Should I remove date from my blog posts? – I often get asked.

Getting rid of the date and time from a blog post is in the thought of most bloggers today. Now let’s get to this question with 2 more questions.

Evergreen content is something that is always useful and applicable, no matter when it is read. Say for instance you read a blog post that gives you tips on how to be productive. Depending upon the kind of the tip shared, the same post can be evergreen or otherwise.

If the post shares tips on how to avoid distraction and how to be determined in order to be productive, then no matter if the post is read today or 2 years from now, the information is still valid.

But if the same blog post points out some kind of software or an app that helps you to stay productive, that particular app may be outdated in 2 years from now!

Opinions are varied as to why one should or should not remove the date from a blog post.

Some readers may be turned off to read a blog post and couldn’t figure out when it was written. However, if the piece of information or the content in the post is regardless of time and is applicable at all times, then it is OK to remove the date and time from a blog post.

If the content is not timeless (say news, or reviews about latest digital products etc.), then for sure, you can not think about removing the date.

There are reasons.

So .. on to removing the date from a blog post…

Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Appearance > Editor. Open the single.php (Single Post) file.

You might want to have a back up of the file if something goes wrong, just in case. So just copy the content of the file and save it in a text or word document in your computer.

Then look for this line of code

<?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?>

and remove it.

This step will remove the time stamp from single posts (since the file is single.php). If you want to remove the date as well, check for

<?php the date();?>

and remove it.

If you want to remove the date from the main page as well, you need to do the same in index.php file.

Alternatively, you might just let WordPress take care of it by installing the Date Exclusion SEO plugin (but the plugin hasn’t been updated for a while now!)

Just click on ‘Add New’ on the ‘Plugins’ tab on the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. Search for the Date Exclusion SEO plugin and install and activate it.

You can remove dates from the front page, the tag pages, the category page and all, aged, or explicit posts.

How to use this plugin? Well, you will have to play with the parameters basically and here are the meanings of the same:

• Remove Dates From Posts – removes date from all single post pages regardless
• Remove Dates from Tag Pages – removes date from tag pages
• Remove Dates from Category Pages – removes date from category pages
• Remove Dates from Front Page – removes date from front page
• Number of Days to Expiry – number of days to expire for single post page
• turn off specific posts by comma delimited list of post ids
• (Optional) add alternative text to replace date functions
  
• (Optional) Turn off each date function depending on theme

Well, at the time of writing this post I have removed the date and time stamp of blog posts on this blog. But I’ve always had this question at the back of my mind.

I feel as if I’m doing something wrong. Even though I am *tempted* to think that all my blog’s content is evergreen, in reality it is not so.

Sure some of the pillar content could be evergreen – but certainly not all of the information is evergreen.

If I want to make sure that my readers get up to-date information without having to worry about the date and time, I have to go back and edit all the old posts now and then, to keep them fresh.

But that is not realistic and is not practically possible as well!

For instance, if I’m talking about search engine optimization in any of my posts, I cannot be sure that the information is still applicable in a month from now – there is so much going on in the SEO world.

I cannot write a detailed post about link building today and hope that the information will still be applicable in a year from now – it certainly won’t be – coz things change so fast.

On top of it, if I remove the date from that particular link building post, a reader who reads the post a year later will not know that the post is old. He/she might try out the wrong technique and if the tip I shared was something like getting links from link networks, the reader could get penalized for implementing an outdated SEO technique.

And I would be solely responsible for it (of course, I expect the reader to do due diligence - but from my point of view I am responsible for spreading out dated and dangerous information).

Some of the leading blogs I know have disabled showing dates on blog posts. Are they doing something wrong? I won’t comment coz every blogger might have his/her views on the topic.

When we talk about whether its ethical or not, we need to take a bit closer look. Now, disabling or removing the date from the blog post is not a clever way to cheat search engines.

Many bloggers do this thinking so – they think just by removing the date, the search engines won’t know the publish date of the post and hence will consider the content to be fresh.

But search engines are quite smarter and know the publish date of a particular post even if you remove the date from blog posts.

But wait a second, its not really about the published post any more. It is about the last updated date.

With a blog, we have the privilege of going back to a post and update it with additional information or remove out dated information to keep the post fresh and valid – something we can’t do in print books.

So in my opinion, all that matters is not the publish date but the updated date of a post.

If you happen to update your blog post a year after its publish date, all that matters now is the updated date. Hence I find that displaying the post’s last updated date is more relevant and useful.

So I’ve now decided to show the “last updated date” on the post – this is a win-win for me and the reader.

The reader gets to know if the information they read is still valid or not. And if I put effort into a post by updating it to add more relevant and timely information, I get to show that too!

Let’s see how this goes. I invite your discussion on removing date from blog posts.

High quality content is the back bone of any online business. With all the search engine algorithm updates and given the way that people and search engines look at web content, the definition of noteworthy content has changed a lot.

