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Getting To Grips With Your Online Contacts

Sharon Hurley Hall — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:43:44 +0000

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

Keeping a handle on your contacts is essential when you run a business and a blogging business is no exception. Most of us have contacts scattered around our online and social media accounts, as well as those stored in different email programs. After a while, finding and managing contact information becomes a headache. Now there’s a site that can help you manage you contacts easily, and adds several other useful features. It’s called Gist.

Collating Contact Data

Still in beta, the site aims to help you collate data about your contacts and it’s very easy to use. If you have Outlook, Gmail/Google Apps or use a supported email program that will export contacts to CSV, all you have to do is import them. It catalogs your emails and attachments and assigns a rank order to people based on how often you email them. In addition, you can import LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, so you can have an almost complete contacts database. Contacts may be viewed by name or by company.

Using The Dashboard

Once that’s done, the key area is the dashboard. This provides an easy way to see the latest from your contacts. Just set the minimum importance level using the handy slider and you can see tweets, blog posts and other news relating to your contact. This means you are always up to date and can respond quickly to new events. It also means you can filter out the less important stuff.

Filtering Email

With a plugin, you can keep track of your Outlook appointments, and you don’t need a plugin to track and search attachments and links sent in your emails. Clicking on those takes you either directly to the link or to the relevant email. There’s even a contact cloud to help you navigate quickly to companies and contacts for more information.

Gist could easily become your contact management dashboard, especially if you get hundreds of emails a day. For bloggers, who have lots of social media contacts too, it provides the chance to merge those with regular contacts, and that alone makes it worthwhile in my book.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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Getting To Grips With Your Online Contacts

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Referral Fees Cut, What Next For Amazon Associates in The UK?

Charles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:56:44 +0000

Last week Amazon sent round an email detailing a significant change in their Associates program fee structure, attempting to put a positive spin on it:

“We have raised the top referral fee rate in our tiered model. Most Associates can now earn up to 9% on Qualified Products, an increase of 1.5% from our previous referral fee structure.”

Unfortunately the reality is a little further from the truth, unless most affiliates are selling over 30,000 products each month:

To recap on how the existing commission structure works:

5.00-7.5% base commission (depending on volume)
2.5% bonus if users purchased the product you sent them through to
£7.00 cap on electronic products, but no cap on everything else

Therefore in the past you could expect to earn 7.5% base commission (5.00% + 2.5% direct linking bonus) when promoting individual products. You’re now looking at just 5.00%, a 33% cut in commissions which will have a significant impact on PPC affiliates (and incidentally quite a few of my sites!).

Interestingly, at the same time it looks like another commission structure with no cap (discussed here) has been introduced for direct-to-merchant PPC affiliates:

What does all this mean? Lower payouts for content affiliates and higher payouts for direct-to-merchant affiliates. Of course, this will simply make getting on the Amazon URL harder than ever as more affiliates attempt to outbid each other.

Why has Amazon done this? Perhaps the were worried about their site being outranked in the sponsored links by landing pages so have offered more commission for those affiliates that send traffic direct. Or perhaps they’re using it as an exercise to gather more PPC data before culling direct PPC affiliates altogether, as they did in the US earlier this year.

My money is on both those reasons being likely but either way the misleading positive spin is disappointing and Amazon’s affiliate program is now a lot less generous to content affiliates. What do you think of the new commission structure?

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Referral Fees Cut, What Next For Amazon Associates in The UK?

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Tools To Manage Your Online Reading List

Sharon Hurley Hall — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:28:27 +0000

Image by Earl - What I Saw 2.0

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

If you’re anything like me, you are always running across web pages that you don’t have time to read in full, so you want to save them for later. But how do you prevent them from getting caught up in the morass of other pages you have saved? Here are a few options.

Delicious

Delicious is the ultimate online bookmarking service in my view, so if you are already using it, a simple approach would be to create a new label for articles to be read. I use ‘to read’ (what else?). I also tag articles normally and the theory is that I can visit my bookmarks and read those articles at any time. (I don’t, but that’s probably my own fault.)

Gmail

Gmail’s labeling system and virtually unlimited storage make it an option for this function too. If you don’t need to categorise your articles, you can create a ‘to read’ label and email all links to yourself. Some people also use plus addressing (appending something to your username separated by a plus sign) to handle these links automatically. I don’t think that Gmail (or email) is as good a solution as Delicious, but it might work if you don’t save too many things.

