Make Mone Online

Apple's .Mac Retooled, Relaunched As MobileMe

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:50:00 +0000

At the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a service that allows users to wirelessly sync and access information across multiple devices.

Dubbed MobileMe, it's a cloud storage service that enables push e-mail and real-time synchronization of calendar items, contact information, and other data on an iPhone without the need for a Microsoft Exchange server.

"Think of MobileMe as Exchange for the rest of us," said Phil Shiller, Apple's senior VP of worldwide product marketing, during a presentation at WWDC.

The Web-based MobileMe works with the iPhone's mail, calendar, and contacts applications in addition to working with Mail, iCal, and Address Book on the Macintosh and Outlook on Windows. Additionally, MobileMe offers online storage for documents, files, and photos.
During the presentation at WWDC, Apple showed how photos taken from a phone can be automatically uploaded to the Web-based MobileMe account for storage or to share with friends.
Apple also launched a site called Me.com, a portal where users also can manage their MobileMe accounts. MobileMe applications feature no advertisements and support a drag-and-drop interface, according to Apple.

The subscription-based service will be available on July 11. It's priced at $99 per year with 20 GB of storage, and subscribers can purchase additional storage capacity at $40 per year for 20 GB or $99 per year for 40 GB.

As expected, MobileMe is a replacement for the company's .Mac service. Current .Mac users will be automatically upgraded, Apple said.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

Google Trends - Selecting Website Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:18:00 +0000

What is Google Trends
Google Trends is another free service that shows you online interest on any topic or keyword. It reflects what keywords people are searching for on a daily basis. All you have to do is go to the Google Trends website and enter a word. A graph then instantly pops up displaying, since 2004, how often the term is searched.

Google's tool can help online publishers tweak their content to maximize traffic from search engine users. Plus, it's a fun way to kill a lot of time.

Google Trends as a Keyword Tool
There are a number of free tools you can use to research how many times per day website visitors are likely to conduct a search for your target keyword. One example is Digital Point's Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. Using this tool, you can type in the keyword "bicycles" and the tool returns numbers that represent how many times that phrase is searched for, along with the number of times related terms, such as "tandem bicycles", are used in search queries. You can then drill down farther by clicking one of the results, such as "girls bicycles".

Using Google Trends, you can compare how often your target keywords are searched for in a matter of seconds. For example, let's say you're not sure which would be a more popular keyword, "bicycles" or "bikes". Open Google Trends in your browser by going to www.google.com/trends. Once the Google Trends tool opens, type "bicycles, bikes" in the box. You don't need the quote marks, but you do need a comma between each search term or keyword phrase you want to check. You can enter as many as 5 comma-separated keyword phrases at a time. When you're finished, click the Search Trends button.

Google Trends returns a color-coded graph that shows the frequency for which your specified terms were used in a Google search query for the past three calendar years. Using the bicycles, bikes example, you can see nearly instantly that the term "bikes" is used in search far more often than "bicycles" and that "bikes" has held this edge consistently over the entire time line. Therefore, those who are looking for bicycles in Google are far more likely to use "bikes" in their search than they would use "bicycles". You might logically deduce this on your own, since it's faster to type "bikes" than it is to spell out "bicycles".

Google Trends also allows you to compare at a glance the volume of news stories related to the keywords you're comparing and provides a bar chart that breaks down the results by selected cities, selected world regions and by selected world languages.

Finally, Google Trends will also show a hyperlinked list of news references to those keywords. The comparison graph will show when those references were published on the web.

AdBrite - A Well Paying Ad Network - Make Money From Your Site Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:23:00 +0000

AdBrite, Inc. is an online advertising firm based in San Francisco, California. It was founded by Philip J. Kaplan and Gidon Wise.

AdBrite serves ads on 58,740 websites, according to their published stats, and is the 10th largest ad network on the Internet, according to Media Metrix. Attributor survey ranked AdBrite as the 6th largest ad server in 2008.

AdBrite was originally founded as Marketbanker.com in 2002, and relaunched as AdBrite in 2004. AdBrite is backed by Sequoia Capital and has raised $35 million in three rounds of funding from Sequoia, Mitsui and DAG Ventures

On February 12, 2008 the company launched Spottt.com, a link exchange that enable sites to promote each other for free.

The Auction:
AdBrite’s real-time auction processes nearly 1 billion transactions between advertisers and publishers every day.
AdBrite brings together thousands of advertisers and publishers in a real-time auction for ad space. It’s like the stock market, only we’re a place to buy and sell online advertising, rather than stocks.

As advertisers set up their targeting parameters and create their ads, the ads are automatically entered in AdBrite’s auction, along with the corresponding bids. When publishers enable their site to run ads, the publisher zones created are automatically part of the inventory that advertisers bid for.

Here’s how it works:

Every time a user views a page on the AdBrite network, our system determines the most appropriate ad to show to that user via a real-time auction. AdBrite OTX (Open Targeting Exchange) ensures that the lastest targeting technologies are deployed to serve the ad.

