The Web Files

Monetize Your Blog the Right Way

Tricia — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:21:19 +0000

When most people think of what it means to make money blogging, two words seem to come up almost automatically: “instant cash”. And yet blogging for money isn’t your ticket to quick wealth as it’s often made out to be. The truth is that today’s highest-earning bloggers weren’t even SEO specialists. Instead, they had a great product, a promising idea for a blog topic, and the industriousness to stick to the effort over the years.

One of the first things that you have to do as a professional blogger is to get ready for all the work that lies ahead of you. Keep in mind that your blog won’t be the only one of its kind that’s already up and running, which means that competition for reader’s attention is much stiffer now. Like every other business enterprise, blogging won’t give you a lot of revenue at the start! A blog needs to be paid a lot of attention to, especially during its first year or so. If you already spend most of your day in your full-time job, you have to be prepared to devote around 4 more hours of your time just to maintain and update your site.

Despite these challenges, professional blogging can prove to be very fulfilling once your site has gained a foothold in its own niche and readership base. After all, it’s one thing to write about what makes you tick; it’s another thing to do that and get paid for your efforts! Before you put up your blog, however, read up on these golden rules that will help you monetize your blog. Follow these principles, and you’ll find that blogging for money can be as enjoyable as it is profitable:

1. Decide on a niche to specialize in, and plan out your blog accordingly:

Will you be writing about sports? Or will you be running a steady stream of political commentary on your site? Are you considering putting up restaurant reviews? Whatever subject you choose to specialize in, the other elements of your blog should match it quite well. Choose a blog template, for example, that matches your overall theme, and keep your blog posts within the bounds of your chosen niche.

You can afford to create an off-topic blog post every so often, but if you want to gain your readers’ trust and establish yourself as an expert, it’s better to be consistent with your blog entries. If you’re dealing with technology, for example, it wouldn’t exactly serve you well to start talking about relationships or how your visit to the dentist was unsatisfactory.

Most importantly, however, you should choose a topic that you will actually love researching and writing about. It’s hard to fake enthusiasm for a topic that you don’t actually care much about, and it’s a tactic that usually backfires. Don’t start a blog on technology just because it’s a popular subject.

Instead, choose a niche that you feel strongly about, whether it’s food, politics, religion, photography, or even something as esoteric as zoology.

Remember, a good blog is one that’s written with obvious zeal and passion, and dealing with a topic you love ensures that you won’t get sick of writing about it year after year.

2. Update frequently:

Updating your blog regularly can make a big difference in the volume of traffic that your blog receives. Because site traffic usually translates into revenue, you have to ensure that readers are visiting your blog frequently. Encourage them to visit by updating your content as regularly as you can. People don’t want to return to a blog only to find a post that they’d already read before! Make your readers’ visits worth their time by providing them with new content as often as possible.

Frequent updating also ensures that Google and other search engines index your site frequently, making your blog more visible and accessible to others. If you don’t want your blog to fall into obscurity, you have to work at giving your readers a lot of fresh entries.

3. Take advantage of ad networks and affiliate programs:

Once you’ve got your blog up and running, you can look into more direct ways of earning money from your site. A good way to jumpstart this is by signing up for Google Adsense, which rewards you for each click that an advertising link receives from your site.

You can also sign up for an affiliate program such as Amazon.com Associates, Clickbank, or Azoogle. When you become an affiliate partner, you have to put up appropriate links to your blog that direct your readers to a product offer. The affiliate program will then pay you for each visitor from your site who makes a purchase or signs up for a service.

Whether or not you like it, blogging for money will always involve some form of advertising in your blog. Remember, however, that the volume of traffic your site receives will affect the number of clicks that your ad links will receive. No matter how great your affiliate program is, it won’t produce a lot of revenue if your blog doesn’t have a lot of visitors.

4. Write quality posts:

No matter how frequently you update your site, and no matter how many ad networks you’re part of, you can’t earn any long-term revenue unless you offer your readers a lot of quality, credible content. Nobody wants to read something that’s poorly or shabbily written, so do your best to write as well and as accurately as you can.