Now before discussing how you can create noteworthy blog content using SEMRush’s SEO modules, let me first tell you what noteworthy blog content is.

You know, these days you need to please both people and search engines when it comes to creating noteworthy blog content. You need to make the both ends meet each other. Or better yet, you have to make the following two go hand-in-hand:

Now these two used to be two different ends and two different perspectives of content creation. But not anymore. These days you have to make both ends meet. You have to create content that is appreciated by both people and search engines.

You fail to make your content look great in the eyes of one of them and you’re gone.

Now that you know the definition or the characteristics of noteworthy blog content, lets see how you can create such content using SEMRush’s SEO tools.

I don’t have to introduce SEMRush to you as a SEO tool because it is a well established piece of beast that helps many bloggers and internet marketers swim towards success in this vast SEO sea.

But let me share what I see at SEMRush from my own perspective.

First of all, the golden information of all that you can get is the ability of SEMRush to give you the keywords that you or your competitors are ranking for.

I’ve not seen any SEO software/tool do that.

Second, SEMRush’s keyword research module does the work of 3 or more keyword research tools combined – all in one place.

OK let me walk you through the exact procedure to create noteworthy blog content using SEMRush. For the rest of this post I’m assuming that you use any one of SEMRush’s paid plans.

Open up semrush.com and type any keyword – you’ll get the following information:

• Phrase match report
• Related keywords report
• Organic results for that keyword
• Ads that use that particular keyword (and their exact ad copies – which is really cool)
• Ads history for that keyword

The key here is to find highly searched yet easy to rank keywords. And let me tell you why.

Highly searched keywords are popular keywords that are sought after by many people. This tells that the topic you write about is quite popular and is sought after by many people.

And by going after low competitive keywords, you are doing yourself a favor by writing useful content that can be ranked higher in search engines (relatively) well.

Here’s an example:

I did a search for the word “keyword research” and here’s what I got -

Click to enlarge

From the screen shot I clearly see that this keyword gets searched 4400 times per month, and returns 127, 000, 000 results per search. This shows that even though this keyword has a decent number of searches, it is HIGHLY competitive.

In addition to this information, you also get phrase match keywords and related keywords (which is very cool). Now let’s see how you can create “noteworthy” blog content from this information.

Go for a win-win situation. You need to do your research and dig out those keywords that are searched by a decent number of people and at the same time is not very competitive.

The former guarantees your win while the latter guarantees your reader’s win.

Here, we focus on two things -

When I talk about keyword research, competition, searches etc. you picture me wearing my SEO hat. Now, SEO is a good thing; but not the kind of SEO which most bloggers think is SEO – it is not.

SEO doesn’t mean finding your keyword and stuffing your post with that keyword to rank high in SERPs. You need to please both people and search engines! That’s real SEO. That’s today’s SEO.

Here’s where you need to make use of the “related keywords” provided by SEMRush.

Related keywords give you possible ideas to expand and improve the post. It also helps you to naturally optimize your post for search engines by making it useful at the same time.

When I write a post by analyzing a keyword using SEMRush, most of the times, the related keywords give me brilliant ideas to talk about the extra bits and the additional information inside the post.

Also instead of optimizing your post for one single keyword by repeatedly using it in headings, body, image tags etc., if you rather use related keywords throughout the post you will also stay away from the risk of over-optimizing your posts.

I’m off to create noteworthy blog content using SEMRush. How about you?

Click on the image below to get your Semrush account and to start creating noteworthy blog content.

Blog design is what makes or breaks your blogging success.

Most bloggers don’t invest money on the design part; they expect money from blogging without actually investing a penny. That’s the major reason most bloggers fail!

If you want to give better user experience, spend time and money on the design elements of your blog(s).

Most people immediately press X button on their browsers after seeing cluttered home pages. If you want to avoid it, here are few things that you should not to do on your home page.

A professional logo is a must if you are serious about making money blogging, no exception whatsoever. A bad logo or no logo creates a really bad impact on the online readers.

When someone first lands on your site what do you think creates great impression? It is your blog design; especially the logo is the first thing that anyone notices. So invest some money on creating an appealing logo for your blog(s); either hire a professional logo designer or use Fiverr services to create a great logo for $5.

How can someone easily understand about your site within less time? Does your blog give an easy description within 3 seconds? If not, it’s time for you to create an elevator pitch or tagline for your website or blog.

Creating a great tagline for your blog isn’t easy especially if you are unaware of your targeted audience.

Here are 3 simple ways to create a great tagline for your blog:

1. First know your target audience
2. Analyze what you can do for them (through your blogs)
3. Create a tagline according to that using 3 to 5 words

And that’s it!

Why anyone should care about your popup’s if they are surrounded by so much of digital information? Don’t expect someone to like your Facebook page (Facebook popup) or sign up to your email list without knowing much about your site. Especially home page popup’s are more annoying, they can kill your blog growth and user experience.