For a given user requesting a given page, we find the pool of ads that match the appropriate ad format and user targeting criteria. For example, a young male user in New York viewing an entertainment site will draw from a different ad pool than an older woman in LA on a page about sports.

Once we’ve defined the available pool of ads, we choose the highest yielding ad. For banner ads and Full Page Ads, we choose the ad with the highest bidded CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). Auctions for text ad space factors in CPC (cost-per-click) bids and click rates of the eligible ads. In all cases, the highest bidding advertiser is charged one penny more than the second highest bid, regardless of the original max bid.

Once an ad is shown, we store click data and other statistics to continue improving relevance and maximizing yield for participants in the marketplace.
AdBrite runs nearly 1 billion such calculations each day — one for each pageview on which we serve an ad.

Get ads from thousands of advertisers, including top brands.
AdBrite can help you monetize your site with advertising that fits the content and user base of your site. Our base of advertisers includes top brands like Live Nation, GM, AT&T, Verizon, and Target—at the same time, AdBrite serves ads on nearly 1 billion pages daily, providing massive scale opportunities.

Optimize results with full transparency and control.
The AdBrite interface is very easy to use – you can sign up online and run ads on your site in minutes. Once you’re up and running, your publisher dashboard will give you all the latest detailed information about every single ad that’s run on your site.

Try out a full suite of ad formats.
In addition to text and banner ads, AdBrite offers advanced options like our Full Page Ad, BritePic, Inline and InVideo ad types. These formats will allow you to show high-value ads without losing site real estate—and the multimedia formats let you take advantage of the photos and video clips on your site. Bottom line, you’ll earn more than with the standard options provided by most ad networks.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income

Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.
Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.
Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information.
In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.
AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.
Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.
Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.
Enable AdBrite auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

Summary:

AdBrite is a very good alternative to AdSense. Since January 2007 it is now possible to display AdBrite on the same pages as AdSense, as long as the competing ad formats don't look confusingly similar. If you want to earn a little extra money after being banned from AdSense then AdBrite is the program for you.

Spyfu - Lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying.

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:52:00 +0000

Spyfu http://spyfu.com/ is primarily for keyword research- keyword research on your competitors and their keywords.

SpyFu lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying and which ones they optimize their site for. Once you understand the competition, you can beat them at their own game or your can exploit their weaknesses.

What’s more?

From there you can drill down into Avg. Cost per click, Average cost per day and Estimated clicks per day. You can see additional information related to the search such as top advertisers of that keyword, list of other keywords bought by competitors, related terms and related concepts. You can also drill down into additional domain and company information

It has Advanced Analytics - When you subscribe, you have access to the entire SpyFu data set, not just the 5 or 10% you can see from on the free site. In addition to more raw data, you have access to a richer interface and more meaningful statistics.

Advanced Search - Advanced Search allows one to search by all the metrics provided on the site and allows you to focus on the data that’s most important to you. What’s more, you can save your Advanced Search results to Excel with the click of a button.
You can search for three types of things- terms, domains and company names.

It can Export to Excel all the data you need.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:36:00 +0000

Use the free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker to help your website rank higher in the search engines.

What is WordTracker
Wordtracker is a web-based service that gives you the capability of finding the best keyword phrases for your website. Choosing the best phrases for your site is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your site.Why? Because if you choose keywords that no one is searching for, then your site will never be found. Or, if you choose keywords that are way too competitive, your site will have a difficult time making it to the top of the rankings. Either way, your site (and business) loses.

Wordtracker provides everything you need to do keyword research, and it's a service that anyone who is serious about making their website a success needs to subscribe to - at least during the time they're creating new pages and working on building traffic.

When should you use each tool?
The Keyword Universe is the tool to use when:
· You're just starting out and you want to generate a list of relevant keywords
· You want to explore your market, find out what keywords other websites are using and expand your content
· You've reached a plateau with your PPC campaigns and you want to find more groups of keywords that you could develop
· The Keyword Researcher is the tool to use when:
· You collected a good seed list of keywords and you want to check out which are the most popular
· You've found some good keywords that are converting well on PPC and you want to see how those exact keywords are used in longer search terms
· You've got some keywords and you want to see how they can be combined and ordered to give you more.

Keyword Spy Most Powerful Keyword Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:43:00 +0000

Keyword Spy is definitely the #1 most powerful keyword tool out there today. If you are serious about making great money marketing online, especially from PPC, then this is an essential tool that you must have.

KeywordSpy.com is a Keyword Research Tool that helps identify what keywords competitors use, with results actually reflecting what advertisers are using at the current time. - http://www.keywordspy.com/

Keyword Spy will literally save you hours of keyword research by making your competition do all the hard work! No more spending hours doing keyword research as you can just simply take the top converting keywords in your niche from the competition, and leave the rest behind. Once you join you immediately get access to the highest converting keywords for your niche from the huge Keyword Spy up-to-date database.

How it works

Know your competitor's online marketing strategies: You can also earn and even surpass what your competitors are making with Google Adwords and Overture. KeywordSpy gives you the key to their success: a good ad-campaign with the right keywords.

