Make Money Online

How To Grow A Great Blog Without Writing It Yourself

2008-06-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

How To Grow A Great Blog Without Writing It Yourself

As an entrepreneur and a blogger I’ve been afforded a unique outlook on the whole blogging as a business discussion. Bloggers look at blogging as something they do for fun, for creative expression, for meeting people, for making money directly from advertising and affiliate promotions or indirectly by promoting a business. Most bloggers are either not blogging for money or are self employed content publishers. While there is nothing wrong with that, and I’ve been living the self employment life myself for a long time, it’s not my end goal.

Because of my entrepreneur mindset I always look at things from a strategic business point of view, not an employee mindset. This attitude has led me to study business strategy and systems and implement what I learn both in my business and in my blogging. I doubt there are many other bloggers out there who think and act as I do in this regard, which is why I enjoy writing about

blogging as a business model so much - it’s not territory many people cover since they just don’t think about it.

Today I have a topic for you that clearly is from the entrepreneur mindset and if your goal is to use blogs for business, possibly as your business (the blogging business model), as a lead generator for your business, or as a cashflow source for bootstrapping your business, you will definitely find the ideas below of interest.

How To Leverage The Talent Of Others To Help Grow Your Blog
Attracting new writers to your blog is a difficult process and there are many variables to consider. Your goal is to sustain the value your blog offers, or ideally, increase the value it offers to your readers. As most bloggers know, value comes from content, and content comes from the minds of people, so your first goal when outsourcing the writing of your blog is to find the right people.

It’s pretty clear that the best blogs have talented people writing them. While talent alone isn’t enough, it’s important to focus on attracting, then filtering and finally retaining talented individuals as the key outcome of your outsourcing efforts. Even if a blogger can’t commit to as many articles as you would like them to write, having one great blogger send in one article a month will do more for your traffic and blog growth than a mediocre blogger writing once a week.

Finding talent is not a process that can be done quickly and you won’t really know if a new writer you bring to your blog works well until they have published to your blog for a period of time. Watching how the blogosphere reacts to your hired bloggers is a good way to determine if you have added a good person to your team. Look for comments, trackbacks and incoming links generated by your bloggers as key metrics to assess their performance.

When Is The Right Time To Hire Bloggers?

This is a tough question to answer. You have two variables to consider -
1. You

How much writing do you intend to do yourself and what role do you want to play at your blog(s).
2. The current status of your blog

How much traffic you have, how entrenched is your personality with the current readership, what can your blog and you offer to incentivise contributions.

The first part I can’t really help with since you know what volume of work you want to contribute to your blog and what role you want to play. You may have an end goal of stopping writing altogether and acting as the manager of a team of writers. Or you may want to continue writing to your blog but want to bring on additional bloggers to increase traffic, or start a new blog or even a blog network.

The current status of your blog is a crucial element because it determines what leverage points you have to offer people you hire. If you have a hugely popular blog then many people will consider it a privilege to write for your blog and will likely give their best work because they know how much they gain from the exposure your blog provides.

The less traffic you have the harder it is to attract writers without offering some form of payment. If you plan to outsource from the start, with no traffic or brand in the blogosphere, you will either have to offer partnership or pay money. Other options include a contra deal where you trade products or services you provide in exchange for blogging, for example consulting, or web design/hosting, or SEO work in exchange for writing.

Given all these conditions you can decide when or why you think outsourcing your blog writing is something you want to do. The position you are in now dictates what options you have and what resources you can leverage.

How To Get People To Write For No Money
If you were to ask me how you can get a person to write for “free” I would suggest focusing on building one great blog. If that means working on it yourself for the short term future then so be it, you have to start somewhere. Make one great blog, grow the traffic and brand into something well known and liked within your niche and then you have something you can leverage.
Like

my story with Small Business Branding you don’t necessarily have to build the blog from scratch yourself - you can go out and buy a blog that’s already established. With an asset available you can offer exposure and traffic to your potential recruits in exchange for content.
Another alternative is to bring on a partner or several partners. The down side with this method is you share ownership of your asset with someone, the upside is they may be as motivated as you are to see your blog succeed.

You could consider offering a future payment option. Make a pledge to pay a set amount in a set time period regardless of the performance of the blog, provided they agree to contribute a certain amount of writing. This systems lets you “put off” paying your blogger until your blog is producing revenue, and is also secure for your writers since they are guaranteed a certain amount of money even if the blog doesn’t take off. It’s a gamble, but it might help you get started.

No matter what the option you choose, there really isn’t any way to hire a blogger for free, you always offer something of value in exchange for their work, it just doesn’t necessarily have to be cash or paid immediately. Even if you had your girlfriend or husband or other family member blog for you for nothing, they do it because they love you and enjoy the chance to demonstrate this, they feel good inside about it, or another way to look at it - they might do it to avoid feeling guilty for shunning a self-imposed obligation. There is always a self-serving motivation behind every action, even when actions appear on the surface to be 100% selfless.

What About Paying Bloggers Money? - How Much Should You Offer?
If you have cash to spare (err…invest) then paying for blog content is a great way to motivate people. If you are serious about building a blog network then you better be serious about rewarding your writers very well.

The payment structures for paid blogging is an area where the market is constantly in flux. It’s such a new job that there is no standard as yet, but for the sake of helping you decide what to pay I offer a few examples I’ve either implemented myself or seen other blog networks use. Bear in mind that ultimately you pay what it takes and you can only find that out by making an offer.

Generally most agreements are based on posts (articles published), either paying per post, or paying a set amount each month or week in exchange for a set amount of posts. Other aspects of the agreement might include having your paid bloggers interact with the community via comments and performing additional marketing or blog management tasks.
Testing For Traction

I can’t remember which network it was - not one of the big ones - that paid $5 per post to bloggers with a minimum of 60 posts per month, so bloggers had to commit to an average of two per day. Note that posts don’t need to be fully fledged articles, news bites of a few hundred words count as a post too.

This particular network spent $300 a month minimum on each blogger resulting in a lot of posts in a short period of time. If after three months it is clear the blog is not taking off even with that much regular content, then the blog is sold off. If the growth curve is good, then the network renegotiates a new contract with the blogger based on a revenue share for moneys above the $300 a month minimum, for when the site starts making good money.

This method requires a significant investment upfront for each blogger, but you guarantee that you fully test the niche. I’d recommend focusing on only a few blogs to start with so you can see the results of two posts per day for yourself. This method is possibly one of the best ways to seriously start a blog network, but it might be too much money for some of you reading this.

Monthly Wage
A few years ago, the original blog network,

Weblogs, Inc, had a blogger contract leaked to the web, so we all got to see how their system worked. While not every blogger had the same agreement, it was possible to garner a general impression of how the most successful blog network hired bloggers.

The agreement was for $500 a month in exchange for writing 125 posts, interacting in comments and deleting spam. I later read that not every blogger was paid the same, but this pricing point certainly felt like a “general standard”.

This is a solid payment structure and for many of the hired bloggers was a nice additional source of income - a part time job. Some people made a go of freelance blogging, combining the income of several blogging gigs to equal a full time wage. Weblogs Inc was one of the first networks to offer stable pay for hired bloggers and could be held responsible for creating a new job type - freelance blogger.

The Revenue Split
Sharing revenues with bloggers is a great way to stimulate motivation and empower your bloggers with control over their income. Of course if their income grows, yours does too.

B5media piloted a system where they paid their bloggers 100% of the revenue up to the first $100 and then a 60/40 split (the blogger received the 40% I believe) of any moneys over $100. They have since adapted a new method with a different payment structure.

I like the split payment option because it means your outsourcers are paid in proportion to the work they put in and are rewarded well for hard work. It’s important to offer a basic minimum retainer so they know they have a guaranteed income, and it should quickly become clear which bloggers are working hard and motivated and who you might have to let go.
Pay Per Post

You can keep things very simple and offer a set dollar amount for each post a person makes with no limitations on how many posts they make. This is a very ambiguous payment method and I don’t recommend it. It’s important to have set boundaries and expectations otherwise your bloggers may lack motivation or simply slack off.
Where To Find Bloggers?

Performancing.com until recently had an exchange area of their site including a blogger job board. It was launched shortly before the Problogger.net Job Board. Performancing was free and Problogger costs $50 per advertisement. Unfortunately performancing recently went through a rough period of changing owners and I’m not sure what happened to their job board. Since then the Problogger Job Board has become the standard.

Jon Symons from the

HomeTurfMedia blog network told me that each ad he places at the Problogger Job Board is bombarded with applicants and he has no trouble finding bloggers willing to write.

Headhunting
Another method if you have more time and patience is to search the blogosphere for good bloggers in the niches you want to target. Once you find someone who’s work you like, email them and propose a job writing for your blog. Using this method you can view a person’s “portfolio” as a means to assess their talents before approaching them.

I like this method best, but it does take the most work and you must be prepared to face a lot of “no thanks” since many writers will be happy with their current blogging gigs.
Know Your Reason For Outsourcing

Before you go down the path of bringing on people to write for your blogs make sure you know why you are doing it. If you have a business goal in mind, then make sure you track your metrics. Know how much a blog earns for you at certain traffic benchmarks so you know how much you can budget to pay bloggers.

As a rough guide, if you are good at blog monetization, generally each unique visitor you have to your blog should be worth about $1. So if you can get to 1000 daily unique visitors then you should be able to earn $1000 per month from your blog. That is a VERY rough guide, but I have found it to be true in general.

The rule tends to apply only when your blog starts to surpass the triple figures mark in daily traffic and becomes more consistent once you get past the four figure daily traffic milestone. It’s not set in stone either - you can make even better returns depending on the audience you are tapping into - as much as $5 per unique visitor is not that unheard of.

Once you know your revenues and costs, you can start to look at things like the ratio between how many posts are made each day compared to your traffic growth rate. If two new posts per day sees you bring in an extra 2% in traffic each day, then you can start to play with your numbers.

The relationship between content production, traffic and income are the core drivers of a successful blog, so if you intend to take your blogging business serious you need to know your numbers, at least to a basic understanding.

If you want more details on building a blogging business I suggest you read my series on

professional blogging.

Yaro StarakProfessional Blogger

How to get a successful website in 12 months using only Google

2008-06-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

How to get a successful website in 12 months using only Google

Google is powerful. We all know this. Everyone uses Google on a daily basis to search for everything and anything. As a web entrepreneur you must have a solid understanding of what it takes to get a good listing in Google. If your business is web based and your website is a channel of distribution or your main sales tool then think of Google as your most important salesman. This guy must mention you to every potential customer that comes asking him for directions.

Over the years I’ve acquired knowledge about Google by reading and researching and then putting into practice techniques I’ve learnt. Today I thought I would share with you the number one resource I used many years ago that formed the foundation of my understanding of Google. I suggest every web entrepreneur read this article as it is a great primer on things to do to get your site up in the top results for Google.

Courtesy of www.webmasterworld.com, read Succesful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone.
*UPDATE*I’ve copied and pasted the article from WebmasterWorld below because it seems to move around a lot and people keep asking for it so this way it stays in one place. Please note the article below is sourced from WebmasterWorld. There is some good further discussion regarding this article if you follow the link to the forum topic - Succesful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone.

Note that some of the ideas below are disputable. Nothing is guaranteed but certainly if you follow the instructions below you will do a lot of good for your website.

In another post google as a Black Box Giacomo proposed that we talk too much theory and not enough application of it. So, lets skip the theory and get to what I know works from time proven methods on google. I know the following system works 100% of the time with google to attain rankings across a wide range of keywords. This is what I do with clients to build a successful site and has worked every time. The level of success will depend largely on the subject matter, it’s potential audience, and it’s level of competition on the net.The following will build a successful site in 1 years time via google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyones favorite a self starter.

A) Prep work and begin building content. Long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a 100 page site. That’s just for openers. That’s 100 pages of real content, as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright/tos…etc eg: fluff pages.

B) Domain name:Easily brandable. You want “google.com” and not “mykeyword.com”. Keyword domains are out - branding and name recognition are in - big time in. The value of keywords in a domain name have never been less to se’s. Learn the lesson of “goto.com” becomes “Overture.com” and why they did it. It’s one of the most powerful gut check calls I’ve ever seen on the internet. That took serious resolve and nerve to blow away several years of branding. (that is a whole ‘nother article, but learn the lesson as it applies to all of us).

C) site Design:The simpler the better. Rule of thumb: text content should out weight the html content. The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers. eg: keep it close to html 3.2 if you can. Spiders are not to the point they really like eating html 4.0 and the mess that it can bring. Stay away from heavy: flash, dom, java, java script. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them - there is little reason to have them that I can see - they will rarely help a site and stand to hurt it greatly due to many factors most people don’t appreciate (search engines distaste for js is just one of them).Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit.You can also go the other route and just throw everything in root (this is rather controversial, but it’s been producing good long term results across many engines).Don’t clutter and don’t spam your site with frivolous links like “best viewed” or other counter like junk. Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability.

Learn the lesson of google itself - simple is retro cool - simple is what surfers want.
Speed isn’t everything, it’s almost the only thing. Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even 3-4 seconds delay until “something happens” in the browser, you are in long term trouble. That 3-4 seconds response time may vary for site destined to live in other countries than your native one. The site should respond locally within 3-4 seconds (max) to any request. Longer than that, and you’ll lose 10% of your audience for every second. That 10% could be the difference between success and not.
The pages:

D) Page Size:The smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can - I trust you are getting the idea here. Over 5k and under 10k. Ya - that bites - it’s tough to do, but it works. It works for search engines, and it works for surfers. Remember, 80% of your surfers will be at 56k or even less.

E) Content:Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren’t sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggester and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

F) Density, position, yada…Simple old fashioned seo from the ground up.Use the keyword once in title, once in description tag, once in a heading, once in the url, once in bold, once in italic, once high on the page, and hit the density between 5 and 20% (don’t fret about it). Use good sentences and speel check it Spell checking is becoming important as se’s are moving to auto correction during searches. There is no longer a reason to look like you can’t spell (unless you really are phonetically challenged).

G) Outbound Links:From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text (this is ultra important for the future).

H) insite Cross links.(cross links in this context are links within the same site)Link to on topic quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links it to the apples and veggies page. Specifically with google, on topic cross linking is very important for sharing your pr value across your site. You do NOT want an “all star” page that out performs the rest of your site. You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do NOT want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day. If you do find one page that drastically out produces the rest of the site with google, you need to off load some of that pr value to other pages by cross linking heavily. It’s the old share the wealth thing.

I) Put it Online.Don’t go with virtual hosting - go with a stand alone ip.Make sure the site is “crawlable” by a spider. All pages should be linked to more than one other page on your site, and not more than 2 levels deep from root. Link the topic vertically as much as possible back to root. A menu that is present on every page should link to your sites main “topic index” pages (the doorways and logical navigation system down into real content).Don’t put it online before you have a quality site to put online. It’s worse to put a “nothing” site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start.

Go for a listing in the ODP. If you have the budget, then submit to Looksmart and Yahoo. If you don’t have the budget, then try for a freebie on Yahoo (don’t hold your breath).
J) SubmitSubmit the root to: google, Fast, Altavista, WiseNut, (write Teoma), DirectHit, and Hotbot. Now comes the hard part - forget about submissions for the next six months. That’s right - submit and forget.

K) Logging and Tracking:Get a quality logger/tracker that can do justice to inbound referrals based on log files (don’t use a lame graphic counter - you need the real deal). If your host doesn’t support referrers, then back up and get a new host. You can’t run a modern site without full referrals available 24×7x365 in real time.

L) Spiderlings:Watch for spiders from se’s. Make sure those that are crawling the full site, can do so easily. If not, double check your linking system (use standard hrefs) to make sure the spider found it’s way throughout the site. Don’t fret if it takes two spiderings to get your whole site done by google or Fast. Other se’s are pot luck and doubtful that you will be added at all if not within 6 months.

M) Topic directories.Almost every keyword sector has an authority hub on it’s topic. Go submit within the guidelines.

N) LinksLook around your keyword sector in googles version of the ODP. (this is best done AFTER getting an odp listing - or two). Find sites that have links pages or freely exchange links. Simply request a swap. Put a page of on topic, in context links up your self as a collection spot.Don’t freak if you can’t get people to swap links - move on. Try to swap links with one fresh site a day. A simple personal email is enough. Stay low key about it and don’t worry if site Z won’t link with you - they will - eventually they will.

O) Content.One page of quality content per day. Timely, topical articles are always the best. Try to stay away from to much “bloggin” type personal stuff and look more for “article” topics that a general audience will like. Hone your writing skills and read up on the right style of “web speak” that tends to work with the fast and furious web crowd.
Lots of text breaks - short sentences - lots of dashes - something that reads quickly.
Most web users don’t actually read, they scan. This is why it is so important to keep low key pages today. People see a huge overblown page by random, and a portion of them will hit the back button before trying to decipher it. They’ve got better things to do that waste 15 seconds (a stretch) at understanding your whiz bang flash menu system. Because some big support site can run flashed out motorhead pages, that is no indication that you can. You don’t have the pull factor they do.

Use headers, and bold standout text liberally on your pages as logical separators. I call them scanner stoppers where the eye will logically come to rest on the page.

P) Gimmicks.Stay far away from any “fades of the day” or anything that appears spammy, unethical, or tricky. Plant yourself firmly on the high ground in the middle of the road.

Q) Link backsWhen YOU receive requests for links, check the site out before linking back with them. Check them through google and their pr value. Look for directory listings. Don’t link back to junk just because they asked. Make sure it is a site similar to yours and on topic.

R) Rounding out the offerings:Use options such as Email-a-friend, forums, and mailing lists to round out your sites offerings. Hit the top forums in your market and read, read, read until your eyes hurt you read so much.Stay away from “affiliate fades” that insert content on to your site.

S) Beware of Flyer and Brochure SyndromeIf you have an ecom site or online version of bricks and mortar, be careful not to turn your site into a brochure. These don’t work at all. Think about what people want. They aren’t coming to your site to view “your content”, they are coming to your site looking for “their content”. Talk as little about your products and yourself as possible in articles (raise eyebrows…yes, I know).

T) Build one page of content per day.Head back to the Overture suggestion tool to get ideas for fresh pages.

U) Study those logs.After 30-60 days you will start to see a few referrals from places you’ve gotten listed. Look for the keywords people are using. See any bizarre combinations? Why are people using those to find your site? If there is something you have over looked, then build a page around that topic. Retro engineer your site to feed the search engine what it wants.If your site is about “oranges”, but your referrals are all about “orange citrus fruit”, then you can get busy building articles around “citrus” and “fruit” instead of the generic “oranges”.The search engines will tell you exactly what they want to be fed - listen closely, there is gold in referral logs, it’s just a matter of panning for it.

V) Timely TopicsNothing breeds success like success. Stay abreast of developments in your keyword sector. If big site “Z” is coming out with product “A” at the end of the year, then build a page and have it ready in October so that search engines get it by December. eg: go look at all the Xbox and XP sites in google right now - those are sites that were on the ball last summer.

W) Friends and FamilyNetworking is critical to the success of a site. This is where all that time you spend in forums will pay off. pssst: Here’s the catch-22 about forums: lurking is almost useless. The value of a forum is in the interaction with your fellow colleagues and cohorts. You learn long term by the interaction - not by just reading.Networking will pay off in link backs, tips, email exchanges, and it will put you “in the loop” of your keyword sector.