If you really provide great value to your readers, they will do whatever you say, agree? Yes, promoting your products or optin form and displaying it all over the blog is good, but don’t make it bad by showing annoying popup’s. Even if you are a lover of popup’s, make them cute (less annoying) and make sure you are not displaying them to already connected people.

Sidebar is the most distracting thing on any blog design; if used right, sidebar is the most converting place on your blog.

• You can convert normal readers into subscribers
• You can sell more products by giving exceptional visibility
• You can turn people to Facebook fans or
• You can briefly describe about your site

But most people, especially the new bloggers simply clutter their blog’s sidebar by filling it up with unwanted widgets or plugins. They use almost every widget that they find fancy under the sun. You know what? It works! It works as a readership destroyer.

If you want to give a great first impression, then make sure you are using as less space as possible on your sidebar. Less is more in blog design, minimalism is the latest trend!

If you are thinking what to place on your sidebar, here are few suggestions.

• Display your email optin form (email list is a must for any serious blogger)
• Show an easy way to connect with you on social media sites like Facebook, twitter, G+ etc
• Display your popular posts
• Put most converting ads
• You can also display ‘resources’ that you use on your blog

Footer is also one of the most noticeable parts of your blog. When you fill the footer with all the unwanted links and widgets, your visitors will go away immediately after reaching your blogs.

Make sure you are focusing on two primary things on your blogs (before creating the perfect footer that can bring you more conversion rates).

One is: What is the first thing you want from your visitors or readers? (For most bloggers it is: email list)

Other is: What is the second thing you want from your visitors or readers? (It can be anything from clicking on your tweets to reading your most popular posts).

Use the above two cases while creating your footer and don’t use too many links to make your footer look crazy.

Do you have any more points? Please share them below; I would love to hear your advice.

Or watch this presentation

Like this presentation? Feel free to embed this on your blog. Use the code below!

<iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/18453584?rel=0″ width=”512″ height=”421″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba/how-to-design-a-blog-for-conversion” title=”How To Design A Blog For Conversion” target=”_blank”>How To Design A Blog For Conversion</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba” target=”_blank”>Problogging Success</a></strong> </div>

Ian Mason is the owner of Web Hosting Billboard. He loves to write articles related to SEO, web hosting and software development.

Email marketing is still golden and still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your target customers.

Even though there are many advanced methods and strategies for marketing, email marketing still stands as one of the most effective one-to-one mode of communication.

With blogs, social media and other avenues, we have a mass reach – but they get personal only to a certain level.

Here’s where email marketing comes to rescue. But before you could use email marketing to market your business and products, you’ve got to build an email list.

Not the easiest thing on the earth, you know. But once you build a list, say a really BIG list, the story doesn’t end there.

It is not enough to have people on your list, but you should make sure they’re responsive. Let me explain -

A responsive list is one where your subscribers are really engaging. They eagerly open your emails, click on your links, reply to your emails and take all sorts of “positive” action that helps your business.

On the other hand, if your list is unresponsive, a majority of your subscribers do not take any action – they don’t open your emails, click links or even bother.

Such subscribers are dead weight; pardon the language but that’s literally it. Coz, most email autoresponders charge you on a number basis.

That is you pay for the number of subscribers you have and as your subscriber number increases, the money you pay also increases.

In order to keep your list “sharp” in this sense, you can review your list on a monthly basis and delete those subscribers who are unresponsive.

For instance, review your list every month and delete those subscribers who have not opened any of your emails over 2 months. You can use the “last mail opened” (or something similar) search feature to filter those subscribers and then delete them.

However, this is in fact additional work. If you manage to so some legwork before you add those people as your subscribers, you can avoid much work load in analyzing and removing them manually afterwards.

Not only that, having a responsive email list help increasing your open rates. If you have a list of 1000 people while only 100 of them are actively opening your emails every time you send them your open rate is going to be just 10%.

On the other hand, if you have a list of only 200 people and 100 of them actively open your emails, your open rate will be 50%. See the difference? That’s huge.

Here’s a handy presentation that summarizes this post:

Like this presentation? You can freely embed this presentation on your blog by using the code below!

<iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/21187461?rel=0″ width=”512″ height=”421″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba/have-you-heard-of-responsive-email-lists” title=”Have You Heard Of Responsive Email Lists” target=”_blank”>Have You Heard Of Responsive Email Lists</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba” target=”_blank”>Problogging Success</a></strong> </div>

OK this is just a metric and not even accurate. You know why? We can find the answer to this by learning how email open rates are calculated. Email autoresponders (all of them, including the popular ones like Aweber and GetResponse) put a small, invisible image in every email you send out.

Once your subscriber opens the email, the image is downloaded from their server to be displayed in their emails. This download is recorded and an open is counted.

Note two things important things here -

So if your email is either only text or if the subscriber has not enabled images, his/her open won’t be counted unless he/she clicks a link in your email (provided, there’s a link in your email).

But still it gives you an idea of how responsive your list is, and how engaging they are.

