Make Money Online With A Solid Foundation

Website Promotion Strategies For Targeted Web Site Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:17:00 +0000

By Guy Ray

If you're looking to drive more targeted traffic to your web site, you'll want to pay close attention to the website promotion strategies presented in this article.

As an internet marketer, or a want to be internet marketer, you know that web site traffic is your livelihood. Without it you have nothing. No traffic - no sales - no profits. You'll continue to be stuck in a dead end job or worse yet, unemployed with no way to take care of yourself or your family.

I've written this article to end the hype and confusion that's abundant on the internet about website promotion and getting quality prospects to your web site or affiliate link. There are no secrets to website promotion. Common sense and proven principles prevail.

Website Promotion Strategy Rule # 1. Tap Into Existing Markets
The first consideration when it comes to your website promotion strategy is your product or service. Too many people think they must reinvent the wheel or come up with something new or exciting.

The first rule of creating an effective website promotion strategy is to find an existing market and then shoot for a piece of the action. It's much cheaper and much easier to tap into an existing market than to try to create a new one. Creating new markets are best left to the multi-million dollar corporations who have the money and time to develop them.

Website Promotion Strategy Rule #2. Consistancy Is The Key
Too many marketers throw up a web site and expect the world to beat a path to it's door. You can't locate your web site on a super highway with a million vehicles passing by every day. It's in cyber space and no one will ever see it unless you promote it.

The key to succesful website promotion is consistency. Day after day, week after week, month after month you must be doing something to let your prospects know your web site is there and offers a solution to their problems.

Website Promotion Strategy Rule # 3. Avoid Website Promotion Strategies That Don't Send Targeted Traffic
Too many greedy promotors are pushing strategies that simply don't work. They may bring some traffic, but the traffic they bring is simply trying to gain some form of reward for visiting your web site. Simply put, they have no interest in your offer, your product, or service. They're not targeted and have no interest in spending money with you. What good is a million visitors if no one buys anything?

Avoid FFA pages where your add is is only listed for a few seconds at best. Don't post on classified sites. The limited readership is simply not worth the effort. Stay away from so called optin safe lists. Your ad will be deleted in mass without ever being seen. I also recommend staying away from banner exchange and traffic exchange clubs.

Website Promotion Strategy Rule # 4. Focus On Traffic First
You can have the prettiest web site, the most compelling sales message, and the best offer on the planet. But if no one sees it, you have nothing.

Therefore you must-must-must focus on getting targeted traffic to your web site first. Once you have the traffic coming , then you can shift your attention to optimizing your sales message, improving your offer, and tweaking your site to get the best conversion rates. But until you have ample traffic(several hundred visitors per week) your attention is best focused on getting targeted traffic. So put first things first. Targeted traffic is king.

Website Promotion Strategy Rule # 5. Use Only Time Tested Proven Website Promotion Strategies And Techniques
Stop wasting time with outdated website promotion strategies that no longer work. FFA pages, advertising on classified sites, and safelists are good examples of this. They simply won't bring you enough targeted traffic.

Instead, focus your efforts on website promotion strategies that have stood the test of time and continue to work.

Eight Potent Website Promotion Strategies That Can Bring You All The Targetd Traffic You Need!

Writing articles for ezines and to post on other web sites. This is an often overlooked website promotion strategy that can bring a ton of targeted traffic to your site. There are many advantages to this strategy. Targeted traffic, exposure, and boosting pr for higher search engine rankings are just a few.

Advertising in ezines is a popular website promotion strategy and can work well. There are to many factors involved to go into all of them here. Just keep in mind the actual product, the copy and the audience all play a vital role in how well prospects respond. I don't push this technique because I believe writing articles is far more powerful.

Free search engine marketing is a website promotion strategy that can literally explode your traffic with targeted visitors. To succeed you must get good listings. The first page is best. You can find an abundance of free search engine optimization articles and tutorials on the internet.

Pay Per Click search engines can bring targeted traffic and are a main stay until you get listed in the free search engines. Even then you may want to consider keeping your PPC listings depending on how profitable the campaign is. A pay per click is worth mentioning is Google Ad Words.

Google Ad Words offers another low cost website marketing strategy to send a lot of targeted traffic to your web site. Choosing the right keywords can get you click throughs for as little as .05 Cents per click. Thats a low figure when you consider the traffic google ad words can send you.

In fact you can make a good living on the internet even if you have no web site by sending prospects directly to your affiliate link through google ad words. Some Pay Per Click engines don't allow this. But use caution. I recommend you read a good ebook about Google Adwords before you jump in blindly. If you don't know what you're doing you can run up a huge advertising bill and have little to show for it.

Opt-in Email marketing. You absolutely must collect the names an email address of your visitors if you want to have any real success for your website promotion efforts. Few visitors will buy the first time. That's why you need an autoresponder series set up to follow up with them and keep the prospect returning to your site. Some experts say your prospect must hear from you at least seven times before they will buy. Keep in mind I'm talking about opt-in email here. We avoid spam at all costs.

Joint venture marketing is another great website promotion strategy. It can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site in a hurry. Basically it involves setting up deals with other marketers who already have a responsive opt-in list. They mail your offer to their list and in return you split the profits with them. This is a great way to generate sales in a hurry and begin to build your own opt-in list.

Exchanging links with related but non competitive sites will bring you targeted traffic and boost your page rank. An absolute must if you want to be listed on the first page of google. It's a necessary website promotion strategy and should not be overlooked.

Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings -- and Stay There

10 Effective Ways to Boost Banner Click-through

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:09:00 +0000

By Chee Wee

Banner advertising is one of the most widely used marketing medium on the Internet. Though banner click-throughs have decreased to less than 1.0% in the past year, it is still possible to achieve reasonably good click-through of 3.0% and above. Below are 10 effective steps that I have successfully used to help my clients boost click-throughs on their banner campaigns.

1. Employ Action Words
Use action words like "FREE" and "Click Here" in your banners.
Offering something "FREE" in your message attracts the reader to click on your banner. Banners with "Click Here" teasers and similar action phrases also increase click-through.

2. Use Short and Punchy Headlines
A short and punchy banner headline makes a difference. Always load your headline with benefit statements - offer solutions to the challenges that your customers face. If you sell diet products, try "Lose 10 pounds in four weeks!". Work on a winning combination of text and graphics in your banner ad.

3. Animated Banners vs. Static Banners
Animated banners usually outperform their static counterparts by more than 100%. Surfers are more likely to notice banners that are animated. Example: If you have the words "Click Here" flashing in your banner, it will perform better than a static version.

4. Adopt Better Designs
Many of us are not graphic artists. We can create simple banners but it is hard to match the work of a professional graphic artist. You should engage a professional banner ad designer to create your banners. Expect to invest $80 per banner.

The standard sizes for banner ads are 400x40 pixels or 468x60 pixels. I recommend that you design a 468x60 banner. With the clutter of graphics on most webpages, a larger banner has a higher chance of getting noticed.

5. Try Trick Banners
These banners resemble Windows dialog boxes, scroll bars, submit buttons or blue-colored underlined hyperlinks. They attract you to click on the dialog boxes and scroll bars - which you are already accustomed to doing with the Windows operating system. If you use trick banners with short and punchy headlines, you can get click-throughs above 10.0%!

6. Reduce Your Banner File Sizes
Reduce your banner file size to less than 15k. The last thing a surfer wants is a slow-loading webpage. Most websites and banner exchanges do not allow excessively large banners.
Create a fast-loading banner right from the start. Optimize your banner file size through your graphic software or an online graphic optimizer.

7. Rotate Your Banners Regularly
Always have 2 or more banners to promote each product. A banner usually burns out after a surfer has seen it 3 times. They will ignore (if not hate) banners which they see repeatedly. If your click-through is steadily declining, then it is time to rotate your banners.

8. Target Your Banners
Place your banners on websites visited by your potential customers. If you promote gourmet coffees, place your banners on sites targeted at gourmet coffee drinkers. The quality of leads generated are higher, and more likely to result in sales.

Running your banners on targeted sites generally yield higher click-throughs and return-on-investment (ROI). You are reaching people who are most interested in what you have to offer. Of course, you can try websites with general audience if they generate substantial ROI.

9. Monitor Your Banners' Performance
Make it a point to check on your banners' performance every few days. Monitor the click-through rate. The click-through tells you how well your banner performs. Most banners fetch a click-through of between 0.8% to 2.0%. If your banner gets more than 2.0%, it is doing a pretty good job. By monitoring your banners' performance, you can kill under-performing banners before they waste away your advertising dollars.

10. Do Your Mathematics
Do your mathematics for each banner advertising campaign. Calculate the cost-per-visitor, cost-per-sale and return-on-investment ratios.

For example: If a website charges you $20 per thousand impressions ($20/CPM), and you get a 2.0% click-through (20 visitors), your cost-per-visitor is $1.00 ($20 / 20 visitors).

And if 1 in every 10 visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00 ($20 / 2 sales).
So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15, then your net profit per-sale will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit - $10 cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses, is 50.0% ($10.00 total net profits / $20 investment). This campaign is profitable!

Try advertising on different sites or using different banners. Find the winning combination(s) that can yield the highest ROI. Comparing Deal A which yields an ROI of 20% to Deal B that yields 60%, your advertising dollars work three times harder (and profitable) with Deal B!

The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from the Advertising Research Foundation

8 Tips To Get More Traffic From Yahoo

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:58:00 +0000

By Vishal Rao

With the new Yahoo! "Pay-For-Review" model it might be relatively easier for sites to get into the directory but getting traffic from your listing is altogether a different story. And now with it's new annual recurring payment policy you have to be extra careful while submitting your site for a review.

Here are 8 things to keep in mind while submitting your site to Yahoo!

1) Selecting your domain name is the most vital step in getting a top ranking in Yahoo! and also other directories like Dmoz and Looksmart.

Make sure your domain name is "Keyword Rich". You can make your domain keyword rich by simply inserting hyphens to separate words in your domain name. Yahoo! gives more relevance to sites with keywords in their domain name.

Take our domain name for example: http://www.home-based-business-opportunities.com/
It is made up of 4 different high-in-demand keywords: "Home Based Business", "Home Business", "Home Business Opportunities", "Home Based Business Opportunities".

While crafting your domain name, even you should try to keep your domain name such that it is made up of one, 2-4 words main or "parent" keyword; which in turn is made up of 2-4 high-in-demand "child" keywords.

You may or may not get a top ranking for all your targeted keywords but you can be sure of getting one for your main or "parent" keyword (If you do everything else right).

Even if you have to get a separate domain name for this purpose, GET IT! It is absolutely crucial for your ranking.

2) Sites which are placed higher in directory structure are given more relevance than sites which are placed lower or deeper.

For example a site listed in category - B2B/Business_Opportunities will be given more relevance than a site listed in category - B2B/Business_Opportunities/Directories

Here's a great tip to select the most trafficked category for your website...

Once you have short-listed 2 or 3 category to place your site in to, check out the cost of Sponsor Listings of those
categories.It's really simple. Visit the following URL: https://ecom.yahoo.com/fast/sponsor
Enter the URL of any website that is listed in your desired category (The URL should be same as it appears in Yahoo! and the category should be a commercial category).

-----SIDEBAR-----

Please note that Yahoo! accepts Sponsor Listings for only certain commercial categories and so this tip may or may not work for your category.

-----SIDEBAR-----
You'll be asked for your Yahoo! ID. Once you submit the information, you'll be provided with the Sponsorship charges for that certain category. Repeat the process for your remaining short-listed categories.

Now compare the prices of all your short-listed categories. Naturally the one with a higher price is the most trafficked one!

3) Yahoo! considers keywords in the directory structure while ranking.
For example, if someone is searching for "Business Opportunities Directories", a web site listed in category - B2B/Business_Opportunities/Directories will be given more relevance than a web site listed in category - B2B/Business_Opportunities

4) Yahoo! DOES NOT spider websites to determine ranking. It ranks web sites based on keywords in domain name, title and description. So having META tags does not make any difference to your listing.

5) DO NOT try to stuff as much keywords as possible in to the description. Yahoo! editors are notorious for cutting down the description if they sense even slightest hype. Try to avoid words such as - no.1, proven, turnkey, exciting etc.

Also, make sure that the heading of your home page is same as the description you provided for your site. There should be no confusion in the mind of the editor reviewing your site.