When your readers realize that they can rely on you to give them solid advice and credible information regarding your niche, they’re bound to return to your blog, as well as create backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine ranking. The moment that your readers see that you’re an expert whgo can share valuable knowledge and information, they’re bound to become loyal visitors who can boost your traffic and create revenue for you.

Although there are different ways through which people make money blogging, the best tactic is still to provide quality content to your readers. After all, your visitors aren’t frequenting your site just to marvel at your blog template! Nonetheless, it’s also important to come up with a blog theme that works well with the niche you’re dealing with, as well as to use advertising networks and affiliate programs wisely. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’re sure to be blogging your way towards a real and sustainable profit!

10 Squidoo Tips to Enhance Internet Marketing

Tricia — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:19:23 +0000

You’re asking why Squidoo? Well, since they launched the site has been an absolute Internet marketing phenomena.

Squidoo is a favorite of Google and it’s absolutely free!

It is still one of the easiest ways to get to the top of the rankings for a long tail keyword quickly and with the minimum of effort. However, it is a good idea to do a little more than just put a page up, so here are my top 10 Squidoo Marketing Tips:

1. Always create your Squidoo page with the keyword as your title.

2. Make sure your content is keyword focused, aside from having good website design. It is a good idea to keep adding fresh content on a regular basis. (But as always, be cognizant of your return on the time invested. It is no good spending hours dominating the search engines for a phase like
‘left handed basket weaving’. Sure you’ll be number 1, however, I’m sure no one would care.

3. The higher your ranking in your Squidoo category the higher you will rank in Google.. (That same principle is being used by Google more and more, for example, videos have to become popular FIRST before being ranked in Google).

4. When you submit articles to the directories, always make sure one of the hyperlinks in your resource box your SQuidoo URL, hyper linked with your targeted keyword.

5. We’ll be talking a lot about Social Bookmarking in the weeks to come, but don’t forget to social bookmark your Squidoo lens too! bumpzee is a great place to start..

6. Always think of your Squidoo lens as another one of your web-sites. So, for example, if you are using any other marketing technique, such as classified ads or forum posting, then don’t forget to include your Squidoo lens as one of the targets.

7. Study squidoo FAQs. You are going to find out just how to tweak the engine under the bonnet. For example, You can check about their Lens Ranks automated algorithm they use to rank the lenses. They look at community ratings, lensmaster reputation, click through rates, frequency of updates, inbound and outbound links, rev-enue generated, and lots of other factors and give the lens a number.

8. Jump over to the home page of squidoo. Study Squidoo marketing strategy to your heart’s content. Always check out the forums.

9. And while you’re there, make a comment (or six) and add your link to your signature.

10. You might have gathered by now that Squidooing is a whole science by itself. There are people who make a living, just by Squidooing..

Finally you often find the best marketing tips on how to promote a site on the site itself (after all, they have a vested interest).

Here are some advice Squidoo give themselves:

{Email it. To your friends, your mom, your boss. Don’t be shy about bragging, you deserve a little limelight! Email it to your family, friends or even your boss. Don’t be shy about bragging as you deserve a little limelight}.

Blog it. Post your lens to your blog. Try sending a note to someone you admire who runs a blog on your topic, and ask them to check out your lens. Sincere flattery gets you everywhere..

Try linking it to the lens of your Facebook page, LinkedIn and Flickr profile, eBay auctions or email signature. Create your own little traffic network and get discovered in more places. Wouldn’t you like to get found more online?

Group it! Find a Group that’s busy talking about your topic and request to join. Get friendly, get relevant, get feedback, get found. Compete. Stop by the Lens of the Day Group for inspiration from winning lenses. And if your lens is up to snuff, enter it in the contest..

Make Blogging Part of Your Search Engine Marketing Plan

Tricia — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:52:16 +0000

Businesses are beginning to realize that a website isn’t enough to make a powerful online presence. Marketers have started to include blogging as a vital part of their online search engine optimisation and marketing mix. Surpringly there are still many businesses out there that have no idea how blogs can help them.

