No brainer here. Everyone knows it. With a budget of less than $100, you can instantly drive people to your affiliate websites. I don’t think there is a need to explain it in further detail.

Adwords Makes You a Better Writer

You have very limited space to tell and attract your target customers. The headline is just 25 characters including space. The two lines are 35 characters each. You have one more line for display URL. At first this appears very restrictive. However, with practice, you know the 25 and 35×2 characters are enough to attract the attention of anyone who will be interested in your offer.

The lack of freedom forces you to edit and edit your ad copy, till you get optimum results. In addition, Adwords also takes guesswork out of question. You can know identify the headlines and ad copy that work and the ones that don’t.

Adwords allows you to run multiple ads under one campaign. You can test similar looking headlines and ad text. Soon, you will know if your choice of words works or not. You can then use the headlines that work in other places too – like a headline for an article, a blog post, or as the subject of an email.

Thus, you are forced to tweak your writing, until you get the results you want.

Discover Profitable Niches with Adwords Keyword Research

This happens mainly because of the Google™ Adwords keyword tool. It is free for advertisers. Enter the keywords related to the affiliate products you promote. Google will return keywords related to the ones you have entered. You can soon find keywords, which open doors to new niches, which you can cash in. When you discover a new niche, it is only a matter of time before you can dig out some e-books or information products to promote through Clickbank.com.

Most likely, you will soon find the Adwords Keyword tool not enough for you. You can then use a piece of software called Keyword Elite. This powerful tool discovers profitable niches and keywords. When playing with Adwords, this is a handy tool.

Twitter lists are the new gadget for anybody who wants to spend even more time on twitter. There are many advantages in using other peoples’ lists of interest, but so far I only found setting up my own a bother. My lists so far are mainly filled with people who have listed me or who recently had contacted me directly. As an excuse for my laziness I might put forward my follower count.

You are able to create one or more lists. So far, I have created four lists of my own; one is for writers, one for visual artists, on for musicians, and a hodgepodge one with people that are active tweeters. As they contain mainly my followers, they are not (yet) much use to me, but they might help me later if looking for something specific, though I think the search feature on twitter will be faster.

When creating a list, or editing it for that matter, you have a choice of making it a private list accessible only by you, or a public one that may be seen and followed in turn by everybody.

You are able to list anybody on your list irrespectively of whether they follow you or you follow them. You may also put people with private accounts on your lists, but you will only see their tweets if you are an accepted follower, i.e. your request to follow has been accepted and is not pending anymore. But you are unable to list people that have blocked you from following them.

As there are already many public lists out, you in turn might find it useful to follow lists of other users. In following other users’ lists, you may follow the lists of people you follow, who are following you, or with whom you have no connection at all. Again, private accounts keep their lists hidden until you are an accepted follower, and you can’t access any lists from users that have blocked you.

So far, you had the possibility to access the tweets of users who block you by going to their personal twitter page, but as you had no possibility to save them on twitter, that meant keeping a separate list on your pc or laptop. Now you can follow a list in which such users are included and thereby read their tweets easily.

For people who publish original content such as writers, visual artists, and musicians, this is a valuable tool. As there is normally no reason to block somebody, blockers are suspect of using your original content for their own use and keeping you away from that information by making access to their tweets complicated. But no longer, as you may now check their tweets by the simple means of following another user’s list.

And for anybody who would like to be included in one of my lists, please send me an @-message to my twitter account with the information which lists you would like to be included in.

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A Road to Twitterdom

The emotions attached behind hope are extremely powerful. People hope the things they see, hear and think are true. They hope against the obvious. They hope against everything they know true. People hope they can:

 - Make money with little effort
 - Lose weight without raising a finger
 - Repair credit score in a week

They also hope several hundred other things. Clickbank has thousands of information products, e-books and software that promise to deliver the hopes of the people.

No wonder, the affiliate links are called hoplinks, affiliate feeds hopfeeds and more. There is hope everywhere. People click on these hope-filled links, to fill the bank accounts of merchants and the affiliate marketers who promote them.

It is the promise of hope that has made Clickbank so successful. The information products, ebooks and software products have several advantages over material products. The merchants can claim their products are worth several times they actually are.

When something goes wrong, most of the buyers think it is their fault. And, they do not press for a refund of their money.

The funniest thing is, the buyers buy similar products. The pathetically overweight moms buy a diet plan or exercise plan e-book. They read it for a day or two. Then they forget they have bought the book. After many weeks, they remember they have downloaded some costly e-books. They can’t find them in their computer. Now, they start their quest for yet another break-through product.

This is how hope works. Although the buyers know the answers, they hope some ‘experts’ will solve their problems. They hope for some magic cure for their conditions.

Thus, Clickbank marketers are merchants of hope. Merchants who sell hope do receive checks with huge affiliate commissions. Clickbank has thousands of ways to sell this hope. It makes Clickbank.com the most recognized force in affiliate marketing scene.

