that with such a huge audience, it’s not what brought them to YouTube in the first place that counts, but who will keep them engaged in the end. Meaning that, for sure someone wants to go and look at some RWJ videos (who wouldn’t???) but in the end they will soon stay to watch motivational videos, instructional how-to videos and anything that they really care about.

It’s like having a personalized television created just for you. No matter what your passions are and what you really love spending time doing, you will find someone uploading videos for exactly that.

And that’s what will revolutionize the way we interact with video in general. For so many years we were used to just tuning in to a Television channel and just let it broadcast its program to us. If we liked what we saw, we just stayed tuned in, passively enjoying what the television companies had to send our way. Well not anymore.

Now we are able to subscribe to a channel we like in YouTube and be able to enjoy new episodes whenever we feel like, wherever we feel like. Google is getting that and apart from its own efforts to create a Google TV, there are many others who have included YouTube video streaming on their device (aka. Apple TV). Most flat TV sets nowadays, come up with YouTube as an app pre-installed. In a few years that’s what will make news; YouTube and not any other colossal news corporation.

Google just changed the default channel profile view and made it much more social, so that when you subscribe to someone, you will also be able to see what person also likes watching on YouTube. Google now pays huge attention to people subscribing to a channel and gives a lot of rank value to channels with a lot of subscribers. It makes sense that what now is a simple channel, soon will become the evolution of a television channel. You will be able to see all your unwatched episodes and when you click resume, you will be able to see everything you haven’t up to now.

To make a long story short, now is the time for you to invest in YouTube, especially if you are a blogger, marketer or entrepreneur. You will be one of the first ones to make a huge impact and help YouTube shift and become a much much better marketing medium than it currently is.

Don’t wait for the right opportunity, a new camera, new lights. Just start shooting and help people understand better what you do and why you rock at it.

To your Success,

Angel

Why YouTube is changing and why you should care is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

In the previous post we saw how fast and easy we can create a free online survey with Google Docs for our market research purposes. However, there’s one thing I didn’t tell you. Even the paid ways to create surveys lack one big important thing: the ability to automatically register the people who finish the survey to a newsletter management service. Many support the manual import of email addresses, but I am not sure that the deliverability of those services is reliable; since if you can import emails manually, what’s stopping you from adding emails that you don’t have permission to send a mail to in the first place? So I’m sticking with Aweber for the third year now and I am very pleased with it.

Back to our subject:if I want some people to complete my survey and at the end be able to send them mails about the survey results, etc., I’m not able to. And that’s when an amazing plugin for WordPress comes in to save the day: Gravity Forms! With this plugin, not only you can create any possible kind of form you can imagine, but also build a complete survey and be able to export the emails and names to your Aweber account automatically.

So let’s see how we can do this.

What we’ll need:

• A WordPress blog…
• A Gravity Forms license. (You need to purchase the Business license and up in order to use the Aweber function. A once-off $99)

Creating a Survey with Gravity Forms

The plugin is easy to use and simply straightforward. When you install the plugin and create your first form, you will be presented with the first block that you will need to fill in order for some basic settings to take place.

On the first panel all we have to do is to set the form’s name and description. These can be shown when you embed the form in a page. (You have the ability to hide them and write your own.)

On the second panel you are able to set what type of button your form will have and to enable the button to appear only if certain conditions take place (conditional logic). We will cover it extensively very soon and explain how this amazing feature works.

You can also limit responses to a certain number, enable animation (suggested feature), or require a user to be logged in (if you want only your members to be able to fill it in).

On the last tab we can set up what will the participants see upon survey completion. It could be a text message or another page with a thank you message. Using the redirect is an awesome way to either use split-testing and see which form performs better or even set a goal in Google Analytics and be able to track how many “conversions” you’ve had and from what type of traffic!

After this small setting configuration, we’re ready to design our form.

The most important fields that you’re going to use are located in the standard fields and the Advanced ones. You’re going to use advanced only for the email preferences.