They simply came up with a blog, not knowing how to make it work to their favor. Blogs are highly versatile tools that are capable of executing the different aspects of marketing—from the basic market researches down to creative guerrilla marketing, blogs offer businesses a lot of breakthrough opportunities.

Below are 5 of the most practical ways in which a blog can help your online business.

1. Writing blogs can create stronger links with your target market
Your brands gets a personality or at least its easier to get one when you publish a blog. Your blog allows people to directly interact with your brand, and they expect some sort of reply or acknowledgement that someone in your company has received and read their messages.

Maintaining this feedback loop allows you to keep an eye on your market and gives you a better conversion rate of prospects to loyal clients.

2. Blogs attract fresh insights and inform you of new category trends
Keeping communication lines open for your blog visitors, you will undoubtably gain fresh insights and new suggestions. The beauty of this is that you don’t need to pay anyone to talk to the consumers for you, but you still get the information straight from the primary source.

Organize the information you have gathered and make them work to your advantage, only you can do that. Go one step further by cross checking your data. Visit your comptitors blogs and see what their visitors have to say about them. Doing so would definitely give you a better view of your marketplace.

3. Blogs allow you to test your market before a full launch
Before fully launching an ad or any creative promo and campaign, you can execute a mini version of your plan through your blog and see how your audience responds. Suggestions and comments will pour in, giving you ideas on how you can improve and tweak it to better suit your market.

Companies spend a lot of money conducting FGDs and researches. These end up costing as much as—sometimes more than—a full-blown campaign. While blogs cannot replicate the accuracy of professional research groups, they can work well for a lot of market-driven studies.

4. Blogs allow you increased exposure online
The blog network survives on a complex link network. Bloggers are usually fine with linking fellow bloggers that they find interesting. It pays to befriend top-ranking blogs in your category and those that belong in other related categories.

Updated and regualr content ensures a high credibility rating.

5. Blogs allow you more room for creativity
Your blog can be the fun alter-ego of your corporate website. While this doesn’t mean a complete dissent from your brand’s identity, blogs allow you to close the gap between how you define your brand and how your market perceives your brand.

Make Money Online With Google Adsense

Tricia — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:30 +0000

Why wouldn’t you wonder how to start blogging for money. Learning how to really make money using Google Adsense is the first form of online income you must champion. And in reality, the odds are that you have seen screen shots or pictures of people holding up huge checks from Google and have considered are they not telling you something and if not, how can you be just as prosperous. You could even be looking for a way for your current website to do even better.

It’s OK if you have a specific reason for wanting to understand how to make money online with blogs. The fact of the matter is that you would like to make money and do so using the web. Please understand, you have a lot to know and will need to be patient. And know that to make money online you will need to become acquainted with all the tricks and services of the gurus.

The real secret to learning and knowing real ways to make money online blogging is to buy into educational resources that will teach you the true system. Of course, you can always still comprehend how to make money with Adsense, but you still want to keep yourself rounded.

A good method can handle all of the needs. The essential pieces are: keywords, competition, management, potential revenue, and more. You can even sell your method for money if it is good enough. Don’t waste your time with online seminars and spam emails. Be careful, take my word for it.

At the end of the day you need to do whatever you can to stay alive in the tough world of online business. Be happy with yourself for taking the time to comprehend something most do not. Now get out there and make some money! It doesn’t take anything more than a some dedication and open minded experimenting to succeed in this game.

Thinking about applying SEO to your business website?

Tricia — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:58:18 +0000

A good majority of people are on the internet nowadays. Today almost every company has an online presence, selling music, insurance, tvs, clothing etc.

But if we don’t know a site to go to for a product, what do we usually do to find a suitable site? We use a search engine to help find our results, but usually we’ll look at the first few results, and maybe the next few, then move on -so its become something of a race to try and get to page one on Google. But how do you get your business to page one on Google? This is where SEO comes in.