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I know the importance of key words and phrases.  But recently I realized I could increase traffic to my blog with hardly any effort at all.

My goal as a professional blogger is to make money online.  I know my blog must have interesting content; but I was not using my tags effectively.

The Gazette has 1,000 postings.  Looking at my dashboard recently I was dismayed to see that I had less than 3,000 tags for all 1,000 postings.  In other words, for over a year now I’ve been using the same basic tags over and over again. 

Now of course my blog has a narrow focus.  Using the same key words and phrases, the same tags that search engines use to find the content of a blog is understandable but it’s not smart marketing.  The solution is easy enough.  I do blog about subjects beyond the core subjects of the Gazette.

So, from now on I will consciously use not only the obvious tags of the core material but I’ll also use tags that will broaden the reach of my blog.

I’m learning to be a better blogger in spite of myself.

What is a Micro Site?

A micro site has fewer than 25 pages. It concentrates on a micro-niche. It sells a specific product or products in a specific category. For example, an insurance website can concentrate on a sub-niche like auto-insurance. It works better than pre-selling hundreds of insurance products from the same website.

Have a micro-website each for auto-insurance, life insurance, homeowners insurance and the different categories. You can also interlink all these sites. This way, you can win the customer who has been looking for homeowner insurance, while not missing the ones looking for auto-insurance.

The micro-site gives the impression that the site focuses on one thing only. It is a good thing for an affiliate website. People can read information on specific niche topics. You can then direct the visitors to the merchant site, which gives you an affiliate commission for referring customers to their sites.

Create Content that Sells

Have a few articles that effectively pre-sell the products you sell as an affiliate. Place affiliate links right in the article or just below it. Several dozens of experiments have proved that content links convert the best. Thus, it pays to create high quality content. Hire me if you are too lazy to write an article. Hire a professional writer to do the writing for you.

You can also paste banner ads or image ads on the header, sidebar or right inside the content space.

Use Adwords to Send Traffic to Your Micro-Sites

Setting up a micro-site is only half the story. The other half is driving targeted traffic to your site. The best tool you have is Google™ Adwords™. You can send laser-target visitors to your site by choosing ‘exact’ or ‘phrase’ keywords for your ad campaigns.

The visitors will be looking for something very specific. Here is an extension of the insurance niche websites. People will be searching for ‘auto insurance’ or ‘homeowner insurance in California’. Targeting these keyword phrases give better results than bidding on every keyword related to insurance. You keep your costs down, while sharply targeting the audience that will make you affiliate commissions.

Once you find the topic is profitable, you can diversify your traffic strategy. SEO, article marketing, blogging, etc also can send traffic to your sites. However, when you need results very fast, nothing beats Adwords.

Now you have the key to affiliate marketing success. Create a series of micro-sites. Use Adwords to steal the traffic to your sites. This way, you will not care if one or more websites don’t make money. There will always be a few dozen websites to rake in the affiliate commissions.

Anyone can sign up for an account at Clickbank.com and start promoting several thousands of e-books a.k.a. information products on every imaginable topic. Everyone is looking for information. Information products sell well. People buy information products in spite of their bad financial conditions.

Some are looking for information on removing rust stains from their satin shirts, while a few others will be looking for information on setting up a website with WordPress. In between, there is information products that teach people buy real estate, improve credit ratings, lose weight, and what not.

In essence, people are looking for information that can solve a problem or two. Some want to lose a few pounds of fat. Some want to improve their credit rating. Some are just like you. They want to make money from the internet. They are looking to download the latest breakthrough information products on Adsense™ income boosting, affiliate marketing techniques and more.

Affiliates can promote all those products to the desperate people – willing to shed ten or fifty bucks on a e-book that promises something.

You are promoting the e-book or information product as an affiliate only. Once the merchant sells the product, he or she will send you your affiliate commission. In addition, information products convert much faster than material products. Since there aren’t any costs involved in storage, handling and shipping of products, the merchants can offer you higher percentage of commissions.

Information is an abstract product. You can’t physically verify the quality of the product. In other words, the product goes even if it doesn’t deliver what it promises. This makes information products the best products to promote – as an affiliate.

The default Poll component available on Joomla! 1.5 has a limit of 12 options. Probably most people will get by without ever hitting this barrier – a 12 option limit is a reasonable number – but in case you need more than 12 options you will not find any way to increase the number through the graphical interface. There are also other Joomla! 1.5 extensions to insert poll components/modules on your site (like Apoll, CoolPoll, Autopoll, pollXT) but most of them are based on the default Joomla! component so usually they have the same 12 option limit. The good news is that the fix I describe below will probably also work for them! So here’s what you have to do to have more than 12 options on the Joomla! 1.5 Poll component:

5 to get over 12

1. Use your FTP client to browse to Administrator/Components/com_poll/views/tmpl/
2. Download and open the form.php file with your text editor (Windows Notepad will do just fine)
3. Search for this line of code:
4. Change the number 12 to the number of optional answers you need your Joomla polls to have
5. Save the file and upload to the same location Administrator/Components/com_poll/views/tmpl/

If you don’t find the form.php file then you aren’t browsing inside Administrator/Components/com_poll/views/tmpl/. Please double check that you aren’t browsing elsewhere; the com_poll folder exists at another location in the Joomla folder structure but it doesn’t have the form.php file.