6) Make sure your domain name and business name is the same since Yahoo! is known to use the business name as the title for your listing.

7) Make sure your website is "Content Rich". This is very critical for two reasons. One - to get your site accepted by Yahoo! and Second - to maintain and get a higher listing.

Yahoo! determines the popularity of a website by the amount of time a visitor spends on your website. If a large no. of them hit the "back button" of their browser as soon as they hit your web site, you can kiss goodbye to your dreams of a possible higher listing.

Once you get a lower listing, it can get very difficult to make up as visitors will not be able to find your site easily.

-----SIDEBAR-----

Once a site gets accepted into the directory, Yahoo! ranks it based on the keyword popularity in domain name, title and description. But as time progresses, it determines the ranking based on the popularity of the website itself.

We ignored this and our listing came down drastically within few days of getting accepted!

-----SIDEBAR-----

8) Before submitting your website, thoroughly research websites that rank higher for keywords you are targeting (Especially the "Most Popular" sites in the directory section). This will give you a rough idea of what to and what not to include in your website.

6 Careers You Can Do From Home

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:14:00 +0000

Working from home can be a great career option for people with all skillsets and lifestyles. You can set your own hours and even work in your pajamas - a pretty appealing alternative to the old nine-to-five in a cubicle. Here are six careers you can do from home, and how you can get started.

1. Personal Chef

If cooking is your passion, becoming a personal chef may just be the job for you. This job can mean that you cook a week's worth of meals in a client's home, for instance, or you can look at delivering gourmet meals - the alternative to the old pizza delivery. With today's high-pressure jobs and families where both parents work full time, this type of service is becoming more desirable, particularly in urban areas. Be sure to understand local regulations regarding the kitchen you prepare the food in; many states require you to have a kitchen separate from your home, and may inspect for health code adhesion.

2. Birthday Party Planning
If you talk to any parent, they'll tell you: planning a birthday party is hard work, and a challenge when you're busy. Where there's a need, there's a job, and birthday party planning can be a great career if you're creative, like kids and can work weekends when parties are often held. You can also plan retirement parties, promotions - any event you think you can handle. For the best changes at earning a good income, make sure you research local rates and competition and understand your liability, particularly if you'll be working with little ones.

3. Home Staging
It's a tough real estate market out there. To sell your house in this buyer's market, it needs to look its best, and home staging can make all the difference. If you have an eye for design, home staging may just be the career for you; there are no education requirements, and although there are many courses and professional organizations for home stagers, they're not required to be successful in the field. Take some time to research rates in your area and practice staging your home or a friend's. Think about what services you'll want to offer, and the startup costs you'll incur. Networking with realtors can be very helpful in generating business.

4. Web Design
Are you computer savvy, and do you have an eye for detail? A career in web design may be for you. Even if you don't have the skills, consider going back to school to learn; there are many online courses, and current education tax benefits can make the bottom-line expense very low. Before you hunt for jobs, think whether you'll be starting your own business or work as a freelancer with web design - the two are very different tax and legal-wise. Check with the IRS on tax obligations, and with your local small business chapter.

5. Virtual Assistant
With today's uncertain economy, more businesses are looking to hire temporary or per-project help, sometimes in the form of a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant can handle anything from receptionist duties to bookkeeping, depending on your expertise and the client's needs. For work in this field, look to online job boards. Tell your friends and family you're looking for administrative-type work to do from home, and check with any old business contacts you may have. Virtual assistants are still a fairly new concept, so expect to have to explain what you do a few times before generating business.

6. Tutoring Service
These days, problems are increasingly solved with use of the internet, including tutoring services. Work as a tutor can be helping a child with homework, or teaching adults how to use a computer - if you have a specific skill, you can become a tutor. You can find work on job boards, or at online colleges. If you have a college degree in your expertise (like math, or English), your chances at building a successful career as a tutor will be even better.

The Bottom Line
These six careers are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to at-home careers. For the best chance at success, look at your previous career for a start - you may be able to work as a consultant. At-home careers are a great way to explore your passion and make a living too. Earnings can vary greatly, depending on your expertise and experience, so take time to research before setting your rates. Make sure you understand your tax obligation, and whether you might be best off starting a small business to protect yourself legally. Your local small business organization or SCORE chapter is great place to get some help. Whether you're designing web pages or starting a small business as a party planner, working from home can be a great way to forge own your career path - and avoid the cubicle doldrums, too.

Career Opportunities
10 Career Essentials: Excel at Your Career by Using Your Personality Type

PPC: The Best Among Passive Income Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:53:00 +0000

Posted by: Abigail of BuyTemplates

People nowadays believe in fast money and easy earning techniques. Despite having a proper income source they want to have a side source for which they won’t have to invest any effort or time. This kind of income is recognized under the USA government as passive income.

Some passive income ideas include revenue from rented properties, interest and dividend from stocks and bonds, royalty from a literary creation, pensions, etc. However, if you have a company of your own, you will definitely know the inevitability of online marketing. With the growing popularity of part time online jobs and online advertisement, the passive income source that has gained prominence is PPC advertising. PPC stands for pay per click. Have you ever noticed that certain sites contain advertisements tempting the visitors to click them? If you have missed those details, I’m sure you have at least noticed the various Google Ads that flash up each time you visit certain sites. These are pay per click programs, allowing passive income through click counts. If you have a company or say, any product that you can advertise then you can earn some money by subscribing your product on an advertising site, say, Google or Yahoo and get paid based on the number of people actually clicking your advertisement. However, you will need to buy the advertisement slot with a certain minimum amount. In order to ensure maximum response in return of the amount paid, you must have an Adwords Management Company providing PPC management.

I’m sure you will not want completely trash visitors clicking your sites just for the sake of it. You will prefer visitors who are actually interested in your product or company so that they can turn out to be prospective clients. Passive income cannot be your sole intention. To ensure quality visits to the advertisement you are paying for, you need a proper management. Most automatic PPC programs have a link with the PPC sites where they pay visitors for visiting the sites. This way the click count increases without any benefit to the actual business. So choose your advertiser carefully by checking whether it includes a proper PPC management. Without a management, you might have the required traffic but ultimately no profit to showcase.
There are certain things you must keep in mind before and after choosing your company for PPC advertising. They should have a good reputation; they must meet your budget and employ a good PPC management system, as said before. The most important thing is that they must be able to produce very interesting advertisements with catchy lines and flashy designs. If you think as a layman user, you will understand that it’s a general tendency of human beings to go for something that looks simple yet attractive. This should be well taken care of. Initially you must invest a nominal amount just to check the performance and then after closely monitoring the responses you get, you can take the necessary decision.

If you want to explore other online passive income ideas you do have many options. If you know something unique like a rare recipe or a personalized home decorating technique or a computer hacking idea, then you can share them online and get paid. It’s like a royalty. The same applies if you write an eBook. If you are innovative enough then you can also sign up in sites letting you designs T-shirts for young and old and later sell them in sites like eBay. Online, being the fastest mode of passive income can quench your thirst of easy money very efficiently.

Keyword Elite 2.0: The New Generation Of Keyword Research Software!

How to make money with a blog

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:48:00 +0000

Article by Bob

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. The good news is that even if you don’t make as much money blogging as you’d hoped, you can always sell your blog. This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have.

I should also mention that I really haven’t written about blogging or making money from blogs on ChristianPF yet, because I wanted to make sure that it was a viable option for making some cash. Now that I have found that it is, I decided to pour out everything I learned the last two years about it…

How it all started for me

About 2 years ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the idea of building websites full of free information to help people. After brainstorming a bit, I got a couple ideas of topics that I was passionate about: Proverbs and Personal Finance. My first idea was to post a Proverb each day and comment on it. As I explained my idea further to him, he informed me that I would basically have a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was, but I thought, “oh, ok, sure.” So, over the next few weeks I read as much as I could find about blogging and ultimately decided on creating a blog about Personal Finance from a Christian perspective. I had been very interested in helping people with their money, so blogging seemed like a great way to reach people all over the world. Over the next couple months, I started writing articles and officially launched ChristianPF in June of 2007.

At this point I had thought about making money from the site, but had no idea how and honestly didn’t really think it was possible to make a living at it. I threw up an Adsense ad just to see what would happen and I still remember how excited I was when I saw that I had made my first 7 cents! From there, I set a goal to make $100 by the end of 2007 which was pretty easy to accomplish – even without knowing anything. I should also mention that from June 2007 to June 2008 I spent about 4-6 hours each weekend writing articles and averaged about 4 new articles each week. And I spent a few more hours each week on site maintenance, emails, social media, etc. So in total I probably was spending about 10 hours each week working on the site.

Getting laid off

In July 2008 things got interesting. The large brokerage firm that I had worked 5 years for was bought out by a larger firm. I was told that my department would no longer be needed, so they handed me a severance check and I was on my way. By this point I was making some money from the blog, but not enough to even pay the rent each month. After much prayer I decided against looking for another “day job” and decided to work full time on building the blog. Thankfully we had paid off most of our debt, and had my wife’s income as a support to buy us some time. I figured I would give it a shot for a few months and if it didn’t work out I would find another 9-5.

From that point, the income generated from this website has increased each month and in February 2009 it exceeded my monthly income from my old day job. I am still a little bit in awe and can’t believe that I am actually paying the bills from this website!. But, I thank God everyday that I get to do this – I really did not like working in Corporate America and am so thankful! It is hard work, but it doesn’t really seem like it when you are doing something that you are passionate about and love doing it.

Blogging basics

I am going to try to boil this down to the essentials. There are whole books written on this subject, so I am not going to try to cover everything here. If you are looking for a good book about blogging for beginners, I suggest reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger. But for a quick, bottom-line version keep reading…

What is a blog?

A blog is short for “weblog”. Basically, it is just a website that has entries listed in reverse chronological order. The original idea behind it was to be a online journal or diary that was updated daily (or as frequently as the writer chose). Over the last decade many software programs and blogging platforms have been created to make the process VERY EASY. As the blog writer, depending on which platform you use, you can just type your entry, press submit and it shows up on your blog for the world to see. Most bloggers don’t know any programming languages and are not “techies.” Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways out there to start a website. If you haven’t started one yet, why not try it? It can be very quick to set up and can be completely free.

Is it easy to start a blog?

It is very easy. Even if there are steps along the way that are confusing, there are plenty of resources to get the help you need. There are over 20 million blogs in existence, so it can’t be that difficult.

How much does it cost to blog?

There are many services that allow you to start a blog for free (see below). I suggest using one of the free services to get a basic feel for blogging and “get your feet wet.” Once you decide you want to stick with it and that you want to make money with your blog, I suggest moving up to a self-hosted blog (see below). Anyone who is really trying to make money with a blog will probably be more successful with a self-hosted blog. Getting a self-hosted blog may not be free, but still can be VERY inexpensive. You will need to pay for nothing more than a domain name ($10) and web-hosting (as cheap as a few bucks a month).

Getting a blogging platform

All 4 of the options listed are free. The first 3 options are the easiest, but the are also limited on features. If you are just trying to make an extra few hundred dollars from your blog, these options could work. But if you are really serious about trying to make good money from your blog, I recommend self-hosting your blog (which we talk about in the next section…).

Tumblr.com – This is probably the simplest blogging platform to use, but it also is the probably the least customizeable. So, it might be something good to start with, but it would be more difficult to build an income-generating website with it.

Blogger.com – Blogger is also very good, easy to set up, owned by Google, you can customize the theme, and the domain name includes “.blogspot.com” (in some people’s opinion a little less professional). Blogger continues to become more customizeable and currently has a lot more options than they did a few years ago.

WordPress.com – I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

WordPress.org – Wait, what is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org? To put it simply WordPress.com is where you will go to set up a basic, easy blog with limited features. WordPress.org is where you will go to get a self-hosted blog. If you get to the point where you are serious about blogging and really want to make some money with it, you need to self-host your blog.

How to setup a self-hosted blog

If you are going to be using one of the first three options above, you can skip this section. If you are serious about blogging and are looking for the best way to customize your blog’s look and other features, then getting a self-hosted blog from WordPress.org is probably the best way to go. It is currently the top choice for most bloggers. It does require more work up front and does have small costs associated with it: buying a domain name ($10/year) and hosting your blog ($10/month).
One of the big advantages is that you can use your own domain name (i.e. yourblog.com). While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a lot easier for people to remember yourblog.com rather than yourblog.blogspot.com which is what you will be given if you use Blogger. I will warn you, being a non-techie myself, this took me some time figuring out how to get my self-hosted site set up. WordPress.org has a great step-by-step guide for getting you set up. While it is more work on the front end, I am really glad I got good advice and did this at the beginning, than having to do it now.