SEO stands for ’search engine optimisation’, which is basically where your website is tweaked and maintenanced to make sure you can bring in a maximum amount of visitors to your site, which in turn will help you power your way up the rankings. So how is this done? Search engines such as Google work on the ‘key words’ that you type into them to help you find what your looking for. Knowing what the most searched for phrases are important, as you can optimise the site to include those words, making yourself more likely to be found undernieth them. Search engines penalise for over using a phrase, but dont under use it either. Have as many keywords as you want, but have a select number to really focus on, usually the ones that get typed into a search engine the most. The keywords can also vary from page to page on the website, to get a certain page to page one status on a search engine, so customers can go straight to the product page. Search engines know about the keywords stored on websites and individual pages by sending their search engine robots, known as ’spiders’ to view the search engine and a few of the site pages.

So in general, SEO can help get more people to see your site, which can lead to more people buying from you and a increase in business.

Interested in finding out more about SEO or giving your site an SEO review? Click on the links to find out more

Google Wants To Help You Make More Money Online

Tricia — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:34:16 +0000

Chances are you’ve seen the ads for the latest and greatest Internet Marketing software program that is suppose to help you make loads of money in short order. It seems more and more these offers can be found at every corner of the Internet. And all you have to do is send them 7.

I’ve been earning extra money as an Internet Marketer for many years now. In that time, there has been thousands of programs that are suppose to help Webmasters. In this time, I’ve used a lot of software. Out of all this software, I can say honestly that there has only been a few that I would pay for. The truth of the matter is, you don’t need a lot of software to be a successful Internet Marketer. I make a lot of money using free software available to anyone.

In fact, Google has some free tools that are better than a lot of the software on the market today. If you don’t want to shell out big bucks for software, give these free tools from Google a try.

The first free program I use is Google Trends. Trends is one of my favorite services from Google. It helps me see what is being searched for currently. Trends keeps track on searches performed on Google and list the most popular searches every day and even hourly.You can even track popular searches each hour through Trends. One you use this service a few times, it won’t take you long at all to figure out how profitable this service can be for you.

Google’s Keyword Research Tool will help you to make cash online. Any Niche Marketer worth his computer knows how important this tool is. The Keyword Tool shows you how many times someone has searched for specific keywords, competition for those keywords and how much those advertisers are willing to pay. I use this tool to zero in on profitable niches. This tool is one that most people who make money with Adsense use.

Serious Webmasters will want to use Google’s Webmasters Tool program. This is an important tool for those of you with websites. This tool does several things. The two most important ones in my opinion are that it shows you the top keywords your website ranks for plus it will show you how many backlinks your site has and how many backlinks each page has. This will help you know which keywords or keyword phrases your site needs optimized for.

Google Analytics is another important Webmaster tool that you’ll find helpful in pulling serious user data from your website with. Unlike Google’s Webmaster Tool, Analytics digs down deep to show you detailed information about your website. The list of features and benefits of this program are too numerous to list here, but it’s easy to say that this free tool does what other tools costing hundreds of dollars can’t do. Analytics allows you to see which keywords are most popular for your site, how many people found your site through specific keywords as well as telling you how long they were there and what they clicked on, if anything. It also shows you where they came from, whether it was a search engine or website. This is invaluable information when you’re trying to figure out where your traffic is coming from and how well your offers are converting.

This destroys the myth that you need high dollar software to make money on the Internet. With these free tools from Google, there is no need in spending a lot of money on other programs. You can take the money you save and outsource some of those boring chores of Internet Marketing that you hate to do, like writing articles!

Unravel the Secrets to High Impact Campaign Ads That Get Results!

Tricia — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:32:16 +0000

Google Adwords campaign can produce amazing results and can show its true potential in online marketing when you know how to take a proactive stance against failure by not simply ‘waiting’ for an outcome or thinking of this as a one-time project.