X) Notes, Notes, NotesIf you build one page per day, you will find that brain storm like inspiration will hit you in the head at some magic point. Whether it is in the shower (dry off first), driving down the road (please pull over), or just parked at your desk, write it down! 10 minutes of work later, you will have forgotten all about that great idea you just had. Write it down, and get detailed about what you are thinking. When the inspirational juices are no longer flowing, come back to those content ideas. It sounds simple, but it’s a life saver when the ideas stop coming.

Y) Submission check at six monthsWalk back through your submissions and see if you got listed in all the search engines you submitted to after six months. If not, then resubmit and forget again. Try those freebie directories again too.

Z) Build one page of quality content per day.Starting to see a theme here? google loves content, lots of quality content. Broad based over a wide range of keywords. At the end of a years time, you should have around 400 pages of content. That will get you good placement under a wide range of keywords, generate recip links, and overall position your site to stand on it’s own two feet.

Do those 26 things, and I guarantee you that in ones years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. If you build a good site with an average of 4 to 5 pages per user, you should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in one years time. What you do with that traffic is up to you, but that is more than enough to “do something” with.

http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm

How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time

2008-06-02T07:28:00.001-07:00

How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time

I remember my first website sale. I made $13,000 Australian dollars selling a website that I had built from scratch myself. That sale was a big windfall for me and a moment I won’t forget because it was the first time I saw the real potential of online property investment.
Since that sale I’ve gone on to sell more than $150,000 USD in websites. Some of the sites I built myself, investing my own time and sometimes money, while others I have purchased and then sold for a profit at a later date.
I’ve never lost money on a website investment, although I have bought some sites that were not big money spinners - I got out with pretty much the same as I went in with. When profits are made though, the worst I have done is double my money.
Long Term Investing?

On the Internet you might call what I do long term investing since most of the sites I bought were sold no earlier than 18 months time. The websites I built myself take as long as five years to reach the point of sale, although I could have sold earlier for less or held on longer for more.
The best return on investment from a flip (a site bought and later sold) was 1,000% - 10 times the money I put in. It took a little over two years to do that. Another trade was a set of sites I purchased 18 months prior that brought in a little over double my initial investment.
In the offline world, returns like that in 18 and 24 months would be considered exceptional and certainly not standard. If a share portfolio or investment in physical property returns 20% a year you are doing well.

The world of the web is different. Everything is changing fast, yet with so many websites and so many people online, the size and potential of the market is tremendous. There are bargains out there all the time and as long as you don’t screw up what you purchase, simply allowing a site to grow organically can result in significant profits, if you are prepared to wait.
Flipping Part Time

I’ve never focused all my energy on buying and selling websites, which is why I haven’t done that many trades. Most of the time I work on whatever my main business projects are at the time, but I keep my eyes on some of the website trading forums to see if bargains come up.
When a site matches my criteria, I act fast with an offer, do some basic due diligence and if all things go well, make a deal. I miss out on more sites than I purchase because other people out-bid me, the site sells before I find it or due diligence convinces me to pass on a particular site.
As a result of buying websites purely as a side project, I’ve focused on a certain type of website and made sure I have people working with me who can help with the activities I don’t have the time to do. You definitely need to be careful if you want website flipping to be a part time job, it can quickly suck all your time, especially if you choose the wrong type of site.
Criteria for Part Time Website Flipping

Here’s some advice from what I have learned in the previous years flipping websites part time.

1. It helps if you have money to invest.

As with most forms of investment, you can make more if you have more to spend. When I was younger, I didn’t have money so I built websites with the sweat off my back. Most never amounted to anything financially, but one did - that first five figure sale I mentioned earlier. From there, as my income grew, I was able spend more to make more.

In recent years I’ve barely blinked an eye to invest a few thousand dollars in a website and spent as much as five figures in one deal. At one point I made a bid for a very popular site of $50,000 (I didn’t have that much money at the time - I figured I would find it after the fact), but I was quickly out bid and the site eventually sold for over $100,000.

Sites that cost more have more traffic and usually bring in more revenue. As a result, if you simply hold on to the site, given nothing unexpected happens, it should grow naturally, depending of course on how the traffic is generated (if the traffic is purchased, that’s a different story).

It’s easier to grow something that already has a stable base of traffic. Traffic tends to bring in more traffic, especially if you focus on websites that are community based. Just as businesses stand to gain the most from existing customers, a website has significant leverage within its current audience.

Taking it a step further, if you are well versed in internet marketing and website optimization, you can use your skills (or other people’s) to accelerate growth even more rapidly. This however requires more time or resources, so you need to consider what roles you want to perform and how much money you want to spend hiring other people, if you do decide to pro-actively optimize the sites you purchase.

2. If you don’t have money, start something new or use alternative sources of funds

As usual the relationship between money and time are converse, if you have one you need less of the other. It’s easier and quicker if you have money to begin trading websites, but you can make it work without money, if you have the patience and the follow through to build something yourself.

The great thing about creating a website from the beginning is the learning process. Nearly all of the sites I built during my first few years online would be considered failures, at least financially.
I spent hours and hours building forums that never took off, coding websites that never had more than five readers a day and swapping links to website projects I quickly abandoned due to my constantly changing focus. While I never made money from these sites I learned a TON about how the web works and that foundation of experience laid the path for future successful projects.

Let’s not forget, if just one project takes off you may hit pay dirt big time. Even if you don’t make millions on your first website trade, if you can build a site, flip it for a few thousand dollars, that money can be reinvested into more sites, and so on.

Alternatively, you can use any source of funding to start a website portfolio. You can seek investors, borrow money using traditional means like banks, funnel cashflow from other projects into website purchases, look for partners with cash or even get a job and use that money for online investment.

If you decide to go into debt to invest in websites, make sure you know what you are doing. There are no guarantees and I recommend you ask yourself how it would impact you if you lost the money invested. I ask myself this question every time I make a purchase and I never buy unless I know I could still survive if everything went downhill.

3. Look for sites that grow organically

I’ve talked about my strategies for picking websites in previous articles on website flipping that I will link to at the end of this article. My strategy has always been to find low maintenance sites, however it’s important to also consider the potential for organic growth, especially when investing part time.

I’ve advocated investing in forums for a long time because they tend to sustain themselves with little work beyond moderation. You don’t have to invest in content creation, marketing or spend money on advertising, If there is already a community in place. You can do all of these things to speed up growth, but generally if you have a base of a few hundred regular forum participants (that’s daily participants - not just registered members), they will create content and bring in new readers without you needing to do anything at all.

Forums are notoriously hard to start from scratch, which is why I don’t recommend choosing a forum as an investment if you intend to build it from the beginning. Buying established forums is great - creating one from nothing is challenging and time consuming.

Blogs can make good investments, especially if you are buying one with an established writer or a team of writers and an established readership. Even if you buy a blog without a writer, it’s not hard to find people who can write the blog for you, just bear in mind there is a big difference between a good blogger and an average one. Blogs live and die based on continuous content and if you don’t find a way to keep the flow of new ideas coming, you might regret the purchase.

On the other hand, sites and blogs using a niche content model, can be a good purchase, depending on the market. Niche sites generally rely on search engine traffic to bring in readers who are then sent off to other sites through Google AdSense ads or other forms of advertising, which is how money is generated. If you find niche sites with a history of stable traffic targeting markets that, given things remain stable, should continue to grow with the natural growth rare of the Internet, then you may have found yourself a good buy.

I’ve stayed away from sites that sell products as their monetization method (like a site that sells an ebook) or sites that depend heavily on paid for traffic like Google AdWords. I like the source of traffic to be organic and sites that sell products tend to require more maintenance (testing the sales page for example) and that you possess an insight into that market. Niche sites that monetize with affiliate products are fine though since you don’t actually manage the products yourself.

There are plenty of other types of websites for sale, from proxy sites, to social media sites, video sites, MP3 sites, to full blown e-commerce sites. Some of these are models I don’t understand or require significant maintenance and participation to keep growing. You however may be very familiar or interested in these formats and I always recommend you gravitate towards projects you have enthusiasm form and understand the model, so don’t follow my lead blindly - make up your own mind.

4. Use a team to make the process as hands-off as possible

There is no website you can buy that doesn’t require work. Right from the moment you make a purchase you have the transfer to handle, including the DNS changes, making sure scripts are working and so on. There may be emails to respond to, moderators to manage and affiliate links or advertising code that needs to be changed.

All of these tasks have to get done. You can do them yourself, taking you away from your main projects, or enlist the help of others. If you truly want to keep website investing a part time occupation then you must have help.

A tech support person is the first role I suggest you fill - and this is not just for investing in websites. I tell Blog Mastermind students this. I tell Membership Site Mastermind (not public yet) students this. I tell everyone the same thing. It’s my number one tip for any person who is not already a tech geek themselves - you need tech help if it is not your strong point and stop trying to do it all yourself - it’s killing your chance of success.

If you have people you trust, who know websites and scripts and web languages, then the technical aspect of maintaining a website is very easy. It also makes it easier to complete changes you want done, for example - website design changes, optimizing the placement of AdSense code and adding new features.

Beyond technical tasks, you can employ help for basic tasks like email support, forum moderation, liaising with advertisers all the way up to more complicated task such as search engine optimization, split testing different advertising methods and seeking new sponsors.
In my case back when I started I did it all myself, which is why it took five years to build a successful website the first time round. Today I’m not afraid to seek help from tech people, designers and website managers. Most of my recent investments require a couple of hours a week of my own time, which usually involved coordinating the people working with me on the sites.

Is It Getting Harder To Trade Websites?

The web has grown tremendously in recent years and will continue to grow. That’s one of the reasons the opportunity right now to invest in web property is so great. Provided you invest in sites that provide value, the size of the market should grow organically as more people go online, which means your investments will grow organically too.

However, let’s not forget that the entire concept of buying and selling websites is becoming more popular and you face more competition when bidding for sites at the popular trading forums. When I first bid for sites at Sitepoint there was little experienced competition (lots of newbies like me at the time). Today, if you don’t act immediately when a quality new site becomes available, you miss it, or the price inflates beyond what you are willing to spend.

That said, flipping sites is still a very unique thing to do and while there is competition, it really is a laughable amount compared to other forms of investment. Let’s not forget most people don’t understand the value of the websites they own and if you use research methods to find sites that avoid the popular trading forums, there are bargains everywhere.

Ed Dale always makes the point that when looking to purchase websites you should consider your existing business model and find sites that can plug straight into it. You can leverage certain sites in ways other people can’t, if you have a unique insight into how a market works or you have an existing process to produce income that the website can leverage off (like a product of your own you can sell to the new audience you get when you buy the site).

$14 Million from Trading Websites

Ed Dale’s Dominiche training program is still my number one recommendation for learning how to buy and sell websites. It’s not cheap, but there really isn’t anything else out there from people who have the experience that Ed does (he has sold $14 Million worth of websites).
Clik here to read about Ed’s program

COPY FROM http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/912/how-to-invest-in-websites-in-your-spare-time/#more-912

$9000 A Month From A Board Game?

2008-06-02T07:20:00.000-07:00

$9000 A Month From A Board Game?

As someone who writes about the Internet marketing industry, who presents articles to help people make money online here at this blog and runs a membership site to teach people to blog for profit, it’s pretty clear I make a living by helping others make a living online too.
That, for obvious reasons, tends to bother some people and I’m questioned whether you can indeed make money from the Internet if you don’t sell people products on how to make money. It does seem rather incestuous in some way doesn’t it.

Well some of you will be surprised to know that yes, you can in fact build an Internet business that is not focused on Internet marketing or anything related to making money and be very successful and in fact I expect significantly more people make a living online selling stuff in niches that have nothing to do with money, marketing, or business…
And here’s some interesting proof of just that -

A Board Game About Herbs?

If you ever had doubts about the potential to succeed online by finding a niche and creating a business around it, then Jeff Walker has a video you have to watch.
Jeff is the guy behind Product Launch Formula, a course I purchased over a year ago that is no longer available. Jeff’s tactics are great and in my opinion, mandatory study for any person who intends to sell something online.

Jeff’s about to release a new version of his program, titled Product Launch Formula 2.0, and in anticipation of the release, he’s put out this awesome video from one his clients who used the launch formula in a very obscure niche - herbs - and one of the products he sells is a board game.
I don’t know about you, but a board game based on herbs is not something I would ever expect could be the basis of a six figure business.
Watch The Video

Jeff explains how our herb entrepreneur pulled off this amazing feat and breaks down the exact process he went through to launch his board game in a free video you can watch here -

Note - you only get the first half of the video if you don’t opt-in. I suggest you opt-in first, then watch the full version of the video that you can access after signing up (it’s free). If you don’t you will have to wait for it to load twice and skip the first half after you opt-in, which is a pain - it’s a big video!

Lessons From The Video
There’s some great content in the video and I recommend you take 45 minutes from you day today to watch it from start to finish.

Here’s just some of the notes I took while watching it -
Conducting teleseminars with experts as part of your launch process is a VERY powerful technique, especially in non-Internet marketing niches. Experts you interview will help build your list because they want to promote their interview and thus will send traffic to it, this in turn helps you sell more product.
Using a limited bonus package for the first X buyers creates scarcity, which ramps up sales big time.

Having a list of buyers is 10 or 20 times more valuable than having a list of prospects. This is the core reason people can run very successful businesses with tiny email lists - because they have a list with people who actually are interested enough in what you offer to spend money, they are not just freebie seekers.

Create a sense of community before the release of your product. One of the suggested methods for doing this is through blog comments and there’s some awesome examples of how John (the herb guy) did this in his launch in the video.

The core strategy presented in the video is what Jeff calls the Horizontal Helix, which sounds scientific to me, but it’s not. Put simply, it’s about using each launch as a springboard for bigger launches in the future. What’s cool about this case study, is that John was able to automate this process using email autoresponders so you don’t have to do a massive launch (and invest all that time and energy) each time.

I’ve only touched on a few of the ideas from the video, so as you can tell this is one value packed resource. It’s worth watching regardless of whether you intend to join Jeff’s program or not. Here’s that link again -

The Horizontal Helix case study video
Remember - opt-in first to get the full version so you don’t have wait for it to load twice. You can unsubscribe after opting in if the emails bug you, but I expect they won’t. Jeff’s one of the few Internet marketers I remain subscribed to because he doesn’t abuse his list. Plus I like the guy, he’s pretty down to earth, yet smart.

Yaro StarakHorizontal Helixing

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading

2008-05-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1

- eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading

It sounds wonderful — making money online — that’s why you are here isn’t it? You want to learn how to make money from the Internet. I’ve been doing it now since I first discovered the web in 1998. Yes in a way that makes me a late adopter of this technology. The commercial Internet has been available since around 1993. You see I was a console kid while growing up. I played Nintendo and Sega. I didn’t have a computer until late highschool and only in first year university was I granted the gift of online access.

I didn’t set out to make money online, but I did and still do. I did want to run a business, that is for sure, but during university I had no idea what sort of business. Fast forward to 2005 and I make the majority of my income from e-commerce and intend to continue down the Internet business path. I’m always curious about the ways other people make money online so no doubt you are too. So here in no particular order are the methods I have used to make money on the Internet.

EBay and Online Garage Sales A lot of people have bought and sold on eBay and while the average user does not trade on eBay as a business that doesn’t mean they haven’t made money from it. One of the first ways I made money online was by selling items I no longer wanted on eBay or by setting up a basic web page, often just a text list, of second-hand goods. I posted a link to my list in local forum communities and newsgroups such as my university newsgroup - uq.forsale.

I didn’t make a lot of money doing this and I really didn’t intend to, I wanted to clear some old junk and make some spare change in the process. I sold things like old video games, movies, books, trading cards, cameras, mp3 players, CDs, discmans, gym equipment, sports gear, anything I had lying around the house.

For thousands of people around the world eBay trading is how they make a living. They might choose to buy wholesale or produce the goods themselves or even scout around local antique shops to find products. Generally the most successful eBay entrepreneurs own a niche market and have access to cheap products so they can maintain respectable margins.
When I was younger before the days of the Internet I used to love a newspaper called the tradingpost. It is a local classifieds paper where people sell second-hand goods. I used it mostly to buy and sell video games. I usually sold my old games and consoles to buy the latest gaming device. I was a wheeler and dealer and really enjoyed haggling with buyers trying to get the best price I could for my goods.

EBay is a natural evolution of this trading concept, taking commerce online and automating the haggling process. Nowadays even the tradingpost is online. I don’t trade second-hand goods online very much anymore because I’m out of things to sell, but whenever I find something of value I don’t need I always go online to sell it. It’s in these marketplaces that I got my basic training in online commerce.

Earnings: These amounts were random and of course depended on what I was selling. This was “spare change” income, a few hundred dollars now and then.

Trading Card Trading After I grew bored of video games the next major hobby I had was the collectible card game Magic: the Gathering. As any good trading card game, Magic had it’s fair share of collectors and because cards were distributed in rarities — commons, uncommon and rares — it was a heavily traded commodity. As a regular player and tournament competitor I had amassed a reasonable collection of cards and I was a vehement trader in real life and online.
Magic cards are bought and sold on eBay every day, there are many trading sites and some huge trading forum communities dedicated to the game. Luckily for me I was the owner of the main Australian Magic community site which had the largest Aussie Magic trading forums so I had access to a large local marketplace. I bought and sold a lot of cards through this site and a few other sites often profiting by selling product I had won at tournaments. Throughout my late teens I did not have a job because I made enough spending cash from card sales. However I could only do this because I was a respectable competitive player and could stock myself with cards by placing well at tournaments. This was only a reliable revenue source as long as I kept playing the game.

Earnings: I made a reasonably stable income from card trading especially after a big win at a tournament. With a box of new cards (usually first or second place won a box) selling for about $100 and certain rare individual cards selling for between $5 - $20 I could bring in around $500 per month provided I kept winning and attending tournaments. Living at home meant this cash was pure spending money and often went straight back into Magic tournaments.
***** You can read the other parts of this series here -

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising How I Have Made

Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 1

2008-05-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 1

Does the idea of continuous passive income from websites you can set-up and forget about sound good to you? Well that is what niche content websites are all about. Let’s take a look at this online income method. I was over at Ben Bleikamp’s new blog, College-Startup, where he has been writing about his efforts to create niche content websites. The concept is reasonably simple. Do some research, find some very tight niches that aren’t well serviced at the moment, build a content website targeting the niche, stick some AdSense, Chitika and similar advertising programs up and just let it sit there earning a few dollars a day. Now you must be thinking how does this make good money? Well it doesn’t make much, but if you are lucky and do your research well, $2-$3 a day is enough to consider it a success. Once you have done this you can move on to your next niche content website.

Over a period of a year if you set yourself a goal to create one of these content websites per week at the end of 12 months you would have 52 niche content sites. If they all make an average of $2 per day that’s $104 per day total, around $38,000 USD per year.