You can easily use:

• paragraph text to ask your visitors for their opinion on something
• drop-down menus or radio buttons for selecting a single option
• multi-select or checkboxes for multiple selections

The most amazing thing that Gravity Forms lets you do when designing forms and in our case a survey, is to use conditional logic. For example, you have added a question for the user to answer, something like: do you own a website? The following question can be: how many visits per month do you have on that site? That question can appear only when the user has selected yes as an option to the first question! You can view our own Internet Marketing product survey and play with the options to fully understand how conditional logic works. By the way, please do complete that survey while you’re at it. We’re in the process of creating our own product and would be so grateful if you could answer our questions!

Using Conditional Logic in your Survey is dead simple! You can add the question that is the master question and then when you add the dependent question, you can click on it, go to its advanced properties and select conditional logic. Then select to show this field only if the answer to the previous question is what you want it to be. That’s it! ;)

Capturing emails with Aweber in Gravity Forms

If you want to capture a visitor’s mail into your Aweber account, you will have to use the name and email from advanced fields and a single check-box for asking your users if they want to opt-in for updates.

The first thing you need to do is to register with Aweber and create your first list with the step by step guide that Aweber provides. Hint: You need to create a form too even though it might seem pointless since you’ll incorporate the form into the survey. Just create a form and don’t pay any attention to the graphics. ;)

When you finish the list creation, return to your WordPress panel and click on the forms panel, then select the Aweber sub-menu. If you can’t see it, you will have to install it from your Add-ons tab under forms. You will have to connect your Aweber account with the Gravity Forms plugin. After adding your API key, the plug-in will ask you what form it should save data to. Select the form in Aweber that you have just created and match the name, email and check box fields with your Aweber fields. After doing that, you’re done!

Save the form and create a new WordPress page embedding the form inside the page. There’s a button created in order for you to easily embed your form in the page, together with the styling buttons above your content. After publishing it you can start viewing it’s conversion rate and see what answers people gave to you.

So that’s it, there’s some work involved and some money to be spent but in the end it’s really worth it. You are now able to keep track of who has completed the form and the most important thing of all, be able to contact them with updates on your progress.

Hope that this post helped you,

Angel

Create your own online survey with WordPress and Gravity Forms is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

We all know that surveys play an important role in everything from product creation to customer satisfaction to market segmentation, and the list goes on and on… It’s one of the most valuable tools that we have in our hands and we NEED to use it in order to know what our prospective customers and visitors want to see from us and our products in the future.

There are many services that will let you create an online form and promote it to your fans and friends, but most of them have limitations when it comes to their Free tier. I know, I know; if you value something that much, why don’t you give some money in order to get the best out of surveys? In fact I did, and the next article on Moneytized will explain why and how we’ve created that solution. But if a reader wants to test the waters and see how surveys can help their business, why pay for testing the waters? That’s where Google Docs comes to save the day!

I used Google Docs in the past and thought that it was a good collaboration tool. But when I asked for some recommendations for good Survey systems in Google+, Google Docs came up three times in the thread! I knew I had to check it out again. ;)

The recommendations were correct. You can create your own survey in Google Docs, with beautiful graphics and all the form elements you will need, while at the same time be able to export all answers into Excel or get great graphs of the responses, all for free.

Step by Step survey creation in Google Docs

When you log-in to Google Docs, you will be able to see a button that let’s you create a new file. Click on Form and the next screen will appear. Name your survey and start adding questions. You have many options to select from and you will be able to create the survey with the exact way you prefer.

Once you’re done, click on the theme button and select the theme of your form page. There are many themes you can select from but remember, you need your visitors to pay attention to the survey itself, not the design. ;)

After you make sure everything is perfect, you can save the form and click on the URL at the bottom of the screen and share it with everyone that you want to complete your survey. That’s it, you’re all set ;)

After a few people answer your survey, you will be able to view statistics, what people selected the most, etc. You might think, why should I need a more advanced solution? Doesn’t it do exactly what I want? What else would I need? The answer will be given in the next article, so stay tuned! ;)

Edit: New article is up, learn how you can create a survey with WordPress and what are the huge benefits from using this solution.