Now head back to the Joomla control panel and the Poll graphical interface will have the number of options you chose – permanently!

Done!

There you have it, the easy way to increase the number and have more options for answers on the Joomla! Poll component. I hope this tutorial was usefull and you enjoy using this great open source software!

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First off, the blog has 1,000 postings.  Each posting has several tags.  Let’s say each posting has 10 tags.  That’s 10,000 ways for readers to find my blog.

The core subject of the blog is blogging, flash fiction and how to write it; the blog also deals with everything from crock pot cooking to a link to a photo of Mariah Carey nude.  In other words the blog has stickiness.  Readers find the blog looking for one thing and end up staying or coming back because of another thing.

Image via Wikipedia

Stickiness is at the heart of making money online.  I make money off of my personal blog because it sends a constant flow of readers to my Triond content.

The reason I don’t blog more on the Gazette is because of the amount of time I spend blogging on Triond.  But I’m always trying to figure out new ways to keep the Gazette relevant so that even though I seldom blog on it the Gazette will continue to send readers to my Triond articles.

Lately, I was thinking of interviewing local business owners who could use some free publicity in one of the best flash fiction publications on the Internet.  The interviews would bring me more readers and the owners more customers.

The idea just might work.

Edit ninjas

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and it just gets funnier from there.

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Not a member of PETA?

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Game console enthusiast

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Funny man

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Someone doesn’t like the ref,

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Someone also doesnt like left 4 dead 2

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We have a new worlds oldest man.

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I guess you could say he had it comming,

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And one of my favorites

I know this is #11 and its not a picture but its still quite a funny skit done by the online comedic group College Humour about Wikipedias randomness and seseptability to subtle incorect alterations.

There are lots of options for hosting including Typepad, Wordpress and Blogger.  I like Wordpress because it has more options and gadgets than the others, but it does not allow you to monetize your blog, so if you want to make money via your blog it is not the place to start.

The easiest place to start is Blogger. It is free and you get access to free software which will help you build your blog by simply pushing buttons. If you are a bit more advance in your knowledge of the internet you will be able to add html code and tweak things quite a lot, but if you can’t do this, it doesn’t matter.

Once you have decided on your blogging platform, you need a topic for your blog. Is there something that interests you? Do you have a favourite place to blog about? A sport? A hobby? Or even an idea?

Try to think of something that will give your blog its own identity.

You can add links to your writing, other blogs and other people’s websites. The more there is to attract visitors the better. You need to keep it interesting because the concentration span of the average internet surfer is very short. You want them to stay for at least a few minutes on your blog.

Okay, now you are ready to start. Go to Blogger.com and set up your blog. You will see lots of templates to choose from. Just select the one you like and you can make changes later if you want to.  Once your blog is set up you need to start posting on it. Some bloggers say that you only need 100 words per post but others say you need longer pillar posts to give the search engines something to get hold of.

After all, it’s no use having a blog if you have no traffic. I tend to use a mixture of short posts and longer ones depending on how interesting I find the topic, or the time I have available.

Once you have half a dozen, or so posts, you can start thinking about getting yourself some readers. The easiest way to do this is to read other blogs, sign up to ‘follow’ them (a Blogger feature) and they will return the favour.  Apply to join Blogcatalog and get involved in the community so that people will visit your blog.  Don’t forget to tell everybody and add a link to your blog to your email.

Then you might consider joining something like Entrecard which will bring you visitors, or Linkreferral. I use these but I almost run Adgitize advertising which pays me a small monthly fee and I buy advertising on the Adgitize system. It is very cheap and brings lots of traffic. I get some new readers from this so it is well worth it.

There are lots of other ways to promote your blog but these are the things that have worked for me. Take a look and see what else brings in visitors and how it can all work  No Way To Blog

If you want to monetize your blog you can use Adsense but it is very slow and the pennies only just tick over, even if you do have thirty thousand visitors a day. I would also recommend Adgitize because it pays out every month if you earn at least $10.  Paid posts also earn money but your blog needs to be established before you will be offered these. Once you have a good solid blog with lots of posts, you should apply for your blog to be added by the various pay to post companies which you will find easily via Google.

You can also run private advertisements at a monthly fee but you need to get out there and ask for these. They do just come to you on occasion but it usually takes work to get them.

Once you have done all this you must keep posting and keep reading other people’s blogs and commenting, so that you are building your own blog all the time. It will eventually work if you keep going.