Step 1: Install a do-follow plugin

This lets people who comment on your blog get a little SEO benefit from doing so.

Step 2: Put your site into a do-follow directory

This lets you be found by the people who use automatic comment submission programs.

Step 3: Use comment moderation

Set it up so that comments are moderated until a person gets one approved comment, then comments from that person bypass the moderation queue.

Step 4: See what keywords people are using

A good percentage of the people commenting, and all the people using automatic commenting programs, will keyword stuff their name in their comment. Presumably, they’ve used that particular keyword because they’ve done some research and decided that there’s a market for it.

Collect a couple dozen keywords this way, and head over to Google’s Keyword Tool to see which ones look like the best ones to create a Neglected Niche Site about. Create the site, promote it a bit, and then do the next.

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So you have to set up a good grouping of graphics and content on your website, but have you ever thought about the colors? If not, then you must, because colors are as vital part of your website as the graphics or content. The colors you select for your website design creates a lot of disparity. Being conscious that a smattering of colors can lead to an emotional reaction is the key to choose right colors for a website. Knowing what colors have a calming result and which cause feelings of anticipation can choose color scheme very easily. Colors can also be used to make difference and awareness to a design. Colors can direct users to definite parts of a webpage.

Color perception changes from one person to another. Color perception problems are more wide spread than people think, and have more causes and variations.

Colors have a deep affect on the moods of people. There are few colors that have certain effect on a person and summon particular emotions in them and as we know, emotions can be very hazardous to business. Let us see how colors effect the emotions of people through website:

• Black is related with power, sophistication, modification, riches and mystery. In designing for the website, it can be used successfully with bolder colors to generate good contrast.
• White is related with clean, simple, calm and purity. White color is used on websites a lot; it can communicate a sense of style and suggests that the content of website is sturdy enough to stand alone without any strong visual aid.
• With intensions to lust, anger, fire and power – the color Red, to be used carefully, as it can be a great way to direct the user’s concentration to a certain area.
• Related with color Blue, gives feeling of cold, royalty, stillness and air, blue is the best-used color for corporate websites. It generates a very different reaction to color Red.
• Green represents nature, environment, peace and luck. Green is a successful color to use for a soothing consequence.
• Envoy of joy, happiness, warning and energy, the color Yellow has a comparable affect to Red, although it is not as popular. Yellow can be used to highlight areas of a website. However, if it’s used too much, it can be an irresistible.
• Inspiring up feelings of style, novelty, fashion and modification, the color Grey is frequently used on places that cover fashion, design and tech.
• Purple is an amalgamation of blue and red. It does have the highlights of red, but has more bold properties than blue. It mixes up the images of royalty, faith and luxury. However, it isn’t regularly used color in designing websites.
• Brown, mainly the lighter end can be very calming. Beige is also a popular color in web design as it gives an earthy and tranquil feeling. It also means tradition, poverty and Earth.
• White is a great color to utilize on a website’s background to create a sagacity of space and modernism.

Knowing about what colors symbolize and their subconscious power can be of great advantage when designing websites. Knowing about the target audience, designers can choose colors considerately which connect to the end user thus making the website look eye-catching and tempting.

E-commerce websites can be amended by directing the user in the direction of the purchase button by drawing attention and building contrast.

About Author

Author is working with Plaveb Corporation.

Author has vast experience in web design and has good knowledge in choosing colors for website. He has more than 5 years of experience in web designing.

2 Comments

• At April 25, 2010, David Saunders wrote:

  I agree that color scheme is important as for example graphics.. Everybody who design sites should know a lot about that.

• At May 11, 2010, ownlimited wrote:

  hi. how the relationship of color composition and speed of loading pages?

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For 2008, I think my income was around $2,500. For 2009, it was around $1,400. But here’s the catch, and what prompts this post and what every part-time beginning online marketer should pay attention to.

For 2008, I ended up with a net loss of about $2,000. For 2009, I ended up with a net profit of around $900.

This leads to some Truths of Internet Marketing that most beginners fail to realize until it’s too late.

It isn’t important how much you earn

How much you earn is not important. What is important is how much you spend in relation to what you earn. If your total at the end of the year is not positive, then you may be doing something wrong.