Bookmarklet

There are several browser bookmarklets out there. These are buttons that you drag to your browser’s toolbar so you can save a page with one click. You can then return to your list at any time to read what you have stored. There are many options, but here are a few:

The advantage of bookmarklets as opposed to email is that it’s easy to scroll through a list of your ‘to read’ items and pick the one you want. It’s also easy to save them with a single click. The best ones also know when you have read an article and archive your old reading list.

I’ve tried all three of these methods and I’m not sure which I prefer. What about you?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com
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Tools To Manage Your Online Reading List

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Searching Your Desktop: What Are The Options?

Sharon Hurley Hall — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:30:13 +0000

Image by ozjimbob

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

When I got my Dell computer a few years ago, it came with Google Desktop Search pre-installed. I’m generally a big fan of Google products, so I had no objection, but recently I have become disenchanted with Google Desktop Search.

Google Desktop Search

Google Desktop Search is a good product in general, bringing the robust Google search features to your desktop. However, there have been a few occasions when it has failed to find something I know is there, and sometimes my poor old laptop grinds almost to a halt while it is doing its thing. I also find the quick search box annoying and it often pops up when I am trying to use the Ctrl key for another function. Since Google owns most of my online life already, I didn’t think it would be a problem if I defected for a single product, so I set off to find some alternative desktop search programs.

Yahoo’s X1 Desktop Search

The first one I looked for was Yahoo Desktop Search, which is now called X1 and is a paid service. That’s a shame, because I used it when it was in beta and liked the speed and the ease of finding several different types of documents. You can preview documents easily too and the professional X1 client has a raft of features that almost tempt me to shell out $50. Almost, but not quite, so I continued my search.

Windows Desktop Search

Since I don’t yet have Vista, I have not tried out the latest version of Windows Desktop Search for myself. Most people who have it seem to be happy with it, though, with some even favoring it over more popular desktop search tools. Here’s a list of some of the features so you can make your own mind up.

Copernic Desktop Search

Long, long, ago, when Google was only a gleam in its creators’ eye, I used Copernic Desktop Search to find files on my computer. It was quite impressive, so it’s no surprise that this desktop search tool still has a strong following. It is available in three versions, but the free version probably provides enough functionality for most people. If you want to search your Outlook email, though, you will have to pay. Other desktop search programs will search everything without charge.

Exalead Desktop

Exalead Desktop is the one I finally went for. Although it was slower than some of the others in building an initial index (I set it to do that only during idle time), it soon had about 15,000 documents indexed and I was able to search. What I liked about the search page was the large document type indicator, the tag cloud for finding similar documents and the search refinement links all on the same page. It’s too early to tell whether this is a keeper, but it looks good so far.

Which is your favorite desktop search program and why?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com
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Searching Your Desktop: What Are The Options?

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How Do Your Posts Rank?

Sharon Hurley Hall — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:37:21 +0000

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

Post Rank is another tool for filtering internet content. Specifically, it uses RSS feeds to rank posts on the blogs you read to determine which ones are the best. The site explains how it works:

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

In addition to that PostRank looks at views, clicks, comments and trackbacks as well as mentions on Friendfeed, Digg, Twitter, Delicious and other social sites.

Getting Started

Signup is quick, especially since you can use your Google, Yahoo or other OpenID credentials. Set up your profile, import your existing subscribptions by using OPML or add them manually. Organise them into topics and let PostRank work its magic.

And it IS magic. I tried it out with my list of blogs about blogging. Clicking on the category gave me a ranked list of the blogs, and then clicking on more details showed my PostRank’s view of the best posts of the week. The rank number appears in orange next to the post title, with 10 being hot and 1 being … not. On one of the blogs I read regularly, the site’s view of the best posts included some of the ones I rated highly; on other sites there were posts I had missed.

Other Features

I found that this provided an easy way to filter my RSS subscriptions, which are constantly getting out of hand. When you look at a category, PostRank also provides links to related categories so you can check out feeds that might be of interest. I learned a good lesson here: categorizing my own feed as ‘freelance’ rather than ‘freelancing’ meant that it wasn’t included among the freelance writing blogs I follow. As with web pages, choosing the right keywords is essential.