Having a responsive list is a crucial part of your email marketing campaign.

Further, if your list is responsive, you can be rest assured that your list is of high quality and that your email marketing campaigns will do well (in terms of action taken by your subscribers.

So now you know how important it is to have a responsive email list, right? It is not about the numbers but it is about the “quality”.

You cannot boast about your email list if you have 10K subscribers while 95% of them don’t even bother to open your emails. Rather you can for sure boast about having a small list of 1000 subscribers who are highly responsive and engaging.

On the next post (Part 2), I’ll explain how to build responsive email lists, in detail.

I need to give Jane Sheeba credit; she caught my eye by writing like crazy. I remember a while back seeing her guest posts on multiple blogs. OK, like every blog it seemed.

Everywhere I turned I saw the name, “Jane Sheeba.” I was impressed. Think about it; many famous and wealthy singers rarely turn down the opportunity to work with other singers.

We call them “duets” or joint-ventures, but this is just like guest posting really. You connect with another blogger, write a helpful guest post for their audience, reach into a new audience, and make new friends.

She is wildly prolific. Guest posting might by the quickest way to leverage your presence as a blogger but if you are simply prolific on your blog, you will gain some serious attention.

If you want to know a few tips and tools from her, check out this presentation

Like this presentation? Feel free to embed it on your blog. Use the code below!

<iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/20384879?rel=0″ width=”512″ height=”421″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba/2-tools-that-make-me-productive-as-a-blogger” title=”2 Tools That Make Me Productive As A Blogger” target=”_blank”>2 Tools That Make Me Productive As A Blogger</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/janesheeba” target=”_blank”>Problogging Success</a></strong> </div>

I received a comment on one of my guest posts the other day about….”meeting that guy who wrote 10 posts in 1 day.” That is me.

For a stretch I churned out 20 posts daily. 10 post on 2 blogs. Do I advise this for everybody? Yes, because to become successful you must push yourself beyond your limits at times.

I do not churn out 10 posts daily but I do write 2 to 4 posts on my blogs plus 1 to 3 guest posts daily. A not too shabby 3 to 7 posts daily. This is how I make money online.

This is why I have written more than 4000 posts during my career. I write like mad when I feel the impulse.

I write every day, whether I am living in Bali, Phuket, Sri Lanka or Malaysia – yeah I am a globe trotter – because if I call myself a blogger I darn well better blog persistently.

OK…how can you become a wildly prolific blogger?

1 – Know Why You Want to Blog

You act because you are motivated to act. I love being free. I love traveling the world and making money online. I write because I know why I wish to become prolific, and this reason pushes me to write daily and network aggressively with other bloggers.

Do you crave financial freedom? Do you want to improve the lives of your audience, by sharing immense value? Decide why you wish to blog. Write the reason on a piece of paper. Carry the paper with you. Become prolific, because your driver is always in your pocket.

If you write once each week set the goal to write 4 times each week. Sound ridiculous? Good. You are quickly learning how to become a successful blogger. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone forces you to change your definition of, “realistic.”

Guess what? This fired security guard thought publishing 1 post weekly was realistic. Then I thought posting once each day was realistic. Then I did the 4 to 10 to 20 posts daily, I thought that was realistic. I began to make money online regularly because I set progressively bigger goals.

The only thing that changed was my thinking, my definition of what I thought was possible, or realistic. If you really want to become ridiculously prolific, hang out with inspiring people. They will force you to challenge your limits, set bigger goals and expand your idea of what is possible.

I churn out 400 to 600 to 1000 words fast. Then I edit. Stream of consciousness stuff, because I listen, write and resist the urge to stop and edit. You become prolific by creating. You never become prolific by writing a sentence, then stopping to edit.

Put your best work out there but PLEASE do not fear publishing a post with typos, or poor grammar in some spots. Why? Accept criticism, and you will become even more prolific. You will lose the fear crippling so many talented but terrified bloggers.

No excuses guys. Champions become prolific. So you work full time and have a family? You only have 20 minutes a day to blog? Spend the 20 minutes EVERY day to publish at least write half of your post. If you want to be renowned and help people and cash in, you need to sacrifice.

No worries though. Sacrifice is releasing something of a lower nature to make room for something of a higher lower. Turn off the TV and fire up your laptop, and blog!

If I try to write like Jane Sheeba I write for hours, trying to churn out 600 words. If I write like Ryan Biddulph I churn out 663 words – where I am right now – in 9 or 10 minutes. Absolute breeze. Like me talking, except I am writing.

Naturally, you become insanely prolific by writing in your voice, or by writing how you speak. The words flow out of your mind onto the keyboard with stunning ease.

Your Turn

Are you a prolific blogger?

What tips can you add to this list?