Create your own free online survey with Google Docs is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

Sharing on social media is not a simple thing to do. First of all, you have to have something meaningful to share; something that your audience will love to check out and will benefit from it. Getting valuable content and pushing it to your social media account is not easy, at least if you want to do it consistently.

My own problem is that I can’t schedule my posts, because every morning I read my RSS feeds I can find more than 10 posts worth mentioning, but I can’t share them all at once, because everyone will hate me! At the same time, I can’t add them to a note and keep remembering every now and then to open it and share each link or story one by one. That’s too unproductive!

Here’s where Buffer App comes in, a Web Application to save the day! The guys that created the application had the exact same problem (that’s actually how the best applications are made, by solving a problem their owners had: necessity is indeed the mother of invention) and decided to do something about it.

After registering with the application, you can add your social media account (Facebook, Facebook Pages and Twitter for the moment) and edit the settings.

As you can see from the image above, you can set up almost everything you should need. The service supports bit.ly so you can keep track of the effectiveness of your sharing, and you can even schedule the time you want your status updates to be published. If you are a more advanced user of social media, you should change your update times into the best hours your audience is more responsive and more likely to check out your posts.

After doing that, you can easily go and install its Firefox or Chrome plugins and start using the service.

You will notice the application icon (top right for Chrome and bottom for Firefox). When you are on a page worth mentioning, click it and it will pop up the buffer dialog where you can modify your settings and send the buffer to the queue.

The idea is quite simple but it’s done right and it’s a service worth mentioning. Speaking with Leo Widrich, co-founder of the application, we got some more information that might be relevant to you.

The application got released in December of 2010 and already has 75,000 users and for the near future, they are planning to release support for Google+ and a new algorithm for better sharing. Especially Google+ support made me extremely happy. ;)

If you’re a site owner and you would like to add the buffer feature for your visitors, you can get the button here and if you’re already using the ShareBar social sharing plugin we mentioned before, you can add it using the following code:

<!-- code for Big Button: -->
<a href="http://bufferapp.com/add" data-text="[title]" data-url="[url]" data-via="[twitter]" data-count="vertical">Buffer</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js"></script>
<!-- code for Small Button: -->
<a href="http://bufferapp.com/add" data-text="[title]" data-url="[url]" data-via="[twitter]" data-count="horizontal">Buffer</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js"></script>

If after loving the application you decide to mail them about adding more services (like LinkedIn, Chime.in etc etc.) don’t bother, I will email them EVERY single month until they do so (I’m serious). :p

So what are you waiting for? Register NOW and finally fix your sharing schedule, once and for all!

Buffer: The Social Media Management Service to Rule Them All is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

With personal branding becoming a trend in marketing, competition is growing bigger and stronger every minute. What everyone who is marketing themselves needs to work on is creating and making their personal brand known, if they want to have a chance at making it big. This gives competitive edge, and the kickstart entrepreneurs and businesses need to get their name out into the world.

You may ask yourself, what exactly is personal branding, and why is it important to me and my business? In a nutshell, personal branding is marketing yourself, your career and your work as a separate brand, which makes people think of you as soon as they hear it. This is a big thing; one that we’ll have to write a whole other article (or maybe even series!) about! So stay tuned to learn more about personal branding.

A good step everyone with an online presence should take is to set a professional photograph or a custom digital brand logo as their avatar. Many may think it’s not that important to have the appropriate picture, but it’s actually a bit more important than you think.

- A good avatar or social media photo must be memorable and distinguishable. This helps for personal branding; after a visitor to your blog or website sees it about 7 times, people will become familiarized with it, and remember you and your brand. This picture should be used as your avatar on social media, blogs and websites, or at least your blog or website’s About Me page. In this way, visitors, prospective clients and subscribers will remember your avatar or face, and will relate that picture to the trust they’ve gained in your personal brand.