One of the things that PostRank suggests is that you paste a feed URL into the PostRank window, filter it with the keywords you want and subscribe to the customized feed. This is yet another way of ensuring that you only see the content you need to see. PostRank actually has a bewildering array of features and one of my niggles is that it’s sometimes difficult to find the section you want. When I wanted to change the topic for my feed, it took a couple of minutes to figure out where to go.

The Verdict

I’ve been using PostRank for a while and I like it. Though it will take me a while to get to grips with all the possibilities, I think it’s worth sticking with. I’m also intrigued by the Feed Analytics service they plan to roll out soon. With Feedburner being flaky, that could be a real winner.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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How Do Your Posts Rank?

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Seven Multiple Social Bookmarking Tools

Sharon Hurley Hall — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:53:40 +0000

Image by wiccked

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

As a blogger, you probably have accounts at a lot of social bookmarking sites where you can promote your content. After a while, submitting to these sites individually can become time consuming, but you still need to do it - and you want to make it easy for readers to do it too. That’s where a multiple social bookmarking tool comes in.

There are two types - ones that make the social bookmarking sites available with one click so that readers can choose the ones they want to use, and those that do multiple submissions at once. For most of these tools you need to input a post title, URL, tags and description, though some may grab this information automatically. Here are some of the options.

Social Marker

There’s no need to sign up to use Social Marker. After inputting information in the web interface, it takes you to a submission page for each site. I had problems logging into some sites, so the submission did not go well. However, I’ve found that if I’m already logged into one of the target sites it works fine. One of the nice features on this site is the ability to select different groups of bookmarking sites (such as dofollow sites, news sites and so on). There’s a browser bookmarklet and a WordPress plugin to make it easy to use on your blog.

SocialMatic

I must admit I found this site offputting and didn’t sign up, but I know several people find this a good site. It submits to 15 sites (though only 12 are listed on the home page. These exclude Digg and Twitter - a big failing in my opinion).

SocialPoster

Social Poster has an impressive list of sites you can submit to, and you can pick and choose by selecting predetermined categories or using the checkboxes. I tested it with a site I knew I was logged into and nothing seemed to happen, but I’m willing to believe that’s a Chrome glitch as I’ve used it successfully before. As well as a free browser bookmarklet, there’s a paid piece of software called Social Submitter. I decided to keep my cash in my wallet.

OnlyWire

OnlyWire used to be my tool of choice for multiple social bookmarking, then they started charging for the service. With OnlyWire you can bookmark to 18 services, using bookmarklets, browser tools, buttons or the API. It’s a good service, but so many other free ones available, why pay for it?

AddThis

AddThis is a bookmarking button. You can’t bookmark to multiple services at once, but they ARE all available at a click of a button. I’ve used this on my blog before and it works very well. Buttons are available in various forms for blogs, sites, MySpace pages, newsletters and more - and it’s a free service.

AddToAny

AddToAny works in a similar way to AddThis and the range of services supported is quite impressive. One of the distinctive features of AddToAny is that it automatically displays visitors’ services first. You can choose between a share button and a subscribe button - or install them both. It also integrates with Google Analytics. While I haven’t installed this myself, I have used it on other people’s blogs and it works well. Best of all it is free and can be used without setting up an account.

Of all the options I’ve looked at, AddToAny is currently my favorite, and I might give it a try instead of the Sociable WordPress plugin which I currently use. Have you got any to add to the list?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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Seven Multiple Social Bookmarking Tools

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Using Blog Carnivals To Get More Readers To Your Blog

Charles — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:13:35 +0000

This post was submitted by Debbie Dragon, writing on behalf of Trace Media, a New York SEO Company.

If the world of blogging worked like the movie “Field of Dreams”, there would be no need to worry about SEO methods to bring traffic to your blog. If you built a blog, the visitors would just show up in droves! Unfortunately, there is much more to getting blog readers than just creating and writing a blog. There are a number of techniques you can use to get more blog readers – even if you are a complete beginner.

Blog Carnivals Help Increase Blog Readers

Blog Carnivals offer bloggers a do-it-yourself method for obtaining incoming links to your site from websites offering related topics; and as a potential way for gaining new readers. It is a long term strategy, which ideally should be used on a weekly basis in order to get the best results.

A blog carnival is a little like an index that references articles contained in a number of different magazines. Basically, a carnival publishes links to articles found on numerous other blogs. They are typically articles centered around a related theme, and blog owners take turns being the “host” of the carnival and publishing the links to the articles blog owners submit for inclusion into the “carnival”.

