BlogTalks

Using RSS as a time saving tool

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:24:38 GMT

Do you find that you are often too busy to work on the sites or projects you want. Or conversely do you find yourself at the other end of the spectrum where you find that you are procrastinating not knowing what you should be doing.

So how about this free method that you can apply to several areas of your online life on the interwebs. This method requires just 3 simple ingredients, an RSS feed, an RSS feed filter and an RSS reader.

RSS feeds if you didn't already know are feeds from a site or blog that contains information about the latest posting on that site. If we look at a blog then the RSS feed would contain the latest blog posts. If we look at a forum then the RSS feed would contain the latest posts from whichever sub forum you want to read.

An RSS filter is an application or site that allows you to filter your feed to only include certain types of posts or exclude certain types of posts. Finally an RSS reader allows you to read the resulting feeds.

In this example I am going to use Bloglines as the feed reader, Feedrinse as the feed filter and Digital Point forums as the feed source. Now my aim is that I want to monitor the site sales thread as in these credit crunch time sites are not shifting which means it is a good time to pick up a bargain.

Firstly we go to DP and navigate to the sales section, now if you look at the top of your browser where the URL is displayed you should see an orange RSS icon. Click on this and then click on the second subscribe link for sites. Now copy the URL and load up Feedrinse.

You will have to create an account but it is free, click on add feed and paste in you URL and click import. You can now set up your filters, marked as set up rules. Once this is done then click on the RSS icon next to your new feed and select your chosen feed reader from the list where you will be taken to your feed reader to add the new feed.

You will now have a news stream that is updated regularly that contains just the information you need saving you from browsing through lots of irrelevant information. You can of course use any RSS feed from any site, any news reader or even a desktop reader and any filtering site depending on your tastes. But whichever way you work it you can stay ahead of the game without having to actually be there all the time.

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Diversify your income

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:14:14 GMT

All webmasters know or at least find out sooner or later is that they should build up multiple streams of income. Just relying on a single site and a single method of monetization is putting all your eggs in one basket. If anything goes wrong with either your single site or single income stream you are in trouble.

The first thing I will mention is TNX, since joining I have made a reasonable amount of money and have been paid several times. You can withdraw your cash at any time and it is paid directly into your Paypal account.

Those 300,000 points add up to about $300 which are earnings for about a month.

In other news I got my fist check from incentaclick who are an affiliate network. They pay you for promoting products and services and you get paid. They do pay by paypal but your first 3 payouts have to be by check. I strongly recommend them as they have quite a few good free offers which means you can promote something the end customer does not have to pay for so they are offers that are much easier to convert.

I am not going to do a screenshot of the check like many affiliates do as it is only for $65 but the next check should be a bit higher. I strongly recommend both TNX and incentaclick as additional ways to monetize your existing blogs or sites. I have been trying other methods but without success so far but if that changes I will let you know.

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TNX text advertising

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:24:54 GMT

A new text advertising broker I have been trying out over the last few weeks allows you to advertise or sell advertising on individual pages of your sites. There different because of the ability to monetize pages individually or advertise on pages individually.

Initially I thought their interface was user unfriendly but after the initial set up it runs smoothly with little or no involvement from you. This is one of the main benefits of the system as once it is set up it requires you to just monitor your ad sales or ad revenue.

How text advertising with TNX works

First off you need to sign up, you can then either choose to add a site where you want to sell advertising or but advertising yourself. If you are selling advertising you need to paste in some code and then the automated system starts selling your ads.

The ad buying part of the system is based on a points system, each page is checked by their bots and given a rating. The higher the rating the more expensive an ad will be on that page and the more TNX points an ad will cost. The downside is that you have no control over advertising on individual pages but you can remove and ads you want individually.

The whole system works on points which you can buy and sell back for cash. That way you can use any points you earn to buy more advertising or cash in. You can use the ad selling system as an additional way to monetise your BANS, ebay affiliate store and the whole BANS ebay niche thing.