Beat them at their own game Now that you know what keywords competitors are using and how it generates money for them, you can use those keywords to drive traffic to your site and give your business the exposure it needs.

All is done with only 2 clicks How about a list of profitable keywords in seconds? KeywordSpy gives you all the keywords you need with just a simple click. The second click would enable you to download the keyword results using a text or excel file format. It's THAT easy.

Why It Works
There are more than 1 billion keywords searched every month by users around the world. Finding the correct ones for your website is not an easy task. Hundreds of hours must be spent in searching for the right keywords for one ad campaign. Your competitors know best, why not let them do all the hard work by spending time and money on keywords you in turn will use for your ad campaign. With just a few clicks you can create a large targeted keyword campaign. Only use keywords that are proven to generate sales and save money. Companies with a much larger list of keywords drive more traffic to their sites compared to those who have less. KeywordSpy helps drive traffic from competing sites to your own instantly, resulting in optimum exposure at the least amount of time and costs.

How to search for keywords?
Type in the “search bar” a generic term that describes your product or services, a result page will then flash onscreen. From the results, simply click on a domain and from there you may export the keyword result to either text or excel file.

How to search your competitors’ keywords?
Type in the “search bar” your competitor’s URL or domain name. A result page of the list of the keywords your competitors are using will then flash onscreen.

How can KeywordSpy help you?
There is no easy way to have a marketing competitive edge than to learn your competitors’ advertising strategies. Through KeywordSpy, you can pick and choose the keywords which suit your business needs and can tailor traffic to your website by waging a bigger campaign with search engines

Meta Tag - Boost Your Blog For Greater Traffic and Improve your site ranking!

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:57:00 +0000

Meta tags are important players in the game of search engine optimization.
Meta tag is close to being the most important step in getting your web site connected to search engines. Now Meta tag generation is as easy as 1-2-3 . A meta tag is a tag that describes a web page. For a broader definition, a Meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, a Meta tag does not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, it provides information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about and what keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use the Meta tags when building their indices.

Meta tag can be used for a wide variety of metadata (data that describes other data), but most site promoters focus primarily on the description tag and the keywords tag. Some search engines use the description tag as the first choice for a search engine listing, using alternate methods if the tag is missing. Some search engines may also use the keywords tag to reinforce the main topics of the page. Meta tags that are hidden from the visible page, such as the keywords tag, have been subject to much abuse over the years. When a search-rating factor gets abused, the natural reaction for the search engines is to de-emphasize the offending factor. This seems to be the case with Meta tags, as search engines increasingly seek "reputation" factors less directly controlled by the web site owner.

How To Do Meta Tags Right
There are basically 2 parts to a META tag: first is the META description and second is the META keywords. The description are what appears on a search. As you can see, if the description is too long, it'll be cropped as search engines only uses a few lines to describe the blog. An optimum number of characters to use for META description is 150 (including spaces and dots).

For META keywords, you can use as many words as you want, but don't repeat the same word too many times (more than 5) to avoid keyword spam. Crawlers can identify keyword spamming easily - which won't make it good either for SEO.

To create a META tag, simply copy the code below and rewrite your META description and keywords (the red text):

Then, place it in between the ..... section near the top part of your template XML code. It's best to put it just below the code.

Any software to help me create meta tags?
Yes, there are a few of these things about. One that I've been told of is at http://www.hisoftware.com/taggen.htm. I've not tried it out myself, but it looks interesting. I'm currently downloading a trial version, to see what its like. I'll let you know.http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/ This site will automatically try and generate meta tags based on the Dublin core for you. Seems to work well, though its a little enthusiastic about the number of keywords it generates!

Free META Tag Builder tool. It directs you easily to build a META tag, create the HTML or XHTML code, and guides to paste it into your blog template XML code.Just for the fun of it, you can analyze your blog's original description and keywords by submitting your blog URL at the Free META TAG Analyzer before placing the new META tags in your blog - so that you can compare how it is indexed before and after the change.

Meta Tag Dos
1 Keep your title no more than 6 to 10 words long.
2 Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200 and 500 characters.
3 Your description should be no more than 200 characters long.
4 You should have different meta tags on every page of your site.

Meta Tag Don’ts
Your page will be penalized if a search engine feels that you're using your meta tags to gain an unfair advantage.

1. Don't load your description with only keywords. A keyword-loaded description is grounds for exclusion from a search engine's database. Even if you get away with it, some engines use that description in its search results under your site's title. The true function of the description is to invite a click. It has to grab the attention of a human reader and convince her to click through to your site. Make your site description keyword-rich, but focus on the human reader.

2. Don't repeat keywords. You can safely repeat a word 3 times. Some people say it's 5 times. Maybe they're right. I'll stick to 3.

3) There is no need to index every single file that you've got on your site - just choose a few representative samples.

How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog - Tips in Easy Terms

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:05:00 +0000

One must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are few steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
Technorati Profile

1) Blog Subscription: Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

2) Sign up for pinging services: Pinging means that when your blog is updated, a “ping” is sent out by the service to let pinging sites know that your blog has been updated. People who are visiting sites with pinging services will then see your blog flash across the side of the screen as “newly updated.” Pinging services include Yahoo’s blogs, weblogs.com, Google Blog search and ZingFast. Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators.