Best of all the websites require no maintenance, it’s all about picking an untapped niche and filling it with content. How To Make This Work For You Before you run off trying to pull this off remember that in order for it to be successful you need to be confident you can successfully generate good search engine traffic to the niches you select. The recursive income only comes when you have search visitors clicking your ads. By the way, random search visitors are usually better ad clickers than loyal readers and that’s one of the reasons why this technique can work. Randoms come to your site once, read your content, click an ad and probably leave never to return again. Loyal readers come back for new content and often screen out the ads. It’s not in your interest to establish a repeat audience using niche sites. You don’t want the responsibility of adding new content since chances are finding content about a niche you don’t necessarily have much interest in can be tough. In this case it’s just search traffic you care about, forgot about being sticky.

Step One: Find A Niche First you need to find niches where there is some traffic. You should use the usual tools, such as the overture inventory keyword data miner, to conduct research on how many searches are done for certain key phrases (look for sites with at least 1000 searches per month). Don’t aim for keywords and topics that are highly competitive, look for low competition with *some* traffic. Take for example Jonathan Wold’s Sump Pumps Information niche. How random is that! Do you even know what a Sump Pump is? I don’t, but he suspects enough people are searching for sump pump information online and he only needs a handful of them to click his ads per day.

The key is to find topics that people search for and advertisers use Pay-Per-Click marketing and other online advertising methods to sell to these people. Your niche content site helps to bring these two groups together and you take your middle man fee, with the help of the search engines for traffic and advertising programs for a monetization system. Always be certain there are monetization possibilities before starting a niche content site otherwise you will be wasting your time. Look for AdWord campaigns by doing Google searches for the niche you are considering - if you see several ads down the right column that target the niche then you know advertisers are paying to reach these markets. To be really thorough, log into AdWords and set some test campaigns up and see what the bid prices are for your keyword research subjects. If the prices are reasonable then there probably is some competition for those keyphrases from advertisers running AdWord campaigns.

Step Two: Scan For Competition Once you find a few niches you think have potential search those keyphrases and see what results show up. If the natural search result sites that turn up are badly optimized (look for low PageRank, poor title keyphrases and heading tag keyphrases) and you are confident that a site with well optimized content would quickly jump to the top of the rankings and by quickly I mean about 3-6 months (remember the Google Sandbox is going to impact how quickly you get high rankings) then you might have your first candidate for a niche content site.

Step Three: Build A Site I suggest you go with WordPress to manage your niche content site. WordPress is blog content management software that runs off a PHP/MySQL backend (this blog uses it). It’s very easy to set up, handles most of the search engine optimization for you and all you need to do is pump in the content and off you go. There are some occasions where a plain static HTML site may be more appropriate, for example when you only need a micro site of a handful of pages and it would be quicker to just set up the few pages using a HTML template design, but I’ll leave that up to you (read Bo’s Marketing-Syndrome post on WordPress vs Static HTML? for more discussion on this topic).

How To Find Content At first thought this would probably be the hardest part of using the niche content site technique - how do you come up with content for a niche site that very likely you have next to no interest in or experience with? Now if you are not the writing type and can’t waffle on and bang out a few key pages of content yourself by utilizing what’s already available online, then you may want to try these options: Use articles from public article repository sites such as Ezine Articles and GoArticles . Writers contribute articles to these sites that you can republish on your site as long as you keep the author’s byline intact. The downside of this is that other people also can do the same and your article won’t be original. However if your niche is small enough there won’t be that many other people out there discussing the topic (in fact you are banking on it) so if you are lucky enough to find some on-topic articles in repository sites, make use of them. Another popular method is to republish Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia contributed to by anyone and if you have ever used the site you know that it has entries on virtually any topic you can think of. Chances are your obscure niche content site topic will have some entries in the Wiki and under the GNU Free Documentation License you can republish the content on your site. Freelance writers all over the web are eager to take your money in exchange for their writing skills. Elance is the largest freelancer hub online and listing your article writing project there will flood you with responses. Most writers are pretty adept at producing content on almost any topic, even if they just regurgitate someone else’s writings in a new way.

A few thousand words shouldn’t cost you too much money. If possible try and establish a long term relationship with a good writer if you plan on needing their services again. There are special article subscription services that give members the rights to make use of articles, some even promise a certain amount of new articles on a range of different niches will be provided on a regular basis so as to keep members subscribed. The idea here is that you get access to an article pool that only other members are granted access to. This is deliberately done so the articles are only utilized by a handful of people and often membership sites will cap their numbers at a few hundred. Members can do what they want with their articles knowing that at worst only a few hundred other sites are using the same materials. Personally I have never subscribed to an article site and

I’ve read various reports, some good, some bad, about article membership services.

I’m skeptical about the concept and I don’t like the idea that you have to either choose a niche that directly matches the articles available or try and modify articles to match your niche. I also have no idea where article membership sites source their articles but I have a feeling it would be a room full of trained monkeys writing the new articles each month (or ahh, freelance writers of course, and let’s not talk about cheap Indian labor). Given that most members subscribing to the articles will be chasing the same niches this seems like a formula to guarantee you will have at least a few hundred people competing in your niche - not much of an opportunity then is it!

Please click here for read How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 2 Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

Generate Advertising Revenue For Your Website - Tips & Advice To Help You Achieve Better Figures

2008-02-29T23:28:00.000-08:00

Generate Advertising Revenue For Your Website - Tips & Advice To Help You Achieve Better FiguresBy: Andrew Long

Before you can generate any revenue from your site, there are a few main things to think about.

1. Do you offer a structure and layout to enable the upload and display of adverts?

2. Does your site reach a key target audience that will get your advertisers to spend money?

3. Do you have enough visitors to justify charging for advertising?

4. Can you offer sufficient tracking so advertisers can monitor resultsIf the structure of your website does not allow ad formats, then you should adapt your main design and take a look at how adverts can work around your current layout.

What you must do here is place ads around areas of specific interest and ideally within text content. It is common knowledge within the web advertising industry that specific text content lures people to read information and advertising is best used within good readable material.One thing to avoid is the use of too much flashy advertising in the left and right side sections of the pages.
The best pulling ads seems to be simple formats that blend in well with text and your own colour scheme, so test ads on a regular basis until you are happy with the results.If you have a site that reaches a good potential audience for advertisers, then you should be able to charge something for advertising space.

Of course, a lot depends on whether you offer valuable options and big enough selling points, but the main attraction for advertisers is the fact that you can capture the right audience for them.Is it true that the more visitors you get to your site, the more money you can make? Not exactly. A lot of advertisers will spend good money for reaching a higher quality of customer - in todays market, more is not necessarily best. It is true that more online sites can offer great click throughs and decent enquiry rates, but the quality of the potential customer to the advertiser is the key to long-term success.
Of course, to provide quality you need to be able to prove it is there for the advertiser.To prove the quality of response, you must be able to send the advertiser detailed reports on their web activity. Any website can provide a click through, but it is the name and address sales lead that impresses the most.
If you can set up an enquiry form link from each advert, you can then capture full contact details for the advertiser - what's more, it's instant and no other advertising media does this better than the internet. If you set up an enquiry generating system on top of your normal view and click stats, then you will be offering something of real value to advertisers.The main point to remember is that you want to stand out from the crowd, in terms of your offerings, customer service and communication. If you can build trust and credibility, you are half way there. If you have long-term happy customers, then you'll have a business model that will keep generating revenue time and time again.

Top Pay Per Click Search Engines: The Big Three And The Others

2008-02-29T23:20:00.000-08:00

Top Pay Per Click Search Engines: The Big Three And The Others
By: Josh Prizer

If you are looking to get involved in pay per click advertising or expand the current reach of your existing pay per click advertising, where do you turn? Here are our recommendations on where your ad spend is best used ... and a few tips to optimize your accounts.The Big Three in PPCGoogle, Yahoo and MSN provide the best results these days. They've morphed into more or less the same sort of PPC services. You can geo-target ads, you can set ads to turn on and off during peak times, you can split test ad copy, you've got complicated quality scores to optimize, etc., etc. Google still holds the lion's share of the search traffic, but each has something to offer.Let's Start With Google AdWordsQuality traffic is important and Google AdWords remains on top in delivering high-volume clicks that count.

However, don't sleep on Google's success -- you still need to monitor your results with frequency.
With enough the time, knowledge and the right tools, you can do this yourself, or you can outsource all that to a professional PPC management company.Keep in mind that pay per click with Google can sometimes be a challenge. Sure, the competition can be fierce in the PPC arena, and that can make things difficult. But the real challenge is how complex Google continues to get. "Quality Scores" play a major role these days and more bids come up "Inactive for Search." And there's more factors to consider in the making of a successful Google campaign. Don't be discouraged. If you make the effort to continually test and monitor your keywords, you can maintain a thriving account and avoid getting penalized. You'll also avoid seeing bid minimums raised or even being priced out. With a steady vigilance, you can finely adjust your ad campaigns to the point where you are actually paying lower prices, but getting higher ranks than the competition.

With any of the PPC engines, you need to make sure you separate out your content network advertising from your search advertising and track those separately. If you don't in Google, bad keywords are probably leaking your account right now.If you are an advertiser with a large monthly budget, you just can't afford to ignore constant vigilance with Google -- it will cost you. Either spend more time on it, dedicate more staffing and hours or outsource it to a professional management company.Yahoo Search Marketing: Still EssentialWhile Yahoo no longer dominates the pay per click arena as they once did, it's still wise to invest ad dollars with them. Yahoo Search Marketing (previously named Overture, which was previously Goto.com) made major changes last year in response to Google's moves in the PPC marketplace.Yahoo also followed suit with their own "Quality Index" ... again, this is something that you have to work at. Quality scores must be dialed up with continual testing. Yahoo won't slap you with the frequency and force that Google does, but you will suffer if you don't do frequent split testing to refine your ad quality.Throttling up the Yahoo Quality Index usually means asking and answering the important questions:
What makes you stand out from your competitors?

Does your ad campaign relate to your customers? With ad copy testing you want to focus on the three
C's: your Customer, your Competition, and your Company. Work it until you have an ad concept that consistently out produces the others. Then, work it some more. Use that as a control, refining and making small changes to variables to produce the best results.AdCenter by MSNEven though MSN was late to the party with pay per click advertising, they shouldn't be ignored. We've noticed some high quality traffic to go along with their very useful targeting capabilities. You'll be able to utilize the same geo-targeting type of local PPC campaigns as the others. Additionally, however, is the ability to target the demographics of users. For example, if you see high conversions on your website for a specific type of visitor, MSN will allow you to raise your bids when it finds those potential clients or consumers using the MSN search network.MSN also recently launched a new method to import your campaigns from Google AdWords. This will make your expansion easier than before. Word of caution when you do this: Make sure your Google account is as fine tuned and optimized as possible, or you will be simply repeating the same mistakes. If you have large Ad Groups with large lists of keywords, you need to break those down into smaller, more manageable ones. This will allow you to target the searches with more relevant ads.

Again, test, test and re-test that ad copy.The OthersWe've seen mixed results with Ask and Looksmart. You can find some traffic that will pay off one week, then next week you are flooded with bad results and your Earnings Per Click go south for the winter ... and sometimes the other three seasons, as well.

Miva can also be hit or miss. If you are doing a poor job managing your other PPC accounts, we definitely suggest you don't push your luck into any of these others. There is some good traffic there, but you have to double your efforts on tracking and keep a tight eye on results since things can turn sour fast. Avoid all the other pay per click engines.You'll find that the PPC programs of Google, Yahoo, and MSN are probably more than enough work to keep you occupied -- especially if you are playing the game correctly. If you are not doing daily ad split tests, if you aren't keeping track of sales results down to the keyword level, if you are not searching for the money-making keywords that your competition is using, then you are not using the Big Three to the fullest potential. Invest your time, effort and money there before pushing on to others...you will get a better return on your investment.

Continual Effort Pays OffIgnoring the daily management needs of your PPC accounts will most likely result in bad keywords depleting your funds. On top of that, good keywords are getting more and more expensive because your quality scores are slipping compared to your competitors. Under-performing campaigns cost advertisers a huge chunk of potential business. It's up to you to protect your investment with effective, intelligent supervision of your in-house PPC marketing or by outsourcing this essential work to a professional pay per click management company.

The Drawbacks Of Pay Per Click Advertising

2008-02-29T23:16:00.000-08:00

The Drawbacks Of Pay Per Click Advertising By: Brian Basch

Pay per click advertising is the latest and greatest thing to hit the Internet. It seems that everyone wants to give it a try. The concept of just writing an ad and leaving the work to the search engines is very tempting to advertisers.At first sight the partnership of search engine and advertiser looks ideal. The advertiser will generate an ad and rely on the search engine to do the rest of the work.

The search engine in turn will get leads for the advertiser through keywords. When a person types in a keyword into the search bar, the advertiser's ad will be seen when search results come up.However this is not really as simple as it looks. This is because keyword research is not so easy. Tracking through the search engines is not enough. The keywords you find here are popular and will bring up too many pages of results. It is good to know that most searchers will not look beyond the first 5 pages of their search results. This makes it very important to be listed in the first five pages, if you want to make money.A second thing to consider is the fact that the amount you bid per click on your keyword will be the deciding factor for how you are positioned in the search engine.

With the old form of advertising you would be paying for the length of time you wanted your ad to be seen, not the mount of traffic it created. The drawback with this form of advertising was that it could cost a lot of money.The next form of advertising to emerge was Pay per click marketing. The idea was straightforward; advertisers would simply pay a fee every time a visitor clicked on their ad. This meant that if the ad had a good ratio of clicks the advertiser would make more money. Next came the question of positioning your ad in the search engines. In order to gain a superior position advertisers would have to bid higher than their competitors.

Pay per click advertising is not without risks. Costs can rise dramatically and the advertiser can soon find himself seriously out of pocket. You need to be sure that an ad that is drawing a lot of traffic is in fact making sales, or you might lose a lot of money.There are many things that can go wrong in a pay per click campaign, and you will have to be extra careful, especially if you are new to this form of marketing. it is not so easy.

However you do not need to feel alone as there are many different marketing strategies to try out.It is important not to rely on one source for promoting your business. Savvy marketers use multiple ways to market their businesses and rapidly develop them into profitable concerns.

how to work part-time from home and succeedBy: Trina Stidham

2008-02-29T23:13:00.000-08:00

How to work part-time from home and succeedBy: Trina Stidham

You might think it would be difficult to work part-time from home to make money online, or perhaps you have tried but had no success. If you think so you may just be misguided, It is possible and if pointed in the right direction, quite likely you will be successful at it. First you must think about why you want to work part time, are you wanting to earn some extra money, or maybe you want to be able to quit your day job and work from home full time. Let us see how we can work from home to make money online by some legitimate ways.

Some Legitimate Ways To Run A Part - Time Online Business Automate your online business: Very important piece of your business. Set up your business correctly and you will enjoy the benefits of a automated online part-time business. Automating your business allows you to free up precious time and enjoy the best possible profit margins. Here are a couple of ways to achieve this, have your reply emails automated, instead of having to answer each and every one by yourself.
Or, you could automate the delivery of your articles to the hundreds of directory websites, saving you time by not having to contact each and everyone by yourself. There is even software out there that will help in constructing a website.Make your hobby your business and outsource: Now, the next important step is create a part-time online business on what you are good at, have alot of knowledge on or perhaps something you enjoy to do. Give this some serious thought and write down your ideas, ask friends and family.
By choosing your hobby, you will be more likely to enjoy the work more, and stick with it. What you can do is outsource the work for your part-time online business if you are short on time but have the money to invest. Use freelance writers to write articles, or use a labor force to build your adsense business.Use network marketing programs or affiliate programs to increase your online part-time business prospects: A very quick and easy way to start generating profits quickly. You could earn nice commissions on a small scale part-time basis, by making sales for other online merchants.

Try and build your own sales network and rake in the cash over time as you work part-time to make money with your online business. What these online merchants can do for you is, kind of work like your own salesman for your website as well as the websites you are promoting using links.Take up freelance jobs: You could work part-time from home as a freelancer to make money with your part-time online business.

Try giving copywriting, graphic design, programming, article writing or other freelance projects. Your part-time online business freelance business would work off of a bidding system. Not sure what bidding is or how it works?. With freelance bidding you would make a certain quote to your prospective client, on what it would take to complete the project and how much you would charge. Now, your prospective client will usually take the lowest bid for the project, so you will need to make sure your bid is good enough to land the business.Besides all these ways mentioned above, you could do a part-time business of selling items on eBay, try selling websites and domain names or you could even get paid for filling in surveys.

Create a website and offer a host of freebies like downloads, wall papers etc. on it and watch your part-time online business website grow in popularity as a pay per click site.

help! my google adwords quality scores are poor

2008-02-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

Help! my google adwords quality scores are poor By: Josh Prizer

For pay per click advertisers, getting high AdWords quality scores is vital. If you are seeing your scores marked as "poor" or tagged with "Inactive for Search" by Google, then it's time to take action. You don't want your once jumping pay per click campaign to be stagnant.

The problems? They could be many. It could be that your ad copy is not relevant and engaging enough. It could be that your keywords are too broad. It could also be that your ad groups are too large. Or, one of several other issues.To turn your ad campaign into a winner, especially in the eyes of Google, you'll need to make an extended effort. The changes and shifts you make may not be easy. You'll need to log in the time and effort. But intelligent effort can make you into a top competitor and keep your PPC cost down at the same time.The client accounts we see at our pay per click managment company almost always have to be overhauled.

Google Adwords has changed -- those old account structures are no longer as effective as they once were and you need to adjust as well.Look at your account. Are there a couple campaigns, with a few ad groups in them and tons of keywords in each ad group? Chances are you aren't as tightly targeted and relevant as you need to be for those searching on your keywords.To help your Google Quality Score, your ads will need to be dialed in correctly. Without focus your click through rates and ad groups will suffer, dragging down your entire campaign.A second way to boost your Quality Scores may sound simple in theory, but our clients have often had trouble with the execution before they came to us.

Do you continually test your ad copy? Are you running split tests daily on every keyword and constantly changing them to crank up your click through rates and conversions?If you are investing a good chunk of money in today's PPC marketplace, you've got to protect it. Not only is it becoming more and more competitive, the Quality algorithms that the PPC engines throw at advertisers force you to refine and optimize -- not once, but as an ongoing practice.Make the effort! A successful pay per click program needs a knowledgeable manager whether it be yourself or you hire out.

If your man hours are just not there, look to a pay per click management company. Don't short change yourself when it comes to the energy you put into PPC. Unattended keywords can drain on your funds on a daily basis, so don't delay!

Make Money Online - 4 Steps To Get You Started

2008-02-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

Make Money Online - 4 Steps To Get You Started : By: Brian McCoy

Have you achieved success with your internet business? Are you earning the kind of income that you had planned on making?If your answer to either of these questions was no, then maybe you need to make some changes to your online business.

1.) Capture PageThe first thing that you need to do is to create a capture page. An effective capture page is a one page website that is warm, inviting, and gives your prospects a snapshot view of you and your business. You want to peak their interest and invite them to enter their personal contact information (opt in) at the bottom of the page.You should include a picture and personal audio or video message welcoming prospects to your site. The idea here is to begin branding yourself online.