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Article marketing to promote any site

Thu, 29 May 2008 10:01:12 GMT

If I had to write about every site I came across then I would be the proud owner of a very fat blog. Fortunately neither my patience or attention span is great enough to ever achieve this goal that is why I am always on the look out for way to get maximum benefit from minimal effort.

How to Article marketing

Many of you may have written articles before and sent them to article directories. This is a good way of getting traffic to your sites and for building back links. If your new to article marketing then all you need to know is that you write an article, add a bio containing links to your site then submit the article to directories. They will then accept or reject your article, if they reject your article then it's usually something pretty simple you can change and then resubmit.

Once your article is accepted and published you can expect an initial trickle of traffic as your articles is displayed on an article directories front page, this usually lasts one or two days depending on the directory. Eventually the article will be indexed by the search engines and you will get back links to your site.

Submitting an one article at a time

You can like I have been doing on and off for the last two years submit articles manually to each directory. This takes a lot of time so I eventually whittled down the list to a handful of the best directories to submit to. Whilst this produced good results it did seem a bit of a waste of an article when there are literally hundreds of places you can submit your article to.

The next step is to gear your article promotion efforts and to do this I settled with an online article promotion site which I hadn't realised has been around as long as I have been using article marketing. They have a great system that has been refined over the years. I did find the process a bit frustrating at first but their system is set up that way for a reason - to get you the best results.

I did procrastinate for a while as I wasn't sure whether the investment would be worthwhile but after looking at some of the other companies they are the best priced for the service. They currently have a discounted price on their service which you can sign up for quarterly membership, annual or lifetime membership.

This service is also great if you have several sites you want to promote as you can use articles to promote any type of site. Going by the articles I have submitted so far they distribute your article to over 1200 places and as they discover more they then submit your site to those as well. I will post more results as they come in.

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Chitika pays per click

Thu, 22 May 2008 13:29:24 GMT

I have been using or should I say under using Chitika (stupid hard to spell name) for a while. It's an ad network that you can use to display ads on your site and you get paid when a visitor clicks on the ads. Earnings compare very favourably compared to Adsense and I prefer to use them on sites that are product related.

Chitika for products

Talking of product focussed sites, Chitika will perform best on sites that are product related and particularly anything electronic. Unfortunately their terms prohibit me from giving you any specific figures but suffice to say they are great but only on product sites. I really can't say that enough.

Lately you would have noticed I have been harping on about BANS sites. Well Chitika does work well with BANS sites and is a good additional revenue source for your BANS site.

As with any advertising on your sites the ads have to be prominent and you should test ad sizes and placement. There are a wide range of ad sizes available from boxes, to banners to skyscrapers.

They also have a good reporting system where you can track clicks and earnings for which you can define by channel, date period and now between US and non-US traffic. They do like their US traffic.

If you have a product related site then Chitika is worth implementing on your site. They do have other ad types including contextual links where keywords are underlined, these also pay out on per click basis.

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Success with BANS ebay niche stores

Fri, 16 May 2008 09:46:49 GMT

It seems niche eBay stores are the site de jour at the moment. There have been a few posts I have read lamenting the BANS software that allows you to create a niche eBay affiliate store easily and with a few back links start earning a few dollars a day.

He made $3.60 per day and while I did have days that I made more than that, my average over two weeks was right at $1 per day. While that's not going to let me quit my day job or buy a house on the beach, if those results hold, that will be about $365 in a year's time for 2 hours worth of work.

Which made a post about after Max also of Blogging Experiment had posted about his success with BANS.

So I'll add in an extra 3 hours of work over the course of the year to maintain the current results. Even with 5 hours invested in this website, it will still be earning me $222.73 per hour�not bad!