Making the most out of ad campaigns belongs to the experts domain since they have already perfected their techniques in getting results with their work but you can also produce your targeted result without having to equal the same amount of skillfulness through basic knolwedge on keyword-copy combinations and making sense of its principles.

The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords author, Perry Marshall, presents some information and tips specifically on observing, plotting, and analysing your ad campaign’s progress and tells you exactly how to direct your campaign the right way. The hard work has already been done; many Pay Per Click masters have shared their tips and strategies for optimizing campaigns and there is a very simple process to getting started on optimizing your own Adwords program.

You can begin by creating content-rich landing pages. Make sure that the landing page the page that you want visitors to come to when they click on the ad is full of quality information, is rich in keywords, and that it relates specifically to the offer or incentive you featured in your ad. This allows you to keep cost-per-click for your keywords at a minimum and people will not have a hard time looking for your page in the Google search results.

Second, check your usage of any negative keywords in your campaign ad. These negative keywords pertain to those that usually send in your site unnecessary or wrong kind of traffic. To concretize this, if your business is selling of gardening books and tools — you would not want to receive or attract visitors who wanted free gardening tips and events especially if your site is not offering them at all. Eliminating the words ‘free’ and ‘events’ from your list when using the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool will ensure your results are highly targeted and relevant to the market you are trying to reach.

Third, you can go through the ads of your competitor regularly. This can be done by ensuring that your ad does not resemble or is in no way similar to your competitor’s; otherwise, you could be giving away a bug chunk of your qualified traffic to them.

Finally, in presenting a similar information, you may conceptualize a creative ad copy and present this using a distinct angle; a good way to do this is through the use of action-oriented words in the headline wherein main words are typed in all-caps to ensure impact from the readers. You can also get other benefits from monitoring your competitor’s ads regularly; it helps you to find out which keywords may perform better than the others and vice versa.

Google Adwords campaign is an important and on-going process that produces more click-through rates (compared to your competitors) with proper optimization and fine-tuning strategies. Use any of these strategies to make sure your Google Adwords campaign is performing well and getting the results you want.

Ann Sieg’s New Free Report – Can It Save Your Business?

Tricia — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:21:15 +0000

If you already grabbed a copy of Ann Sieg’s 7 Great Lies Of Network Marketing you will know how groundbreaking it is. You know, everyone who has read it, appreciates it.

But there is one problem with it for most MLMers … it does not really reveal just what you should do and how to do it, to take your business to being as successful as Ann Sieg’s.

Now, Ann realized this herself and ever since she published the previous report, she has been working on this problem. And the result of all this work is her new free report, The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto.

In this revealing (and amusing) free report, Ann recounts the story of how she accidentally stumbled upon the strategy that brought people to her in dozens and then hundreds to order her company’s products. It’s a funny story! Before she even understood why it was getting such great results, her new technique was creating a million-dollar business. In fact her customer base grew so fast that her company could not handle all of the orders she was pulling in!

And now in this new report she reveals exactly what she did. It is a simple technique that you can copy if you want. If you market the same kind of products you can do the exact same thing! And even if your business is working with a different kind of product, you can easily adapt what she did.

After sending in so many orders that her company could not keep up, she discovered a simple way of sponsoring 50 or more people every month without ever talking to any of them … and in case you are thinking she must be some kind of MLM superhero, she demonstrated her strategies to her team and a lot of them were soon bringing in 10-20 people every month too.

It got so that around 90% of the leaderboard was invariably dominated by Ann Sieg’s team … until the company stopped releasing the figures!

In The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto, Ann Sieg exposes the precise ways that anyone can start to replicate results like these online. Most network marketers do not even know about these strategies. Even those who do are not using them in the best way.

More and more network marketers are using the internet for their marketing now but most of them are making a huge mistake. They are using the same approach online that they used before. Unfortunately it almost never works, and so they do not get results. If you are one of them then you will know exactly what I mean.

As you might expect with anything from Ann Sieg, The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto turns established MLM strategies upside down. Download it today at www.marketersmanifestofree.com – before other people from your company get a hold of it and begin stealing your prospects!