2.) TrafficMany online marketers are under the impression that all they need to be successful online is to have a website. This is so untrue. To be successful marketing online you need to generate traffic to get prospects to visit your site.There are many ways to get highly targeted traffic to visit your site. Some are free, while others are low cost options. Some of the best free options for getting traffic to your site are article marketing, YouTube videos, blogging, or chatting on forums. If you are willing to invest some money into your business, Pay Per Click advertising is a great option.

3.) AutorespondersOnce you have prospects visiting your site and opting in, you need to have an autoresponder in place that will send follow up emails to your prospects at times designated by you. The money is in the follow up, so if you can keep your opportunity in people's minds on a daily basis, you will have a better chance of closing them.

4.) Mentor Or Team DynamicYou will have a lot of ups and downs in your online marketing career. Especially when you're just starting out. To wade through the victories and the defeats, it is to your advantage to have someone mentoring you or a group of people supporting you.I would suggest that as you are just getting started, a mentor is probably the way to go. It is helpful to have a lot of 1 on 1 attention in the beginning. Then once you get rolling, you can survive on the support of your business team.In closing, your dream of making money online is completely achievable. There are great rewards that come with being your own boss and working from the comfort of your own home. Although there will be challenging times, there is no better lifestyle to be had.

online profit - money with affiliate commissions

2008-02-29T22:59:00.001-08:00

Online profit - money with affiliate commissions

When one reaches section three, this is probably a real gem as the author shows you a number of different ways in which you can monetize your WordPress blog. But be prepared to spend sometime on this section as it provides a good indepth explanation on how the author himself made a $15,000 income through just one blog post. Of all the sections you will probably find that this one alone is worth the money that you have spent purchasing the book. It is also here that you will learn about the ways to make money from a blog offline. It is through this authors plan that one can learn about how to create an extra $1,000 per week by the end of the year, which is a vast change from those plans which say "earn $$$$ in just 30 days" and so makes this plan more achievable. After reading section 3 you move onto section 4 and in this part of the book the author will explain the different methods that can be used to promote the sites that you build. There is an easy to follow diagram in this section which lists the kinds of sites that one can utilize and which will in turn help to make yours a success rather than a failure. Again this section is value for money simply because it is not often yuo will be provided with details of a traffic generation system for your site that is easy to master.It is not often that an e-book is published on a certain subject, which clearly shows just how useless others already available are. With the publication of WordPress Goldmine this is just what has happened. Where most of the other affiliate marketing guides ask you to focus on finding the right product through Clickbank and then creating blog in order to market it. With WordPress Goldmine you will find that this is not what you need to do. Instead through this book you will learn about different aspects concerning not only finding the right domain names abut also the right products to promote on your sites.

This e-book takes an in-depth look at not just the processes but also the different kinds of sites one can build. It also provides you with live examples that actually provide the value in this e-book unlike any other. What seems to make this book so special is that those who have already used it have found it easy to follow because the author has broken it up into five separate sections. Section one of the book looks at the ways of using WordPress for building blogs and takes you through the various phases of not just setting up but also running your blog in the shortest amount of time. Included within this section of the book are some bonus videos that will further help you to understand the whole process of making blogs from beginning to end.Whilst in section two of the book you will learn about the different kind of content you can use in your blog. In this section of the book, the author covers everything from using PLR articles to original content. In here, you will also find out how to get unique content posted to your blog regularly and completely for free and which will help you to develop yours in no time at all.In the final section of this book helps you to take your website promotion to a completely different level when building your site. Although some people may find this section a little daunting, the author has included several warnings at the beginning of it stating that you should have in fact mastered the other sections of the book before you move on to this one. When taken as a whole WordPress Goldmine is a superb guide to help with affiliate marketing. By using commonsense over unnecessary hype certainly made a pleasant change and could well lead to more internet marketers actually producing books of a calibre similar to this one.When taken as a whole WordPress Goldmine is a superb guide to help with affiliate marketing. By using commonsense over unnecessary hype certainly made a pleasant change and could well lead to more internet marketers actually producing books of a calibre similar to this one. Although WordPress Goldmine contains 110 pages, each single one proves to hold a wealth of information that makes it great value for money.

This book is ideal for those who are just starting out in affiliate marketing or have been an internet marketer for a while, because they will find information, advice and tips which can help to increase their online income within the pages of it. So if you are only intending to buy one e-book this year then I recommend that you go out and buy a copy of this one.

What it Means To Be a Search Engine Marketing Company

2008-02-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

What it Means To Be a Search Engine Marketing CompanyBy: Pradeep

Search engine marketing got a new lease of life in 1995 and since then it has just grown to become one of the most powerful medium to drive your online business. The sad part is that for many, this field is still new and unexplored. You can find numerous search engine forums and newsletters posting facts, steps, and tricks surrounding search engine or internet marketing. The most questions of them all are how to look for a famous and dependable search engine marketing company. Though this question may sound cliché but it holds a lot of significance. There are many website marketing companies who employ unethical or black hat SEO techniques to gain high ranking.It’s Brick Blue, the search engine marketing company in UK that really hits the nail on the head. Being one of the budding Internet marketing companies in the UK, Brick Blue knows how to rank a website in the shortest span. However, they never overrule search engine rules and are complete ethical to what they do.
Before beginning with your website marketing campaign, they’ll gather every bit of information required for ranking your website.
Their main aim is not just to rank your website but also generate quality traffic.Acting as a guide, Brick Blue provides internet marketing services in the UK as well as other countries across the globe. This website marketing company is a company that educates, performs work, analyses and solves problems, makes decisions, and promotes ethics. Following the right path Brick Blue simply promotes ethics associated with this field of study. Being a search engine marketing company they follow a simple and clearly defined path so that there are no hiccups. Any search engine marketing company in UK follow a contract stuff, in which various points are clearly stated. You can get desired ranking, if you don’t make changes online. So try to mention or clearly state the changes you are planning to make to their site in your contract. And do this before starting any work.
If you haven’t signed a contract of yet, just do it now.Many website marketing companies offering Internet marketing services in the UK are very particular about certain addition and deletion. Try to mention that the client should not change, add, or delete the new copy and HTML coding for minimum three months while search engine marketing campaign is under progress. If they still do, then you shouldn’t be held responsible for any goof up occurring in the near future. It has been seen that any online change directly affects the search engine rankings of your website. If you simply want to play safe and even cover yourself, don’t forget to mention that you will take no responsibility for the search engine rankings if they change, add, or delete the pages without your knowledge and approval. So, to boost your online business, contact the best and dependable search engine marketing company in UK.For more information about Search Engine Marketing services, visit::http://www.brickblue.co.uk
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

www.brickblue.co.uk www.brickblue.co.uk/services/index.php www.brickblue.co.uk/seo-plans/index.php

Benefits of Internet Marketing – Search Engine Optimization

2008-02-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

Benefits of Internet Marketing – Search Engine OptimizationBy: Steve Mallard

Because the internet has became a staple in the daily lives of the majority of people around the world, it is important for business owners to realize how much their company can benefit from having a properly optimized web site. Regardless of whether a company sells products or services, having a web site that is properly optimized can and will provide several major benefits for any company.Obviously, the first major benefit of having a web site for your company is an increase in revenue.
As long as your web site is properly optimized by a professional firm, your web site will help you increase your sales of your company's products or services. When a web site is properly optimized, it will be able to attract targeted visitors. This means that the majority of the traffic your web site receives will be people that are already interested in the products or services your company is providing, which will make the task of completing a sale much easier (instead of trying to complete a sale with an un-targeted visitor).
In addition to increasing your company's revenues, a quality web site will increase the awareness of your company's brand. Because people will consistently see your web site when they are searching for something in your industry, they will associate your company's brand and name as a reliable leader in that industry.Finally, when your company has its own web site, it will actually increase your company's credibility in the off-line world. Because people expect businesses of all sizes to have their own web site, when you are able to print your web site's URL on materials such as business cards or fliers, people will instantly feel that your company is more credible than one of your competitors that has not taken the time to have a web site created for their company.
In order to have a properly optimized web site that your potential customers will actually be able to find when they visit a search engine like Google, you need to work with an internet marketing SEO firm. In case you are not familiar with this terminology, an internet marketing SEO firm combines the practices of internet marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) to provide their customers with the highest level of service.
Internet marketing methods include search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising and viral marketing, while search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results. Although many firms only focus on internet marketing or search engine optimization, by choosing a firm that is experienced in both fields, you can ensure that your web site is properly optimized from every angle and provides the maximum amount of benefits for your company.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Internet Marketing Blog Internet Marketing

Increase Web Traffic By Seo

2008-02-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

Increase Web Traffic By SeoBy: Frank

As there are billions of web pages in cyberspace competing for attention, it is crucial that your website has an edge over the competition. We offer a wide range of effective and affordable web site promotion services to help drive traffic to your site. Getting the right Keyword is the most Important step in search website optimization of your website.
Some say that you need to submit your website quite often to search engines. Submitting your web site once in a month is good, but continous submission may lead to negative results.Even through SEO you can not guarantee yourself traffic unless you know how to do keyword searches and search on your competition first. Things you'll need to consider before implementing your SEO is; how many times your keywords are searched for in a month, how many web pages are in competition with you for those keywords, and a few other things that would go beyond the scope of this article. The key here is to try and use keywords that are targeted, don't have much competition, and are searched for more than 1000 times per month.
There is no point in optimizing your site for keywords that are searched just 57 times a month. If you search the Internet you will find tools to help you with all this preliminary research.Once you have found the keywords that you wish yo use on your site, you will need to do more research, but this time on the top 5 competitors for your keywords. There are a number of things you will need to look for, but most importantly is to find out how many sites are linked to your competitors, and which ones. What you want to do is get more incoming links than any of your competitors. You should be forewarned that it isn't all about quantity but also quality. Although it may be easy to go out and link to every site available, that is not a good practice. It would be better to link to 10 highly ranked pages, than to link to 1000 low ranked pages.It is possible to promote website traffic ranking for any type of website. We can apply both on-page and off-site optimization according to the websites.
In order to generate targeted traffic to your website quickly, we employ successful traffic building strategies that will produce the result that you really want. We work for both new and old websites.At OSI, you will get best services at cost effective manner. We continuously update our services and can work with the latest methods that convenient all algorithmic changes of leading search engines. Using such up-to-date methods, we can retain your traffic for a long period. Aside from sites linking in, other things to make note of would be the title, description, domain name, and keyword density of each site. Try to have more keywords than your competitors in each of these fields. When composing your title try to make your keywords appear at least twice without going over 12 words. While these SEO tasks can be performed manually, they can be awfully time and labour intensive -- especially link-building. That's why expensive SEO companies have traditionally had such a corner on the market, charging you thousands of dollars to generate guaranteed web site traffic. Thankfully though a number of inexpensive tools have recently been developed that will allow you to automate much of the job yourself.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
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Search Engine Optimisation

2008-02-13T06:40:00.000-08:00

Search Engine OptimisationBy: Maxim Garanichev

Over the last year there is increasing evidence that many CMS systems and shopping carts are being sold as ‘search engine friendly’, indeed at the Internet World show at Excel this year it was one of the main selling points being hawked about. Of course the promotional literature was avidly gathered in readiness for our research and investigation. Once back at the office we carefully checked out the advertised systems and then looked for ‘live sites’ using these systems. Closer inspection of all the sites we looked at showed they were only marginally search engine friendly and most would offer no potential for any generic competitive listings in popular search engines.
This really poses a number problems, it is evident that the majority of these development companies are clearly jumping on the ‘get listed in Google’ bandwagon that is clearly rolling at the moment. Fair due must be given to their marketing people who have clearly seen an opportunity to increase sales but in their panic they are missing the real potential and offering short term gains but long term failure.You see the best thing about this industry is that it is transparent, your website and its pages are either listed or they are not, the people who purchase this software will realise sooner or later that it has not done the job and the result is failure. Much of this failure will be pinned on the unfortunate SEO companies who are haplessly trying to get these websites listed and not fully understanding the scale of the task that presents itself.
The end result will be the panic introduction of many so called ‘content and themed’ pages, some of this will work in the short term but it is not what this is really about.The real picture is that the unfortunate people who are conned by false promise are like lambs to the slaughter, these buyers do not know enough about SEO to realise what they are buying is not going to do the job on the search engine friendliness front but they are desperate to get listed. The floundering SEO companies will get the blame because too few of them really understand just what it takes for a website to be competitive in the long term and especially where the market is at all competitive and will not realise that what they are working with prevents the software from delivering.In this industry there is a wheel that turns slowly, once it starts turning then sooner or later it will have completed its full revolution and when this happens many of those people who have been let down will come back into the market, they will be rather cynical and a bit wiser but still looking for the solution that will deliver.
The industry providers of these poor performing systems will lament the passing of the real opportunity, the opportunity to truly develop a world beating CMS that really is search engine friendly from all aspects. The current market is crying out for this, those systems that are currently being branded as SEO friendly will ultimately fail to produce and the clients who purchased these systems will lose confidence, money and of course some will lose their businesses.There is only one guarantee in natural search and its relationship with most CMS and shopping carts, it is not that they will deliver top search positions, it is that they will fail in natural search because they do not carry the functionality or the correct structure and none of them seem to be talking to the right SEO experts to deliver an off the shelf system that has the potential do deliver if it is harnesses correctly both on page and off page.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Search Engine Optimisation

Top 10 SEO Mistakes and What to Do to Correct It

2008-02-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

Top 10 SEO Mistakes and What to Do to Correct ItBy: Anthony Yap

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings (Wikipedia)This definition of SEO sounds simple, but beware! Search engine optimization is a minefield, even for professionals, and although necessary to a business, should not be undertaken lightly. Below, is a brief look at the top 10 mistakes and how to correct them.

1. Non-Relevant Linkage. External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engine algorithms and can be considered an endorsement of your site. But if you are being linked to from sites that have no relevance to your content, then that is now considered a negative endorsement and will not raise your ranking in the search engines. Ensure all links to your pages are from relevant sites. Be wary of link builders who acquire links from gambling, pharmaceutical or adult themed sites, especially if your site is not of the same theme. Link building is as much a science as it is an art, one we take very seriously.

2. Untargeted Keywords. The people who use search engines are ‘normal’ people who are not likely to use words used in advertising brochures. Get to know how your customers ask for your services/products and use these in your content. Often times, actual keyword research will surprise you.

3. Excessive Graphics and Flash Content. This looks good on a web page, but to Search Engine crawlers it means little. Search engines are looking for content and keywords and relevancy to the search terms. By all means have some graphics, but don’t forget the meat. This doesn’t mean Flash designed websites are bad necessarily. In fact, some big businesses do use it. For most webmasters though, Flash sites are best avoided. Unless your Flash designer does high-end websites and knows how to integrate the content and keywords within the Flash, hybrid sites combining Flash headers with HTML content will be a good option.

4. Believing all search engines are the same. What pleases Yahoo might not necessarily please MSN or Google. Optimize your content, keywords, inbound links, and internal linking structure so that there is something for at least one of the three top search engines.

5. Multiple Search Engine Submissions. In the very early days of search engines, this technique may have had some success, but now it can lead to slower indexing and rankings. A site with inbound links from other sites will get indexed naturally and search engine submission is not necessary. In fact, multiple submissions may be construed as an attempt to spam the search engines. The top 5 engines account for more than 90% of all activity so it is wise not to ruin your chances of ranking naturally in the search results (comScore Media Metrix qSearch data, August 2005)

6. Incorrect Use of Title Tags. Most people consider the title to be for their company name or product. Not so. You must include your most important search phrases within your title tag and if you do want your company name there, keep it for the end. Keep the title tag to less than 65 characters long to avoid the appearance of title tag keyword-stuffing.

7. Use of ‘Black Hat’ techniques. Techniques such as doorway pages, hidden text, and overstuffing keywords may have had success in the past but now they will earn you penalties and could even get you banned. Avoid them altogether if you are seeking long term success. Some black hat techniques can work on a short term basis, but in the long run prove very costly.

8. Expecting Immediate Results. SEO is an ongoing process and should be treated as such by your SEO company. Good optimization will involve building good links with quality sites and this takes time.

9. Use of Unethical SEO Consultants. Beware the consultant that guarantees rankings with no past clients to back it up with or claims of special relationships with search engines. Many such "consultants" or "experts" will probably take your money and run. Choose a reputable SEO consultant, one who will keep in regular contact with progress reports and updates.

10. Decide to do optimization in-house. Probably possible in the past, but now with ever increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, this is an area best left to an expert. Furthermore, the good SEO experts usually have other income streams from their online marketing activities and a regular paycheck to work full-time simply doesn't justify their time invested. We've yet to meet a good SEO who doesn't have virtual real estate bringing in a nice chunk of cash.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Anthony Yap is the principal SEO expert for SEO company SearchMarketingROI.com. Services offered include keyword research, SEO, link building, local internet marketing, web copywriting, and reputation management.

Free site traffic from search engine optimization.

2008-02-13T06:36:00.000-08:00

Free site traffic from search engine optimization.By: Steve Cowan.

If you are keen to create free traffic from search engine optimization, let me ask you a question. Have you ever wondered why certain websites come out at the top of the major search engines results pages?Assume that you are searching for online dating. So, you type 'online dating' into the search box on Google, and you see around 122 million results.However, on the page that you see in front of you, there are only 10 results out of all those numerous millions that Google originally found.

If your diabetes related website was to appear on this first page, then it is not hard to imagine just how many thousands of searchers would almost automatically become visitors to your site.Even appearing on the second page of the results will be no major disaster, as research has indicated that most searchers who have a serious need of knowledge will often look at least this far.But, of course, that tends to be as far as they will go meaning that, if you are on page five or six, you might as well not be there at all.Now, take this analogy one stage further and imagine that your site appeared on the first page of every major search engine results for online dating. In this situation, it will be almost impossible not to earn substantial revenues through your site simply because of the number of visitors who were dropping by your site every day.

It would simply be natural that, should your site appear on the first search page in all the major engines, then you cannot fail to make money every day, and all that money will have been generated by free advertising!It doesn't matter what your product or service is, this scenario is probably like an almost perfect daydream for you.It does not, however, have to remain an impossible dream. It does not take a lot of money, or any special talents or training to achieve consistent top-10 search engine results.You should, however, be wary of wasting your cash on marketing products that promise to bring you instant success by firing your site to the top of Google and Yahoo's search results in only a couple of days. Please do not be tempted to waste your money in this way.Because, as crazy as it will no doubt sound, this is exactly what lots of online business people actually do, without ever understanding that many of these products will actually focus on using tactics and techniques that are forbidden by the search engines themselves.

What this therefore means is that instead of your site becoming an instant success, it is, in fact, the quickest way of having your site banned by the search engines entirely.If, on the other hand, you learn and apply the correct search engine optimization tactics, then it is relatively simple to create a torrent of free traffic for your website. And, because these tactics are all completely acceptable under the engines 'ToS', there is every possibility that your site will enjoy long-term search engine success as well.Put another way, using the correct methods will provide your site with a naturally increasing stream of visitors, but, of course, there can be no guarantee that you always maintain your top-10 position without further efforts.Until quite recently, search engine optimization was the number one method for driving new visitors to your website without paying for them.