The concept is really quite interesting, and it is one of the easiest ways for a new blogger to start generating incoming links and interest from their target market of readers. There is a website that serves as the directory for carnivals, and allows you to search for carnivals you can submit your blog posts to: BlogCarnival.com.

One of the criteria search engines use when determining which website to display first for each keyword or search term is the number of incoming links a website has. If your blog has many incoming links, you’ll be listed in a more visible position than a blog that is also related to those particular keywords but that does not have incoming links.

The “strength” of those incoming links plays an important role in your search engine positioning, as well. You don’t want just any-old site linking to your blog; it’s much more effective to have reputable websites and blogs on related topics linking to you – which is what makes blog carnivals such an effective search engine optimization strategy. Bloggers only submit their articles to carnivals that have a related theme, like personal finance for finance bloggers or parenting for mommy bloggers, and so when their articles are published in the carnivals their links are seen as “strong” in the eyes of the search engines.

Advanced Strategies for Getting More Blog Readers

If you are a new blogger, blog carnivals is a great way to increase your blog’s exposure. It takes a minimal amount of time, and offers long term results. If you are interested in using more advanced strategies to further promote your blog in the search engines and increase the number of blog readers you have, you will want to consider other methods of search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and/or social media marketing. These techniques are slightly more advanced than blog carnivals and unless you have a lot of time to devote to learning how to implement them, you may gain better results by using specialists.

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Using Blog Carnivals To Get More Readers To Your Blog

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Getting Started in Blogging: Blogging As A Business

Sharon Hurley Hall — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:48:51 +0000

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

By now, you know almost everything we know about getting started in blogging, but there’s one more step many bloggers want to take - to turn their hobby or passion into a money making business. Here are some of the steps you can take.

Build A Community

If you have followed the whole series you will have begun to build up an audience for your blog, and this is essential if you are going to make it a business. For your blog to be successful, you need a blog community that is interested in what you have to offer and pre-sold on its value. Look at Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog for an example. The minute he mentions anything, thousands of people go to check it out. That’s the kind of leverage you’re working towards. The tips we have given on guest blogging, commenting on other blogs and joining forums will help you to build your community, as will providing quality content that keeps readers coming back.

Offer Membership

Perhaps you have special expertise or industry links that mean you can offer premium content. Turn part of your blog into a membership site (it’s easy to set up different levels in Wordpress) and you can make this content available to members only. The more quality you offer, the more the word will spread and you will have a good source of recurring income.

Buy And Sell Ad Space

Businesses advertise and your blog should be no different. Use the blog ad companies we have recommended as a starting point for buying and selling ad space on your blog. Alternatively, broker your own deals with blogs in your niche.

Become An Affiliate

Select some affiliate products that will appeal to your target audience and promote them. It works best when you can recommend something you have used yourself, but that’s not always necessary as some products are an obvious fit. Promote these not only on your site, but through the other promotion methods we mentioned (forums, Squidoo lenses, hubs, article marketing). That will boost the revenue coming from your blog.

Create Your Own Products

Even better than becoming someone else’s affiliate is creating your own information products (ebooks, courses, videos, podcasts and so on) that other people can promote for you. Let others become affiliates for your products and they will do the selling for you.

All of these tips will help you get started with business blogging, but always remember that ultimately the more value you create with your blog, the more you will get back. Happy blogging!

Series Recap

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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Getting Started in Blogging: Blogging As A Business

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Getting Started in Blogging: Monetization

Sharon Hurley Hall — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:59:00 +0000

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

How can I make money with my blog? Many people ask that question once they get over the initial thrill of starting a new blog. Whether your blog is the start of an internet empire or something much more modest, it would be nice if it brought in some pocket change from time to time. Here are five ways to make money with your blog.

1. Google Adsense

Google Adsense is contextual advertising. That means that the ads match the content on the page. If my blog is about travel, my Adsense code will show travel ads. If yours is about parenting, then yours will show ads related to that topic. All you need to do is sign up for an Adsense account and you will be able to create ads for various parts of your blog. The header, sidebar, footer and at the start of posts are popular locations, but check out Google’s own heat maps for the best places to put your ads.

The amount you will make depends on how often your content is viewed and how many times people click, as well as the amount available for each click. This varies from ad to ad. On my own blog, there have been months where I’ve earned enough for a Starbucks coffee and others where I earned enough to buy tickets to a Broadway show. Earnings fluctuate, but once your code is up you can pretty much forget about it till you hit the $100 payout threshold.