3) Sign up for FeedBurner, an RSS service: FeedBurner basically helps you to promote your blog’s content, and to build and measure your audience.

4) Write high-quality posts. They don’t have to be long but they need to be good. Give a unique view of your opinions. Try writing something that will create a buzz and get other bloggers to talk and link about your posts.

5) Don’t be boring: Don't post any boring article,

6) Article Submission: Submit each of your post to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, netscape etc. Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum.

7) Use keywords in your blog: Like regular web pages, having a good keyword density on a blog is a terrific way of getting search engine spiders to notice your page.

8) Post comments at other blogs: Visit similar blogs to your own, post legitimate comments and then sign your name(along with a link to your blog).

9) Submit Blog in Directories: Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.

10) Participate in blog carnivals.

Don’t give up. It’s hard to build an audience and takes a lot of time and effort. It won’t happen over night, unless you’re already somewhat of a celebrity. Stick with it, if you write unique content eventually you will build a good following.

Understanding Ping - The Way to Increase Your Blog Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:01:00 +0000

If you’re a blogger and are constantly hearing about pinging. The thing is, you don't know what it is and what it can do for your blog. Well that's fine because a lot of bloggers don't quite understand pinging. Lets understand what is

What is pinging?
Pinging is a way of letting search engines know that you’ve created a new post, or updated an existing post on your blog . When a blog is pinged, the ping basically sends a signal to a web blog tracking system telling it that the blog has recently been updated. Thus, pinging is the process of telling tracking services that a site has been updated.

What is a ping server?
A ping server is a web-based service that accepts messages in the XML-RPC format. It uses the information in these XML-RPC messages to publish a list of blogs which have updated content. Some of these ping servers run their own blog search engines, and some propagate the information to a number of other ping servers and search engines.

How does pinging work?
Well, a ping service regularly scans blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, it is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can sort of think of ping services as being just like search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts.

Things you should know about pinging
1. Only ping when you have updated content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted as a spam blog, also known as a splog.

2. If you tend to post to your blog and then re-write the post frequently you might want to make sure you only ping when you actually post new content, not on updates. If you are using Wordpress there are a few plugins that make sure that pings are only sent when a post is created.

3. It’s a good idea to ping several ping services, especially the ones that notify several search engines. Don’t overdo it though. Make sure that if you are pinging a niche search engine that your blog falls into the relevant niche.

4. Make sure that if a search engine is notified by a ping server you are already using that you don’t add that search engines own ping service to your list of servers to ping. Because blog spammers have abused ping servers if you are pinging a search engine multiple times your site might end up being blacklisted, and not appear in the search engines at all.

Why is pinging useful for my blog?
Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog posting available. Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells people when your blog is updated. Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a scroll on the left or right side, or top of the page. The scroll is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

Who offers pinging?
Many blog publishing platforms, such as Wordpress, have a built-in pinging tool. In the case of Wordpress, pinging is turned on by default and pings go out to one ping server which updates several search engines.

You can also notify a ping server that you have updated content manually by going to their website and submitting your blog’s name and URL.

One popular ping server is PingOMatic, found at http://pingomatic.com/. When your blog pings PingOMatic it then notifies a number of search engines that your blog has been updated. Many of these search engines also have their own ping server as well.

These search engines can then update their listings with new content almost instantly. This of course will give you one-way backlinks to your blog from these search engines, many of which have a high Google PageRank.

There are several pinging services available which you can use to have your blog pinged

Weblogs.com
Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blogs
Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ. It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com
Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their blogrolls (updates) through a web-based interface. Recently updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site. Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Often times your blog is already being pinged by Blogrolling, so you might not have to sign up for it. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati
Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging.

These are just 4 of the many different blog pinging services available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged. A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors. So sign up for as many as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

Pinging tells people when your blog is updated. It is an incredibly useful, and easy to sign up for service, so be sure to sign your blog up for pinging!

Popular ping servers
Finally, here’s a list of popular ping servers you might try to get you started.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

How To Build Backlinks

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:47:00 +0000

If you want your blog to gain high PR, rank better in SERPs and attract traffic you will have to build strong backlinks. I know there’s been a lot said about backlinking so I’ll just present four easy steps I recommend. I realize this is time consuming but it’s a must if you wish everything nice for your blog.

1. Social Bookmarking
Let’s start off with these. Many people underestimate the power of social bookmarking websites thinking it’s a waste of time since you never get to the front page but it’s not just about that. Your articles stay there forever and everyday people surf Digg so it’s a good source of free daily traffic because your posts might be what Digg visitors are looking for. Let’s name some sites worth using: Digg, Del.icio.us, Spurl, Blinkbits, Blinklist, Bluedot,Ma.gnolia, Reddit, Technorati, Kinja, PlugIm, Blogg-Buzz, BlogBookmark, Blogmarks,StumbleUpon

2. Comments
What’s better way to let people know about your blog than leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Spam is unacceptable and don’t write one-liners but make interesting and quality comments and people will more likely visit your blog. Comment on as many blogs as you can in your niche to grow a big net of backlinks.