It is fair to say that this is no longer the case, as other traffic generation methods are now equally as effective as search engine optimization tactics. Nevertheless, this is not an excuse to skimp on the efforts necessary to make sure that your site is fully optimized, especially as it should take no more than an hour or two to do so.Do not be under any false illusions about search engine optimization. There is no secret formula for creating free traffic, by using such techniques. It is a relatively simple, logical process, but it is equally something that needs to be done correctly from the outset if you genuinely hope to see your website hit the 'golden' target of a top-10 search engine ranking.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Steve Cowan is a leading businessman in South Est Asia, and an expert on traffic generation for websites and blogs. Take a look at what he ha to say about driving free website traffic and grab our free 25 part traffic e-course whilst you are at it! You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.

Why Choose SEO Services ?

2008-02-13T06:34:00.000-08:00

Why Choose SEO Services ?
Implementing SEO services in your marketing strategy is a very wise thing to do for the following five reasons :

* The Absence Of Risk – often, paid advertising is subject to click-fraud risks and competitor’s unfair techniques ( examples of these techniques would be the usage of software that will click your ads for hundreds of times without any noticeable profit to your site; however, you will pay for each and every single click to ). Pay-for-performance programs like Google AdWords have advanced protection against this harmful behavior but the risk will never be eliminated. However, SEO is free of any potential risk unless you make obvious mistakes like spamming.*

Reliability – paid search engine placement or banner ads work right until the moment when the marketing budget depletes. After that moment the site disappears from the listings and the returning customers will not find you again ( nor will the new visitors ). SEO services will help buffer this process so you can gradually minimize the advertising budget as you will be increasing your results that are obtained from the organic search engine listings. Another advantage of this would be the fact that consumers prefer purchasing from a site that is ranked high in the search engine results rather than purchasing from an evidently placed advertisement.

* Brand Awareness
– a website that has a high rank among search engine listings means that more people will see the company’s name and become more and more familiar with the products as well as the company although they still haven’t made one single purchase. A recent survey clearly shows that consumers are twice as likely to recognize businesses that are ranked high ( top three ) in the search engine listings in comparison to those that are appearing in the regular banner ads.* Targeted Traffic
– the SEO services will bring paying customers right to your door step. These customers that we are talking about have entered your websites keywords or phrases into the search engines and the results showed your business. The SEO services will help you transform regular visitors into real buyers by analyzing their behavior once they locate your site. By utilizing the content of your website you will learn how to transform these visitors into buyers in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

* Affordability
– comparing banner ads with SEO services in terms of costs, the money that you will pay for these services won’t reach staggering sums like $15,000 that people pay for banner ads.Now we are going to offer you a small list of techniques that should be avoided at all costs:

* Keyword stuffing

* Automatically generated doorway pages

* Misspelling of well-known websites

* Hidden text or hidden links

* Cloaking and false redirects

* Duplicated content on multiple pages

* Other methods that try to trick search enginesAll in all, SEO is highly recommended if you want to make your business popular because popularity over the Internet is crucial as you will attract more visitors and if you play your cards the right way, these visitors will be transformed into first time buyers and with a bit of luck, customers.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Razvan Marian Jr. is the owner of www.huntingtraffic.com where you can buy quality targeted hunting traffic on content sites.

Directory Submission Service For SEO

2008-02-13T06:31:00.000-08:00

Directory Submission Service For SEO
Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building strategy. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Today the Internet is cluttered with thousands of millions of websites. It is impossible to do online business if you are not noticed by the visitors. Directory Submission service or website submission is the key to maximize the exposure of your website in the cyberspace or Internet. Evidently, increased exposure brings increased visibility which in turn boosts the sales of your service or product that you are trying to sell through your website. Thus, Directory Submission Service is an indispensable part of Internet Marketing that provides a better platform to your website to compete with the other online businesses.A directory is a website that contains lists of categorized links of several other websites that exist on the Internet. When a surfer looks for particular links of his interest web directories help him by providing the best links that include important and relevant information. For example, if you search for "interior decoration" a directory will provide you with several links to websites containing information on furniture and "interior decoration".
Actually the directories contain several categories of links on numerous subjects and sometimes they also contain sub-categories to make the search more specific for a surfer.Benefits Of Directory Submission:1. It's a fast and affordable way to get one-way links2. You attract buyers in your industry3. They generate traffic for your website4. Good place to find promotional partnersDirectory Submission Service is the most significant tool to increase link popularity and enhance the ranking of a website on the search engine. Directory Submission Service can be of two types – one for General Directory Service and the other is for Vertical Directory Service. The general directory contains a wide range of categories of links, languages and regions which make its scope more general.

The vertical directory or niche directory concentrates on the restricted regions, special sectors and single language, and has greater impact on SEO. For example, if you want to have information on "sports" your search will be more relevant if you go for a Sports Directory.So far we have discussed the scope of Directory Submission Service and now let us take a look on how Directory Submission Service works. Considering the scope of directory submission it is clear that directories are an excellent source to build one-way inbound links, which are most powerful for increasing link popularity. Suppose your have an online business or "retail service" and you want your website to be visible to the interested netizens for sales. You can take the help of a good Directory Submission Service provider. According to your preference, they will submit the link of your website to the specific category of any general directory or to a Shopping Directory (niche directory) that deals with only specific interests. Clicking on the link in any one of the directories will redirect the viewer to your website.
The first case will fetch you more average selling prospect while the second one will generate more sales. Directory Submission tops the list when it comes to promoting the web sites. When any web site is submitted correctly to the directories, it is observed that we get superior rankings in the particular search engines. The probable reason behind this is that almost all of the leading search engines usually crawls these directories whenever they need to update their own databases. Directory Submission is one of the most significant parts when it comes to your link building strategies. Directory Submission Service follows some specific methods to provide excellent visibility to your website. A good Directory Submission Service provider prepares some necessary and prerequisite information (URL, Title, Description and well descriptive Keyword) before it submits your website-link to a directory. It will submit your site’s link to the most appropriate category of a directory, thus, helping the site-owner to have more traffic inflow.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Read out Directory submission service. Check out directory submission benefits.

SEO Canada Internet Marketing

2008-02-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

SEO Canada Internet MarketingBy: Merilin Hooposhy

For all websites to receive traffic it is a must to go in for SEO Canada Internet Marketing Canada is become very popular with all website owners that expect quality visitors and sales from their website. It is also important to have a search engine friendly and user friendly websites. Know more about search engine friendly design read further. The importance of the DoctypeHTML follows certain rules-these rules are contained in a Document Type definition file, otherwise known as a DTD. A DTD is an XML document that explains what tags, attributes, and values are valid for a particular type of HTML.
And for each version of HTML, there’s a corresponding DTD. By now you may be asking, “But what’s all this got to do with CSS?”Everything, if you want your Web design search engine optimization to appear correctly and consistently in Web browsers. You tell a Web browser which version of HTML or XHTML you’re using by including what’s called a doctype declaration at the beginning of a Web page. This doctype declaration is the first line in the HTML file and not only defines what version of HTML you’re using but also points to the appropriate DTD file out on the Web. When you mistype the doctype declaration, you can throw most browsers into an altered state called quirks mode.Quirks mode is browser manufacturers’ attempts to make their software behave like browsers did circa 1999. If a modern browser encounters a page that’s missing the correct doctype, then it thinks “Gee, this page must have been mwritten a long time ago, in an HTML editor far, far away.
I’ll pretend I’m a really old browser and display the page just as one of those buggy old browsers would display it.” That’s why, without a correct doctype, your lovingly CSS-styled Web page may not look as they should, according to current standards. If you unwittingly view your Web page in quirks mode when checking it in a browser, you may end up trying to fix display problems that are related to an incorrect doctype and not the incorrect use of HTML or CSS.Fortunately, it’s easy to get the doctype correct. All you need to know is what version of HTML you’re using.
In all likelihood, you’re already creating Web pages using HTML 4. You may even have started using XHTML for your Web sites.The most popular versions of HTML and XHTML these days are HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Transitional. These types of HTML still let you use presentational tags like the tag, thereby providing a transition from older HTML to the newer, stricter type of HTML and XHTML. Although it’s best not to use these tags at all, they still work in the Transitional versions, so you can phase out these older tags at your own pace. In the strict versions of HTML and XHTML, some older tags don’t work at all.If this entire discussion is making your head ache and your eyes slowly shut, just make sure you use the proper doctype listed above, and always make it the first line of your HTML file. If you want a basic template to use when building either HTML or XHTML pages.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Merilin Hooposhy is an Experienced SEO and Internet marketing Expert Currently with SEO Canada Company Sempro. Search engine optimization Canada Firm. Internet Marketing Canada is necessary for all websites that expect good traffic

Success In The Online World With Professional Seos

2008-02-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

Success In The Online World With Professional SeosBy: Kathy Austin

"Out of sight is out of mind" is a true saying though it may be a bit bland and outdated. It is indispensable for every trade endeavor to realize the basic nature of this maxim, so as to triumph over the hurdles of cut-throat competition and provide evidence of its spirited edge over others. All the same, this tenet stands true for every business association and online businesses do not enjoy any imperviousness from this. However, the techniques or ways of acquiring the most feasible location for an online business may differ from those of the time honored off line businesses.Higher search engine ranking and online traffic Though the Internet might have bestowed many advantages to both business organizations and customers, when it comes to gaining that competitive edge, the Internet proves to be more of a disadvantage as the area of competition has widened from a small town or city to the whole world.

Probably this is the reason that it becomes difficult for users to identify the best business organization as there are innumerable search results that are displayed in accordance to the keywords of the query submitted by them.The ones that are displayed in the top rankings of the search engine are the websites that are most favored by the users as it is practically impossible for users to open every connection. Acquiring this traffic is certainly not sufficient. The website should also have the potential to convert these customer visits into profitable deals or valuable clients. This line of attack is called as conversion strategy. Web designing company is the one to guarantee that.

And so, explicitly stated, it can be said that gaining a better ranking for the website among the search engines and having knowledge about the conversioning planning in any field is the means to a successful online trade. On the other hand, there are many other factors that control the success. But the prime objective is to gain a privileged search engine ranking or an ideal location with search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a device that helps in gaining these better website locations that have been made available on various web directories. More than the preparation, it is important that the execution of online strategies or techniques should be effectual enough to gain a higher standing in the directories.Here are some important optimization techniques that are worth being considered:
The most important of all techniques is to have an original, simple and relevant content for the website and everything else is secondary to it. After this comes the keyword rich content, Meta tags, Meta titles, article submission, blog marketing, e-mail marketing, and PPC (Pay per Click) advertising. Exchange links and other such techniques that will help the web crawlers to recognize the website and place it among the top rankings. Apart from this, gaining high recognition today, affiliate marketing is another of the promotional strategy that can be used for the premier location of the website via affiliates.Web-Designing There are broadly two things that are necessary to keep in mind, while designing a website, i.e. to make it Search engine friendly and customer-friendly. Now that we have discussed the former part, let us take up the latter part. Making a website customer-friendly means that it should be able to provide the users what they want (content management) and making it easy to navigate.

A professional web designing team is the best to consult in this regard.Role of SEO companies All strategies that contribute in the development of the online business are called online strategies. However, after knowing all of them like website development, lead generation, PPC, and search optimization techniques, it may sound easy to have a successful online business. Nonetheless, implementing them requires in-depth research and cannot be achieved within a few hours or days. Achieving higher ranking in search engines and more potential traffic via SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a slow process, until they use black hat techniques which are acknowledged by the search engines are employed.Therefore, it is feasible to delegate this responsibility of implementing these online strategies to organizations that are proficient in the field. They handle all these strategies ranging from SEO techniques, affiliate marketing, to conversion strategies and web-designing and thereby taking online business to the zenith of success.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Kathy is a writer and marketer for Online Business Systems at SEOecom. She offers online strategies and tactics to business owners who seek to grow their business.

Things to take care before submitting your site in directories!

2008-02-13T06:21:00.000-08:00

Things to take care before submitting your site in directories!

What is a Web Directory?A website which has the listing of some websites arranged in different categories is known as a web directory. There was a time when people use to search websites from these types of web directories only. That period has created a boom in directories industry.Due to the number of visitors these type of directories were getting most of the webmaster started creating at least one or two web directories for him or her self. Due to this type of hype lots of web directories grown up during that period. Even today lots of new web directories are coming up.From the point of view of earning too these types of web directories are very much fruitful to the webmasters. Webmasters can even generate money from Google Adsense or from charging a few dollars to the owner of the websites who wanted to place there websites in some good place on that directory.

Even from the point of view of the webmaster, these type of directories are fair enough, since they can promote there website by just submitting there website in these web directories and in return they can get some quality one way back links and a good amount of targeted visitors and a better position in the SERP i.e. Search Engine Result Pages.Now, if these sites are so important for them then they must be aware from the process of directory submission, which is in fact quite simple. You just require a few things in your hand before starting the directory submissions.First one is the category for your website, it should be clear to the mind of the person who is going to submit the website. Some directories prefer a very strict rule for the proper category of the websites. So they will surely reject your site if you submitted your website in an unrelated category.Next is to create a few titles for your website.

Generally, most of the directories don’t allow entering some other title than the original name of the site, but if they allow submitting different titles then please submit something which is your main keyword. But it should not be only keyword; it should be something which has the meaning.Other thing which is very much essential for directory submission is the proper description of the website. The person who is going to submit the website should be accompanied with two or three different descriptions of different word length. The reason behind this is that different directories ask for different word length’s description, so we must require submitting different descriptions in different directories.Proper care should be given while writing the description for the websites; it should not be a collection of keywords only.

It should reflect some meaning.Hence, if we will follow these guidelines then we are sure that we can be able to achieve some good one way quality links for our website. These links will increase the number of visitors and rankings also and this way you can your self do the search engine optimization of your own website.REPRINT RIGHTS statement: This article is free for republishing by visitors provided the Author Bio box is retained as usual so that all links are Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Author Alok Vats is associated with many SEO India activities at AN Info Solutions. They are the leading SEO India company and they deals with PPC analysis, website design and much more.

3 Reasons Why Adsense Is Essential For Content Sites

2008-02-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

3 Reasons Why Adsense Is Essential For Content SitesBy: Alexander de Albuquerque
The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.

The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the Adsense ads. Also webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information search engines are providing and are more focused in making cash from these search engines.The first reason why Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced system that allows full ad customization.

Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their webpage layout.The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way the people behind the Adsense will get their content read and making profit in the process.

The second reason is the ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colours and pages within a website.

Trends are also easily spotted. With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. There would be time to sort out the contents that people are making the most clicks on. The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services.

All because of the content and its constant maintenance. As opposed to those who are no using Adsense in their sites, they are given the option of having other people do their content for them, giving them the benefit of having successful and money-generating web sites.Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site contents and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them. This is the part where the effectiveness is working its best. There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements. The cash generated only came into existence when the webmasters and publishers realized how they can make Adsense be that generator. In those days, the content were the most important factors that is taken quite seriously. It still is. With the allure of money, of course.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Alexander de Albuquerque, for car insurance please visit our site. Also, for used bmw please go here.Submitted by: where to submit articles

Boost your adsense and affiliates Income.

2008-02-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

Boost your adsense and affiliates Income.
There is a number of earning money online. Adsense is one of the popular ads serving program owned by Google. Google uses its search technology to show the advertisement on the site depending on the geographical location as well as some other factors. The individual owning the website on which the ads are posted is paid through the different ways including the pay per click and ad impression as an average.
An individual has to create an account on the Google adsence for earning money. But you must have a live site if you are looking to earn money though adsense. Once your site is approved by the Google you will start earning money by both clicking and impression of the ads. Adsense is getting popularity these days as a popular method of advertising as it is more effective than the banners and the ads are more relevant according to the location and some other factors. Though, it is not easy to earn the money using the adsense. An individual has to follow an effective strategy to earn enough money through adsense.
There are some effective tips that can help an individual to boost the sale of affiliate products on the site. Generate quality traffic for the site: You will be earning zero money if there is no traffic or most of the visitors are irrelevant to the site. To get the quality traffic for the site an individual has to get a name of domain properly matching with the type of product it is marketing. Post the description of your site on the popular online forums and search the people who are working on the same profile and try to post your comment on their site along with the name of product and the domain name of the site.
Join only quality affiliate programs: It is not a good idea at all to increase the number of affiliate to get more sales. Rather than it, joining the reputable programs and focusing on the proper marketing of a single product can generate more revenue. Joining a program just for earning some money quickly is not a good idea at all. One should follow a long term policy to boost the affiliates rather than providing weekly advertising tactics that is not good for the reputation of the site.Register your own domain: Most of the people like to buy a product only from the person they can trust. Having your own domain is always better to earn the trust of the visitors. Try to get a name that is more appropriative according to the affiliate product which you are selling. Create your own site and load it with the most relevant information so that more quality visitor comes on the site. Using of appropriate keywords is better for search engine optimization.These are some tips that can help you to boost the affiliate marketing. This is a very effective ways to earn money online. The traffic on internet is increasing rapidly so it is going to be a big market in future.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Ramil Alcibar is a full-time freelance web designer & developer. He has been online for several years and is also involved in hosting and domain reselling, affiliate programs and other online income opportunities. You can view his great online money-making resource blog at money.earnersclub.net.

Blog Advertising, 8 easy ways to profits

2008-02-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

Blog Advertising, 8 easy ways to profits

A blog is like a web page that is updated regularly. But, a blog can be much more than that. If you want to start a business and has a small budget, than there are a lot of ways blogging can be useful.On your blog you can put your sale pitches, Articles, web page links, and what ever, out where everyone can see by publishing them on your blog. You are than paid A commission for the sale.

1. The blog idea is great if your business is affiliate progroms. You put various links, banners products, and or whatever your affiliate program consist of on you blog. Your vistors click on these links and buy your products.

2. Another good reason for using blogs when starting your business is blogs is A whole lot cheaper than web sites. You can set up a blog for free. You don't need to buy a domain name, the cost of designing A web site, monthly cost of hosting and etc.

3. Blogs has picked up speed in the last few years. Blog marketing now days is the way to go, as of cheap advertising. Creating a blog and setting it up cost next to nothing, comparing to web sites. Including A RSS feed means you can keep in touch with your customers and prospects without having to email or write them. Blogs are easy to updated on a regularly bassis. Blogger.com has free bloggers and free hosting.

4. Discover How to use free Blogs And A zero dollar advertising budget To Consistently Generate Thousands Of Dollars A Month from blogging. Easy blogging means getting your mine on it. Make up your mine to do it. Get advice from the experts, the ones who are already making fortunes, More on this later.

5. To make an extra profit with your blog you need to intergrate Google Adsense on your blog. Adsense is the google program that pays you when someone clicks on the little ads that has been placed on your web site using the adsense cord provided by Google. Their are lots more contextual programs you can use in your blog, including Yahoo, msn, Kanoodle, Chitika and more as well as your own affiliates links. Another way to benefit from blogging is setting up back links to your blog pointing to your other blogs or web sites.

6. A blog is not the same as a web site. The posting arepresenting prospects with interesting bits of information about your topic or products. Posting regular will get the attention of your market and build interest in your product and establish your expertise. Offer subscriptions to your blog, your prospects can receive your recent posting in their email. Many blogs will let readers post comments, this provides for feedbacks and enables you to clues as to what your market wants.