Using Images in SEO

Tricia — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:17:22 +0000

Most websites rely heavily on images to explain something to the site’s visitor or to give the page a more visually appealing look. Here is an example of the latter, it can be a photograph of the owner of the site or some kind of map, it can explain something to the visitor more easily than when using text.

Search engines, at the moment, can’t “read” images. The phrase “An image is worth a thousand words” is not true in SEO-land.

One of the most commonly known Search Engine Optimization tips(seo tips) that go around has to do with the way you name and tag the images that you use on your site. It’s fairly commonly accepted that Google measure your site’s worth by looking at the text on your blog, also Google’s spidering bots will take a look at the code you us in your image files.

I don’t suggest you to stop using images on your sites. You can use them where needed, but you should understand the consequences of using those images. They essentially hide content that is available for your users from search engines.

The easiest way to overcome this problem is to use the alt-attribute of your image. If the image is about your labrador dog, use “labrador dog” in the alt text. When people are doing an image search, this can help search engines find your image.

Please remember not to make the alt text “link to my labrador dog” if the image is also a link, as the < a > tag will have made that clear. I recommend you use some keywords in your image tags, it is still legitimate if you don’t stuff alt tags with all kinds of keywords.

Using alt tags this way also helps vision-impaired people. As they can’t see the page, just like search engines, they have to rely on the text that’s on your page. For many sites, it wouldn’t hurt to think more about this.

Free Ads Online Still Work

Tricia — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:17:16 +0000

Although they are largely wrong, many webmasters would probably say that free advertising is dead and gone. Though it’s most likely the case that paid advertising works more effectively, free advertising is by no means dead.

There are many forms of free advertising, such as forum signatures, viral ebooks, and article marketing, which is indeed proof that free advertising is not dead. In this article however, we will just be looking at a simple and easy method, that of using free ads forums and classified advertising sites.

When it comes to placing free ads, it’s largely just a numbers game. Naturally, the more ads you have out there in circulation, the better your results are going to be. And there’s no shortage of places to post your ads. One good thing about a lot of free ad sites is that you can post your ads over and over again. At many of the free advertising forums you can move your ads to the top of the list with just a quick reply, making things much quicker and easier for you.

It’s easy to find sites to post your free ads. Simply go to your favorite search engine and look up terms like advertising for free, post free ads, free ads forum, and so on.

The real trick to effective free advertising is to simply do it on a consistent basis. If you track your results, you’ll quickly learn which sites and what times are the most effective for placing ads. Knowing the best places to post your ads makes things a lot easier and saves time as well.

Ultimately, what it is you are offering will largely determine how successful your free advertising campaigns will be. Promoting an offer that either has a wide appeal or is free, or better stiil both, will most likely bring the greatest results. A lot of the traffic at most free advertising sites is comprised of other advertisers, who are there to post their own ads, so having an offer that appeals to them is a good idea. If you happen to be offering something related to advertising, or even better, free advertising, you chances of success can be greatly boosted.

While posting free ads may not be the most effective traffic generator, it can certainly be effective enough to start pulling in some good targeted traffic, especially if you make the effort to do it on a consistent basis. And combining this method with other forms of free advertising, such as using forum signatures, social bookmarks, submitting articles, etc., it is quite possible to get a brand new or unnoticed site off ground in just a few short months.

The Web Files

Monetize Your Blog the Right Way

Related Reading:

10 Squidoo Tips to Enhance Internet Marketing

Related Reading:

Make Blogging Part of Your Search Engine Marketing Plan

Related Reading:

Make Money Online With Google Adsense

Related Reading:

Thinking about applying SEO to your business website?

Related Reading:

Google Wants To Help You Make More Money Online

Related Reading:

Unravel the Secrets to High Impact Campaign Ads That Get Results!

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Ann Sieg’s New Free Report – Can It Save Your Business?

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Using Images in SEO

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Free Ads Online Still Work

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