Check out Jane’s guest blogging guide > Guest Blogging Champion

Former fired security guard and current world traveler, Ryan Biddulph went from having a net worth of 4 cents to generating steady cash flow online while living in tropical paradises like Bali, Phuket and Hoi An. How does he help you magnetize yourself to cash? To find out Click Here

In order to overcome the fierce competition in the modern online world, businesses (that is, entrepreneurs) should use all kinds of tools to enhance their presence. In order to study the market conditions and demands, you may want to use special online tools and applications.

GeoSurf is a browser based premium proxy toolbar which gives unique experience through its local perspective. GeoSurf gives power to users to search with a local perspective from many global locations.

In addition to various kinds of online businesses, professionals working in online media can use the services in an efficient way.

There are number of benefits through GeoSurf. You can view ads that are targeted to focus various geographical locations. GeoSurf lets you monitor the campaigns launched by you.

It is possible to create new business leads based on the available opportunities. When you can find content as it is seen various other locations, time and money can be saved. Thorough research, testing, quality assurance and monitoring can be achieved through GeoSurf.

If you are running an online business by maintaining a number of websites, you might place advertisements or use ad networks to increase the profitability of your business. While being located in the US, you will browse the web as if you were browsing from in France or 110 other locations.

The mobile emulator will let you find the display as you would find in various kinds of mobile phones. GeoSurf Plus gives important data about a particular website. Hence, you can study the competitor in a detailed way. You will get the power to break other’s competitiveness.

By deploying GeoSurf, you can trace the source of income in an effective way. If you know from where the major chunk of income is generated, it is possible to invest more in such campaigns.

GeoSurf certainly helps you in this direction. It is a great wonder that you can find how your website is viewed in other countries and cities.

GeoSurf allows you to get search results as you would find from various geographical locations. At present, GeoSurf gives results as you would find from more than 110 locations.

There are number of markets in the US. GeoSurf has included most of those locations so that you can make the most through the geographical search.

As GeoSurf maintains dedicated servers, premium range of services are offered. If you are not sure of the efficacy of GeoSurf, the trial version is the best option. The trial version gives access to 5 days of free usage.

There are four types of plans. The number of users, bandwidth per month, VPN connection, GeoView and Mobile Emulator are certain features that are available in various plans. It is a great tool for marketers and if you are really serious about online business, you should buy the GeoSurf proxy.

When you have great potential to figure out how your website appears in different parts of the world, you can utilize the results for the improvement of the display. You can study the ads and ad network that is engaged by your competitors. How Ad Sense fares can be assessed.

Before selecting ads to be arrayed on your website, you will get a chance to assess the performance of various kinds of ads that are already on the anvil. You will select ads that bring results to you. By making little adjustments to the existing affiliate campaigns, you can make the most from your campaigns.

The ads that are not generating income can be dropped and the ads that are yielding can be increased. By shifting your attention to ads that are paying, you can generate more income through your online business.

• Easy to install
• Enhancement of revenue through research and analysis
• Can be installed on various browsers including IE and Firefox
• Simple operation
• Better check on competitors through analysis

By doing research through GeoSurf in various angles, better websites can be created. As a consequence you can improve your revenue generation. It is easy for you to find what products are being promoted in which locations.

You can assess the reason for compelling sales in a particular geographical area. Not only that, you can also analyze your promotional campaigns in an appropriate way. You can successfully minimize the risk as grey areas can be figured out through GeoSurf.

If you’re a blog owner who’s regularly putting up fresh content and has been doing it for some time, you probably have a base of regular readers that visit your site all the time and even comment frequently.

Because of this, maybe you’ve also been thinking of collecting a more solidly established group of fans by turning some of your site readers into email subscribers that get your best content right to their inboxes on a periodic basis.

Luckily, doing this isn’t very hard and if your blog’s niche happens to be related to a sales or business oriented niche instead of something that’s pure entertainment – though an email campaign can work fine with either – then you can also eventually create sales offers and start monetizing your monthly visitors in a way that’s not easily possible if you leave them as regular site visitors.

Now, we’re going to assume you already have a blog online, have readers regularly visiting it and are frequently posting new content. That being the case, let’s go over the process of turning blog content into a monthly email newsletter and eventually creating a potential sales list from your reader base.

To start everything we’re going to do off, you first need a list of subscribers that you’ve gleaned from your overall reader base. You can create this by setting up a section on all of your website content and other pages that give readers the option of handing over their email address in order to receive content directly to their inboxes.

A good and unobtrusive place for your opt-in box is one of the sidebars on your site, preferably on the right side since it will likely attract more attention.

Make the opt-in offer highly visible but don’t go overboard with constant pushiness; although you can use a program like PopUp Domination to create one time (per visit) popup based email opt-in offers that, although annoying to some, have a higher average conversion rate of 2 to 5% over the typical .75 to 2% you’ll likely get for a sidebar opt-in.

Read this post for additional conversion tips: Email List Building: A 3 Step Working Strategy To Build Email List FAST

The bottom line is that your readers, just like anyone, respond best when they have incentives to do so. Simply asking for email addresses won’t motivate them to hand over their valuable email addresses regardless of how much they like your content – after all, they can always just come to the site itself for more of the same thing. Thus, you need to include a bonus of some kind and make it worth their time.