3. Forums

Forums are a good way to increase traffic and build backlinks, especially crowded forums specializing in one or two topics. I get many visitors from big forum like SitePoint, DigitalPoint, NamePros, SEOChat, Freewebspace, Webhostingtalk and dnScoop.

Don’t overreact with your advertising because you might get banned, a decent link in your signature and profile is enough.

4. Link Exchange
Find blogs related to yours and ask bloggers to exchange links. Don’t look for high PR blogs because you won’t get a link on their blogroll unless a) your know the owner and ask him for a favor, b) your have a very unique and interesting website or c) you have a higher PR than competition. Look for blogs in your own range and watch out for blogs with potential because they might get successful and drive you free traffic. Work hard and eventually you’ll see results but there’s a difference between driving traffic and holding traffic. It’s not that hard to drive hundreds or even thousands of unique visitors every day but it’s hard to keep them and make them return to your blog so content is still a priority

Tips Optimize Kontera ContentLinks™ for Your Site & Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:59:00 +0000

I thought I would post this for anyone who has questions about Kontera (www.kontera.com) also many people having problems implementing Kontera's code in Blogger.com blogs, here is the few tips.

Can you use Kontera Contentlink and AdSense together?

In Google’s TOS they say that you can use other contextual ads, on the same page, as long as they do not look the same as AdSense ads. Kontera ContentLink doesn’t look like AdSense ads so you don’t have to worry that you are violating the TOS.

What is Kontera,

Kontera ContentLink is another great way to earn advertising revenue with your website. Kontera ContentLink is a link ad network which allows you to make money from advertising without giving up any advertising spots and places on you site. They have specific technology which reads your posts and turns some of the words into a link ad. Those links are double underline and after the visitor hover over the link, ad pops up. when someone places their mouse over the word, an ad bubble comes up. If someone clicks on the ad, you get paid. It is good if you make the link colour to match your site colour

Adding Kontera code to blogger

Login at Blogger.com and click Layout link on Dashboard. Then click Edit Html subtab of Layout tab. In Template Code box scroll down to the bottom and see the last /body> tag and paste it before that. Save Template

Taking Cntrol of the LinksThe

keywords are automatically selected by the code that you have to add to your html pages. But there are ways to control in which section of content ContentLink can appear. (If you don’t use the statements below, then ads can appear everywhere, even in your menu.) ContentLink ads will appear on the text in the div statement:

Your content

ContentLink ads will NOT appear on the text in the span statement:
Your content /span It is good if you make the link colour to match your site colour

Optimization process:

During the first two weeks Kontera will conduct an optimization process on your site, so you may not earn so well during this period. So if you wish to make money online with your web site, try out Kontera. It’s a great way to get a second stream of income from your site.

I am now using Kontera ads on my blog to make money. I added the code to my Blogger, just before the /body tag at the end. Now, I can see that certain words are double-underlined, and ads popup.

I would highly recommend you try Kontera

What is Feed Burner And Why do you Need it?

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:45:00 +0000

What is FeedBurner?
FeedBurner is a Chicago-based company that provides media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Its Web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. A ton of Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers to promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Internet / Web 2.0. And they where right, FeedBurner had become popular enough to be bought by Google in 2007. FeedBurner is todays most popular distributer of RSS. RSS offers you many ways to monetize your work and to drive traffic to your blog or website. Read in this article what RSS is and what it can do for you.

What is RSS?
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines and descriptions of specific information. While the majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are broad.

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. Using this standard, webmasters provide headlines and fresh content in a succinct manner. Meanwhile, consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content viewed in the RSS reader or news aggregator is place known as an RSS feed.

RSS is becoming increasing popular. The reason is fairly simple. RSS is a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships

What is an RSS feed?
Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS feed, updates posts and comments on your computer. To read RSS feeds, you will need to set up a feed reader. RSS is a lot like HTML, the programming language behind websites. RSS code is very similar, but must be read by an RSS aggregator (or reader), which can then display the update for you, including any enclosured files such as PDF documents or podcasts.What is an RSS aggregator (or reader)?An aggregator, sometimes called a reader, collects (or aggregates) all of your subscriptions in one place, like a magazine rack in your house or classroom. Once you subscribe to few sources, you no longer need to visit each site, you simply open your aggregator to read any new updates. The experience can be a lot like reading email, but can also be thought of as reading your own customized newspaper. Web based aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader are particularly popular with teachers because they let you check your feeds from any computer, while aggregators like NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedReader (Windows) have more options. iTunes (Windows or Mac) includes an aggregator for subscribing to Podcasts.

How do you subscribe to a feed using your reader
Most aggregators have a subscribe button of some kind. Generally, all you need to do is locate the web address of the RSS feed (see the tip below), copy the address, click on the subscribe button in your aggregator, and then paste in the address. From then on, any new updates will appear in your aggregator and save you the trip back to the website. There are far more advantages than disadvantages to have a free account on FeedBurner.