There is no magic program

The number one mistake most beginners make is falling for the hype that there’s a program that will make them successful. It just isn’t so. There is no “one true program”. That hype is put out by the people who will make money if you invest in the program.

You can make money with anything online. Chasing programs just costs you money. Pick one and stick with it.

There are magic skills

There is a learning curve. You must learn SEO, copywriting, keyword research, creating web sites, etc, etc, etc. Those skills are what will make you money.

And you can learn them without paying out a lot of money to expensive programs. But it takes time, and trial and error.

The Recipe For Success

Pick an affiliate program to promote. For beginners, affiliate programs are an easy way to get started on the learning curve without the hassle of creating your own product.

Start on the learning curve. Write some articles, put up some web sites on likely keywords, and see what your results are. The only things you should be spending money on at this point are web hosting and directory submission services. A new site should cost you very little to put up.

Keep at it! Explore the corners of the product you’ve chosen to promote. Don’t switch products, see how many different ways you can promote the one product or line of products. This is the way you learn.

When you are comfortable with the process of promoting a product, and making a little money at it, create your own product. This can be anything! Create it, and promote it. You’ll spend a bit more here for a system that can accept payments (such as Rapid Action Profits), but that should be a one-time payment that can be amortized across this and future products.

Again, keep at it. Promote your product using the skills you developed, and while you’re at it, look for ways to develop more related products. Creating a line of products allows for better branding, and allows you to build on the relationships you’ve made with sales of each product.

Internet Marketing is not supposed to cost a lot of money. So if you’re chasing programs looking for the one that will magically make you money, get off that treadmill and start learning the skills that will help you succeed.

4 Comments

• At March 15, 2010, Josh wrote:

  I think it is great you profited this past year despite not giving as much effort compared to the prior year.

• At March 18, 2010, Klauzer wrote:

  Yea, internet marketing is great. I just started ans already see results. Thanks for the post.

• At April 18, 2010, David Saunders wrote:

  Yes, Internet Marketing is the most exciting way to acquire true freedom. Not only that, but people like you add value to those who are just beginning in this exciting adventure. You sure know how to get someone going.

  Thank you for this post! Please keep the value coming :-)

  Happy Blogging,

  ~David Saunders

• At June 19, 2010, Matt wrote:

  I have come to much the same conclusion. I figure that as long as you are making more money than you are spending, then you're doing okay. The challenge then becomes to just slowly improve that ratio so that you make more and more profit.

  Same with SEO. Some people might be really disappointed if after a couple of months the traffic is only trickling in. Then they give up.

  But just those few clicks form searches is a good sign. You are in Google and ranking for some keywords. So you've just got to keep learning and building on your successes.

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I wanted to highlight some of their services.

First, I was very happy with the process of logo design through them. I’ve tried some of the cut-rate logo design people on the various forums, and found that generally what you get is stock shapes and fancy text. If that’s what you want for your logo, then you’re set. But the Logo Design Team folks designed several possible original logos based on my input, and then made changes based on my (sometimes very picky) feedback.

The logo I ended up with was exactly what I wanted, and a cut above the cut-rate folks. Well worth the investment for me.

Some of the services they’ve added since I worked with them are worth a mention.

Logo Repair

Their Logo Repair service is an alternative to having a logo designed from scratch. You have to have a logo first, but if you do they can tweak it to make it more modern, adapt it to changing circumstances, etc.

This is also useful if you have a JPG of your logo, but nothing more. They can take the JPG and produce higher quality source files that can be used for print, letter heads, etc.

Holiday Logo Design

Their Holiday Logo Design service is a great idea that I wish I could afford to take advantage of. They’ll take your existing logo, and adapt it to a specific holiday. For example, for my logo they might add a Santa hat to the world, or show a sleigh circling it, for Christmas.

If you’re in business for the long-term, investing in some holiday logos will add to your site’s attractiveness. Look at how well Google does changing its logo for special occasions.

Logo Reseller Opportunity

Their Logo Reseller Opportunity is an opportunity for you to create your own logo design business, using the Logo Design Team folks as your designer. You work with your customers, charging them what you’d like. Logo Design Team does the work and you earn the difference between what they charge you and what you charged your customer.

This is certainly not something for everyone, but if you’ve been looking for a business to run, this might be a good fit.