Pick a Domain Name

1. You should start by purchasing a domain name. Psychicwhois.com is a great tool to see what names are still available. I would suggest going to for a .com rather than a .info or .us or anything else for that matter. It is just too easy for people to get confused. A .com is always going to hold more value than any other extension.
2. Once you get it picked out, you need to find somewhere to purchase it. I bought my first few domains at GoDaddy.com and have bought the remaining ones from Dreamhost (and now BlueHost as well). While GoDaddy is about one of the biggest names out there, I can’t say that I recommend them because of some of their advertising campaigns that they run. But the good news is that there are thousands of options of places where you can purchase a domain name.

Pick a host for your blog

The webhost is the company that you pay to store all of your files for your blog. There are also a million web hosting companies out there. I don’t suggest just looking for the cheapest one, because a lot of these companies are not very reliable and your site might be down quite a bit. I like to go with the bigger companies who have a longer track record and are more established. They may cost a dollar or two more a month when you are starting out and it is well worth it.

I have hosted my websites with Dreamhost from the beginning, mostly because I knew a lot of people using them and I got a hosting package for about $7.00 a month. I did find hosting cheaper, but with hosting you often get what you pay for – so keep that in mind.

I still host most of my websites at Dreamhost, but have moved ChristianPF.com to MediaTemple. The main reason was that since my livelihood now depended on the website I wanted a higher level of service from my hosting company. MediaTemple has been great in that regard, but as always it comes with a price. I am currently paying $50 a month for hosting with them.

Get a customizable theme

After I took the step the self-host this site, the next step that greatly helped me increase earnings was choosing a highly-customizable theme. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this at the beginning, since it does cost money to get a good theme, but once you are committed to blogging and are willing to invest a few bucks, putting that money towards a good theme is a good investment. For this site, I purchased Semiologic, which is a fantastic theme that gives you a lot of control. It costs $300 for the full version, but I quickly made that money back because the theme allowed me optimize my ad placement in ways that no other themes did.
If you are a programmer, you really don’t need to buy a theme because you can make the all the customizations yourself to any basic theme. Since starting to blog a couple years ago, I have learned some HTML codes, but I am still about the furthest thing from a programmer! So for people like me, a customizable theme allows me to control things and areas of the site that I would never be able to change with out the help of a programmer.

My Themes

At the time of this writing, I am still using Semiologic for the theme on this site, but since I had been hearing so much buzz about the Thesis Theme, I decided to buy it and try it out on another one of my sites. I have to admit, I never thought it would be able to compete with Semiologic, but I am finding out how wrong I was. After testing it out, I really am very impressed with it. Right out of the box, it provides you with a very pretty looking site that is very easy to customize. It is SEO optimized very well, has a ton of support for it, and once you figure out how to use the hooks you can customize it to oblivion if you want. The kicker is that you can buy it and get lifetime updates for $87. I still really like Semiologic and think it is a great theme, but for the price, if I were shopping right now, I would go with Thesis. I am going to get to know and learn Thesis on my other site for a while and make sure that it really is everything that I think it is and eventually I will convert this site to Thesis.

How I make money with this blog

When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…

CPC Ad Networks

There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google’s Adsense program. Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA.
So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not. I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.

CPM Ad Networks

While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) Adsdaq, AdClickMedia, Adbrite, Adify, BuzzLogic, and Casale Media. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.

Affiliate Product Sales

Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, FlexOffers, LinkConnector, Commission Junction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.

Added 10/20/10 – I recently found out about a new site called Viglink which allows you to automatically turn all our links on your site to affiliate links. I am testing it out and am pretty excited about it since it greatly simplifies the process of adding affiliate links.

I have a very strong policy about honest recommendations. I give my honest opinions about products that I find regardless of how it will affect affiliate sales. This is probably why I don’t really make too much with affiliate products. For example, I wrote about Cash Crate and updated the article to show what I didn’t like about them. Because Cash Crate has such a generous referral program, I know some people making lots of money from it, but I just don’t feel comfortable recommending it since I had a bad experience using it. On the other hand there are products like ING Direct, Ebates, Perkstreet Financial, Mint.com, and Sharebuilder that I recommend and also have some sort of affiliate or referral program as well. These are what I love because I can help readers by pointing them to good resources and tools that have helped me and get paid in the process. I know some people don’t have a problem promoting anything that will pay them, but I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend something to someone that I don’t genuinely believe will help them.

Direct Ad Sales

I also sell ad space directly to advertisers. This hasn’t provided much income for me yet and may or may not even be worth my time. I know that in certain niche markets direct ad sales can work out very well, but thus far it hasn’t been a big money maker on CPF.

How long does it take to make money from a blog

The second question that people normally ask after, “how do I make money with a blog?” is, “how long is it going to take?”. Well just like most things in life, there is no legitimate quick and easy way. It takes time and hard work. As you can see from the chart below it took me a long time before the trend started moving upward. But, for more than a year I was working at it about 10 hours a week. And don’t forget I didn’t know anything about blogging, advertising, getting traffic, etc when I started. So, if you know that ChristianPF is a blog, then you have a head start on me. Also, you have the wonderful privilege of reading this article where I am going explain most of the things that I did to help create that upward trend seen below – that I didn’t know the first year.

Blog earnings visualized

From other people I know who make a decent amount from their blogs, this curve seems to be typical. While the first year didn’t yield much income, it was crucial for the second year to be able to. While I wish I could tell you that you could jump right ahead to where the income starts increasing quicker, but I just don’t think it is likely. There are some tips in this article that I wish I would have known at the beginning and I think they will make things go a lot quicker, but there is no getting around the fact that it is going to take time to get there. But just like anything, the more you put in, the more you get out. The two keys are consistency and a willingness to learn. Without them, I would say that it will be very difficult to make money with your blog.

How to get traffic to your blog

So now are getting to the point of this article where I start sharing everything I have learned over the last couple years about blogging. So, if you are like most, you want to create a blog so that others can read what you have to say. Sadly, people will not find your blog (in the beginning anyway) unless you do a little legwork. These are some of the things I did to get traffic and some that I still do. The first thing I suggest doing is writing a few great articles about your topic and feature them in your sidebar. Then I would start working on generating traffic, because you not only want traffic, but you want returning traffic as well.

Guest Posting!!

I think this is one of the best ways to start getting some quick traffic. Almost every blog I know allows guest posts (even this one) – and almost every one of those does not discriminate. What I mean is that most bloggers (that I know anyway) will accept or reject a guest post based on it’s quality, not on whether they know the person or not. This provides a great opportunity for a newbie to write an article that could be seen by 20,000 readers.

I don’t know of any other method that could bring traffic as quick. I must admit, I could still do more guest posting myself. I have been pleased with the results in the past. The key is to write a great article – don’t hold back your best stuff. I have seen people grow their blogs very quickly by giving some of their best articles away as guest posts. Also, only submit unpublished content as a guest post. If it has already been published, then the blog that is allowing you to guest post won’t get any search engine traffic for that article. But there are places to republish your articles you have already published – we will get to that in a minute…

Sign up for blog community sites

Just a few off the top of my head are mybloglog.com, technorati.com, and blogcatalog.com. Look for other blogs in your niche and join their networks and ask to become their friends. Networking with some of your fellow bloggers here will send a few visitors your way and is a good way to get started.

Submit to Blogcarnivals

One of the best things beginning bloggers can do is to sign up for blogcarnivals. At this site you can submit articles that you wrote on your blog to be included in a list of articles by the hosting blog. It is kind of like “open mic night.” If you have a good article with a good title, you can get some good traffic from blogcarnivals, not to mention incoming links from other related sites.

Join Directories

If I were starting a blog today, one of the first things I would do is Google “whatever topic I want to blog about” + “directory” This should return a list of web directories about your topic. Getting added to these directories will only help. You may not get a lot of traffic from them, but ultimately they will help you get more traffic from the search engines. A few of the more valuable ones to get you started…

Blog Commenting

One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way. The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it.

Forum Commenting

Becoming involved in forums related to your topic and having a link to your blog in the signature line can send a few visitors. Google “your topic” and “forums” and you are sure to find a few. Just don’t be annoying and go in just to promote yourself. People can see that from a mile away. The new age of the internet (aka Web 2.0) is very much a “give and you shall receive” environment. If you seek to give and be a benefit before seeking your own rewards, you will be much better off. Why not get started at the Christian PF Forums?

Linking to other blogs

I don’t know what it is, but everyone wants to know when someone is talking about them. So it is with blogs. When people link to my site, I get a notification and often go check out who linked to me and what the context was. I have had some good relationships form just from this.

Create Squidoo pages

Squidoo.com, Examiner.com, Hubpages.com and a handful of others are sites that allow you to build a simple page about a topic. You can do it very quick and the pages often rank well in the search engines. If you build a page that gets a little bit of traffic and have links coming back to your site, you will catch some of those visitors.

Article submissions

Submit articles to article submission sites. These sites collect articles and most allow a bio-section that can include a link back to your blog. Here are a few that are worth looking into…

SEO tips for blogs

It will take a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. The search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, hence proving that they are reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other web sites that have a good reputation in the search engines’ eyes is very important. As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links the search engines will begin to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing!! But, as I mentioned earlier, they are very wary of new websites – so time will be your ally when it comes to the search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google’s results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part about it is that it is FREE TRAFFIC!!!
I am not going to get deep into SEO much here, there are far more thorough books about it (i.e. SEOBook) but as your blog grows you should try to learn more about it, as it will only help you by knowing more. Just like most of the things you will learn while blogging, you don’t need to be an expert at it – just having a working knowledge will provide great results. The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they are trying to create a perfect system where any searcher can find exactly what they want. Google wants to display the most relevant websites to their searchers. They will never have a perfect system, but they probably won’t stop trying. If you can keep this in mind, it will be very helpful when you are trying to optimize your blog. Don’t waste your time trying to trick them, they will figure it out and will punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear to them what your site is all about and writing great content for your reader and the rest will take care of itself.

So, let’s get to some SEO. These are some of the most important (in my opinion) pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you will be much better off than most people who don’t know anything about SEO.

1. Title Tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of your browser window. It is also one of the most important determining factors that the search engines use to determine what your site is about.

In the above picture you can see that the title tag is “Christian Personal Finance – Financial help, debt help…” You WILL want to make sure that your title tags contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. If your site is about rock climbing, you will not want to have “welcome to Bill’s blog” in the title tags. Something better would be “Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text – the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine you can see that the link will go to Google. “great search engine” is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google really places a lot of importance on what words are in the anchor text. Obviously, you will not be able to control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, you should use your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals, and your signature line in forums all may be good places to make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text.

3. Keyword Research

If you are trying to get traffic from search engines, it is always a good idea to know what people are searching for before you start writing. I often use Aaron Wall’s keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4. Get links

We already lightly discussed the importance of links coming into your blog. Other that the great benefit they play in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It is an obvious benefit, but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot of visitors, you could see a huge traffic spike from it. If you get links from lots of blogs, you could and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more and more links, you will see more visitors coming. The bottom line about link-building is that you have to create something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

How I increased Adsense earnings $1500 in less than 3 months

This section is going to be a little bit beyond the basics and I will provide details of how I dramatically improved earnings from Adsense. Just to clarify, at the time of this increase I was already making some money with Adsense, but I had no idea how much difference a few tweaks could make. In my case I increased earnings over $1500 in a short amount of time. The thing you have to understand about Adsense is that no two sites are alike. Every blog has a different audience and different articles and most likely a different layout, all these things affect Adsense earnings. Knowing that, testing and trying new things is critical to find the winners!

1. Added a Privacy Policy

This is such a simple thing to do. I never realized that is a “requirement” for Adsense publishers, but when I added a link in my footer to my Privacy Policy there was a noticeable increase in earnings. I assume that Google rewards those who have a privacy policy and punishes those that don’t by trimming their earnings. In a perfect world you would want your lawyer to draft your privacy policy, but here is a sample template of a privacy policy to make your life a bit easier.