- As good as it is to relate to you and see your human side (which is why it’s preferable to post a real picture of yourself), your visitors must be able to take you seriously. Just think of how you’d show up at a job interview: it may not be necessary to dress up, but you wouldn’t go to a job interview in jeans or slacks or looking like you’re ready to go out and party. Sure, we’d love to post our Facebook pictures from last week’s party or our summer vacation (we just look so good in them!) but putting vanity aside, a smile against an office or your home wall will be sufficient to reach out to your readers.

- Like I mentioned before, posting a picture of yourself will help your clients and visitors to your website relate to you, thus gaining trust (and their sales and money!) more easily. We all like to try and have some kind of tie or bond with the person we’re going to be transacting with; it’s better to know they’re not trying to hide behind a computer screen or silly avatar. It’s like we say, “putting a face to the name.” We tend to trust people more if we’ve seen them, rather than have just talked to them over the phone or read some words on a screen.

- The quality of your profile picture must show that you took the time to pose and fix yourself up so you can look presentable. Readers always appreciate this. We don’t all have the time or money to hire a professional photographer to take our head shots, but we can be honest enough and ask a friend with a camera to take some snaps of us. Hey, it may even turn out to be lots of fun! Anyways, pretty much everyone has a digital camera they can lend you; it doesn’t even have to be a professional camera.

- You don’t have to be wearing a suit and tie, or a pants suit or skirt. Your clients and colleagues want to know that you can get the job done when you have to, which means you can’t show a picture of you goofing off or out partying! Clients have to trust that you are serious about your work, and that you mean business. However, it’s not a bad thing to show a hint of playfulness, either! You have to make your visitors feel comfortable with you, so you don’t have to take expensive professional head shots in a tuxedo taken at Trump Towers. Looking too extravagant or expensive might actually turn off your readers, who mostly are average Joes like you and me. Go for simple, down-to-earth, and neat-looking. As you can see in my silly profile picture here, I’m at my old office, wearing a smile, but showing my teddy bear posters in back.

- It might be considered racism or favoritism, but it’s true that when you see a person well-dressed and well-groomed in a serious way it makes you trust them more with your work (not as a person!) Take what I said about job interviews earlier. Unfortunately, the first thing we notice about someone or something they see is the way they look. If you get hired for a job, you may see that you’ll slowly start to dress more and more casually, and probably won’t hear a thing about it. The thing is to get hired in the first place, right?

- If you’ll be using a digital logo as your avatar, make sure that it looks professional enough. You don’t have to be an expert at digital design. You can always outsource your logo creation to another; there are hundreds of online marketplaces you can go to. This means you can’t just make it in MS Paint (unless you’re really good at MS Paint!)

Take this real-life example of a logo that was acceptable at first, but with a few tweaks, actually became profitable:

In the first example, we see a cute speech bubble with text inside. It’s pleasurable to look at, but the design is pretty plain, and wasn’t as distinguishable or memorable. On the other hand, the second avatar is more clear, with bigger letters, memorable white and red color association, and all around more pleasant to attribute the website to. This is an actual case study; Best WordPress Themes actually jumped up a whopping 220% more followers per day after the avatar was changed throughout the website’s social media pages! As you can see, the new logo isn’t all that fancy, flashy or extravagant: just a few simple changes made all the huge difference.

As far as your social media is concerned, you can use a service like Gravatar to assign an avatar to your email address. 99% of blogging platforms today support Gravatar, so when you comment or write an article on such a platform, your profile picture will be automatically included next to your comment or post.

Do you have any stories, experience or case studies on how a picture, logo or avatar helped or broke your business? We’d love to hear about it!

Why You Need A Professional Social Networking Avatar is a post from Moneytized Blog
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A few months ago, we wrote an article about another social sharing plugin, ShareDaddy. I sure think it’s an amazing plugin and it can easily be incorporated on any blog, but if you’re feeling a little bit more adventurous, Sharebar is a plugin you much check out!