7.You can build traffic with blogs several ways, through the blog provider, search engines, links to your web site or sites, 'pinp'your blog, this tells of your update and the search engines will pick it up. Link to your business web site, this will increase traffic to your sales page. Add an RSS to your blog, which allows other web site to run the content from your blog. When you post to your blog the information will be updated on the sites thats featuring your RSS.

8.Blogging has A lot less technical problems, less knowledge is needed for blog operation. Blogging has an extra edge over the competition because its real time, no waiting. Vistors can post their comments and suggestions to yoursite.

Be sure to post answers to all questions or problems in a quick manner.In summary, blogging is a great business tool and should not be overlooked. It is very helpful to beginner internet marketing because it is very costeffective and has no boundaries. Add your own creativities and you will have establed a successful internet business.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Author:William McRand:mcrand-blogadvertising.blogspot.com/ is deeply involved in Internet Marketing (Affiliate Programs). He offers free marketing advice. his love of marketing has developed into a full time marketing business, that

Start Your Business And Make Money Online Free

2008-02-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

Start Your Business And Make Money Online Free

As I started to make money online free, one of the things that I have came to realize was that there is way to much hype in this business. I am sure you have notice how so many marketers tell you how you can start making thousands of dollars a week with little or no effort by following there secret system to success. It’s all hype, and so I won’t be one on those internet marketers pushing that line to you. What I will tell you is that you can make money online free but it will take work on your part.
It will also take a little lowering of your expectations. That is why I have named this report “How to make Your First Hundred Dollars Online.” Once you know how to make a hundred dollars it becomes easier to make that second hundred and so on.In this report I won’t waste a lot of time on fluff. I will get right to the point as to what you need to do in order to accomplish the one thing all internet market want to accomplish and that is getting paid for doing what you do online. So let get started.
Plan Your StepsIf you really want to make money online free you must remember this one thing and that is you must start with research and planning. By starting with a plan you will be able to eliminate many problems you would normally face otherwise. Take time to determine what things you wish to accomplish. If you expect to make money online free then plan your work and work your plan. Doing it any other way will lead to costly mistakes that could be detrimental to your hopes of ever building a solid online business.Build Your Business Around Your InterestThe initial step in building a successful online business is to find a niche area where you have interest or passion in.
Here's how you can accomplish this:

1) Brainstorm some of the best niche concepts that you believe will work for you. It's much easier to build your successful online business if you love what you are doing.

2) If for some reason you can't find a passion of your own then, create one. Find a niche that interest you and dig into it until it becomes your passion.3) When all else fails, go for the money. Research to find out what niches are popular and make money. Find out what people want and sell it to them.
You will greatly increase your chances of success by doing so. There are a many places where you can go to find out what sells. Start out by doing alittle surfing. Perform some keyword research. You will soon find something to catch your fancy.Determine Your Target AudienceOnce you have determined your niche, it is time explore who your audience is.

Your audience may affect the design and content of your web site. Answer the following questions:

1) Who do you expect to visit your web site?
2) How will they find your web site?
3) What are their ages, gender, education, etc.?
4) What is your audience looking for; information, products, services etc.?
5) What do you desire them to do once they reach your web site; request information by signing up for something or, ordering some product or service?
6) What will you use to entice and convince them to stay or revisit your web site?If you answer these questions and other similar to them your will have taken a critical step in the development of your make money online free business.
These question will help you to focus on what important steps you must take to build, maintain and promote your business. In the end they will help you to increase your web site revenue, maximize your marketing spending, improve you web page customer conversions, increase your brand awareness and reinforce your customer loyalty.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Craig Cawthorne has been an internet marketer since 2001. See his base business home internet make money online opportunity mall. Also check out his make money online for free website.

Three Things You Need to Know To Make Money with Affiliate Marketers

2008-02-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

Three Things You Need to Know To Make Money with Affiliate Marketers

Every affiliate marketer looks for the best market that will give him thousands of dollars every month. But making money with affiliate programs can be a little tricker than that. There are tactics that used to work in the past and good ones that keep working now days. With these top three marketing hints, you will learn to increase your sales and start making the big money.
Here they are:

First

You should offer free reports to your readers. Did you know that a sale is usually closed on the seventh contact with a prospect? That's the reason why you should create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to your visitors after they input their personal information into your sign up box. Keep sending them good reports and fill them with you affiliate offers.When they receive your reports they will remember the product they wanted later and they can buy it now. Try to focus on important points like how your product will make their lives easier or a new way to make more money. But keep one thing in mind, when you use the word free a lot old spam filters will send it directly to the junk before your customer read it.

Second

You have to use separate web pages to promote each different product you are marketing. Don't do this big mistake trying to save few dollars. It's always better to have your site focusing on each and every product.Tell me one thing. When you want to purchase some product or service do you search for people that already bought it to know their opinion? The answer is yes, and so your customers do it. That's the reason why you should include testimonial in your site. But please be sure these customers are willing to allow you to use their names and photos. And never try to create fake testimonial. If you want to make serious money you have to treat your customers with respect and not cheat on them.You should write your sales letter in a way that each headline attracts the reader to read more. Pretend that you are writing to a close friend, and you want to explain to him how great that product is. If you don't believe what you are selling you can be sure your customers won't either. Writing a good sales letter is easy, keep practicing and sooner than you think you will be able to write real good ones.

Third

What will happen if a person that has no interest in your product visit your site? They will simple leave it right? Targeted traffic is a very important concept. You should keep that in mind when you are choosing the places to publish your articles. You should choose the right ezines and article directories.If you write a minimum of two articles per week and publish them in the right places that will bring to you targeted traffic you can be sure that in less than two months your site will be a success. Following this you can easily generate as many as hundred targeted readers to your site in a day. It means you can sell at least one product per day as usually one out of hundred people are likely to purchase it. These are very easy tactics and requires a little time and effort on your part. Try to use these hints for every affiliate program that you are marketing. You definitely can maintain a good source of income.Remember to always have fun when doing it and the rest you happen naturally.Good sells!

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
My name is André Palis and I'm graduating in Business Administration. I've been working with online marketing for four years. It's definitely a very good way to make a lot of money on the Internet. If you liked this article and want to learn more about marketing tactics, SEO, article writing and the best affiliate programs, visit BuildSuccessOnline.blogspot.com

Get in the Affiliate Marketing Game

2008-02-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

Get in the Affiliate Marketing Game

The Internet industry has had affiliate marketing for awhile now and it is a very popular business model for generating income online. It allows you to get products together quickly for your new online business quickly and cheaply.Even with the popularity there are still many in the internet community that really don’t know what affiliate marketing is.
Plus those that do know of affiliate marketing often times do not fully understand it.Most that are new to affiliate marketing just assume that they are going create big bucks in just a short amount of time, but they are wrong.Success with affiliate marketing is not easy and just does not happen overnight. It is like most online activities, it takes persistence and variety. You will need to develop and try different strategies to find those that work. It may take signing up for several different affiliate programs before finding one that performs well for you.
Every one will take time and effort on your part.Often expectations are high when starting out. Most think to make more they need to place affiliate banners all over their site, but this usually does not work the way they think it will. Too many banners will make a website look like a link farm with little value to visitors. Most visitors will not be interested, will not click on your banners and will leave quickly.
To promote affiliate products on your website they need to match the theme of your website. You need products that match the niche of your website so your visitors will have interest in them. Banners that you do place on your website should blend in well with the design.Some affiliates think that all they need to do to get sales is add the link to their site. Unfortunately that is not the case because affiliate marketing is also about advertising. To make sales you need traffic to your site.
The more that you advertise your site or your affiliate link, the more people will see is and increase your chances for a click thru.If you are new to affiliate marketing and have any of these misperceptions you might need to get a mentor to achieve the success you want. Some of the reasons you may want to ally yourself with an affiliate mentor are:Experienced affiliate marketers understand how the business works and can speed up your path to success by passing on some hard learned truths of the business. They can assist you in getting a clearer picture of what it takes.Any affiliate marketing mentor should have already achieved success in the business and they can pass on their experiences to improve your chances for success.You need a mentor there to teach you not to give up and to help you in developing traits that you will need.
Things like patience, hunger for knowledge, persistence as because affiliate marketing takes hard work and commitment.Mentors have been there and have the ability to guide you in order to increase your sales. Their experience and knowledge will help you generate more income.Affiliate marketing requires a proficiency in several things including link exchanging, developing newsletter marketing, forum advertising, search engine optimization and a mentor can ease the learning curve.To achieve success in affiliate marketing become effective, efficient and have a mentor there to help you along the way.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Gain an online presence for your Website by getting listed on The Authority Web Directory. You can sign up for their affiliate program and begin marketing the Authority

How Do I Extract The Maximum Money Out Of Google Adsense

2008-02-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

How Do I Extract The Maximum Money Out Of Google Adsense

Below are some tips to help you optimize your pages to make them more Adsense-friendly. Note that these tips deal with ad delivery rather than ad formatting or placement. While ad formatting and placement may affect ad click-through rates, they have nothing to do with the delivery of relevant ads to your site. Your site must display relevant ads before they have any chance of being clicked on.

1. Avoid too much content on a pageIf Adsense does not understand what is your page is about, it cannot deliver ads targeted to its content. Although a human being can easily tell what a web page is about by taking a glance at it, computer algorithms are no so intelligent. If your page contains too much content, chances are that it also contains too many seemingly unrelated keywords. Adsense becomes confused and displays PSAs or ads unrelated to the topic of your page. Try dividing the page into smaller ones, each focusing on just a few related keywords.

2. Avoid too little content on a pageIf your page contains lots of graphics and very little text, Adsense may have a hard time figuring out what it is about. This is especially true when the bulk of your content is derived from graphics and scripts. When possible, use text rather than graphics to display website names, page titles, and headline texts. Make certain to include your keywords in the title of your page and repeat them throughout the page. Avoid hiding your text through sneaky tactics, such as using tiny fonts or making your text the same color as the background. This may be construed by search engines as spam.

3. Repeat keywords that you are targetingKeyword repetition makes it easier for Adsense to decipher what your page is about. Do this in moderation as excessive repetition may be considered spam by the search engines. Excessive repetition may also make your writing sound awkward to the human reader. Instead of repeating the same keyword more than 5 or 6 times on a page, use synonyms and related keywords. For example, instead of repeating ?Adsense optimization? 20 times, you might try alternative phrases like ?increase Adsense revenues? or ?earn more from Adsense?.

4. Avoid acronymsI once wrote an article on pay-per-click advertising for one of my sites. When I uploaded the article to my site, I was surprised to find that all of the ads showing on the page were for Apple computer products and had nothing to do with pay-per-click. It later occurred to me that instead of repeating ?pay-per-click? over and over in the article, I used the acronym ?PPC? numerous times. As it turned out, ?PPC? also stands for ?PowerPC?, Apple?s line of Power Macintosh computers, which explained why I was getting all the Apple related ads. When I replaced all the ?PPCs? with ?pay-per-click? and ?pay per click?, the problem went away.

5. Choose keywords with commercial valueYou may get public service announcements rather than paid ads if your page deals with a subject matter whose keywords no one bids on. A remedy for this is to incorporate keywords with commercial value into your manuscript. For instance, if your page is on some obscure medical condition, you might try sprinkling a few drug names into your document to make it display paid ads rather than PSAs.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Tigran J. Baroyan is an Internet Marketer with more than five years of Online Business and Marketing experience that successfully uses the Best methods and technics to develop his internet projects. Free Viral Advertising With Viral Link TrackerSubmitted by: Free Article Marketer

Make Money Online And Obtain Financial Freedom

2008-02-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

Make Money Online And Obtain Financial Freedom

There are lots of ways to earn money online and supplement your salary. A simple search on any search engine will reveal various ways to earn money online and a good number of of the websites shown in the search results pages all seem to focus on similar ideas of making money. Work from home and make money online with affiliate programs. One of the best ways to earn money online is to construct a profitable websites that provides a regular income. If you are new to internet marketing, you need sound professional advice.

Marketing

Marketing a website can be rather time consuming for bloggers, webmasters and business owners. Don’t rely too heavily on any specific keyword, or search marketing system in general.
At the end of the day it is all about marketing, and the one thing worth tracking is results. There is no substitute for good content and aggressive social marketing. Find your niche and market aggressively to your chosen demographic. There are a lot of free tools available online that you can use to track your method used to find your site, visitors, length of time on site, page views and which search engine they came from.
All of this information will help you to understand your visitors and change your site to optimize your sales.

Traffic

Traffic is key to obtain referrals and to make sales which in turn increases your earnings. There are various things that you can do to increase traffic to your website, and that includes things like PPC, social networking, search engine optimization, quality content creation, consistency of posting and much much more. You will not make money online without traffic. Period. Even if your website is not perfect, if you are getting targeted traffic you will make some sales. Search engine optimization can be a slow and tedious process, but any traffic you get from the engines is free.
This makes a huge difference to your bottom line if you are not having to purchase traffic, that may or may not buy your products and services.

Content

People who are earning lots of money aren’t just posting links willy-nilly on their content sites without any fore-thought. You need to take the time to write original content at least once a week and engage your visitors. You will make money if you write top quality content and receive traffic to your site.
It's fairly simple, search engines love to search and find new quality information. Ultimately, webmasters optimize their pages in the hopes of making sales, or, for information based sites, getting advertising revenue. The most important thing is clearly going to be your unique, fresh content.How to earn money online is a learnt skill like any other profession. In order to earn money online from each visitor that arrives at your website, you should have a landing page which is specific to what the visitor is looking for. You will not sell red widgets to someone wanting to buy yellow lemons. There are hundreds of so called gurus online trying to peddle the latest get rich quick scheme. Ensure you research your new found gurus carefully. The majority of information on how to earn money online can be obtained for a small investment.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Nigel is a successful webmaster and publisher of an Internet Shopping website. This site showcases , among other topics, a FREE Make Money Online e-book.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - Why You Need A Website

2008-02-11T07:50:00.000-08:00

Affiliate Marketing Tips - Why You Need A Website

Affiliate marketing is making it possible for virtually anyone to come online and make money with little or no money of their own. You do not need to create your own product or service so it simply comes down to being able to generate sales. Learning how to sell online can be a great challenge for many people.Unfortunately most affiliate marketers try one or two approaches to sell and they usually fail and then quit.
Do not be part of this group. You must learn from your mistakes because people that are making big money online do things very similarly and people that do not make much money also do things very similarly. Sometimes it can take a bit of time and a few failures before you figure out the game of internet marketing.Most people want to make money online and they want to do it overnight without any effort. The problem is that this lure of trying to make quick money causes you to use strategies that are simply not effective. An example of this is throwing up a google adwords ad with a direct link to an affiliate page and then targeting any general related keywords.
This strategy rarely works and can cost you a lot of money very quickly.Remember that most people look at the internet as a free information resource and not a shopping mall. They do not make searches on their computer with the intent to buy something. Certainly there are a few searchers that do have clear intentions to buy so if you do want to target these then make sure to only bid on keywords that have the term 'buy' in it. However this is a small percentage, it appears that most people buy things online by being referred from sites they trust.The kinds of sites people like and trust are simply those that help them and offer them either free information or a free service. For instance article directories can be great for selling products because people will read an article, feel like they have done some research and then maybe they may switch into buying mode when they encounter your links at the bottom of the article which means your conversion rates will be much higher.
This is why creating content rich sites is very important because you must be able to keep the visitor on your site long enough for them to potentially switch into buying mode before they click on your affiliate links. People buy based on emotion and not logic and most people will not purchase something unless they feel that they have done some research on the subject. If your site can offer the research information then people will be much more likely to buy after they click on your links.
Make sure you create a content rich site related to your niche and add your affiliate links either to the side or the bottom of your articles. Also try to make sure your articles are unique and written by you as search engines are becoming more strict with duplicate content. You can use adwords to promote your site but also be sure to use article marketing too as it can be very effective at driving free traffic from both the article directories and also the search engines as your sites ranking increases due to increased link popularity.Also make it a point to learn about search engine optimization.
The biggest key to getting high rankings with the search engines is to create good quality unique sites that offer free useful content for its visitors. Ask yourself whether or not you would find your site useful if you were a visitor. Always try to give your visitors the best possible experience as this is also the goal of the major search engines too. You can do reciprocal linking or article marketing to help increase the visibility of your site on the internet as this is also important to better rankings. Build a site and do it well and in time you are sure to find affiliate marketing success.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Eleanor is an online researcher, author and a regular contributor to a site that shows people how to make money online. Be sure to visit and also learn about affiliate marketing too. Click here to get your own unique version of this article.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And The Beginner Guide

2008-02-11T07:49:00.000-08:00

What Is Affiliate Marketing And The Beginner Guide
When an advertiser get paid for every customer or sales genarated by him, it called affiliate or associate, a derivative term in Internet marketing. Affiliate marketing is the essential for all other Internet marketing strategies.In associate marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized to use E-mail, Ezine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, RSS Feed and Display Advertising for the success of the product.The web traffic can be tracked with the help of a third party or own affiliate programs.

A lot of work is involved in this process. At first marketing by this method involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc. But, after the invention of more intelligence and advance security this has been regularized to make it more convenience for doing business and shopping online.This even led to the better scrutinizing of the terms and conditions by the merchants. Affiliate marketing became more profiting with the opening of more opportunities but at the same time it also increased the competition in marketing.Due to this limitation, in house affiliate programs for merchants became a thing of the past and were replaced by external programs.

The companies that offered this service have expert affiliate and network program managers who have various affiliate program management techniques. These affiliate networks have {marketerspublishers associated with them who help them with the advertising part.CDnow.com was the first merchants started affiliate program who had music oriented websites. They placed list of music albums on their site and they paid others if they put those links in their websites when a visitor bought their album through their site. The first company to link with cdnow.com was Geffen Records.

Two months later, A woman approached Amazon that she would sell Amazon's books on her website and she should be paid a certain percentage in return if she sold Amazon's books through her site. They interested in the idea and started the Amazon associates program. It was more of a commission program where they received a commission if a visitor clicked their links and banners on other's site and bought anything through it.Since its invention, the affiliate network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites, the most common being adult and gambling sectors. In UK alone, affiliate marketing produced 2.16 billion.

A few compensation payout plans are Cost Per Sale (CPS), Cost Per Action (CPA), Cost Per Mile (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC). The first two are the more famous methods today. This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor which turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate commission. CPS and CPA have a compulsion that the visitor not only clicks on the link but also buys something or signs up for some service after it which proves that he is among the targeted audience.Only in the above case the affiliate gets paid. S

o the affiliate should try to send as much targeted visitors as possible to the advertiser in order to increase his/her returns and for this reason affiliate marketing is also known as performance marketing because it totally depends on the performance of the affiliate. The affiliate team can be differentiated from a sales team from the nature of their jobs. The job of the affiliate team is to drag targeted traffic to a point and from that point it's the job of the sales team to influence the visitor to buy the product or the service.This is a very effective kind of method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant. Many businesses apply to this method of marketing for their success.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Set up your own Affiliate Marketing website in matter of a day. We will help you with free set up, follow up newsletters... Or learn more about Affiliates Programs Articles

Internet Marketing Business - Sell your Internet Marketing Business Globally through a B2B Exchange

2008-02-11T07:48:00.000-08:00

Internet Marketing Business - Sell your Internet Marketing Business Globally through a B2B Exchange
Internet marketing is a lucrative business. You can earn as much as several hundred dollars overnight if you know how to do it. Aside from selling products and services through your Internet marketing website, there are other ways of earning online such as joining affiliate marketing programs, article marketing and publishing, webpage optimization services, and other Internet marketing-related services.