2. Put ads where people’s eyeballs went…

For me there is an eternal struggle between usability and profitability with ads. While I want need to make money to pay my bills, I still want to make this site as user friendly as possible. So, I have made some sacrifices with this site in order to maintain certain levels of usability, but one of the main keys to making money with Adsense is ad placement. Like I mentioned before, this needs to be experimented with. But for the first year or more of this site I just kinda threw the ads where ever I had extra room. Once I changed the location of my ads, my earnings tripled overnight. It really freaked me out. I had no idea that just moving an ad a couple inches would have such a dramatic effect. The diagram to the right (from Google) provides some good starting point for what locations work and don’t.

3. Section Targeting

This was another tweak I made that made a noticeable difference in earnings. Basically “section targeting” is telling Google what text on your site to look at when deciding what ads to show. Google is pretty good at figuring this out if you don’t do this, but if you have a lot of stuff going on in your sidebars and footer sections, it is probably worth experimenting with. It is very easy to implement. You only need to use this tag… to tell Google to start, and this tag… …to tell them to stop. I just added a text widget at the top of my post for the start tag and after the content for the end tag.

4. Who Sees Ads Plugin

This is a great plugin that allows you (as the name suggests) choose which visitors see which ads. There are lots of criteria that you can select, so you can specify that Search Engine users see a particular Adsense unit when regular readers see something else. I have found that search engine visitors click Adsense ads a lot more than regular readers. I still show some Adsense to regular readers, but I focus my energy on the visitors from search engines – this plugin makes this very easy.

5. Changed the colors

When Adsense first came out, people said to make the colors as loud and ugly as possible to draw attention to them. Next I heard that the best thing to do was to blend them into the site. Of the two methods I think that blending works a little better, and definitely looks a lot better! But, I have a slight variation of that has worked even better for me. Currently I have have most of my links set to a lighter blue color. I used to have many of my Adsense ads match that, but I saw a nice increase when I changed the Ad titles to the old standard Link Blue. I feel that visually it is a complement rather than a match. It stands out a little bit more, but doesn’t look bad either – IMO…

6. Wrote articles people are searching for

This might seem unrelated, but it is very important. If you are like most bloggers, you have a regular readership and you have readers from the search engines. For some reason, a lot of bloggers just don’t give much respect to search engine readers and don’t really try to reach out to them other than trying to “convert” them to a regular reader. I approach things a little bit differently, rather than getting frustrated at the fact that so many search engine visitors don’t come back, I started to embrace it. I realized that my main goal of this site was to help people, so why should I care if they only visit once or on a daily basis if they are getting helped? So while I very much appreciate and value my regular readers, I also understand that I can help those who find the site via a search engine. I started doing keyword research to see what people were looking for in the search engines. If there are people searching to find the highest paying jobs without a degree, I want to help them find out! What happened for me as I started to become more conscious of what people were searching for was that I started getting more search engine traffic – which of course leads to higher earnings from Adsense.

7. Added a Google search bar

This is a no-brainer. Google is the master of search, so you can bet that their search capability on your site is going to be better than the default WordPress search tool. By installing this, you will help your visitors find the information that they are looking for on your site and make some extra cash in the process. When the search results (from the websites you choose) are displayed they have the standard Google ads present, just like normal Google search results.

8. Hooked Google Analytics up with Adsense

A few months ago, Analytics started allowing the option to integrate your Adsense data. This has been so helpful for me. It provides webmasters with a wealth of information about earnings. It is simple to see which articles are making the most money, which keywords are yielding the most, what sites send the most valuable traffic, and a whole lot more. If you use Adsense, don’t pass this one up.

9. Tested, re-tested, and tested again…

When running Adsense tests, I typically let them run for a month in order to make sure they are very thorough. I have a calendar that I use to mark down when I make changes and what changes I make. Then when the test is complete I compare CPM and eCPM rates to see what performed better. A/B split testing is a better method when possible, but for certain tests is just isn’t possible or practical. But either way, if you want to make more money with Adsense, experimenting and testing is a must!

11 tools that have helped make it all possible…

Not all of these tools directly contribute to the bottom line, but each one of them have been very helpful over the last couple years.

Google Analytics – which is a wonderful (and free) statistics tool that will help you keep track of your visitors and analyze a lot of data about them. As I mentioned before it now integrates with Adsense to give even more valuable data.
Semiologic WP Theme – This is the theme I used to use for most of my WordPress sites. It costs about $300 for the full version, but I started with the free version, which I think is far more customizable than the vast majority of WP themes out there already. So if you are just starting out your probably don’t need the full version yet, but eventually it is probably worth considering. For what it has allowed me to do I know that it has paid for itself many times over.
Google webmaster tools – This will help you see how Google views your blog. They will also let you know if there are any problems with it that you may not be aware of. For me I had some issues that were really hurting my search rankings, but I found out about them and fixed them and voila! All better.
Aweber Email Marketing Service – I haven’t been using this too long, but if you read anything about internet marketing, you will certainly hear about the incredible value in having an email list. I have been happy with Aweber thus far.
Google’s Keyword Tool – This is a great tool to get ideas about popular keywords as well.
SEObook Keyword Tool – I use this to get a ballpark estimate of how many people are searching for particular key phrases.
SocialPoster – This tool allows you to submit articles to multiple social sites. I used to use it to submit to about the top 5-10 social sites.
Hittail.com – This one provides ideas for articles based on what you have previously written about and could probably rank for. I just noticed that the free version is gone. If you have a blog that is established it might be worth paying $10 a month for it – I suggest doing the free-trial and see how much it helps you.
Stock.xchng – The best free stock photography site I have found.
iStockPhoto – The best cheap stock photography site I have found. They have lots of images that you can get for just a few bucks.
Feedburner – If you have a blog, you will want to burn a feed. Feedburner makes this fun, organized, and easy…

A few more tools that may be worth checking out…

Scribe SEO Tool for WordPress – I wrote a more thorough review of this tool that the blogging tips subscribers received (you can sign up for free below if interested). But basically, I tried it out and decided not to continue to use it because I thought it was priced a little to high for what I got from it. It can make the SEO process a bit easier, but I just wasn’t sure about spending $27 on it. If they lower the price, I might recommend it a bit more.
How To Build A Successful Blog Business – I haven’t read this ebook yet, but some of the biggest names in the business have some great things to say about the book.
Frugal Theme for WordPress – This is another premium theme like Thesis and I haven’t tried it out yet, but it seems to be gaining popularity.
Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Training Course – I haven’t tried this, but have heard good things about it. Yaro is an extremely successful internet marketer and I have learned a whole lot from him. If I were starting out today and could afford the program, I would do it. Since it has a hefty price tag, it would probably be a good idea to wait until you are actually making a little money from your blog before signing up.

Warnings for those starting out…

Don’t quit your day-job

Even if you know a lot about making money with a blog (which just be reading this article, you have a tremendous advantage over me when I started) it is going to take a while. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it is more of a work-for-free-for-a-long-time-and-then-reap-your-reward type plan. The beautiful thing is that I can now say that it does work if you are diligent and open to learning from your mistakes. But either way, convention wisdom says, build your blog part-time and when you start making more from it than your day-job consider making it a full-time deal. My situation is a unique one and I don’t recommend doing what I did unless it really is God calling you to do so. In my case I am now thankful that I got laid off – if I hadn’t I would probably still be doing a job I didn’t like!

Learn everything you can

One of the advantages I have is that I love to learn and don’t stop when I make a mistake. I work really hard to learn from my mistakes and figure out what the better course of action would be for the next time. You are going to do things wrong, but you just have to keep going and keep learning. Learning how to use Google search is very important. If you do, you will be able to find an answer to just about every problem you encounter on the web.

Avoid time-wasters

Checking your stats every hour, reading 500 blogs in your RSS, playing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or Youtube all day will kill your productivity. Focus on what yields results and stay disciplined to stick with that. Social media is an important part of building traffic, but you have to keep it in check.

Have fun

While I wrote this article as a guide to help those who want to make money with a blog, I understand that many people don’t really care about that. Either way, life is too short not to be enjoying it. So whether you want to be a full-time blogger or just communicate with friends – have fun!!

Search Engine Optimization Explained

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:04:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization Secrets: SEO For 2011 (Search Engine Optimization Learning Series - A Kindle Bestseller)

Almost all of our customers and associates are interested to know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). While most of the people come to us after they have a website to optimize it for search engines, we must stress that it is something you should take into consideration right from the initial project planning. We are writing this blog to explain what is SEO and process we follow at Genex Business Solutions. Google is the largest search engine today, together with Yahoo and MSN, the three search engines produce 80% of the website traffic to different websites which rank higher in their listings for specific keyword phrases.

What is SEO?
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Search Engine Optimization is a process or group of processes in which we optimize a website to work best with search engines. As we all know that we use keyword phrases on search engines to find relevant websites. These keyword phrases are actually extracted by search engines from the content of a website. Then these website results are indexed on their page rank and results are listed from best match to lower match and so on. The websites having same keyword phrases in their content may have different page rank. A page rank is evaluated for the number of websites pointing to your website. The websites pointing to your website should have a better page rank as well, in order to prove authentication and reliability of your website. Search engines are always changing their policies, improving them to get the best results for their users. Altogether SEO procedure holds many different areas which require continues workout to keep on improving your search ranking and page rank.

I am explaining you our SEO process below which starts with the website development. We can also perform this procedure after the website is developed, but that may add more funds to the budget as there might be changes to be done in the website to optimize it. So you should optimize your websites or talk about the issues with your provider before you begin development.

Keyword Research
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As per your website’s subject we brainstorm to find out with which keywords a potential customer will be looking for you on a Search Engine. More also we take into account the information you want to put in the website, the content. We prepare a list of approximate 50 keyword phrases. Then we evaluate these phrases with different professional tools to find out competition of these keyword phrases on different search engines. We evaluate competition of search VS competition of websites for specific keyword phrases. We target to find the keyword phrases which are high in demand of search and less in competition. This helps us get your website on high rankings sooner. If we go for the keyword phrases which are high in demand of search and high in demand of competition as well, we can face a long time to beat the competition and get up on results.

Prepare The WebSite
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The final list of keywords is used in the menus, content, image name, alt tags, meta tags, description tags, and on external links which point to your website. This adds power to these keywords and search engines give you more priority on the specific keywords we are using in website and on other websites as well.

More also the website coding in HTML/CSS/JavaScript or any other language, should be in accordance with W3C standards. Search engines should be able to trace all links on your pages, there should not be broken links, or errors on your page. You should not use complex menus where search engines cannot trace links, such as Flash Menus, DHTML menus etc. If you have to use any complex menu, then you must make sure there is an alternative navigation to the pages as well or the menu should be optimized for better search engine performance. Presence of a sitemap is very important; a site map is a page which has links to all pages in your website. More professionally your website is developed; more credibility search engines will give to it.

We can also store instructions with our website for search engines in a file called robots.txt. With this file we can restrict web robots and spiders to crawl pages on our website. For example there are certain pages on your website you do not want search engines to crawl, we can restrict those pages. More also this file is used to direct search engine robots to certain pages on the site which are newly added or updated, so that search engines can index them.

Control Over Your SEO
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We give you control over your SEO process. Search engine world is organic and continuously changing and growing. In fact at a very rapid pace they are moving. Trends come and go and frequency of keywords change, to keep up with this change we empower you with such backend control panels with your website, which let you manage your content, keywords, page titles, page descriptions of each and individual page dynamically. This allows us to enhance keywords and keep up with the change and improving our website rankings.

Site map is also auto generated and it keeps on updating whenever you add any new pages to your website.

URL Re-Writing
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The pages produced with our content management system are auto mapped as an HTML pages, making search engines easily find a page and recognize it. In technical words, we re-write website URLS into search engine friendly URLS.

For example a dynamic website with a content management system displays the URL to its about us page as: (http://www.dummy-domain.com/index.php?pid=5)
While the URLS we produce, although the page is still dynamic, URLS appear to be like
(http://www.dummy-domain.com/aboutus.html)
Note: Please do not click on the URLS, they are dummy.