On the one hand, this can be a special offer of some kind, maybe a free report or ebook and on the other hand you could also offer something constant and exclusive like unique email only content from your site or, if you’re selling something, regular discounts on products and services.

Whichever you offer, be sure to include mention of the fact that you will be sending them regular content from your site and that you will not under any circumstances give away your readers’ emails to any third parties for any reason.

As a final note regarding opt-in, make sure that your opt-in process requires email verification through a clickable link in an initial message you send them.

Also, bear in mind that the conversion rates mentioned in the first step above depend more than anything on what kind of motivation you provide for getting an address, you can make them fairly high if you really strike a nerve of desire because you gauged your audience well.

Now that we’ve covered the extremely important process of getting people to actually give over their email addresses, let’s look at the mechanics of emailing your posts off to your viewers and giving them their content along with any additional specials you offered as part of your opt-in bonus.

The entire process of actually sending out your blog posts as email subscription messages will be much, much simpler if you just use a pre-built email marketing software package to take care of it instead of doing everything from scratch by yourself.

This applies especially if your email subscriber list is long and you’ve got a lot of dynamic content to deliver.

Some great services that can be found online include the well-known (amongst email marketers) Aweber, GetResponse and a more bare-bones but very effective service known as FeedBlitz, which depends on scanning your blog’s RSS feed for all the content it’s going to send out to your subscribers.

The great thing about all of these is that they let you set up your mailing service, mark off certain sending parameters, choose from numerous email message templates and start sending off emails in an almost totally automated way. Like we said, much easier than doing it all yourself, much, much easier.

Whichever email marketing system you use, you’ll have a choice of templates presented to you. Choose the one that best fits the nature of your content and the kind of reader base you have.

A good option is the typical two column email format that gives a wider left-hand column loaded with content and also includes a narrower right-hand area for additional promotions, discounts, sales offers and anything else you’d like to sell or promote.

Don’t lose sight of this promotion aspect. Email marketing takes some time to set up and by taking advantage of its high sales conversion rates, you can really turn your existing sales up a notch or start a sales campaign from scratch on top of your existing free newsletter service.

Finally, as part of the process behind your email marketing system, set out some mailing frequency parameters for your messages. If you’re offering exclusive content that’s only available to your subscribers, you might want to limit how often you send it and maybe send a richly filled message every couple of weeks or more.

On the other hand, if your blog is updated daily with new posts, you really should limit how many of those you mail monthly since receiving such a flood directly to their inbox is likely to cause your subscribers to list you as a spammer or simply unsubscribe; they may like your site content a lot, but having their email inbox flooded daily can really kill their enthusiasm.

The bottom line you must always keep in mind is this: never fail to provide value. Any email you send as part of your monthly newsletter should be something that really delivers valuable content, updates or offers to your niche followers.

Aweber and other software like it can be used with almost any type of WordPress based blog that was set up through the popular CMS software.

However, if you want to save money, the WP software itself is also connected to a dazzling array of utility plugins that can offer their own mailing systems wither for free or much cheaper than the more comprehensive services listed above.

Some good examples include:

Wysija Newsletters, which is free and very extensive, available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wysija-newsletters/

WP Autoresponder And Newsletter Plugin, which is a more bare-bones program but also great for a basic email subscription campaign, especially since it too is free. Available at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-responder-email-autoresponder-and-newsletter-plugin/

ALO EasyMail Newsletter. This email marketing plugin is also free, a bit basic but great for most ordinary campaigns: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alo-easymail/

There are also other email marketing plugins available and new ones almost certainly emerging every now and then. All of them can be downloaded directly from your WordPress dashboard and set up very quickly.

Michael Klein has been writing about affordable email marketing for companies like Reachmail for more than a decade. When not writing, Michael is generally working on his golf game or practicing his jazz guitar at home.

So, you have a blog for your business. Every forward-thinking small business owner knows how blogging can be a great marketing tool. It is a vehicle that allows you to easily connect with your customers on a massive scale.

In fact, statistics have shown that having a blog can drive sales by a significant number. According to this report from Hubspot, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors than companies that don’t blog.

The same report also shows that B2C (business to consumer) companies that blog generate 88% more leads monthly. B2B (business to business) companies that blog generate 67% more leads as opposed to companies that don’t blog.

But if you have a blog and you aren’t seeing your success mirroring the statistics, then something’s clearly wrong.

Have you asked yourself why your blog isn’t attracting more customers?

Are you just beginning to realize that just because you have a blog doesn’t mean that your business will automatically take off?

The truth is that having a blog isn’t enough. You still need to do a bit of planning to turn your blog into a sales generation tool.

Are you ready to craft your blog into a venue that actually leads to sales? If so, let’s explore the possible reasons why it isn’t performing as you think it should.