I’ve only tried the logo design, but like I said above was very happy with it. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Logo Design Team.

1 Comments

• At November 19, 2010, nursery vouchers wrote:

  Where do i get freelance work like logo design, poster design, illustration in delhi?

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The bounce rate for a web site is the percentage of web visitors that land on a page on your site, and don’t look at anything else. They don’t read other articles on your site…and if you’re writing a blog, this should probably concern you.

What does your site’s bounce rate tell you?

Landing Page Targeting

First, you should be able to see the bounce rate for various search terms people have used to find your site. If you cannot, switch to something like Google Analytics, which gives you this info.

If some of those search terms have higher bounce rates than others, that tells you that the landing pages for those terms are not highly targeted. People are coming to your site looking for specific information, and not finding it.

This is a terrific opportunity! Look at the search terms that have higher than average bounce rates, and write landing pages for them that are highly targeted. Link to the highly targeted page from the one that the search engines are sending traffic.

Eventually the search engines will send traffic directly to the new pages, but for now visitors should see the links and be able to get to the targeted pages. By giving your visitors what they’re looking for, you can increase your site’s value to them.

For example, Online Opportunity gets some hits for the search phrase “diy tracking affiliate links”. Those hits go to my post about DIY Link Cloaking. Traffic for that search phrase has a 100% bounce rate, because they’re looking for tracking links, not link cloaking.

I could write a post about tracking affiliate links, and my keyword research has already been done for me by Google Analytics. I know there’s a (small) demand, I know what keyword to use, and I feel that I know what the visitors are looking to find.

You don’t often get guaranteed targeted traffic handed to you, unless you pay attention to high bounce rates on your site.

What’s A Good Bounce Rate?

That’s impossible to say. That’s why I suggested you look for bounce rates that are higher than average for your site.

Bounce rates vary widely based on:

o) Your niche
o) The type of your site (e.g. store, blog, info site, MFA site, etc)
o) Your style of writing
o) The quality of your writing
o) Your use of graphics

and more.

When Is A High Bounce Rate Good?

There are times when a high bounce rate is good. Primarily, if you’re running an MFA (Made For Adsense) site, you don’t care about keeping visitors on your site. You want them to click through to ad links that earn you money. So a high bounce rate isn’t really an issue for you.

Overall, though, you want to keep bounce rates low, so that people see more than one page on your site. That gives you more than one opportunity to take search engine traffic and convert them into regular readers.

What sorts of bounce rates do you typically see?

4 Comments

• At January 9, 2010, Niche Marketing Breakthroughs wrote:

  This is a very interesting thought!

  However, some caution may be needed before going out and doing all this work. You may have bounce rates for search terms that have no marketing value for affiliate work (not buying keywords). So the only hope for income is through google or yahoo ads, etc.

  Best then to leave it alone.

  Or, on the other hand, you will find people appreciate that you have answers to their issues (non-buying keywords) and remember where they got the answer. They come back, or refer you (backlinks), when they help others. So go ahead and write a short, informative article.

• At January 9, 2010, Jay wrote:

  Obviously, if you're selling things, keyword research is always important, regardless of where your keyword ideas come from.

  On the other hand, if you're monetizing traffic via ads, nearly any keywords that get traffic are good ones.

• At March 23, 2010, paul fald wrote:

  I have a bounce rate of approximately 75% for my site(not good).

  I will go now back to Google Analytics and have a closer look, I certainly want to have a lower figure.

  Great article, thank you !

  Paul

• At May 12, 2010, cna training wrote:

  Bounce rate is very useful. I had a bounce rate of 80% on my home page. I included some pictures and a video, I've got it down to 30%!

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Some quick background…I stumbled across this technique early in my days of investigating Internet Marketing techniques. I created a web site around a specific keyword, and put in some affiliate links and Adsense. It wasn’t a good web site, but it was a cut above a Made For Adsense site (if only just). I used that site as a target when I was testing Directory Maximizer.

Nothing happened with the site, and I forgot about it for several months. I continued looking at other Internet Marketing techniques, and as part of those was checking my Adsense income regularly.