Google
---------
The biggest of all search engines, is providing the best webmaster tools, information and help without any cost. Yeah you can open a Google account and start enjoying today! Tools such as Google Analytics are wonderful to work with. Since Google is the leader, we all optimize our websites with Google standards. Google provides detail reports of your website traffic, keyword analysis, reports of which keywords are in demand etc. We can integrate Google tools with the website (which is not a myth, very easy, you can do it yourself too). This helps a lot to keep an eye and making future decisions.

Off Page Optimization
------------------------------
All the actions performed not on your website for better search engine results are called Off Page Optimization efforts. These include mainly the following:
1-Adding your website in search engines
2-Adding your website in free and paid web directories
3-Adding your website on different forums through articles and free content
4-Posting your website on different public blogs and groups
5-Sharing your website through social bookmarking sites
6-Sharing your website through Podcasts and video blogs
7-Promoting your website through social networking sites
8-Exchanging links with website of similar interests
9-Adding your website to related groups on Yahoo, Google and other key sites
10-Adding reviews on other websites to leave link of your website
11-Sending out press releases
12-Sharing your RSS content if any
and more…

Off page optimization is a continues process and we can perform these actions on continues basis, providing you a transparent monitoring system where you can find what is going on and in which sites we have added your links.

While we create links back to your website by performing all above actions, you must know that we strive to get the highest level PR links for your website. For example an inbound link from five websites having PR 1 is equal to a link from one website having PR5. I hope that helps you understand, it’s very critical to develop relationships with reputed websites.

Illegal Ways!
----------------
Beware of the companies and individuals offering quick search engine rankings, they might get you these results by illegal means, and later on your site if banned by search engines will face no sunlight again. It is very easy to understand these illegal activities.

Trying to fool search engines by optimizing and stuffing your website with irrelevant keywords, and using hidden areas on your website to hide these keywords, or using self made pages with a lot of inter links to create high linking are all illegal ways. Search engines have strict policy for such websites and they often ban them.

You must stay original, patient, and work hard and you will get better results on search engines with the time. There is no magic trick to get you on top page within weeks. Once the website is ready and optimized for search engines, start the off page optimization phase. If your website is really cool and worthy, the traffic generated with your off page optimization will spread the word and your site will start getting traffic. It is also very important that you keep the site up to date and keep on improving it.

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

The 7 Deadly Fears of Blogging and How to Overcome Them

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 03:40:00 +0000

This guest post is by Nathan Hangen of Build Your Digital Empire.

I remember back to early 2008, when I’d just started blogging, that even though I had great ambitions, my knowledge, expertise, and confidence as a blogger was sorely lacking. I stumbled through my blogging career for over a year before I felt I had a really good grip on things, and even then, there were many things I struggled with.

But more than anything, through all of the struggles I faced, there was one enemy that kept popping up time and time again, each time in a different form than the last. This enemy was fierce, determined, and relentless, and eventually I had no choice but to either confront it, or forever commit to a life of running.

Finally, in a Bruce Wayne moment of clarity, I decided to turn-around, face this enemy, and obliterate him. His name was fear, and there are seven ways that he tried to take me out. Here are the tactics I used to fight back.

I never thought that having too many ideas would be a bad thing, but what’s worse, I never suspected that the culprit would actually be fear itself.

In the early days, I found that just when I’d get close to completion on an idea, I’d suddenly be overwhelmed with dozens of new ideas. As a result, I’d move from idea to idea, never finishing a single one. In the end, I realized that my own fear of going all in on a single idea was keeping me from being successful as a blogger.

Tactic 1: Stop running from idea to idea and ship the ones you’re already committed to.
Once I’d committed to a single idea, I often found myself running out of things to write about. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any ideas, but that I was too scared to actually talk about them.
“What if people make fun of me?”
“What if people think I’m an idiot?”
“What if I don’t really know what I’m talking about?”
This kind of self-talk is a blog killer, and it’s a great way to take yourself out of the fight before you get a chance to grow. Successful bloggers don’t run from their best ideas, they give them to the world.

Tactic 2: Don’t be afraid to be you. Turn your little flame into a wildfire. Some of the best bloggers I know are more personal and open than even I’m comfortable with, and guess what…their audience loves them for it.
My wife often asks me this very question: “Who cares what you think?”
And for a while, it hurt like a dagger, not because it was a silly question, but because it’s one that I was asking myself every single day.
“Who really cares what I think?”
“Why do my ideas matter?”
This is a confidence issue, and it’s where fear likes to play serious mind games. First of all, it doesn’t matter if anyone cares what you think. The only person you need to serve is yourself. Furthermore, there are people just like you everywhere, and you’d be surprised how many come out of hiding when they see a true leader emerge.
You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can be a great leader to the people that resonate with and connect with your ideas and philosophies. However, they can’t do that if you don’t share them.

Tactic 3: Seth Godin wrote about it in Tribes, and the truth is that yes—we need you to lead us. People do care what you think, in fact, much more than you can imagine. You owe it to them to share it; don’t be selfish.
I see this one all the time. Bloggers still call themselves hobby bloggers even though they don’t want to be. They call themselves B-List or C-List even when they’re capable of more.

Fear likes to tell you that you’re not good enough to be great, and that you’re always bound to the role of a follower, or a 2nd rate talent. It’s not true, but it’s easy to fall prey to that kind of talk.
There aren’t any rules that say you have to be just an average blogger. In fact, the road is wide open for anyone willing to walk it.

Tactic 4: Stop cutting yourself down and give yourself permission to be great. No one is going to ask you to be great, but they’ll step in line the minute you prove that you are. Claim your authority; don’t wait for it.
I remember shivering at the thought of asking a fellow blogger for a guest posting opportunity. Her name was Caroline Middlebrook, and though we’d talked a bit via email, I was nervous as hell asking for her permission. Finally one day I just did it, and guess what? Success! Unfortunately, I see many bloggers fear that step, and as a result, they toil in isolation for years.

I joked with Kelly Diels about this once—that asking a blogger for a guest post opportunity is like asking a friend to go on a date with you. You might have a great relationship on Twitter or in the comment section, but you don’t want to ruin it for the sake of a guest post … so you wait.

Tactic 5: The word no is nothing to be afraid of, and instead of fearing it, you should get used to hearing it. Don’t view no as a crippling blow, but as a way to get one step closer to a yes. If the simple act of making a request is enough to ruin a relationship, then it wasn’t worth much in the first place.
People aren’t just going to show up on your blog and offer to send you free cash via email; you need to be able to offer them something.

You’ve been told time and time again that you need to develop your own online store, which means you start planning a series of products, courses, webinars, and anything else you can think of. But that’s where you stop.

For some reason, there’s always something that gets in the way of your product actually getting finished.
Blog postsEmailSocial mediaEmergency this and crazy that.
You know it’s true, but you do it anyway.

Look, I know it’s not easy to sit down and create a product, and the minute you try to do so, you get distracted. It’s easy to do, but you have to fight it.

Tactic 6: Don’t let the resistance win. Rather than focusing on the fear of losing time to do something else, or your inability to create a perfect product, focus on the positive … focus on shipping. Product creation, like blogging, takes time to perfect, but you’ll never get there if you don’t start.

This is a big one, and sadly, it’s probably the most prevalent fear in the blogosphere. How can you ask for money when you love what you do? How can you ask a friend or a peer to buy something, especially when you like seeing them comment and retweet your blog posts?

Well here’s the deal, if you aren’t asking for the sale, then you’ll never get one. Case closed.
You can try to avoid “scammy” sales pages, big launches, or affiliates, but unless you’ve got an army of people waiting for you to sell them something, a weak close is never going to work. If you want to make a living doing this, then you have to fight for it; you cannot be afraid of the close.

Tactic 7: Get comfortable asking for the sale. Find every opportunity you can to practice this, and keep going until the fear goes away. Eventually, it will become second nature, I promise you.

I think the biggest fear that bloggers face is that all of this hard work they’re doing is never going to pay off. I know how it feels.

You don’t want to waste time on something that won’t work. You want to “Crush It,” and you want to make a difference. You don’t want to lose, or to look like a fool.

The best advice that I can give you is this:
No one knows if what you’re doing is going to pay off. However, I can say without reserve that as long as you want to succeed, with every fiber of your soul, and you are willing to do what it takes to do it (this could mean shifting gears or changing your business), then the fear monster will not have anything close to a fighting chance against you.

Turn around, look fear into its eyes, and deal it a finishing blow, Mortal Kombat style.

Check this out

Getting Website Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:15:00 +0000

Getting Website Traffic

Need to get some traffic to your new website?
Here’s my basic Traffic Action Plan…

These are simple “old school” techniques that you should always run through to start getting traffic to any new website you set up.

They’re not flashy or “black hat” or “secret loopholes”, they’re just the boring old standard stuff, but the important bit is these tactics WORK!

Get your site indexed by submitting to some authority sitesArticle SubmissionsDirectory Submissions [inc. Blog Directories]RSS SubmissionsBlog CommentsVideo SubmissionsSocial BookmarkingTraffic Widgets for blogsPress ReleasesBlog Carnivals

I’ll be running through each of them in future blog posts, but to get things rolling we’ll cover the first straight away, as it’s really quite simple.

1. Getting your new website indexed
There’s actually two things I recommend doing to get any new website indexed, the first is to simply submit your website to the backlinks tool here: -

http://seouk.com/backlinks/

Follow the instructions on the page and your site should be picked up within a few hours and end up getting indexed in Google from one or more of the 20 authority sites that it now has backlinks from.

Feel free to use this script for any sites you have, this is totally “White Hat” and won’t get your site in to any trouble with Google or the other search engines.

The second thing to do is to make sure your site has a sitemap that Google can find and recognize/read.
If you have a WP blog then this really is a piece of cake, simply grab and install the XML sitemap plugin that you can find here: -

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

If your site isn’t a WordPress blog then you’ll need some sort of sitemap creation tool/software, the best one that I’ve fou8nd is the GSiteCrawler that you can grab for free here: -

http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/

Simply plugin your url and upload the files it creates once it’s finished spidering your site.

If any one has problems with this feel free to leave a comment and if there’s enough interest I’ll look at getting a video done to help out.

Tags: Blogging

How To Make Money Blogging-Through Niche Blogging Of Course

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:05:00 +0000

Posted by: Peter Lee

How do you make money blogging if I may ask? Have you found your best monetization method that works better than others? Perhaps it’s affiliate marketing, one of the most popular business models because it’s relatively easy. I like to hear what your favorite and most profitable method of making money blogging is. Please go ahead to put a short comment.

As for me, and if you have been a frequent visitor to my blog you’d know by now I’m sure – its niche blogging or niche marketing if you will.

If you have been blogging for as long as I have, which is 3 years and 1 month, you would know what is working for you and probably that’s what you are now focusing more efforts on. That’s the right thing to do anyway as even the experts say so. I remember while working for a client, I saw an article from Liz Tomey and she says that the key to online success is to “find a proven profitable business model and stick to only it”. So have you found this? Do share a little success story if you have so that we can learn from you.

Well I’ll share some insights and the intricacies of building small and profitable niches. If you are new to niche blogging, hope some of this information is useful to you especially if you are venturing into niche blogging one day. If you’re someone who is already making good money from niche sites, well then do share with us what works well for you. It’s a learning process for all of us right?

Forget about the one-page wonder in niche sites if that’s what’s been ingrained in you about what a niche site is. Many years ago, this would have worked and worked really well I might add. Many online marketers just built a single page (excluding the default pages of Privacy Policy, About, Contact) and they began making money. Nowadays people built more pages to their sites, not so much to avoid getting the Google Slap but more pages make more money.

My Insights: Try to eventually build each of your small niche sites to a 10-page site first, then add more when you’ve accomplished that. In fact I’ve known some successful niche bloggers use this 10-page site requirement as a pre-requisite before considering their site is “ready” i.e. ready to do the work of ranking in search engines and to start making money from adsense.

You don’t need to rank every page on a large site. The benefit of a large site is to be able to provide more information to your visitors. In the past people were saying that Google tends to value sites that have a bit more substance than that of say a 2 page site. This has been proven to be totally false as I’ve seen some 2 page-sites ranked on Google’s No. 1 position and beating other bigger sites with higher PR. And they are not the flash in the pan either. The ones I know of are still ranking well.

Larger sites also get rankings for many long-tail keywords even without any backlinks. Therefore it is to your advantage to build more pages because generally you increase your chance of attaining top search engine with more content on your website.