Here are the top three things to ask:

Just updating your blog with any kind of content is not going to attract those customers and make a sale. You have to capture their attention, sustain their interest, engage them in ways that only you can, and keep them coming back for more. How do you do this?

Get inside your customer’s head. Talk about the kind of things that they would be interested in. You can do this by doing a bit of market research. It doesn’t have to be complicated – just send out informal surveys, ask your target customers some questions on Facebook. Then, read their answers carefully. This only takes a few minutes, and it ensures that you are on the right track with your blog content before you even write anything.

Establish your authority on topics that are relevant to your product. Write well. Use statistics when you can. Make sure the data is accurate.

Have an opinion when writing your blog posts. Make sure this opinion reflects your brand. This will encourage interaction among your readers, and can attract more visitors who find that your opinions resonate with theirs.

The above 3 tips can help strengthen your readership, but you will need to do more to retain it.

Your regular blog readers can now be considered your “leads”. You have a group of people already interested in what your company has to offer. Now, how do you convert these leads into paying customers? Here are a few ways to do this:

Set up your blog so that traffic from there is driven to an appropriate landing page. This way, any random blog visitor searching the internet for information relevant to your product can have an easy go-to page when they want to learn more.

This is a one-pager that should contain an introduction to your product, testimonials, and product features. Direct your readers to this landing page.

The results may also be better if you create specific landing pages for each main issue or category that you discuss in your blog. Copyblogger does this well with their individual landing pages on copywriting, keyword research, and other online marketing topics.

At the end of your landing pages, ask your readers to opt-in to your mailing list. This will allow you to bring in interested blog readers into your sales funnel. Through the mailing list, you can send them more information which can lead them to buy your products.

If you don’t direct your readers into a sales funnel like this, then you are wasting almost all of the effort you put into producing content for your blog.

Remember that the content you’re creating has a purpose – to get you more leads and sales – if you don’t focus on that then you are just producing more information for information’s sake.

It would be a pity to spend all this time improving your blog and then not promoting it. But this is exactly what some people are doing. It doesn’t matter if you upload a blog post everyday, you will not get results if no one is there to read it.

Here are a few ways to avoid this common mistake and get your blog out there for the potential customers to see:

Use the right social media channel to push your content. If you find that many of your blog readers and customers are coming from Twitter, then get active on Twitter. If they are coming from Facebook instead, then set up your Facebook page. Find out the social channels that your target customers are using, and use that to bring in more new readers to your blog.

Spend a few minutes a day responding to your readers and commenting on other relevant blogs and forums. Be an active participant. Don’t forget to link back to your blog when you do this.

Email key influencers who have blogs or social media accounts followed by your target audience. Just reach out to these influencers. You don’t have to sell them into the idea of promoting your blog at first, build a real relationship first and they will promote your blog and business naturally.

It’s time to stop treating your blog as an outlet for ideas, and start treating it like the business generation machine that it could be. Follow these simple, practical fixes and recreate your ordinary blog into a great marketing tool that attracts leads, engages them, and turns them into paying customers.

Rita is a marketer at London based web design agency Activate Media. Connect with Rita on Twitter @ritaauta and Google+. You can sign up here for a free 5-part course on how businesses can really get more sales and leads online.

Affiliate marketing industry in the United States is one of the most buoyant branches of the marketing. Financial institutions, banks, credit unions and payday loan companies make endeavor to reach more customers.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best sources of traffic and leads for this type of business. There are many payday loans affiliate programs but almost none is specialized only in one type of goods and services.

There is however one program that works only for payday loan companies. It is PaydayMansion. So what it means that this company is specialized in very short term loans? It’s simple! If you want to become an affiliate you can count on the best ratio of commission for the traffic you generate.

Companies that act in many areas of services and products tend to achieve lower results. Such a payday loans affiliate program as PaydayMansion concentrates on one type of consumers, it enters into the deals with more payday loan companies.

Therefore it works cheaper, and get better commission. We offer to our affiliates the best commission ration in the market. And what is very important – you don’t have to work a lot to get it.

We have made strides in how our programme works and what results it brings to our members. It’s not only to our business mindset. It is mainly thanks to you and other affiliates with whom we discuss many matters like design of dashboard, and marketing methods, as well as statistics and charts.

We sacrificed a lot of time in order to create the great affiliate programme. Its principles are not the making of one man, but the whole team.

If you want to be our affiliate first thing you need to do is getting an invitation code. Access to our programme is limited to those people who have been given such code. Most of them are distributed by our webmasters, who have already joined the affiliate programme and can recommend new team members.

Unlike in many payday loan affiliate programs registration procedure is very simple. It takes only one day. In the first stage you have to furnish us with some details about you: name and surname, your street address, telephone number and e-mail address, website URL. Do not hesitate to inform us about marketing methods you prefer to use.

After this step we need to verify your application. When the application submitted is approved, you can enter Member Area and start your work.

The dashboard you access in Member Area is really appealing to all users.

If you have any problems, we are ready to help on ICQ, Skype and e-mail.