You can check out how Sharebar works on this blog. The social sharing icons on the left will move as you scroll the article. Lately, more and more sites are using this method to urge their visitors to share their posts on their social networks. What made me check out Sharebar is that if your screen resolution is less than 1000 pixels, the left share bar will be removed (since it can’t be shown properly) and normal sharing buttons will appear at the end of an article. You can check this feature out if you resize your window, I loved it! So, visitors browsing your site from mobile devices will still see your social sharing buttons. Amazing, right? ;)

Sharebar was created by Monjurul Dolon of DevGrow and can be downloaded from here.

By default, the plugin supports the following services: Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Share by Email, Reddit, DZone, StumbleUpon, DesignFloat, but you can add as many as you like very easily. As you can see, I’ve also added Google Plus, LinkedIn and BizSugar.

If you’d also like to add them, go and grab the codes for Google Plus, LinkedIn and BizSugar. The great thing is that you can add the square versions for the sidebar and the short ones for when your visitors’ screen is small.

In case you have any problems with where your sharing bars appear, you can disable showing the sharebars and add them manually to the part of the template you prefer. For the Vertical (next to post) Sharebar type: <?php sharebar(); ?> in your template and for the Horizontal Sharebar type: <?php sharebar_horizontal(); ?> .

Tip: If the horizontal Sharebar is showing bulleted dots, go to your theme’s stylesheet and add the following: ul#sharebar > li, ul#sharebarx > li { list-style: none; } This should help.

After playing with it a bit, we’ve finally made it appear exactly as we wanted! We hope that it will be one of our plugins for quite some time.

Sharebar: A neat social sharing plugin for WordPress is a post from Moneytized Blog
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Whoever is thinking and doing research about making money online has no doubt come across the idea of affiliate and vendor programs. But, what are they, how do they work, what’s the difference between them and any other online income, and what can they do for you? Read on to clear things up about affiliate programs and their uses, tips and tricks.

What are affiliates and vendors?
A “vendor” is the manufacturer, creator or distributor of a product that will pay you, the affiliate, a commission when you redirect a potential buyer to the vendor’s products and make a sale. It doesn’t have to be a tangible product; it can be virtual, like an e-book or a service. All ranges, markets and niches have vendors who are looking for affiliates.

How do I make money from vendors, being an affiliate?
All you have to do is promote vendors’ products and make your visitors buy them. You get a large commission because the vendor doesn’t have to put any additional effort for every new sale, and thus making money with your help! So don’t be surprised if you see a vendor offering 75% commission; that’s 25% they wouldn’t be making if they didn’t have you on board their advertising train.
The best way to promote vendors’ products is by incorporating their links into your website’s content. Let’s say you have a website about camping sites. Either you could have a banner ad for a vendor that sells camping gear on your site, or you can mention their name and product in your next newsletter.

How are affiliate programs different from Pay Per Click, Cost Per Action, etc?
In Pay Per Click and similar methods of advertising revenue, the marketer  is paid a small fraction of money when a potential buyer clicks on their link or performs a special action. This doesn’t involve commission on the price of the product; no matter how much a product or service costs, it’s more incremental than percentage, that’s why it’s called “per click” or “per action“. Vendors using affiliates, however, actually offer a percentage of sale for the product. So there’s definitely more money involved, and that much more work in promoting!

How do I find vendors and choose one?
It’s easy! There are tons of affiliate sites, or marketplaces, you can go to΄ if you haven’t come across one on your own. Examples are Clickbank, Commission Junction, Amazon Associates. Also, tech companies like Logitech and Case-Mate have their own affiliate programs, usually found on marketplace sites as well.

Not sure how to choose one? There are two ways you can effectively choose a vendor to work with.

- Choose the vendor with a product that’s closest to your website or specific article/content. This means, first you have the content ready, then you’ll choose the product to promote. Each affiliate marketplace has extensive search options, so you’ll be able to find the perfect match to promote with your content. Make sure it’s as close as possible to what you’re writing about; not only will irrelevant affiliate links “turn off” your readers, but you may even get penalized by search engines for it! If you can’t find something exact, better to not put any affiliate links at all. Or, if you don’t have any ready content:

- Pick out a vendor and product you like, and write something up from there: this is choosing the affiliate program first, then creating your content. This is also an amazing remedy for writer’s block. If you’re at a loss for what to write, you can always log on to an affiliate marketplace and get ideas from there. It doesn’t even have to be relevant to the rest of your website; give your readers a nice surprise and write a review on that new product you’ve bought (make sure there is an affiliate program for it, of course!) Make sure your content is original, and don’t copy it from anywhere else! (But hey, that’s like a fundamental law of blogging; you already knew that, right?)