As you know Google is known to make many algorithm changes throughout the year and you should stay informed of what these changes are. A good way to do this is by visiting some of your favorite online forums and you will know such news instantly.

Personally I’d say a new website that is less than 6 months runs a 50-50 chance of getting Google’s Sandbox or sometimes called differently. Till today, Google has never shared any more information as you and I know about the subject which isn’t much. It’s another of Google’s secrets where they don’t really tell anyone much. Here is a post you can read up: Sandbox effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My insights: I’ve learned to live with such possibility. There are actually 2 ways that you can do something about it. (1) Do continuous linking everyday but don’t overdo it or (2) let it run its natural course and wait and your site will re-appear in the same SERP as when you lost it provided you still do the occasional link building. I’ve actually tried on one of my sites that’s got the sandbox and I used Angela’s high PR links and managed to get it back for 2 days before it disappeared again so I’ll just give it time.

I still see many bloggers preferring to do link building on their niche sites the old fashion way. While there is nothing wrong in it, personally I think it’s a slower way to increase your adsense income or at least that’s what I learned. What’s this old way – well they create a one page and target just one main keyword phrase throughout the page. Somehow the old way continued even if they had more pages now. The newer way I learned is to optimize each page with at least 2 keyword phrases and apply Latent Semantic Indexing when you are writing. Here read up something on LSI here: http://www.wilsonweb.com/seo/google-lsi.htm and about using more than one keyword per page learn from someone who’s done it successfully – Lisa Parmley.
It’s got to be using an existing brand name of someone or a corporation. Just taking an example if you try to register a name like sonylaptopsdotcom, you could land yourself in deep trouble not less than getting sued. So don’t jeopardize all the hard work you know starting a brand new site takes when you know you’re violating copyright laws.

Take it from someone who’s done more than 20 niche sites – it’s topics that I like that I find I tend to focus more on these sites. Like they say “follow the passion” or “follow the money” how true that is. If it is a product niche there must be buying interest in your market. Then make sure in your posts you include buyers’ keywords too e.g. “discounts”, “best deal”, “cheaper” words like that.

When I first started niche blogging one year ago I was motivated by other people’s success namely John Xfactor as he earned $500 a day from his army of niche adsense sites. Now I get motivated by my own little success. I get really motivated whenever I could increase my daily adsense taking and when it happens I usually get charged up to write more, do more link building or find something to improve on, on all my 20+ niche sites. Actually I’m in that state again as I write this post as the last 3 days have been good – at more than $20 per day. It just spurs me on. Ok now tell me what motivates you?

Autoblog Samurai

The Niche Blogger Blogging Organizer Workbook: Keep Track Of And Organize Your Blogs

PROFIT PULLING NICHE BLOGS WITH WORDPRESS! AAA+++

Discover 1 Easy Google Keyword Research Trick

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 04:22:00 +0000

Here’s one quick and easy Google Keyword Research Tip for you if you are looking for profitable keywords.
posted by: Peter Lee

This month marks my first anniversary date of my XFactor micro niche adsense project so I thought I’ll write a few short posts over the next one month on this topic. I like to think that anyone who is either making money blogging or other Internet Marketing ventures do keyword research quite a bit. It’s just a question of time before you want to buy a new domain to create another blog or website.

When I was starting out on keyword research a long time ago, I was often left frustrated after much time and effort was spent on searching for the keywords. Why? Well because 95 percent of these times, while going to Godaddy to try to buy my domain with these exact keyword phrase, all had been taken by some other people.

The lesson I learned then was that in keyword research, knowing which domains are available for purchase first is very important. Otherwise you will find yourself being unnecessarily unproductive having to repeat your keyword research all over again.
So how do you find out if the keyword phrases you have found have domains that are available? Well thankfully my Micro Niche Finder tells me just that for any keyword that I type in the tool. It lists available for .com, .org and .net which is essentially what I need anyway. But what if you do not have Micro Niche Finder?

The Solution
1. Go to Adwords Keyword Tool
2. Type in your Keyword Phrase that you have in mind
3. Select the keywords result the tool gives you. You can chose the best ones with good CPC
4. Download and export to excel spreadsheet.
5. Your spreadsheet will contain a list of these keyword phrases. As an example if I type my keyword phase as “make money blogging” I would receive a long list of different suggested keyword phrases like:
6. Go to Godaddy or whichever domain registrar you usually go to:

- Go to Domain Bulk Registration and key in your list of keywords.
- it should look like this:

7. Hitting the ‘Search’ button will now tell you which domains are available for your purchase.
8. You can now proceed to do your keyword Research.

Keyword Research Bible - Keyword Research Bible gives you a detailed description of how you can build an effective keyword phrase that will ...
Keyword Research 101 from PotPieGirl

XFactor Niche Sites Building-One Year Today!

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 10:48:00 +0000

Posted by: Peter Lee

This post marks the 1-year anniversary date of my XFactor Niche Websites Building Project in which started exactly a year ago. I published a post on 15 Sep 2009 sort of officially announced it. If you’ve missed this you can read it at your leisure (Building Micro Niche Mini-Webstes Takes Off This Week). Well the fact that I’m writing this post just means one thing – I’m still just as passionate now as I was one year ago. In fact I just purchased my domain yesterday for my 20th niche site after having found a great exact named keyword domain available. I like to share a bit of my micro niche building journey over the last 12 months with anyone interested in making money online in small niches. Who knows I might add in my 2-cents worth as I reflect on this little journey of mine. You may agree or disagree with some of the thoughts I’m going to share here. But you may find them interesting but unacceptable to you; a little crazy perhaps but thought-provoking; somewhat unconventional wisdom but intriguing and worth exploring it yourself? Maybe. Well here goes:

Where I am after 1 year?

I have built a total of 20 niche sites and I’m still using XFactor’s techniques that I learned although lately I’ve made some changes. I don’t always used the same template designs and colors although that’s more to add some fun to seeing a refreshing new looking template and not what others are saying about not leaving footprints by using the same color template. I really don’t believe using the same template will get you into trouble with Google so long as you provide good information on your websites and earns its trust. The bottom line - don’t make your niche site a MFA site.

Which is better, static websites (like XFactor) or WordPress theme?

I don’t think there is a clear answer to this as I’ve heard many people swear by XFactor’s templates and many others rave about how good WordPress is for niche sites creation. I personally used both methods now. I like the static ones that I used my Xsite-Pro2 to build because they give a more professional look. On the other hand, for my last 5 sites, I have used WordPress and I simply love building my new sites this way. Sort of like meeting up with an old trusted friend all over again.

Which is better? Building many small niche sites or few big sites?

When I first started building small niche sites, the original plan was to build a hundred sites over 2 to 3 years. Well after building about 20 sites in one year, I could still achieve this objective. But really, it’s not a numbers game as hypothetically you could have just 5 sites that earn you more money than 100 sites could. The key is to build sites that provide useful information that people are searching for so that these sites earned the trust of Google. I may well focus on my top earning sites and grow a couple of them up into authority sites to increase my adsense income. That is a very likely option I’m now seriously considering.

In my short journey I witnessed this trust that Google looks for and one that it did place on was a particular niche website that I came across. What puzzled me at first was that this website had only 2 backlinks but could rank on Google’s #2. The keyword is searched 3600 times monthly and has a high ‘Strength of Competition’ of ’61' when I looked at Micro Niche Finder. So what is the secret? Google’s TRUST! and I later learned this key secret ingredient to niche building from Brian Johnson’s Commission Ritual. Oh BTW, this site now belongs to me because I bought it in Flippa but not before learning this wonderful little secret. It’s also the reason why my last 5 sites were built using WordPress.

AutoBlogging- Is it your friend or your worse enemy?

I have to say autoblogging is so widely used and whether you make it work to your advantage or get yourself into trouble depends entirely on you. One good way that someone makes good use of such automated WP plugins is using it to parse RSS feeds from other blogs to produce new posts in your blog. As owner, you tell the script which RSS feed to extract for importing and it checks for duplicates and create a new post from its RSS feed for you. The correct way to do this is add feeds that owners allow for syndication. You then give due recognition by linking back to the blog but respect and ignore those that specifically don’t allow any of their work “reproduced” anywhere. Unfortunately many people have conveniently used such free information quite blatantly using scrappers and have probably given the word “auto-blogging” a bad name, besides incurring the wrath of Google.

This is just one aspect of the auto blogging feature in some WordPress plugins and I do have one blog that uses a plugin to import Amazon products to add value to my niche product sites. For this blog of mine, I combine auto-blogging with unique content to give good user experience.

Buying Niche Sites

Another good way to grow your arsenal of good earning niche sites is to buy as many as you can afford them. However you have to do lots of checking before determining which sites are going to consistently make money online for you. I’ve purchased 2 such niche sites from Flippa and I do recommend anyone who has some spare cash to consider this marketplace too. Believe me some of the sites put on sale are really worth buying. Even if you don’t buy, you can learn a lot from just spying on how these pro bloggers make their awesome blogs. These are the people who make money blogging as a second nature. It’s from this place that I learned about Brian Johnson’s Commission Ritual too.

My Next Phase

It’s going to be more focused as I know pretty much what I have to do to increase my adsense income while doing clean, white hat techniques. Almost all of my sites are on Page 1 so the focus is on working towards increasing the CTR and getting more traffic and increase contents for all my top earning sites. I will also choose at least one good niche site to grow into an authority site besides growing my virtual real estate of small niche sites.

I have to say my last 12 months home business journey has been fulfilling as I gained much experience from learning from many work at home experts. It looks like niche marketing is going to be my main focus for a long time because it seems both interesting and a profitable.

Unlocking The Niche Code: A Step-by-step Approach to Finding the Best Niches in which to Market a Product or Service!
Niche Internet Marketing: The Secrets To Exploiting Untapped Niche Markets And Unleashing A Tsunami Of Cash

Marry Your Blog to Your Life … and Watch it Take Off

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:17:00 +0000

Miscellaneous Blog Tips - Problogger Topic - Author: Anonymous

I’ve watched in wonder how my blog has grown since it launched in early 2008. It started as a hobby blog, and has since morphed into an income-generating network of five sites, complete with a loyal community of readers, four other editors, and a family of more than 20 contributors. I got a book deal about two years into my blog’s inception, and it’ll be on bookshelves worldwide in just a few weeks. No doubt, those hours of soaking up every bit of wisdom here at ProBlogger have paid off, and then some. I love what I do, and I love that I can earn revenue doing something I would do for free if I had to. What’s my secret? He’s about 6'2 tall, likes his coffee black, and as I write this, is currently driving the minivan taking our daughter to school. Yep, that’s right. It’s my husband.

There is absolutely no way my writing career would be where it is now without Kyle working right alongside me. I’m the main voice of Simple Mom, sure, but he tirelessly does many of the behind-the-scenes tasks so that the blog succeeds. Together, we work hard to make the network thrive, and as a fortuitous blessing, our marriage is strengthened.

Now, I’m not saying you have to be married, or have a partner, to have a successful blog.
But I do think a blog works better when it’s married to your real life. Let me explain how.

I’m blessed that Kyle also works from home. Every Sunday, we scribble out our family calendar for the upcoming week, allotting work times for the both of us. When one of us is working, the other one is the primary parent on duty, and is also in charge of the dishes in the sink and tackling Mt. Laundry.
Ultimately, I normally write several mornings a week while my oldest is in kindergarten, and my husband takes charge of our younger two. He also oversees dinner one night per week, giving me some extra time to edit posts and handle email.

This is an unbelievable help in keeping the blog running. We’re a family with little kids, and it’s a busy season of life. Being a mom is still my full-time job, and it definitely takes more of my attention, physically and emotionally, than blogging ever could. There is no way I could run a blog as large as Simple Mom without a parenting partner in crime.

My husband is actually the first person to see the email that comes through my blog’s contact form, not me. He forwards me the emails he thinks I need to see—reader comments and questions, or PR requests worth a look. I created a set of pre-formatted emails for him to use for the mail that contains the most frequently asked questions, such as requests to do giveaways, or the occasional blogging question. The answers are still from me, but I don’t have to write them from scratch every time, and he can quickly reply to those people without having to wait until I’m free.

And I get a truckload of mail that could easily be deleted, but it still stresses me out to see them. Letting his eyeballs be the one to scan through all the fluff and mass-generated emails works well for us. They don’t bother him.