Consumer Advantage: Subscribing to feeds makes it possible for consumers to review a large amount of online content in a very short time without cluttering your inbox. There are many ways to easily subscribe to a feed and it will less than a minute to permanently stay informed. If a blog or website offers e-mail subscription to it’s RSS feed, you will find it almost certainly on the home page of the site.The subscriber gets presented with a headline and the heading of every new article published. upon clicking the link, the user will be brought directly to the article on the blog, not to the FeedBurner RSS feed page.

Publisher Advantage: Besides incredible insight into RSS statistics and consumer behavior , RSS feeds permit the publisher instant distribution of content through blogs or podcasts and the possibility to get a vast amount of subscriptions and build up a permanent reader community who can also directly interact at the feed. There is also the great chance of monetizing an RSS Feed (Under construction) by allowing Google AdSense to be shown with your content. That is if it will ever work, but read below.

Advertiser Advantage: The plan is that Google Adsense ads should finally work on FeedBurner, the fact though is, it doesn’t! - At least for now it doesn’t. The FeedBurner website states; quote: "Advertising in feeds overcomes many of the shortcomings that traditional marketing channels encounter including Spam filters, delayed distribution, search engine rankings, and general inbox noise". So that would be a good thing and one expected that it would work just fine with Google and FeedBurner merging into one company. But maybe this is exactly the problem, one hand doesn’t know what the other does. At the FeedBurner dashboard your are encouraged to monetize your feed. After you finished setting it up and finding out that it doesn’t work as advertised and you never receive the promised confirmation e-mail, you may start checking around in forums at Google and FeedBurner.

5 Tips to Boost Your Adsense Revenue

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:22:00 +0000

Google AdSense program has made it easier for webmasters to make money through a website. Webmasters who run an AdSense campaign will display Google's contextual Ads relevant to the content of their sites and thus encouraging visitors to click the ads and earn money for each ad click.

However you will earn very little AdSense revenue if you don't know how to optimize your AdSense ads on your website. Here are some tips to increase your AdSense earning:

1. Focus on one Adsense ad format. The Large Rectangle (336X280) ad format seems to work better than other ad formats because this format tends to result in higher click through rates (CTR). Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors use to click on them. It doesn't matter whether the visitors know that they are clicking AdSense ads or not, as long as there are clicking, you earn AdSense commission.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Select a color that matches your website's background. If your site's background is white both, the color of ad border and background should set to be white too. Also the color of the ad title should be similar to coloe of the links in your website. This is to make your AdSense ads look like it is part of the web pages. Again, this will boost AdSense CTR.

3. Don't place your AdSense ads at the bottom of your webpages because it is proven to be less effective. Displaying your AdSense ads at the bottom is like hiding your AdSense and thus leads to low CTR and AdSense revenue. Try to put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between AdSense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Try to place your AdSense ads near rich content as visitors main focus usually are your content. There are several ways to insert AdSense ads into your content and one of the ways is place your AdSense just after the end of your content.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your AdSense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your AdSense code in a text file, name it as “AdSense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then use SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. There are other ways to optimize your AdSense that produce high CTR also. You can learn more tricks by reading in AdSense and webmaster forums.

Easy Steps To Effective Keyword Research

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:58:00 +0000

Keyword research is an important part of any online business and collecting a list of important keywords to attract users to your site can be daunting. Whether you’re developing a pay-per-click campaign or looking for effective keyword content, these five keyword research tips may help you find the right target keywords.

Brainstorm
Make a list of all the obvious keywords that could be associated with your site. Try to think of every variation possible including plurals.

Competition
Try each word on your list in the search engines and make note of the top ten sites for each word. If there is a trend to certain sites appearing regularly, check the keyword meta tag in their page source code. Are there any keywords that your could add to your keyword research list.

Research Tools
Now that you have a set of basic keywords it is time to use a keyword research tool to drill down for related keywords. There are many tools that also enable you to check the number of searches made for each keyword - if keywords get 10 or more searches each day, note them down, less than 10, delete them from your list.

Search Engines
You will have a lot of keywords now so it is time to really trim them back to a manageable level. Use the search engines now to search for your keywords. Enter the keyword (in inverted commas) and see how many sites are returned.

Prioritize
Make a note of the keywords with the fewest sites returned. You do not want to compete with millions of other entries for one keyword.

Once you have gone through this process, look at some long tail keywords or keyword phrases that could be used. Start to think of questions that users may enter into a search engine. Once you have this list, go back to the search engine and repeat that step. Keyword research is time consuming, however, once you have your list, you can start to target those keywords to effect.
The basic premise of these five steps is to find keywords that have a reasonable number of searches performed each day yet have the smallest competition pool. Whilst this represents a very basic keyword research program, for individuals considering doing there own SEO work, this type of keyword research is a good start.