You should always look out for the percentage of commission that each sale will get you, and how popular that specific vendor is. Hey, you don’t even have to have a website to promote things! Many vendors have special pages on their website especially for affiliates, including tips on how to promote their product. Lots even have their own ready content for you to distribute; banner ads, text blurbs, etc. Utilizing their own content is very helpful, since they know best on their product’s features, specifications and use; they will also know how to promote it the best, and help you do so as well.

These tips have proved helpful in internet marketers’ and online bloggers’ quest in making money online. Do you have any tips or tricks that have helped you in the past with affiliate programs, or have something to suggest? Share it with us in the comments!

How do Internet Affiliate Marketing Programs work? is a post from Moneytized Blog
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When sharing a link on Facebook, its service tries to parse the linked page and extract as much information as possible from it. Facebook tries to extract the title, a short description and an image from the linked page. While this information may be extracted by the standard meta-information means of the page like page title and meta-description, the author may recommend the default values to the users sharing the link.

For the Facebook service to extract the relevant meta-information recommended by the author, it uses another meta-information protocol, named Open Graph Protocol (OG). One may view this protocol as just another meta-information protocol for web pages. While the new version of Open Graph Protocol, which changes everything, is still in beta, there will be backwards compatibility with the current version.

As the documentation states, in order to turn your web pages into graph objects, you’ll need to add Open Graph protocol <meta> tags, suggesting the current page’s suggested meta-information. An example in WordPress follows:

<?php if ( have_posts() ): the_post(); ?>

    <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>

        <meta property="og:title" content="<?php the_title(); ?>" />

        <meta property="og:type" content="article" />

        <meta property="og:url" content="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />

    <?php } ?>

    <meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"/>

<?php endif; rewind_posts(); ?>

The code above should be included in the header.php file of your theme, inside the <head> tag. Please note that the code checks if the currently loading page is a post or page (is_single() function) in order to proceed, suggesting the relevant information. One may include an else part containing general and default meta-information for the rest of the pages of the site. For an explanation of the meta-properties, please refer to the OG types documentation.

Even though the code above provides the basic information, it misses some critical information: a description of the page content, and an image describing the content. These elements can be integrated into WordPress in many ways; so the following sections provide implementations for some of the different options.

Setting the Facebook Summary Text

Many authors prefer the post excerpt field of the WordPress CMS to include a small description or summary of the main content, whilst others use third-party SEO plugins to manage the meta-information. In the first case, one may add the following, just below line 5 of the code above:

<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, '_aioseop_description', true); ?>" />

In the second case, the documentation of the third-party plugin should be consulted for extracting the required data. In the case of the All-in-One SEO plugin, the code should be:

<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, '_aioseop_description', true); ?>" />

Setting the Featured Image as the default image Facebook will show

Many WordPress themes support the relatively new feature of “post thumbnail”. Usually, authors choose an image relative to the content; it would be a good idea to include it in the meta-information of the web page. Again, add this just below line 5 of the code above:

<meta property="og:image" content="<?php $post_thumbnail = wp_get_attachment_image_src(get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID),'large'); echo $post_thumbnail[0]; ?>" />

For themes not supporting post featured images, one may use the first image found inline in the main content:

<meta property="og:image" content="<?php preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches); echo $matches[1][0]; ?>" />

So, no matter which theme you have installed on your WordPress site, you will be able to set the title, description, and most important of all, the image that will appear on the liked post, helping you achieve a better click-through rate.

If you have any problems or suggestions, please comment, and we’ll look into them as soon as possible!

How to set the default Featured Image and Description when sharing your posts on Facebook is a post from Moneytized Blog
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