There are several methods of creating reports. We think that profoundness of information you get from reports generated in the dashboard may lead to interesting conclusions about what you do, and what you can improve.

Here you can find all types of reports you can use:

Now is the best thing in our affiliate programme you may find. We release payments at the end of hold periods, meaning per every fourteen days.

We send money via PayPal or WMZ. In some cases we may extend the hold period what is subject to payment method and the transfer fees.

On the other hand, you may count on more regular payments, when your traffic is big. Then we are up to send you money even every fourth or fifth day.

It is up to you what traffic you will generate. With our help and great results, the best webmasters earn as much as 2-4 thousand dollars per day.

With our portfolio of marketing methods your possibilities to generate and monetize traffic are unlimited. We base our marketing activities on e-mail marketing, mobile marketing, CPC actions, SEO, banners, landing pages, and also popups and pop-unders.

Also there are social media and job advertising pages, but you need to discuss it with our affiliate manager.

You can use banners to direct users to your landing page. Here they may become leads. This is how traffic in our affiliate programme is generated.

You can earn more money from mobile applications. We have designed some that can be operated on iPhone and Android. You can generate mobile links and send them to your friends and relatives. We will trace them because each link is connected with your unique Affiliate ID.

Working with PaydayMansion means no complicated programs that will ask you to adjust to the needs of five, ten or more industries. You will work only in one line of business, and concentrate on one group of customers.

Also there is no affiliate programme that give you both helpful hand in marketing activities and the highest commission fee.

Here’s a short video that explains all the features

This post is written by Carol, who is the account manager at Payday Mansion. You may contact her at carol[at]paydaymansion[dot]com if you have any queries.

Content creation is part of a bloggers everyday ritual. It is sometimes hard to keep with the requirement of having to keep up with the content race.

It is natural that bloggers get burned out with creating content. For those who struggle on this aspect, I’m introducing Bloghands.

Bloghands is at your disposal to take care of your blogging needs. It is a big challenge to present fresh content on a regular basis. You should prepare the content to please the audience as well as search engines.

In this process, you should need extra hands to achieve great results in less time. ‘Bloghands’ is the one stop solution for all your blogging needs.

You can undertake blog writing as well as search engine optimization services from Bloghands. You can sit back and steer your blog as per your dreams so that you can turn it into profitable business.

If you would like to present the best online content, blogging is the best option. Even though you have a website, the blog will act like a satellite so that users will be well connected to your business.

Creation and management of a modern blog is a gigantic task. It is important to present quality content by following the guidelines of major search engines.

Fortunately, this job is made easy through Bloghands. By availing Bloghand’s services, you will never be left alone.

With Bloghands at your disposal, it will be easy to create, update and present resourceful content. By creating great blog content, it is possible to improve the rank of your native website.

Bloghands offer versatile services. If you are burdened with heavy writing loads, it is possible shed down the same by utilizing the Bloghands’ writing services.

You can avail various services including 100% unique content, search engine optimization and blog post promotion. The content will be prepared by professional North American writers. Hence, it is guaranteed that you will get 100% satisfaction.

There are three phases in the process of creation of unique content. As soon as you place an order for the content, a project manager will be in touch with to know more about your requirements.

SEO analysis professional will analyze the content to assess the strengths and weaknesses of keywords. Content present on your website will be reviewed so that there will be complete harmony between website and blog.

Phase 2 will take care of the content research and development. The content will be fine tuned in SEO point of view after performing the keyword analysis by using the most competitive software available in the market.

Keyword competitiveness and trending topics are selected so that blog posts will get sufficient traffic. All blog posts will be submitted to Copyscape.com and double checked for plagiarism. Brainstorm session will be conducted so that most competitive blog post ideas will be generated.

Social promotion of blog content is becoming more and more important as search engines have started to give increased importance to social signals. Not just for search engines, but when visitors come to your blog and see that the content is well shared, it serves as a social proof.

And not just for the sake of social proof, but social promotion of a blog’s content will result in increased volume of referral traffic. Bloghands helps promote your blog’s content at the major bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Tumblr, Diigo etc. Also promotion at the major players like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are available (upon user’s permission).

Bloghands implements various packages to take care of the needs of various kinds of clients. There are three kinds of plans called Starter, Blogger and Content King which can be subscribed at $150, $250 and $350, per month respectively. It is also possible to subscribe for one time single post which will cost you $40.

The website, bloghands.com presents all the information that you would like to know about Bloghands’ services.  You are advised to visit the site so that you will have firsthand experience about the kind of services that you can avail from the service. Bloghands is a helping hand for serious bloggers.

Bloghands gives great opportunity for professional bloggers and businesses. By investing in Bloghands’ services, you can reap benefits that are valued many more times than the investment.

There is huge potential to create a steady stream of right visitors by creating a professional blog that is well synchronized with your business website. It is a great opportunity to turn these potential visitors into customers by attracting them with the right stuff and the right service.