Much to my surprise, I found that site actually making some money. Investigating more, I found that it was on page 3 for its keyword in Google. Over time, the ranking grew, despite me doing nothing more to the site. Today, that original site is #1 in Google for its keyword, with no additional content added to it since creating the site.

Eventually I got around to writing up the technique, and duplicating it. In the ebook I’m giving away in this post, I walk you through the complete process of creating sites like this, using one of my sites as an example (not the original site, but one of the ones I’ve created since).

I earn an average of $50 a month from each site. Obviously, some perform far better, some far worse. Your earnings potential depends entirely on picking a good niche and keyword basis for the site, so it’s a bit hit or miss. But the sites are easy enough to put together that duplication is the key, so you can average out the misses with the hits.

If I were doing this by the book, you’d need to opt-in to a list to get the ebook, and then I’d try to sell you various things in the sequence of messages that followed. But I’m busy enough in my teaching job right now with some pretty exciting projects that I’ll just let you download the ebook with no hoops.

You can ask questions as comments here, or you can use the contact form on the blog to ask questions. I’ll answer questions as I can, and update the ebook as needed.

You can download the ebook through this link: Neglected Niche Sites Ebook

Update: I’d be very interested in hearing your results with the techniques presented in the ebook. Niche selection is probably the most important step, and can largely be trial and error. My best performing site is still the first I created, and it just happens to be a niche that does well during recessions. So don’t worry if some of your sites don’t earn well at first, you never know what might happen. Leave them up and create more.

5 Comments

• At November 30, 2009, Jim wrote:

  I've heard of sites like this earning money OK I'll down load the e-book.

• At November 30, 2009, Jay wrote:

  Keep in mind that if you have the time to invest, creating a quality niche site is always better. But for those doing this part time, a neglected niche site is a nice way to generate some level of income to reinvest into better tools, etc.

• At June 5, 2010, Pat wrote:

  Thanks Jay, downloaded your ebook. – very nice!

  While searching for information on making mini-sites using wordpress and getting into affiliate marketing I found your site.

  I don’t know why I don’t like the little adsense ads on websites. I would prefer banner ads or CPA I think.

  Do you know of any good video tutorials on mini-sites using wordpress? I love learning with videos. So what do you mean by a quality niche site, and how large of a site is that? How much content?

  By the way I teach at a small college.

• At June 10, 2010, Kenn wrote:

  Great book - do you think pop unders would help generate more income on a site like this? I use pop up traffic to monetize my site - I get them from this company - http://bit.ly/bXmHHf

• At December 3, 2010, Jay wrote:

  A quality niche site is one that provides real, useful, content, as opposed to the sites that stick junk up just to attract clicks in search engines.

  Adsense is convenient, but yeah, you're going to get better results if you do the work to get a nicely targeted banner ad.

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Now, I understand why they’re doing this. People have trouble committing $299 to hosting and tools to create a website, even when the tools are top-notch. That isn’t a problem with SBI, but with the general attitude of most Internet Marketers. The “gurus”, the ones who make their money off the rest of us, create an image of instant success, so most people aren’t willing to invest for the long-term.

So, a monthly payment for SBI seems like a good deal to those people. They can try out the tools and system month to month, and get out if they decide it won’t work.

The problem is that building an online site that will earn money regularly takes time. My neglected niche sites (ebook to come, promise!) typically take six months to start generating income. Sites that are actively developed take less time, but we’re still talking months.

In my opinion, anyone not willing to invest a year into an online project is dooming themselves to failure. Going month to month just means that the people looking for quick results will probably quit after a couple of months. But the person who paid for a year will keep going, and see that success happen.

So, if you’ve been wanting to try SBI but have been put off by the yearly fee, you can certainly try the monthly option. But if you’re going to make a success out of it, you’ll spend less by just going for the yearly fee to start.

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I’m now officially ending the Adsense experiment, and will report the results. I’m limited in what I can report by the Adsense TOC, but here are some general results.

Click Through Rate

The Internet Marketing crowd is very ad resistant, at least when it comes to Adsense ads. Click through rate (CTR) was very poor, well under what I’d consider to be worthwhile. As a comparison, my best performing Neglected Niche Site (instructions for creating those will be in my upcoming free ebook) had a CTR 10 times that of this blog.