Whilst the figures are not ground breaking the fact that these stores can run pretty much on autopilot makes BANS a pretty interesting internet idea. I have been running a couple of niche stores as a test. I have also been able to monetize the sites further by using Chitika which pays per click like Adsense. Additionally you could put banner ads from Money4Banners and Matched to cover the cost of the domain and hosting making this a time only investment.

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Ebay affiliate and BANS

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:46:25 GMT

The more astute among you may have noticed the avatar on the right, yes that's me, or at least what I look like when I'm on the net. I am holding a cup of my favourite beverage, tea. Tea has been fuelling internet development since 1989, some mistakenly believe it is coffee that powers the internet but they are sadly confused.

So the new avatar. I thought the blog looked a bit plain and needed a bit of colour and focus. I like it what do you think, oh I forget I still haven't gotten round to adding comments to the site. Well in the meantime lets assume everything's great.

eBay BANS site

At the moment I am working on a new eBay affiliate system which will include an ebook and some software. It's early days yet but I am testing and coming up with ideas. I really believe these sorts of sites are a good investment as once they are set up can be run without any ongoing maintenance.

I mentioned previously about BANS in the eBay affiliate stores post and realised not everyone knows what BANS is. It stands for build a niche store and is a popular script among affiliate webmasters that allows you to quickly and easily set up an eBay affiliate site.

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Ebay affiliate stores

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:12:31 GMT

Recently the eBay affiliate program has been taken in house where it used to be run by Commission Junction. The reason I mention this is that I have a couple of eBay sites I recently set up that use eBay feeds. That's what I have been busy working on. Honest.

I got started with eBay after seeing how popular BANS was becoming and being a geek and a webmaster got stuck in. I have been reading about some real successes which peaked my interest in eBay affiliate sites.

eBay BANS and stores

One of the other benefits of creating sites that use data from eBay is that there is almost an unlimited amount of niche's. This means that there is the potential to create any number of sites or integrate eBay data into existing niche sites to compliment or even replace Adsense.

Another benefit of using data from eBay is that it means you have constantly updating information on your site. To prevent any duplicate content problems I have also been adding unique content with every page.

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How to track clicks

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:18:13 GMT

If you want to be able to keep a track of which affiliate links or ads are working on your site then you need to be able to track them. When you know which links are being clicked on then you know what links work and what your visitors are interested in.

Tracking how many times a link is clicked

I recently started using Mark's Show your ad here service that allows you to manage graphical banner ads on your site. The ads on the right are the ones that I am testing. Whilst Mark's service is great and not forgetting free it doesn't provide and statistics so I have no idea how often the links are being clicked.

To add statistics for our banners we need to be able to ad some link tracking code. It just so happens that I have a very basic script in PHP that records clicks to a mySQL database. To integrate this into Mark's ad serving system I just replace my tracking code link as the target URL. Now every time the link is clicked this information is recorded and the PHP script forward the visitor to the target site.

Obviously you may not be able to knock up your own tracking script but you could use one of the many URL shortening services available or search for a free script from the likes of SourceForge.

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Show your ad here

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:36:18 GMT

I have been meaning to test out Marks ad hosting system so I decided to install it to give it a whirl. It took all of 5 minutes to set up as you need to provide some information about your blog (or site I guess).

Show your ad here ad management

Having tested Openads for ad management previously I was pleased with the simplicity of show your ads here. It is relatively easy to understand and implement. It allows you to manage ads spots on your site and also sell advertising from your site and via the marketplace.

The ad management is free to use and advertising sales are charged at 25 percent which is a lot lower than most ad brokers. You may want to use the free ad management part of the service to show and rotate affiliate ads.

Remotely hosted ads

The ads are hosted on the SYAH server so if that server goes down your ads will not show. However Mark has some appropriate hosting to serve all these ads so I'm not too worried.

Mark has also added an affiliate program into the mix that pays out 10 percent of all referred ad sales. If you refer someone who than buys an ad on one of the sites in the network then you get 10 percent of the sale revenue which is quite generous.

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