Ways of Making Money Within a Niche

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:25:00 +0000

Here is a short list of ways people use to make money within a niche. While these apply to niche businesses or sites, one should note that these methods can be equally applied to websites without a defined niche, although the results may differ.
Create a product within a specific niche and get other affiliates to promote your product. Alternatively, set up your own online retail store and sell the product directly or distribute it to major online retailers like Amazon.com

Establish multiple niche mini-sites and landing pages around specific keywords/topics and make money by referring visitors to the merchant’s webpage. This does not involve regular content creation and largely involves link building and getting traffic to completed websites.

Develop blogs in multiple niches and update them regularly. You should eventually generate income through the display of contextual advertising, direct ads, affiliate programs and the sale of editorial content.

Sell your services through your website. This is suitable for web-based services like web design, programming or copywriting and online businesses or firms specializing in client-specific work.

Build online communities around a specific niche topic (e.g. amateur filmmaking) and then generate income through the usual monetization channels. Paid subscriptions work especially well for online communities or websites with a loyal following.

Ways to Make Money with Your Website

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:01:00 +0000

There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.

Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network.
The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. Enjoy!

Direct Methods
1. PPC Advertising Networks
Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.
List of popular CPC advertising networks:

Google Adsense
Kontera
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)
BidVertiser
Chitika
Clicksor

2. CPM Advertising Networks
CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.
A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.

CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.

You can get as low as $0,10 and as high as $10 per 1,000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).

List of popular CPM advertising networks:
Casale Media
Burst Media
Value Click
Advertising.com
Tribal Fusion
Right Media

3. Direct Banner Advertising
Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremost because it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.

The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.
Related links:
How to Find Advertisers for Your Website
Finding Advertisers for Your Blog
Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners
Openads Ad Server
OIO Publisher Ad Platform

4. Text Link Ads
After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular.
Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not.

The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process.

Text link marketplaces and networks:
DigitalPoint Link Sales Forum
Text-Link-Ads
Text-Link-Brokers
TNX
LinkWorth

5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:
Commission Junction
ClickBank
Azoogle Ads
Link Share

6. Monetization Widgets
The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links.

Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.
List of companies that provide monetization widgets:
WidgetBucks
ScratchBack
SmartLinks

7. Sponsored Reviews
PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy on the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model.
Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics. Not all bloggers are willing to get paid to write about a specific product or website (because it might compromise the editorial credibility), but the ones who do are making good money out of it.

If your blog has a big audience you could also offer sponsored reviews directly, cutting off the commissions of the middleman.

List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:
PayPerPost
Sponsored Reviews
ReviewMe
BlogVertise
Smorty

8. RSS Feed Ads
With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel.
Feedburber already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.

Finally, some blogs are also opting to sell banners or sponsored messages on their feed directly. John Chow and Marketing Pilgrim are two examples.
Related links:
Feedburner
BidVertiser
Pheedo

9. Sponsors for Single Columns or Events
If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.
This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”

Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.

10.Premium Content
Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools.

SEOMoz is a good example. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members. It costs $48 monthly and it grants them access to guides, tools and other exclusive material.

11. Private Forums
While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.SEO Blackhat charges $100 monthly from its members, and they have thousands of them. Obviously in order to charge such a price for a forum membership you need to provide real value for the members (e.g., secret techniques, tools, and so on).

Performancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. It is called The Hive, and the monthly cost is $10.

These are just two examples. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.
List of popular forum software:
vBulletin
Simple Machines Forum
phpBB
Vanilla

12. Job Boards
All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy Kawasaki, ReadWriteWeb, Problogger… you name it.

Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.

The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.
List of popular job board software:
JobThread
Web Scribe Job Board
SimplyHired Job-o-matic
Jobbex

13. Marketplaces
Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.

Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.
The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

You can see an example of a marketplaces being used on EasyWordpress and on Mashable.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls
There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.

Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages
Million Dollar Wiki made this concept popular, but it was being used on the web for a long time around (check Pagerank10.co.uk for instance).

These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way.

Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors
Techmeme probably pioneered this idea, but somehow it has not spread to other websites. The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”

On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way. Considering that the monthly cost for one spot is $5000 and that they have around 6 sponsors at any given time, it must be working well.

17. Donations
Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).

A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin. This WordPress plugin enables you to insert a customized message at the bottom of each article, asking the readers to chip in for a beer or coffee.

18. In-text Adverting
In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.

Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

19. Pop-ups and Pop-unders
Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.
If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.

Ad networks that use pop-ups:
Tribal Fusion
PayPopup
PopupAd
Adversal

20. Audio Ads
Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

The company is still rolling tests, but some users are reporting to get from a $4 to a $6 CPM. Regardless of the pay rate, though, this is a very intrusive form of advertising, so think twice before using it.

21. Selling the Website
Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.

Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they most used parameter to determine the value of a website is the monthly revenue that it generates, multiplied by a certain number (the multiplier can be anything from 5 to 30, depending on the expectations of the seller, on the quality of the site, on the niche and other factors).

Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.
Related links:
How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit
How To Sell A Website - How Much Is Your Website Worth?
Where to sell a website? How to go about selling it?

Indirect Methods
22. Selling an Ebook
Perhaps one of the oldest money making strategies on the web, using a website to promote a related ebook is a very efficient way to generate revenue.