It is not just a lucrative business. It is also a place for a wide range of opportunities for earning. Before you step your feet in the soils of Internet marketing, you need to educate yourself about the basics of this business opportunity as well as the methods that you can use to increase the marketability of your Internet marketing business. In other words, as an Internet marketer, you should be familiar with different marketing methods, especially the B2B exchange agency. Although B2B is quite unfamiliar for a majority of online-based businesses since most of them caters to specific needs of their online clients (or known as B2C or business to customer marketing method),
B2B is important to online-based businesses in other ways. B2B exchange agency is one of the fastest-growing marketing methods for online-based businesses looking to augment their clientele base outside the local market. It offers good potential contacts with thousands of prospective clients in a single location. Internet marketers who got a first try of the B2B exchange agency discovered an instant “goldmine”—unexpected number of ready-made customers without exerting too much effort on getting them. And there are more benefits of a B2B exchange agency in just a short period of time.

Before we reveal the additional “goldmines”, you need to understand first what exactly a B2B exchange agency is. It is an online-based exchange agency that serves as an intermediary between buyers and sellers in making business transactions (particularly business-to-business transactions, hence the term B2B applies).
It allows an efficient conduct of transactions between two transacting Internet marketing business online.It is capable of helping online-based businesses in streamlining their business processes as well as forming effective business partnership among two Internet marketing businesses and boosts their sales volume and generated revenues. Aside from getting an augmentation for their respective clientele bases, there are other benefits that they can derive from getting the services of a B2B exchange agency.

• The integration of your products and/or services offered online with the electronic cataloging services of the agency will help you manage the product inventory of your Internet marketing business.

• You will be able to serve both your business partner (affiliate) and customers effectively. This will bring higher efficiency in terms of customer service.

• Through a B2B exchange agency, you have a new sales channel for your Internet marketing business. You will be exposed to a new targeted audience which has been untapped before.

• The agency works like an outsourcing firm, taking care of some aspects of your Internet marketing business, particularly the sales aspect. This will help you reduce unnecessary paper works and focus on the core business of your investment.

• Since you are exposed to a new targeted audience, you can receive a new set of valuable feedbacks from your business partners and new clientele. You can build new partnership that will help you generate higher revenues. Although there are several benefits that you can derive from getting the services of a B2B exchange agency, you need to be careful in choosing the one that will serve your specific needs.
Remember that not all B2B exchange agencies will work for you. To give you a better picture of a good B2B exchange agency, you need to establish certain financial goals. Possible objectives that you may consider must be to:

• Produce increased sales volume;

• Obtain access to huge quantities of sellers and/or buyers;

• Locate importers and distributors;

• Enhance client and business relationships through online-based tools;

• Expand market shares;

• Automate business process, from selling to closing transactions; and

• Conduct market research and adapt useful marketing system. It is important for every Internet marketing business to increase its marketability so that it could generate more revenues. With a B2B exchange agency, you might wake up one day with a smile on your face—your $1,000 check is right at your doorstep.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Daniel Bell is an Internet Marketer who has been reviewing home based online business opportunities for many years and webmaster of www.manomanju.com ...Learn how to start your home-based online business at www.manomanju.com

Affiliate Marketing What's It All About

2008-02-11T07:46:00.000-08:00

Affiliate Marketing What's It All About

Affiliate marketing has several descriptions, however each have the same significance. Affiliate marketing is a large business enterprise piece on the Internet. It's a combined endeavour between merchants and an affiliate’s website. Since several years now, affiliate marketing has demonstrated to be a efficient, important formula of delivering long-tern solutions. It's become renowned for internet sites who are trying to earn both extra or additional income for their site. Day-after-day, people get involved in affiliate marketing and need to make money out of it. But in numerous cases, these recently affiliates don't fully understand the affiliate world and make high-priced errors. Put differently, affiliate marketing has oftentimes been misinterpreted. Among the more common misconceptions that are being associated around affiliate marketing is “selling”, although selling makes up an significant activity of affiliate marketing and the key function of a business operation. Some other is that affiliate marketing is generally associated with “advertising”.
Although the importance from advertising in marketing a certain product is not to be underestimated, the truth of the matter is, advertising same as selling, is merely a part of the several works of marketing. In affiliate marketing, an affiliate is paid for every visitor, subscriber and/or purchaser offered through his attempts. The said compensation can be made based upon a certain value for each visit. The most appealing aspect of affiliate marketing from the merchant’s vantage point is that no payment is owed to an affiliate until effects are appreciated. Affiliate marketing is normally being operated by affiliate networks and this affiliate networks are compiled from two working bodies, the group affiliates and the group merchants. For each one has their particular function and purpose when it comes to affiliate marketing.
The affiliate network plays a third company between the merchant and the associated affiliates. The network offers the technology to deliver the merchant’s campaigns and offers. The affiliate network as well takes in commission fees from the merchant and then pays the affiliates which are part of the program. The merchant is some web site proprietor that wants to take advantage from performance based marketing. The profits to the merchant are numerous. First of all, the merchant maintains and operates the affiliate program. Whenever it would be extracted, the merchant needs to do their part by searching interested affiliate websites to guarantee that they are a better fit for that particular website.

Finding a match for their merchandise would be the significant to several generated profit. The merchant has access to markets and purchasers without him spending valued time searching out. Banner ads on affiliate sites are not distracting to the site user. It could bring on interest for that product and drive the consumer to the merchants’ website. They are as well the merchant who determines how much he is willing to pay for each sale that results by a visitor sent from an affiliate. The affiliate or the affiliate marketer as well sees several benefits. The affiliate is a web site owner that promotes one or more merchants and their affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can give a full-time revenue for the affiliate.
Merely this isn't an easy project to reach. The affiliate needs to experience a better agreement with the merchant on what the commission will be, expected payment method and time called for in the contract. The affiliate has as well the obligation to represent the merchandise their user based would be most interested in. For instance, if the site has a user base of primarily homebody mothers, then on-line job openings such surveys would be a better match for them. This group would likewise appreciate direct links to children’s products and informational sites. Merchandisers frequently provide aimed, best-seller details and personal support to their affiliate. They oftentimes offer sales event* promotions that will benefit the merchandiser as well as the affiliate.
Affiliate marketing is a expectant situation for both the marketer and the affiliate. Whenever they would work together, they can be an reward to both. Plus the reality that it appears to make good sense, it's easy and affordable way to begin, and you can be up and operating within a few days. But there's one matter to consider, it's how to acquire traffic and make your offering unlike all others.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Eduardo writes about affiliate marketing and other related to issues.Discover how to earn money online from an super affiliate by visiting; www.secretaffiliateweapon.com/?hop=edward9591

Easy Make Money Online Free Interesting Guideline

2008-02-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

Easy Make Money Online Free Interesting Guideline
As you search for Easy Make Money Online related information or other information about website affiliate programs, earn money survey, business strategy, make money online quick, make easy money online or making easy money online, take your time to view the below article. It will provide you with a really refreshing insight into the Easy Make Money Online information that you need. After going through it you will also be better informed about information in some way related to Easy Make Money Online, such as investment opportunity, small business broker, blog, business easy internet make money online zone, easy make money online way or even survey make money online.
The World of Easy Make Money OnlineSo friends, many people will look at online businessman or entrepreneurs and think that you have to have high education in information technology for making money online but in reality it is common man or woman in the normal day-to-day life making huge profits in World Wide Web. But you are here to know how you will get your share of the profits.From the past you will come to know that the two main methods the people have used most of the time to make money online are

1. Make your own new product or

2. You can choose any product from any market and improve on it.Now in the case if you think you have analytical and inventive mind then you can choose first option. But this case is not possible for most of the people because they want maximum output with minimum input.

Now have a look on other auction websites like EBay and see which sellers are doing good space business.
You will see that most successful auction websites are in CD or DVD trading. Most have taken the same item and rebranded it in a unique way and put their own name to it. Many people have made internet riches with this method.So how you do the same? Look at your hobbies or fields that interested you most in your life. This is because if you are going to spend a lot of your time in a particular field you must have great level of interest that will keep you going moreover your interest will be reflected in your business and this thing will keep you going when going is tough. You can start from auction sites because they are very easy to run and very cheap to set up. When you become successful in your initial efforts then later on you can increase look and feel of your site.

KEEP READING -- That's right. Keep reading and you will find other Easy Make Money Online related information that will not only excite you but also educate you about Easy Make Money Online in general and even other best paid surveys, civil engineering jobs, high profit business, how to money, internet make money and business make money online information.Choose a product and see what your competitors are selling this product for. Now search for all the different resources you can find for this product in your area. You can find online retailers and wholesalers for this product in various auction website. In this transaction you have to make a minimum profit margin of 25% to make this venture feasible and if you're capable of increasing the margin then your future is bright.Now if you are in the situation where you are selling information online, than you need to write your own e-book in your own style and unique way. When you follow his advice you will be having your own unique product that you can sell over and over again in future for maximum profits, as the saying goes money for old rope.

Be careful about your words and writing style in order to avoid duplicity issue. You will see that many people in past had generated lot of money by duplicating a product in their only style and selling it in unique way of example cars, electronics and even computers.You see that this method is mainly targeting at auction websites and you know there are many ways to earn money online which includes building your own Web sites. Building of the site is totally other issue and you need separate guidance and advice on this matter. You can get that information from the website listed below.Unlike many people out there, don't forget that even if this article related to Easy Make Money Online doesn't cover all the basics you wanted, you can always take a look at any of the search engines like Google.com or Search.Yahoo.com for more Easy Make Money Online related information.Many folks seeking online for articles related to Easy Make Money Online also sought for articles about making easy money online, how to money, and even business make money online.

LAST THOUGHTS -- Lots of people who read this article agreed that it not only helped in their quest for Easy Make Money Online information but also business innovation, earn money website, careers in telecommunications, make easy money online with, easy ways to earn money online and other earn easy money online related information.Deepak Kulkarni is a prolific writer who has taken the time to write very helpful and insightful articles on various subjects such as Easy Make Money Online and other information in some way related to surveys, making money now, save money, easy way to make money online, earn money and even making money online.

ABOUT THIS WEBSITE -- This website contains specific and general information related to Easy Make Money Online. It also contains information somewhat related to earn money website, business easy internet make money online, car insurance rates, earn money, business easy internet make money online and 3 easy make money online ways.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
VISIT here right now to get your free report on easy make money online and explore untold secrets of online money earning methods. earningmoneyonline.information-

Make Money Online Newbie

2008-02-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

Make Money Online Newbie

Have you spent spent hours searching online affiliate programs or how a newbie can make real money online?Are you new to trying to make money on the internet and have tried online "lotteries" and other free online services promising $$$ without any success? I had done the same and was coming to the conclusion that I would need to get into computer programming or other IT programs to earn a living online.Being new to making money on the internet, most newbies will fall for at least one "get rich quick" idea. Many of these get rich quick schemes are like buying fake jewelry from a street vendor.
Their sales pitch was great and even though it seemed 'to good to be true', you think you have gotten a great deal. Then, after trying on your new jewelry, you notice that the gold is only paint on the surface and that other than the great outside appearance, you have bought something of almost no value. It's no wonder many newbies are giving up trying to find ways to make money online.While the internet is saturated with websites offering "make money filling out surveys" or "data entry employment", there are a few that offer good value. People are now getting more involved in Internet Marketing and promoting software and digital products along with many other items.Even with Affiliate Marketing being a great place for newbies to get their feet wet, many will find themselves wondering what they should sell? You will achieve success by coosing just one Niche market to start and giving it 100%.
The leading causes to failure in Affiliate marketing is that people get sidetracked half way into a project or decide to throw in the towel after a few unsuccessful attempts.When researching campaigns, many people feel they need to run many campaigns at the same time. This causes them to spread themselves too thin and often they will be too worn out to continue before seeing a profit. With the Internet full of fierce competition, it's advisable to focus on one niche market at a time than to be a "Jack of all trades"If you're a newbie looking to join a trusted and successful Affiliate marketing website, they're out there and you just need to look around. It's best to find one that requires a membership as many of the free sites attract scammers and spammers who prey on people looking to make a living online.
I registered for more than 25 free sites before learning that the sites you pay member fees for, ultimately have the best value.If you do happen to fall for a scam, learn from your experience. It's always the people that continue to move forward that end up being successful.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Ready to make money from home? please visit Make It Legit for proven methods to make a living from home

Take Your Website to the Next Level with Google Adsense

2008-02-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

Take Your Website to the Next Level with Google Adsense
If webmasters want to earn more with their websites, a good way to do it is through Google Adsense. There are lots of webmasters working hard to earn some good money through their sites. But then some of the “guros” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Google Adsense ads on their sites. What makes these webmasters different from the others is that they are different and they think out of the box.You will be very suprized how easy some of these stadiges are to inpliment.Here are some of the best proven ways to improve your Adsense earnings.Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go best with the background of your site. If your site has a blue background, try to use blue as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Google Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.Concentrating on one format of Google Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280).
This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the Google ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.Remove the Google Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top were they will be seen. Do not try to hide your Adsense. 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.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, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using 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.Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you.
It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Think Before Buying Promotional Pens

2008-02-11T07:34:00.001-08:00

Think Before Buying Promotional Pens
Every business today has to strive hard to succeed in the competitive environment around it. That is why it becomes important for them to advertise their products and services effectively. Keeping in mind the development in all spheres of life, a new mode of advertising was devised a few years ago. Now companies promote their brands by giving out promotional products to their target audience. The markets today are flooded with numerous kinds of promotional products. So, it becomes important for any company to make appropriate selection of these promotional articles for advertising. Of all these promotional items, promotional pens are products that can be used by any and every kind of business as efficient advertising tools. Without doubt, the promotional pens suit all types of businesses, and they can be given to all types of customers. However, one also needs to choose the appropriate design and the quality of the printed pens that make the big difference in the brand promotion aspects. There are different types of pens, broadly categorised as Plastic Pens, Metal Pens, Pen Sets, Recycled Pens, Multipurpose Pens, Novelty Pens and Highlighter Pens. Under each section, you can find the difference in their quality, brand, colour, and other features. Thus it becomes important for you to settle for the best one for your business.

At www.yesgifts.co.uk, you can see one of the best collections of pens that are widely used by different companies in the UK. Each of these pens has its own special features. All of them excel as brand promotion articles. To pick the most appropriate printed pen, firstly, you have to consider the target audience. Depending on the budget allotment and the number of receivers, you can finalise on a set of pens that falls under the desired price range. Once the price range is finalised, you have to consider the different features such as colour, ink choices, additional features, and of course, the brand promotion features. For example, if your target group is of below 20 years of age, you can choose the pens from the collection Novelty Pens or Plastic Pens. These two categories suit them well because they are available in a wide range of colours and added features. If you are targeting a selective group of people, for example, a group of elite customers, media persons, shareholders or your employees, you have many options to choose from. The best quality branded pens such as Parker, Prodir, Balmain, etc., are there for you. The Pen Sets contain a good selection of best quality pens that can be given as executive pens. To see the details of each of the promotional pens, please log on to the website www.yesgifts.co.uk .

Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Tina Rinaudo is one of the leading lights in the UK promotional pens industry. Tina is the co-founder of YesGifts, the UK's fastest growing online promotional items resource specialising in promotional pens, mugs, mouse mats, conference items and much more. For more details please visit www.yesgifts.co.uk

Why Promotional Products Work

2008-02-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

Why Promotional Products Work

There are a multitude of things you can do with promotional products. Where before a promotional product falls into a certain range, recent innovations and concepts allow for a more creative breathing room, such that you can even personalize a fairly common item and rework it into something highly artistic and functional. For many business-minded people, such a product can be used to complement services or products they primarily offer, and can even be an added perk for purchases.
Working with the concept that nothing is ever free, the hook of a promotional product is that you can purchase it for less than it normally goes for, or as something that comes in package with a main product.Take, for an example, a simple pen. With the right styling and packaging, this item is the perfect complement for someone who produces personalized notebooks and stationeries. Although it does not necessarily need to be part of the purchase, it’s fairly logical that your customers will find it extremely useful. Add in the fact that if you style the pen as something that targets a specific market, or make several designs of it, you may even find that at some point, you’ll have an entirely new item to add to your roster of items.From corporate giveaways to freebies to all-year-round gifts, promotional products are a staple in the market. You could take a very basic item and transform it into something quite unique, if you are able to zero in on what suits a particular market and make sure that the products you produce are aesthetically pleasing as well.
A company might have need for Christmas giveaways and products could range from office items to simple gadgets, even car accessories. A group might be producing a Valentine’s Day ball and you can be sure that the “all-hearts” theme can extend from the usual balloons to heart-shaped cakes, dinnerware and even charm bracelets.There is a wealth of ideas to be found if you know where to look. If you are looking into producing promotional products as a business, it would be a good idea to list all the occasions and holidays you see coming up. From there, conduct a market study of what could click. Observe what seems to be garnering repeat orders from those who already supply promotional products. This would not really require hardcore research, merely being observant of which items are more popular than others. If you find that you have the skill to produce the simpler ones, then that would be better in cost effectiveness. That means that you can bring down the cost and offer your products at a more competitive rate.
If, however, you would need to get products from a supplier, there’s still a lot you can do to jazz up the products and turn them into something unique. Make sure that you do not head off planning the grandest things right off the bat. Sometimes, it pays to start with the basics first, then work from there. With several test runs and more observation, you’ll discover soon enough what niche you can explore and develop your own promotional products line from there.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Gareth Parkin is the co-founder of Ideasbynet, the UK's largest online source of promotional products and promotional gifts. He has taken the UK gift market by storm by the application of modern business thinking and the latest search engine marketing techniques. For more details on promotional products visit www.ideasbynet.com

Promotional Sticky Notes - Useful In Nature

2008-02-11T07:31:00.000-08:00

Promotional Sticky Notes - Useful In Nature
The different promotional gifts are gaining a lot of importance these days and are increasingly being used for promoting and advertising one’s brand. As compared to television advertisement or newspaper advertisements, the promotional items provide a much cheaper option that is affordable by everyone and can easily fit into your budget. If you are making use of promotional products for promoting your brand then ensure that the promotional items that are to be used are of good quality and are useful in nature. The promotional sticky notes can be perfect promotional gifts as they are very efficient and are useful also. The promotional sticky notes are one of the most economical promotional items that can be gifted to your consumers or can be used for promoting your brand. The brand name and business logos are imprinted on these promotional sticky notes which advertise your company and get good publicity. The promotional sticky notes are gifted to the consumers and are used as promotional giveaways during trade shows and exhibitions. These free promotional gifts impress the receivers and attract them towards your brand. The printed sticky notes are one of the most useful promotional products that are very useful to everyone. These promotional gifts are used by employees and executive and are useful in homes also.