Earnings

The earnings per ad for Internet Marketing related ads isn’t bad, but the poor CTR makes it not really worth the real estate on the blog to show the ads. Total earnings over the same time frame put this blog at about half of what my best performing Neglected Niche Site earned.

Total earnings certainly more than paid for the effort of adding Adsense to the blog, but wasn’t really enough to justify keeping it, in my opinion.

Other Options

Better options for advertising on an IM related blog would be specific IM products. For me, though, I would only do that for products I’ve tried and could honestly recommend…and frankly, there really aren’t all that many of them that I consider to be worthwhile.

So, if you’re looking to create a blog to make money, I’ll repeat my usual advice: don’t create a blog about making money. Create a blog on another topic you enjoy, and you’ll see much better CTR on your ads, and probably better affiliate sales, too.

4 Comments

• At November 24, 2009, Ev Miles- Online Business Cookbook wrote:

  Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It's allot more overall though.

• At December 2, 2009, Tom Lindstrom wrote:

  [quote comment=""]Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It's allot more overall though.[/quote]

  There is a lot more to Adsense than just placing an ad on the blog.You need to choose the right ad block size, the right colors, and know exactly where to out the ad.A lot of testing is required.Here is more information:

  http://ask.joelcomm.com/selecting_the_right_adsense_bl.shtml

• At December 21, 2009, Ian wrote:

  I agree that it's much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it's much more profitable.

• At March 3, 2010, Make Money Online wrote:

  I agree that it’s much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it’s much more profitable.

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Unfortunately, I had so many spam comments that I just deleted them all. My apologies to the legitimate comments in the past year that got deleted, too. With the new version of Wordpress I should be able to keep up with moderating comments now.

If you find links not working, do let me know. It’s hard to tell what plugins might not be working, and it’ll be slow going for me to double check each.

In other news, the ebook that I’d written long ago and intended to sell, will shortly be given away for free. I’ll post it here when I do, as a reward for the people who keep checking back here even after so long a time of inactivity.

On an SEO note, the search engine traffic to the blog has not dropped off due to my lack of updating the site. So while new sites do need regular updating to keep their rankings, established sites (mine had about a year and a half of regular posting) apparently do not. Something to keep in mind.

3 Comments

• At November 23, 2009, Josh wrote:

  Jay, I am glad to see you get back into the groove of things. It's been nearly a year since your last post but who cares! Maybe just set a goal to post once a week or maybe even once a month. Either way, welcome back! :-)

• At November 23, 2009, Jay wrote:

  Thanks Josh! I'm not sure how often the updates will be, but I'll put something up now and then.

• At March 6, 2010, Photoshop CS4 Training Online wrote:

  Thanks Jay for the SEO nugget you just share with us. I just started a new blog integrated to my existing website and I am trying to keep up with posting regularly. I have also noticed awhile back that another blog of mine has dropped in Google PageRank when I did not updated it for about 3 months. Then when I started posting again within 2 weeks the PR went back to its previous value.

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They’ve recently started marketing SBI as a complete online business course. It’s about time, too, since their Action Guide really is a complete course. It’s a very specific course, designed to allow you to create content sites that compete on high profile keywords.

The secret of SBI is that anything that can be automated has been automated. You don’t worry about search engine optimization, you just pick keywords according to the guidelines in the action guide, and put them in the places you’re told to do so. Everything else just happens. There are tons of other features like that that make it worth the yearly fee.

Your only responsibility to your SBI site is to create content consistently. That might mean one page a day, it might mean one page a week, or one page a month. Just keep creating content at whatever rate you can, and your site will keep creeping up in the search engine results.

SBI is not for people who want to create a site and forget about it. My upcoming ebook is for that audience, but SBI sites require tender loving care on a regular basis. Think of them as high maintenance friends. Give the sites what they need, and they’ll start earning for you.

To take advantage of the 2-for-1 Christmas special, click on that link and click on the Order link at the bottom of the page.

2 Comments

• At February 3, 2009, Ruby wrote:

  I didn't realize that your last post was so long ago. What are you up to lately?

• At November 23, 2009, Jay wrote:

  Hi Ruby, I've been pretty busy with some exciting non-IM projects in my teaching job. I'll try to give some attention to the blog now and then, though, rather than let it go. Thanks to everyone who has poked me asking about my absence!

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