You could either structure the website around the book itself, like SEOBook.com, or launch the ebook based on the success of the website, like FreelanceSwitch did we the book How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.

Related links:
Writing an ebook for your blog
How to sell ebooks
Processing payments for your ebook
How to sell digital products online
List of ebook selling software

23. Selling a Hardcover Book
Many authors and journalists leverage their blogs or websites to sell copies of hardcover books. Examples include Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

While most of these people were already renowned authors before they created their website, one could also follow the other way around. Lorelle VanFossen did exactly that with her Blogging Tips book. First she built her authority on the subject via her blog, and afterwards she published the book.

List of self publishing and publishing services:
Lulu
Self Publishing
iUniverse
WordClay

24. Selling Templates or WordPress Themes
As more and more people decide to get an online presence, website templates and WordPress themes become hotter and hotter.

On this segment you have mainstream websites like TemplateMonster, as well as individual designers who decide to promote and sell their work independently.
Brian Gardner and Unique Blog Designs are two examples of websites that make money with the sales of premium and custom WordPress themes.

25. Offering Consulting and Related Services
Depending on your niche, you could make money by offering consulting and related services. If you are also the author of your blog, the articles and information that you will share will build your profile and possibly certify your expertise on that niche, making it easier to gain customers.
Chris Garrett used a similar strategy. First he created a highly influential blog on the blogging and new media niche, and afterwards he started offering consulting services to clients with related problems and needs.

26. Creating an Email List or Newsletter
Email lists and newsletters represent one of the most powerful marketing and money making tools on the Internet. They offer incredible conversion rates, and the possibility to call people to action in a very efficient way.

Creating a big list is a difficult task though, so if you have a popular website you could leverage it to increase the number of subscribers on your list.

Yaro Starak is a famous Internet marketer, and if you visit his blog you will notice that right on top he has a section encouraging visitors to subscribe to his email newsletter. Yaro generates five figures in revenues each month from his email newsletters, proving that this method works.
List of software to manage email newsletters:
AWeber
SendStudio NX
PHP Autoresponder
Constant Contact

27. Mentoring programs
People are willing to pay for someone or something that will teach them and give them knowledge (as opposed to mere information). Education is one of the biggest industries in the world, and the online landscape behaves in a similar way.

Creating a mentoring program related to the niche of your website could be very profitable if you manage to structure and promote it adequately. There is a wide range of media and tools that you can use to deliver the information, from text articles to audio and video lessons.
Brian Clark leveraged the success of Copyblogger to launch a mentoring program teaching people how to build membership and how to sell content online. The program is titled Teaching Sells, and it costs $97 monthly. Sounds expensive, but they have over 1,000 members.

28. Creating a conference around the website
If your website takes off and becomes an authority on its niche, you could create a conference around it. Depending on the size of your audience, the event could attract thousands of people, and you could make money directly from conference passes and sponsors.

Are You Following Google's Marketing Strategy?

noreply@blogger.com (Omi Petra) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:46:00 +0000

I just read Google and The Value of Web Supremacy, comparing Google to the history of Venice. It is a great blog post well worth a read.

Google's position on top of the web allows them to monitor any area of growth, and give themselves the first slot for any area they want to compete in. If they are uncertain of their competitive positioning they can list a couple other competitors alongside until their internal stats show their product is superior. Free exposure and free benchmarking are great advantages.

Their relevancy standards and universal search product allow them to vote for or against any type of information or company. From a business standpoint, anything they buy or launch can be tightly integrated in the search results like they did with YouTube and Google Checkout.

Their protective moat extends out from that position with the following assets

the default video hosting platform
the default display & contextual ad networks
the default blog feed management company
the leading feed reader services
the default web analytics service
the default mobile operating system
the default standard for map sharing
free payment processing for non-profits (good for public relations and a cheap way to buy market exposure)
(soon to be) the default web development platform - Google App Engine

Given the size of that moat and diversity of their offerings, holding Google stock is like holding a mutual fund with a long position on the web. As SEOs we monitor Google too closely to talk about why and what they are penalizing and how to get ahead, but I think you can learn more about marketing by watching what they do to build their brands and dominate their markets, and try to do the same in our markets.

When you have a well known brand, a good idea, and do an aggressive launch sometimes your idea sticks as the default answer for that question. You end up owning ideas - sometimes for years. In some cases idea ownership requires extensive maintenance costs, but in many cases there is little ongoing cost.

Even if a domain name costs $50,000 or $100,000 it is only $8 a year going forward.
A good site design might cost $5,000, but earn you that much each month.
Some software tools and downloads rarely need updated.
The difference between an average blog post and a piece of feature content might only be 8 hours of production and 4 hours of marketing.

Once you have default status in a category the web's network economy works for you and works against the competition.

if you already rank that exposure can become self-reinforcing (until someone creates a better idea)
if you are already well known it is easy to get listed in DMOZ and get other trusted 3rd party citations
if you have a well known brand you can charge more and be selective with who you sell to
if you have a lot of exposure people new to your field are likely to quickly run in to you and help promote you while they learn from you