Kyle also handles all the accounting for the network. He keeps up with all our transactions, from hosting service payments to ebook purchases, by automatically transferring our Paypal account to Outright and handling things there.

These tasks take him ten to 15 minutes per day, tops, because he’s set up a system that works for him, and he tackles this housekeeping daily. If I waited to deal with it when I had time, it would take me hours where I could otherwise write. And I’d want to curl up in the fetal position and cry, because I’m horrible at these sorts of things.

Believe it or not, only 72% of the Simple Mom readership is female. Yes, that’s the majority, but it means over a quarter of our readers are male. I’d be remiss to write solely to females, and leave a sizable chunk of my readership by the wayside. The blog is much more about the ins and outs of intentional living than it is about wearing the mama hat.

Kyle helps me think of post ideas I wouldn’t have considered—not only because he’s a guy, but also because he’s a parent, too. I’m blessed to work in a blog niche that’s directly related to my everyday life as a parent. But sometimes, I’m so entrenched in the thick of it that I don’t see clearly. My husband provides an additional perspective.

He’s the one who came up with the idea of writing posts about family mission statements, and pizza Fridays, and he recently came up with the brilliant idea for my next book proposal.

He’s there when I need to stay up late to fix some code. He lets me vent to him when I get harsh emails from readers. And his eyes teared up when I opened the envelope holding the advance copy of my book when it arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. His positive attitude and cheerful perspective keeps me going on those days when I want to walk away from the blog.

Likewise, Kyle will also let me know when an idea I have is just dumb. Or when I’m taking criticism too personally. Or when I need to say “no” to a PR request or guest posting offer. Or when I’m too focused on the blog and need to change the baby’s diaper instead. His perspective keeps me grounded and optimistic.
Again, I’m not saying you need to be married to have a successful blog. But I believe a blog will have a better chance of success if it’s part of your real life.

It’s easy to see a blog as a one-man-or-woman show, but there are lots of things behind the laptop screen we don’t see. Simple Mom would not be doing as well as it is without Kyle’s help, plain and simple. It’s not a one-woman show, by any stretch.

When we keep our blog aligned to our offline life, we aren’t as pulled in as many directions. It can even enhance our lives, our families, and our marriages. When Kyle helps me, we work together. We talk, we spend time together, and we focus on the same thing. Our relationship is enriched by it.
Blogging takes a lot of work, and the to-do list is never really done. Are there some tasks you can delegate to those around you? Can you tap into your spouse’s strengths and ask him or her to help out?

Maybe you’ve got a friend who’d enjoy collaborating with you. Ask her or him to run your blog’s newsletter (my friend Jenny does). Maybe get one of your friends to act as a sounding board for your post ideas. Or if the grandparents live nearby, see if they can watch your kids once or twice a month so that you can get a chunk of writing done.

Let your blog enhance your offline life, and recruit those around you to help. And watch it take off.
How do you use the help of others to run your blog?

Tsh is the main voice behind Simple Mom, is editor-in-chief of Simple Living Media, and her first book, Organized Simplicity, hits bookstores next month. Follow her on Twitter to learn how to handle cloth diapers and Silly Bandz obsessions, and to chat about why less really is more.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
Blogging For Dummies
Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro

Run Your Own Affiliate Program

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 03:36:00 +0000

We’ve talked about the possibility of being an affiliate for other websites and earning a percentage of every sale you refer to them. But have you ever considered doing it the other way around? The truth is that if you can get your own army of affiliates to bring in sales for you, you will cut your advertising costs considerably – and you could well make more money too. But how do you decide what subject to build your website around? And how do you supply the products so your affiliates have something to sell? Okay so you want to build a website and essentially get other people to advertise it for you, in exchange for a percentage of the profits from each sale. What do you think would be the easiest thing to sell?

Simple – information.

You can of course sell anything you like but information is the best thing to start with since you can automate everything. When someone buys a copy of your latest e-book (more about that in a moment) they pay you and the product can then be downloaded or sent to them automatically.

Now I can hear you saying you are no good at writing and couldn’t write an e-book if your life depended on it. No problem. All you need is a good idea; you can then find a writer on one of the online freelance bidding sites who will write it for you at an agreed fee.

The next step is to find your affiliates, and the easiest way to do this is to join ClickBank for a one off fee, and your book will be listed on there, provided you comply with all the rules. You decide how much commission you want to reward your affiliates with, and ClickBank takes care of the rest. This means you don’t have to worry about processing all the affiliates’ payments and working out who is owed what. Everything is done for you.

Now if you have physical products that you want to sell (let’s say you have contacts with suppliers to sell a whole range of their products for example) you could instead look at Commission Junction to help you out.
It’s not enough to just put together a website, create an e-book and sit back and wait for people to promote it though. You need to have a tempting proposition for the affiliates who are out there. They need to feel that they stand a good chance of selling a lot of units of your product – whatever it may be – and so you need to be sure you have a product which is going to be popular, and that is priced fairly.

The price is particularly important since a certain percentage of it will be going to the affiliate in return for bringing you each sale. Therefore you need to give a reasonable percentage to them, while still making a decent amount yourself. Take a look at other e-books on ClickBank to give you an idea of how much you should charge for your product, and what rate of commission works best. Quite often the affiliate will get 50% or even more of the sale, so be prepared to share! You will get more sales for no effort on your part however, so it really is a win win situation.

You should still advertise when you are enlisting the help of affiliates – at least to begin with – but after a while you may find yourself in the happy position of not having to. Your affiliates and your ranking in the search engines may be all the advertising you need to rely on.

So why not make a start now and come up with some ideas for that first e-book or product to sell? Don’t forget to leave a comment below first though!

Web Marketing For Dummies
Affiliate Marketing Programs

Ways To Make Money Online

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 02:56:00 +0000

This entire website is a testament that there are hundreds of different ways to make money, both online and off. But today we are going to have a look at the top 5 most popular ways to make money online. Make Money Building Niche Websites Make Money Writing Your Own Blog Make Money Advertising CPA Offers Make Money Selling E-Books Make Money Taking Surveys.

We all know that your best shot at making money online is to appeal to a specific group of people – a niche market interested in a specific topic. If you try to appeal to everyone then very few people will actually buy what you’re selling. That’s why topical content sites are a great way of making money. You simply pick your topic, build a site around it and wait for the money to start coming in. So long as you focus on a profitable topic you’re home free…

Make Money Writing Your Own Blog

More and more people are realising that blogging is one of the best ways to start your own online business. It requires minimal start up costs, you can build an impressive and loyal readership over time and once you know how to monetize your blog it can also bring in a decent income that will keep on coming even on the days when you don’t update your blog. There are several ways to set up a blog online. You could use WordPress, Blogger, or another free site that hosts your blog for you; or alternatively you can set up your own blog under your own domain name.

Make Money Advertising CPA Offers

With the internet such a large part of our lives today, more and more individuals are looking for opportunities to make money online. While some are doing it to bring in some extra cash, others are looking for full-time careers and are being quite successful with their endeavors. Many are doing this by becoming marketers of CPA opportunities. You, too, can make money marketing CPA offers.

Make Money Selling E-Books

Make no mistake – e-books are big business online. No matter what you search for there will be someone out there selling an e-book on it. But the best thing about them is that they provide one of the most potentially lucrative businesses you could ever hope to start online. So long as you do your homework and don’t try and cut corners you can start making inroads into this business within days of deciding to get started. There is plenty to learn but none of it is beyond you – and even if you don’t think you’re up to the job there are plenty of people you can call on to help you.

Make Money Taking Surveys

Are you looking for a legitimate way to make money online? Maybe you want some extra spending money. Or perhaps you need the money to pay bills. Either way, getting paid for filling out simple surveys can be a fun and lucrative way to earn that extra cash. In fact, there’s quite a lot of money to be had — and the cool thing is that you can earn it in your spare time. Any time you can spare a few minutes — or a few hours, you can make money.

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How To Make $200 A Day Online Even If You're Bankrupt, Broke, jobless or Even Homeless [Online Money Making Strategies Series] (How To Make Money Online ... Bankrupt, Broke, jobless or Even Homeless)

web directory

Why Write eBook Reviews?

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:48:00 +0000

Have you ever read a particular book and had a really strong opinion of how good or bad you thought it was? And have you ever thought about making money from those opinions?

The chances are you haven’t, and yet you could be doing just that if you are an avid reader and you always get through a lot of books. The time it would take to write a quick review at the end of each one could earn you a nice chunk of money to spend on your next big read!

There are plenty of ways to write for cash online, but writing book reviews isn’t one of the most popular. People tend to go straight for writing articles as this is the most well known way of earning money from your pen (or in this case your typing fingers…), and that leaves a good chance for those people who want to have a go at reviews.

So how do you get started?

Well there are a number of ways you can sell your reviews, and you can actually sell them both online and off, depending on which markets you have locally that may accept them.

A good first step is to search online for websites that pay for book reviews. There are some writing based sites that pay according to how many people view your reviews, such as Helium for example. Other websites allow you to sell your reviews direct to anyone who may wish to buy them; a good example of this kind of website is Constant Content. You set your own price and write whatever kind of review you want to, at whatever length you desire. This can be a good place to sell your book reviews.

But if you want to sell directly to a particular market then you may need to submit your reviews (or ideas for reviews) straight to the editor of a specific publication. Check out your local newspapers and magazines to see if there is a book review slot that isn’t taken up by a regular writer. You can also offer to write a regular review for a particular magazine if you like the subject it is concentrated on; many people get started in a regular job by offering their services like this.

The trick to writing a successful review is to be able to write to any guidelines that people require you to. It’s no good writing 500 words if they only want 300. You have to learn to be able to write tightly and get everything in the required amount of space otherwise you won’t succeed at writing reviews.

Before writing any real reviews try a few practice ones to get the hang of how to do it. There are also plenty of writing based websites and blogs where experts will help and advise you on how to write well and get your ideas and opinions across in the right way. These sites will often also give you more contacts for places that are looking for good reviews to start your career off with a bang.

Incidentally the review business doesn’t just stop at books. If you find you have a knack of writing good concise reviews on many different subjects then why not try your hand at reviewing other things as well? There are plenty of websites which pay you either in cash or in vouchers to review anything from everyday products to cars to electronics, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

In short you can make a nice second income from review writing if you do your research and start adding several markets to your list of possibilities to write for. Take your time though and get used to the process of writing first; if you get off to a good start you will be making more money in no time.
Do you fancy writing for a living? Why not start by writing a comment for us in the box below?

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Peachpit Press.(Make Easy Money with Google Using the Adsense Advertising Program)(Cool Mac APPs: A Guide to iLife 05, .Mac and More)(Photoshop CS2 Help ... Review): An article from: The Bookwatch

Start Your Own Passionate Local Business

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:46:00 +0000

One of the keys to being a success in business is definitely to start up in an area you have a natural interest in. You wouldn’t start up a restaurant if you hated food, or start selling flowers if you had no interest in them and they made you allergic.

Everyone has a passion for something and whether it is model trains, photography or cell phones that passion could hold a terrific business idea for you to capitalize on.

Starting An Online Business 101 - Your Ticket to Financial Security! (Brand New 2010) AAA+++

A lot of people think that in order to run a local business you need to find an outlet of some kind and rent out expensive premises to stand any chance of making any money.

But you don’t have to start out that way. In fact the best start to any kind of local business can often be through getting a market stall of some kind, if your business is suited to it. There will still be an outlay to rent it but it’s cheaper than a proper shop and it can get you off the ground and into profit a lot quicker on many occasions.

Good Ideas for 2010

The main point to think about is whether your passion can be converted into a profitable business that will attract enough customers to keep going. You might need to do some research here to make sure your idea will fly, but even if it doesn’t look encouraging you might be able to alter the angle of it to appeal to a wider audience.

For example you might have a passion for making scenery for model train sets by hand, but there might not be enough of an interest in that to build a successful business around it. But if you were to start a model shop and make some of your scenery in front of the customers while the store was open, you would no doubt attract a lot of interest and probably more customers as well. You could use your hand built scenery to enhance all the model trains you put on display.

999 Great Business Ideas

You will often find that with a bit of lateral thinking and some solid research you can find an angle on most subjects that would work well as a proper business. And it might not be something you make either. If you love computer games and there isn’t a games store in your local town at present, why not think about opening one yourself? Even if the major stores sell computer games, people will get to know you as being someone who loves them yourself and who knows which ones to recommend and which ones will work on what type of computer. Knowledge like this will put you head and shoulders above the competition.