2. Text Links

Another way to make money is to sell links within your existing blog posts. There are several companies you can sign up with, including Kontera and Text Link Ads. The idea is that the links are unobtrusive (not necessarily true for Kontera). With some companies you can limit the number of ad spots, exclude certain posts from displaying ads and take control of managing ads. However, many of them do it automatically once the code is installed. The earnings from these ads compare well with those from Adsense, but your page rank may drop if you use them.

3. Paid Reviews

Exactly what it says on the tin - you get paid to write a review on your blog. What you can earn depends on the company you choose, but earnings can range from $5 to $100 or more. Check out our list of paid to blog sites to get started. And many of the sites mentioned in our post on advertising and promotion also work well for monetizing your blog.

4. Blog Ads

BlogAds, Performancing Ads and Entrecard are just three of the networks you can join to display ads on your blog. In general, you have to set up a profile, decide what ads you will accept and how to get paid, and wait for the ad deals to come in.

Of course, it helps if you actively promote the advertising space too. If you have a new blog, then you may find it difficult to earn a lot with blog ads, but if you have a popular blog or a blog in a popular niche, this could be a money spinner.

5. Private Ad Sales

You can also manage your own advertising. To do this you need to have a handle on your blog stats, so you know where your main audience is and how many people are visiting your blog. You can then use this information to set the right price for your ads. (A short cut to this is to look at what sites like ReviewMe and SocialSpark suggest you charge for ads.)

You also need an easy way to manage ads. Two tools that work well for Wordpress (there are many others) are WP-125 (free) and OIO Publisher (not free - $47). You can also enter ad code in your template manually.

Private ad sales are a great way to maintain complete control over what’s shown on your blog. They make a good complement to other methods of advertising.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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Getting Started in Blogging: Monetization

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Getting Started In Blogging: Advertising And Promotion

Sharon Hurley Hall — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:18:26 +0000

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

Advertising and promotion can really pay off when it comes to spreading the word about your blog. Although many of the link building activities you undertake also promote your blog, sometimes it’s worth spending a bit of money to get recognition fast. Here are some of the options.

Google AdWords

We’ve all seen Adwords ads. They appear beside search results and on website pages. They are short, to the point and related to the page content, making you more likely to click on them. What if that click brought someone to your blog? All you do is get an Adwords account, create an ad and choose keywords (using the keyword tool we mentioned in an earlier post) and set a budget for the campaign. You only pay when someone clicks the ad, rather than paying for display (hence the name pay per click advertising). There are dozens of pay per click advertising companies to choose from.

Social Advertising

StumbleUpon offers another way to promote your site. This site is based on users looking at and rating sites based on their interests. Your page becomes one of the sites they see when they click the Stumble button. Create a campaign by typing in your chosen URL, clicking on the interest area it best fits, and streamlining who the ad should be shown to and your budget. The more people like your site, the more likely it is to get lots of traffic, so it’s a great return for a relatively small investment.

Blog Advertising

You have probably seen those little 125×125 ad boxes on people’s blogs. These are not simply a way for bloggers to earn money, but a way for you to advertise your blog on other blogs and sites in your niche. All you need to do is sign up with a site, create a profile for your blog and specify the niche you are targeting. Depending on the ad system, you may have to buy ads with credits, buy ads with money, or show ads on your blog in exchange for having your ads on others. Three well known blog ad networks are BlogAds, Performancing Ads and Entrecard. Make sure that there are blogs in your niche with available ad space before you spend.

Reviews, Free And Paid

Getting someone to review your blog is another way to spread the word. While there are several sites that will review your blog for free, it may be worth spending some money for a paid review. The advantage of doing that is that you can specify that you get a broadly positive review. Paid reviews don’t cost much, especially if you don’t mind the Page Rank of the review site. The more popular the site is, the more the review will cost you, so you could spend between $10 and $100 to get a good review. Popular paid reviews sites include ReviewMe, SocialSpark and PayPerPost, as well as many of the sites listed in our review of paid blogging opportunities.

As you can see, there are several ways to advertise and promote your blog, and new ones come up all the time. If you are more concerned with connecting with bloggers, then advertising that focuses on this audience is probably the right pick. However, if you are seeking a more general audience, then perhaps pay per click advertising will better meet your goals.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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Getting Started In Blogging: Advertising And Promotion

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