The great thing about starting a business around a topic you love is that news of your passion for your subject will spread among customers by word of mouth. Eventually you will build up a good customer base even without advertising (although you should of course do all you can to draw in new people in as many ways as possible; the more visible you are the better).

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide

In the end the amount of effort you put into your business will be far easier than it would be for a business you didn’t have the same passion for, and that alone will give you the determination and passion you need to succeed.

How To Use eBay To Create An Online Empire

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 03:31:00 +0000

DISCOVER How To USE eBay To Create An ONLINE Empire (34 VIDEOS)

WATCH Over My Shoulder As I SHOW YOU How To USE eBay Correctly!

Are you looking to make some quick cash?

Or maybe you're looking to become financially independent so you don't have to work at a 9
to 5 job anymore.
I'm sure you would like to spend more time doing the things you really love, like:

---- Spending time with your family and friends.

---- Travelling the world.

---- Helping people and contributing to society.

---- Being able to buy anything you need or want.

I would be lying if I said I could help you achieve

all of the above BUT...

...I could help you get started and give you the foundation you need. After all, getting started is usually the hardest part of all.

How Would You Like For Me To Come Over To Your Home And Teach You How To Sell On eBay?

I have created a series of 28 video tutorials showing how to sell on eBay in real time. (Plus 6 BONUS Videos That ROCK!)

This set of videos was originally intended for my private clients only.. but because of this recession,

I am willing to share it with anybody that is in financial trouble.

This course is no hype, just basic information on how to make money instantly (and simply) on eBay.

After watching these videos, you will be able to make money on eBay IMMEDIATELY.

There’s no need for you to learn HTML, how to do joint ventures, how to do article marketing, how to research a niche, and no need to spend many hours getting an internet business up and running.

Just go here to see what I'm really all about...

Ebay Training Videos

To your eBay success,

Auto Blog Samurai Software Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 02:36:00 +0000

Auto Blog Samurai Software

AutoBlog Samurai is the first and only blogging software that helps you build multiple revenue streams online with a few clicks of the mouse.

This is one of it’s kind, never seen before software that can create profitable blogs with ease.

Auto Blog Samurai is a quality product and is created by popular internet marketer Paul Ponna who is also the developer and creator of bestselling software products such as Miracle Traffic Bot, Magic List Bot, Disc Mojo and Auction Acrobat.

Now with the AutoBlog Samurai software you can create 10, 50 or even 100 profitable money generating blogs that can each generate $1 to $100 a day in record time!

Introducing AutoBlog Samurai…

A breakthrough content rich profitable blog generation software. This software is one of its kind and is already powering 15,000 blogs around the world!

This is the most robust, easy to use and the most powerful blogging software available online.

There has never been a better time to make money online from blogging. With Google acquiring Blogger.com, and Wordpress becoming the most popular and widely used blogging platform, blogs have become the number one source of information online by attracting free traffic from search engines.
Many blogs are now rivaling the traffic of established news media sites such as CNN, Fox News and other popular networks.

How The Software Works -

So now that you know the power of blogging, you might be wondering, how does AutoBlog Samurai generate money from the blogs you create with the software.

Let me show you how the software works…

1) First thing you do is pick a niche. We will provide you with comprehensive training on how to pick the most profitable niches
2) Once you do this, the software does all your research and automatically writes unique content for you
3) Then, the software takes this content and automatically posts it to your blog
4) The software keeps updating your blog every day automatically without clicking a single button
5) You start receiving free targeted traffic as your blog and content are already keyword and SEO optimized.

It’s as simple as that! Your sparkling new money generating blog is created in 10 minutes or less.

Cutting Edge Features -

The software automatically updates your blogs for you every day so you can go ahead and create more profit pulling blogs without having to worry about updating the blogs you already created with the software.

The most powerful feature of Auto Blog Samurai software is that, it can create blogs in any language so that you can target people from various countries around the world. The software supports a whopping 42 languages so you will never run short of untapped niches or worry about saturation or be constrained to audience from one part of the world.

And the most shocking part of it all is that the software automatically writes the content for you in various languages… You do not have to know any foreign languages to use the software!

This is nothing like you have ever seen before and the software is completely compatible with the most popular blogging platforms!

The software is completely scalable to manage thousands of niches and hundreds of money generating blogs on autopilot. You can now manage a massive blog empire of your own right from your desktop without having to go through the hassles of constantly writing new content and managing hundreds of profitable blogs at once.

Auto Blog Samurai for List Building -

If you are a seasoned marketer who wants to build a massive email list using the software, this is a perfect solution for you. Now you can instantly place your opt-in forms in hundreds of blogs and generate thousands of new subscribers and a flood of new traffic to any offer you like!

As you may know, email marketing is the most profitable medium to generate money online. Using AutoBlog Samurai… Lead generation, traffic, and building multiple income streams becomes an absolute breeze.
Wave good bye to all the ebooks, expensive manuals and software tools that just automate one part of your business. With AutoBlog Samurai you have an all-in-one solution that can control blogging, niche research, traffic generation and list building, all under one easy to use platform.

It is like having your own army of virtual workers who work 24 hours a day and complete all the time consuming work for you!

Special Limited ‘Early Bird’ Discount -

Our beta testers and customers from around the world are already raving about the software due to its incredible proven potential and flexibility. This is your opportunity to grab this breakthrough technology at a very special introductory launch discount.

Auto Blog Samurai

Top Level Position

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:45:00 +0000

How It Works
After viewing the video on our homepage, simply click on the Join button and input your basic information. You will not be asked for any type of credit card or payment. The process is completely free and your information will not be shared with anyone. We'll even give you a free website allowing you to market Top Level Position to anyone in the world. Anyone that goes to your website and enrolls will be counted as your personal sponsor. Upon enrolling, you will be given a username and password. You may login by clicking on Member Login from our homepage. It is in the member center that you can view how many people have enrolled after you as well as read company messages and change your basic information. Be sure that you login regularly as people will be added to your database regularly. Spread the word to family, friends and business associates now to ensure they sign up with you, and not someone else. Remember, you will make money from every single person that enrolls after you, but the more personal sponsors your have, the better off you'll be. Personal sponsorship includes those that enroll from your personal replica site.

Getting Paid
Our revolutionary compensation plan is being touted by experts as a complete game changer. There are no legs to balance and no structure requirements. You have the ability to make money off of every single person that enrolls after you, for life! Top network marketers across the world have named our compensation plan as the "fairest and most lucrative plan in the industry today".

Use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. The more people you enroll personally, the more you will get paid! You can use the Twitter This Opportunity and Facebook This Opportunity on the homepage. Be aggressive now and get your prospects involved. Because if you don't, someone else will!

The Product
Our products are powerful, life changing and not carried by any other company in the world. They are endorsed by some of the most well known and respected doctors and scientists in the world. You will will feel their impact immediately and notice a drastic change in your life. We have multiple products to choose from, all formulated by the best in the business. These are products that will end up affecting millions of lives across the globe. Now is your chance to profit from every single unit sold.

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How To Make Money Online

noreply@blogger.com (marklevine) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:32:00 +0000

How to make money online and maintain your motivation and guarantee that you will stick to your business without ever giving up! We usually get motivated and excited when we bump in into a program that is too good to be true and promises to earn money instantly by copying their strategy. By the time we know it, it's the same BS program that the so called "gurus" don't use and never had it tested. Before even attempting to earn money online, you must condition yourself and see the opportunity as your personal business and passion. Do not envision it as a way to just earn money because you will not succeed.

I know everybody wants to make money online and wants to improve their financial status to be able to experience life to the fullest. Not every business is for everybody and that's the truth, something we must accept, but because of the evolution of the internet it is now possible to start your own online business with the right approach, thanks to blogging. People trust information from a blog because it is a communication tool that let people post their opinions, ideas, reviews, problems, solutions, suggestions, promotions and other topics that are relevant to their everyday lives and business. Large companies browse through contents from blogs related to their products and services to keep up with the competition. It gives them valuable information on people's behavior in buying and how they want their products or services to be. It is also a good source to discover problems and be able to act quickly and improve their company's customer satisfaction policy.

Blogging is a passion and your own professional ideas

I say professional because you are injecting quality contents to your blog based on your line of work, technical know-how and things that you know well than ordinary people. Once you have selected your topic the next step is to work on the foundation elements of blogging – building content and marketing content. Two foundation principles are essential and all you need to know for successful blogging – Informative Articles and Communication Channels. Informative Articles, are the building blocks of a good blog. The content is the main reason why people read your blog in the first place and it is your valuable contribution to the public. Communication channels that bring people to your blog. Communication is vital in marketing – pathways and lures that drive traffic to your blog. Build your foundation first and enjoy posting quality contents for a couple of months and have an audience to follow your posts and establish your name. You can begin monetizing your blog if you have a steady stream of readers by posting affiliate links from clickbank, google adsense, amazon affiliate program, ebays partner network, commission junction affiliate program to name a few.

No matter how good your content is, if people don’t know your blog exists, you can't build an audience. Pillar content and communication channels must work together for you to succeed.. Majority of blogs never build significant traffic and thus never make significant profits, is because they are poor marketers. If you just follow the advice, “write informative content”, you are not going to succeed. You must learn how to be a marketer as well.

How To Create A Firm / Informative Article?

There is no exact formula for creating an article that will become your foundation, however you can work on some key characteristics. You may be surprised to articles where you spent time and heart into a great article and it doesn’t do much for your traffic at all. Compared to articles you write and become your firm one.

Here are typical article concepts that you can post to your blog:

    * The “How-To” Article - teaches how to do something
    * The Definition Article - concepts, explanation, how it is implemented
    * Present a Theory or Argument - discussing your theories about something
    * Create a resource like a free report - series of articles combined to create a course
    * One of the most popular concepts is a List Article - Top 10 tips to improve
    * A Blueprint - use graphs, spreadsheets and images to demonstrate how to do something.

How To Market Your Blog

Once you have pillar content in place and you have plans to release a continuous stream of content, the next step is to attract people and show them how informative and valuable your content is. This is when marketing is crucial and blog marketing is building communication channels.

A communication channel is a way of flagging the attention of a person and causing them to take action, usually clicking a link and visiting your blog. There are literally limitless tactics you can implement to build communication channels, from the quick-and-easy to the complex and time-consuming.

Traffic Streams

Blog comments
Forum commetns
Trackbacks
Blog carnivals

Traffic Rivers

Digg front page
Del.icio.us popular page
Top blog links to your blog
Newsletter features your blog

    * Go out and leave comments on complimentary blogs everyday.
    * Post to 1-3 top forums every day – full-sized articles if you can
    * Trackback other blogs every time you write a new blog article
    * Submit your best content to blog carnivals REGULARLY
    * Build relationship to your visitors and try to reply to their comments
    * Make sure your signature is not just a link, make sure to draw their attention
    * Write a blog worth linking to, to attract attention to other blogs - Problogger.com
    * Use twitter and tweet your new posts/articles to invite people to visit your blog.
    * Ping your blog to pingomatic, pingler and many more.
    * Submit your blog/website to google, bing and yahoo search engines.

Social Networking is one way of driving traffic to your blog or website. Simply create an account to each of them and post as least 3 to 4 times a week with unique stories about your blog or website. It doesn't have to be a long story, just as long as you can catch their attention about your topic and have them directed to your blog or website for them to find out what is all about. Make your post as attractive as you can for you are fishing for traffic. For example: "I discovered a way on how to make a solid foundation on making money online legitimately" or " Are you tired of not making results with your hard work?" Something like that will have your readers thinking and would like to check it out. When they do, your blog or website will have to sell itself and have them read more.

Social Networks
SideTick.com
Gnolia.com
Reddit.com
StumbleUpon.com
Digg.com
Swom.com
Sweeva.com
Twitter.com
Peoplestring.com
MySpace
Facebook
GoogleBuzz

Article Marketing

Post unique and quality articles 3 to 4 times a week to ezines, goarticles, articlealley, buzzle and many more. This will solidify your position in the future for the topics you have chosen.

Submit your articles to these sites:

Ezinearticles
Goarticles
Articlebase
ArticleDashboard
Buzzle
Searchwarp
ArticleAlley

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