The promotional sticky notes can be used for scribbling down important messages and conveying it to others. For instance, if you have to go out and need to inform the members of your family where you are then you can just scribble the message on these promotional sticky notes and stick them at places where they can be noticed easily. At office also you can use these promotional sticky notes to give out special message and convey it to others around you. You can also use these as memo and write down important messages on it and stick them around your work place so that you are reminded of the task or event constantly. The promotional sticky notes can be used to note down important telephone numbers or messages also. The personalised promotional sticky notes would make your brand look more professional and would leave a good impact on your clients. Make use of stylish promotional sticky notes as they would be highly efficient in attracting everyone’s attention and in promoting your brand. There useful nature makes them one of the most effective promotional gifts that can promote your brand and can popularise it easily. Log on to www.yesgifts.co.uk for the best promotional items which has the best variety of different promotional items that can be personalised and used for promoting your brand. View the online catalogue of the website to know more about the promotional products and there prices.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com

Tina Rinaudo is one of the leading lights in the UK promotional sticky notes industry. Tina is the co-founder of YesGifts, the UK's fastest growing online promotional items resource specialising in promotional sticky notes, mugs, conference items and much more. For more information please visit www.yesgifts.co.uk

HOW TO RAISE UP TO $50,000 WITH YOUR CREDIT CARDS

2008-02-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

HOW TO RAISE UP TO $50,000 WITH YOUR CREDIT CARDS

Millions of people have an assortment of credit cards in today’s almost 'cashless' society.
With many bank credit cards, and even department store cards, it is possible to apply under the 'same name' and obtain TWO OR MORE identical cards bearing only different account numbers. Given the high limits on cards such as American Express ($20,000) and others, it is a simple procedure to raise up to $50,000 by utilizing 30 to 40 credit cards, or less if you use American Express.
With the bank cards, you simply obtain a 'cash advance' up to your credit limit. With the American Express and Carte Blanche cards, you can charge some merchandise such as gold coins and turn around and sell them at a discount to your friends, neighbors, etc. With enough cards, you can quickly turn any amount of discounted 'merchandise' into cash.

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2008-02-06T10:12:00.000-08:00

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How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 2

2008-01-22T06:12:00.000-08:00

How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 2

The Importance Of Keyword Click Through Prices For most niche content sites AdSense and/or Chitika will be the main monetization strategy. These programs pay on a per click basis and click through prices are calculated based on advertiser demand. The golden mix is to find a niche with few well established content sites but a lot of advertisers competing to find customers. This means click through prices will be high but the market is not likely to stay untapped for long and likely a bunch of competing content sites will pop up. In fact you may never find this combination.

A more likely scenario is a niche where there are high click prices because of lots of advertisers and a few well established content sites or moderate to low keyword prices but almost no competition. How you can succeed in these situations is to be better at search engine optimization than any of the other sites. If your site pulls more traffic you get more clicks. The situation you want to avoid is a niche with few advertisers so low click through prices. No matter how much traffic you get and much you dominate a niche, if there are no advertisers paying to use Google AdWords you won’t get any AdSense income or it will be 10 cents a day from the one advertiser with no competition. Bear in mind however that there are general advertisements, for example Chitika can show cameras, computers and other electronic products that may appeal to a general audience and produce enough click throughs to make it worthwhile. This is a risky venture though since your niche is not relevant to your monetization method, the amount of income you earn will like be very random and inconsistent.

Underachieving Due To Low Entry Barriers If you have read Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club Newsletter you will know about two online marketing strategies he discusses, one called ‘underachiever’ and the other ‘overachiever’. Note - if you haven’t signed up for the special offer to try Perry’s marketing newsletter it’s still available and you still get the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, five marketing reports and five audio CDs thrown in just for trying out the membership for one month at $29.95 - check it out here for more information.
Overachiever Overachieving is when you dominate a niche, become an expert and “go deep” by offering more than just one product or service. You may offer seminars, audio recordings, DVD video classes and a whole host of additional materials that make the lifetime value of a loyal customer a lot more than a once off purchase or text link ad click. This method means you can afford to compete by making a loss on the sale of your first product or lead capturing method because the value over time of that conversion is much higher. I’d say Perry’s offer that I mentioned above is a loss leader (overachiever) strategy too, he can’t be making money shipping off all these CDs and reports at such a low price and paying out affiliate commissions - but he knows that the 5% of customers that become fans and purchase everything he produces will spend hundreds to even thousands of dollars over time.

Underachiever Niche content website building is an underachiever strategy. Profitable niches rarely stay uncompetitive for long and as niche content site building becomes popular you are going to be fighting with others for niches. Underachieving is when you deliberately choose to lightly skim a niche, perhaps by selling an ebook to a market that currently is not satisfied. Niche content sites service a unique niche with basic information and generate advertising income as a side effect, there is no intention to further capitalize on the audience. The idea of course is to rinse and repeat, building up a portfolio of profitable niches. The problem here is that you must keep working to find new niches to replace those that become too competitive to fight for.

For those that can manage a lot of sites and in fact enjoy the variety that comes from building sites on such an array of different topics, the niche content site strategy can work well. If you can build a really large portfolio, competitive action won’t impact you significantly because it will take a long time erode your entire income stream. Remember though that it’s not true passive income forever since you will need to replenish your portfolio with new niches if you want this strategy to work for you long term.

In my mind however a better way to go about this is to treat niche content site building as an education and research tool. Learn what it takes to get free traffic to a site from search engines. Learn how to optimize sites, find profitable niches and build content quickly. When you stumble across a niche with unexpectedly high demand and return consider switching your strategy from underachiever to overachiever. Start collecting email addresses to build a list. Get an ebook written, find affiliate products to sell, create a membership service, record screencasts to build information products, and “go deep” in the marketplace. Become the expert in that niche so you can own it and depend on it for long term income despite competitor actions.

Leverage Your Previous Hard Work I’m sure you will find that many of the weird and wonderful niches you come across are already serviced by hobbyist sites, very unprofessional, perhaps hosted on free hosts with designs created in Frontpage or even (shudder) Microsoft Word. They usually have low PageRank but due to lack of competition will show up as top results in search engines. A quick search and easy technique to surpass these sites in the search engines is to leverage one of your already successful, high PageRanked sites.

Most online marketers have a site that they devote the majority of their time to, likely a blog or their main business project. This site enjoys good, hard-earned traffic and has lots of backlinks that were built up over time. Using this site as a tool to promote another site is an advantage, especially in the niche content market.
For example this blog is my main site. If I built a niche content site I would link to it from the sidebar that is on every page giving the niche site lots of valuable backlinks, PageRank points and helping it to very quickly enter the search engine indexes. In fact I’d hazard a guess that a site-wide link from this blog alone would vault a niche content site to the top of the results for it’s niche without much other work on SEO. There might be some sandbox issues initially, and true the relevancy of the links would not be very good, but given the competition likely doesn’t even know what SEO is and your carefully researched niche is small and untapped, the advantage is significant. Having a powerful site to leverage is a big helping hand for a niche content site marketer.

Conclusion You will be surprised by what type of niches you can dig up. Often the most bizarre topics have real followings. Everything from how to raise turtles, where to find the best secondhand clothes, how to do magic tricks, how to snowboard, learning to cook vegetarian - and these are mainstream topics already well catered to. It’s your job to find the obscure, to think outside of your box and find markets that you would personally never consider being a part of yourself. Thankfully the search engines are full of keyphrases and all you have to do is get out there and research. Browse Wikipedia, follow the external links and expand your horizons. You may find some very profitable niches that no one else has thought of.

Please click here for read How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites Part 1

Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

2008-01-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

In The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1 I covered the first four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques as explained by Brad Fallon. The first four methods were applicable to On-Page SEO, techniques you can manually apply to your website internally. The remaining four that I am about to discuss cover Off-Page SEO, which in my mind is a lot more difficult to control since you are dealing with external variables.

As I mentioned in part one, these techniques come from a special seminar recording that I received as part of my welcome package for joining Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club.
Off Page SEO

If you are at all familiar with search engine optimization you are probably more interested in Off-Page techniques. With a bit of study and practice you can quickly grasp the most important On-Page variables to play with on your website. There is always more you can do of course, but as long as we are talking 80/20 rules there are only a handful of really important On-Page things and most of them were covered in part one of this article series.

Off-Page SEO in my mind is more important than On-Page. You can get your On-Page content perfectly optimized but without any good Off-Page SEO your On-Page efforts are wasted. No website can be a success in natural search engine results unless there are links flowing into it. This is what Off-Page SEO is all about, getting good quality links coming through.

Quite frankly I don’t believe there are any consistent, easy and affordable ways to conduct Off-Page SEO, and that is why I was so interested to hear what Brad was going to cover in his presentation. To be honest I wasn’t blown away by his comments. It didn’t cover anything new to me but I have been reading about SEO for a number of years, including some of Brad’s other materials, but it did reaffirm what I currently practice in my own Off-Page SEO activities and it’s always good to be reminded of what is smart practice.

Let’s go through the final four of the Top 8 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques so you can also do a mental check list and be certain you are following what the experts do.

5. Links and PageRank
Brad mumbled this first point out but later it was clarified that he said links. Really his Off-Page SEO technique discussion was more of a gradual break down than a top 4 list, with each point flowing into the next (which you will see is mimicked in this article) so the first place to logically start is links.

Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Simple but true. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. Yes all the On-Page SEO techniques will influence the variables but the links will determine the strength of your web pages to compete for the top places in search engine results pages. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be. Nuff said.

PageRank
If you read my blog you should be well and truly familiar with PageRank. Most of my SEO posts are laden with the term but just in case you don’t know about PageRank head over and read this article to get yourself introduced to the topic - PageRank Explained - Keeping SEO Simple - this is one of my most popular articles and it should answer your basic questions.

Brad Fallon did not do anything more than a basic introduction to PageRank but he did make one interesting comment that I think is worth repeating. He gave a typical scenario of a person conducting search engine marketing for a website (or a company hired to do so), which usually starts with submitting to directories and hunting around for link exchange partners. Not exactly the most effective means of SEO because you tend to get low quality and low PageRank incoming links.
Brad went on to note the perils of over optimizing, which often happens when techniques like low quality link exchanges and free directories are over used, generating thousands duplicate anchor text incoming links from sites with low PageRank. He stated that the search engines don’t reward these techniques well, but strangely enough these are often considered the foundations of SEO campaigning but don’t lead to great results.

What Is A Good SEO Plan?
A more sound search engine marketing strategy is all about quality over quantity. Get your site listed in the best directories - DMOZ (the open directory project) and Yahoo! - and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. This pattern is considered more natural and hence is rewarded with better organic search engine results. Yes it takes longer and you better be a patient bunny, but it will lead to better results in the long term. It’s all about spending your time finding the 20% of links that will give you the 80% of results.
Brad pointed out that 1000 low quality and low PageRank backlinks generated in a short period of time will not be nearly as good as a handful of high PageRank incoming links added over many months. The emphasis is on oh-na-tur-al. Don’t follow the crowd and exchange links with anybody and everyone that comes asking for a link (perhaps I should drop my link exchange practices for this blog?) and don’t spend all your time asking for links from any site you can find that is remotely relevant to yours.

How To Get High Quality Links
It can be especially difficult for a commercial site with no interesting content (for example, nothing but sales pages) to get quality incoming links. No self-respecting, high PageRank site will have a good reason (besides money) to link to a site that is just selling something. Okay yes Apple will probably have no problems getting quality links to its iPod pages but that’s obviously not a position most businesses enjoy.

Unfortunately I don’t have a full-proof method for gaining quality links other than what I have already written about before and what is repeated over and over again all over the Internet - Content is King. The better the content the better the backlinks. Of course you can’t expect quality backlinks to come immediately unless you are willing to buy them. You need to slowly build up an audience that will eventually lead you to enjoy some exposure in the eyes of the quality sites and quality backlinks will come. The best thing is that links from one popular site tends to give you exposure to the owners of other popular sites and momentum will build.
If you need a practical example of how to get high quality backlinks using content read the second part of this article - Smarter Online Marketing. This article explains how one of my blog articles enjoyed some major exposure around the web resulting in lots of links.
In the case of commercial sites the same rules hold true, content will bring in links and visitors. With a commercial site the secret sauce is great content that is tightly aligned with your target market. Whitepapers, articles, free reports, resources, anything and everything you can come up with that will bring your market to your site. If you have just launched a new site put together a whiz-bang whitepaper, it doesn’t have to be too long, just a few pages of really really good stuff and make it available on your site for free.

Once you have the resources on your site you just need to get out there and tell everyone. At the moment one of the best ways is to comment on blogs and forums where your target market congregate. As I mentioned above, if one popular site owner reads your whitepaper, thinks it’s great and tells her audience, your job may be done already. This alone may bring in hundreds of backlinks and definitely lots of real visitors. It’s not easy but good content will lead to good results - it’s almost guaranteed!

6. Page Reputation
Back to the wisdom of Brad Fallon. Page Reputation is a relatively new concept in the eyes of the web public and has been gaining more and more credence as an important SEO consideration. In a nutshell reputation refers to the value of the sites linking to your site and the value of the links linking to the sites linking to your site. Confusing isn’t it!

Every website has a reputation value and incoming links determine that reputation, however it’s not about the number of incoming links but the quality and reputation of the sites that link. The reputation of a mainstream news site, for example CNN, is quite high and will have incoming links from other high reputation sites. If you get a link from CNN then your reputation will rise. Basically it’s measure of a site’s value based on the network of sites linking to that site going back multiple levels of the network.

That’s about as far as my understanding of the concept goes and in my mind ties right back in with the quality over quantity theory.

7. Anchor Text
Number three in the Off-Page SEO technique list is anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to your site and like your internal linking structure, your external link text is very important but often harder to manipulate. You don’t decide how people link to your site, all you can do is encourage people to link in a certain way.

This issue is all about your keywords. First you have to know what keywords you want people to use to link to your pages and then you need to figure out ways to make sure people use those keywords. For the basic link exchanges you usually communicate with the person providing you with a link and stipulate what anchor text to use. However most of the valuable links will come in response to you writing some good content and it will be quite random, the linking person won’t approach you to ask how they should link to you, they will just slap up a link as they feel appropriate.

In most cases people linking to your pages will use the title of your article, or part of the title, as the anchor text and as such you need to be extra careful when deciding how to name your articles. Yes usability and marketing comes first - you want to grab the attention of human beings with a tempting title, but if you can get some good keywords in there too you will be killing two birds with one stone. Other areas to consider are your name (now don’t go changing your name just for SEO!) and your website’s title as these are often used as anchor text.
I wouldn’t stress about external anchor text too much otherwise you can become bogged down in little details. Often the people linking to you will use completely random text that means absolutely nothing (for example - visit Entrepreneur’s Journey - click here - “click here” is not good anchor text) but at least will bring in human visitors. Just stay consciously aware of the importance of keywords in anchor text whenever you produce new content.

8. Link Popularity
Lastly Brad noted link popularity as the final point in his top 8 SEO technique list. Link popularity is all about the numbers, not the quality. This is purely how many incoming links there are to your website.

The one interesting point Brad mentioned in this section of his presentation was the difference between Google and Yahoo! regarding the top variables in their algorithms.
Google - 1.Title Tags, 2.PageRank and 3.PageRepYahoo! - 1.Title Tags, 2.Keyword Density and 3.Link Popularity

Now I can’t verify that in any manner but it does make for some interesting discussion. This shows that Google cares more about quality and Yahoo! cares more about quantity, but I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that. I’ll leave it up to you to test this theory on your sites.
Link Relevancy and ‘Do Keywords In Domain Names Matter?’

Before I wrap this article up I want to make one comment regarding how relevant backlinks have to be and whether keywords in domain names matter. Brad made some interesting comments about these topics.

My assumption was that relevancy meant that the pages your incoming links come from should be relevant to a pretty high degree, for example, Entrepreneur’s Journey would appreciate links from business, marketing, SEO and entrepreneurship sites but universities, sports clubs and cooking sites would not be relevant. Brad stated that Google’s relevancy scope is quite wide, as wide as the top categories in the DMOZ directory. A site that on first inspection may not be relevant may actually in fact offer some relevancy even if the connection is obscure or drilled down (is every link from a blog relevant to a blog simply because they all belong in the “blog” category? I think not). It’s a hard thing to judge given that determining whether a result (say a search engine ranking increase) has a direct correlation to a single backlink is next to impossible.
What was really interesting and actually makes total sense is what Brad said about domain names. One of the age old questions in SEO is whether keywords in your domain name are important. Brad straight out said that the Google algorithms do not consider keywords in the domain name, however when people link to you they often use your domain name and if your keywords are in your domain name then the anchor text people use to link to you will contain your keywords. In a round about way, yes, keywords in domain names matter.
Conclusion

There you have it, the top 8 search engine optimization techniques as presented by Brad Fallon, one of the web’s most respected search engine marketers, along with lots of additional commentary thrown in from yours truly. For some people there won’t have been much new material but what these two articles do provide is a solid list of the 80/20 variables that you should work on if your organic search engine results are business critical. For solopreneurs with little time on you hands knowing what the key two-to-three things you need to worry about makes for efficient business.

A few people have emailed me questioning the validity of Brad Fallon and I can say one thing only - Jay Abraham would not have selected him as the presenter on search engine optimization if he wasn’t the real deal. If you don’t have any confidence in Jay Abraham then perhaps you need to start studying business and marketing.

**Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
The Auther : Yaro Starak

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1

2008-01-21T02:58:00.000-08:00

The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1

I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to get my copy of the Definitive Guide To Google AdWords at the discounted rate, however I’ve started to realize there is a lot more value in it than just the AdWords eBook, which I guess makes sense since Perry wants people to stay subscribed to his club, so he must keep dishing out good stuff.

Just this morning I had a listen to one of the CDs you receive when you first join the club. This one was with Brad Fallon, the search engine optimization (SEO) expert. It formed the third part of the Jay Abraham’s Power To Profits seminar series that was completed earlier this year with Perry, Brad and Ken McCarthy. You get this CD, titled “The 8 Essential Things You REALLY Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization“, when you first join Perry’s club, along with the two other CDs that make up the seminar.

Who Is Brad Fallon?
You have probably noticed Brad Fallon’s name, his free e-course and SEO product, Stomping The Search Engines, pop up in the yellow boxes on this blog lately. This is because I know Brad is the real deal after reading his material and listening to his audio and I feel confident recommending him to you as one of a handful of SEO experts that I trust. Much of my understanding of SEO, in particular about sitemaps, has come from Brad. He also has the credentials to back up his products, having grown his business My Wedding Favours from brand new in January 2004 to about $700,000 per month operation 15 months later, mostly thanks to his position in the search engines (his site is number one for most of his key phrases, including “wedding favors“).

As a result of his success with his online store he went on to teach others how to get great results in natural search engine rankings. The audio CD I just listened to had some fantastic materials on the 80/20 of SEO activities we should all be doing. Brad’s skills have come from testing things on his websites and research - lots of real life testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps more importantly he knows what might be sound SEO practice but falls into the 80% of activities that only have 20% impact on your search engine performance, so shouldn’t be prioritized, and the 20% of activities that have the greatest impact that you need to devote most of your time to.
The 80/20 Rule For Search Engine Marketing

When I say 80/20, I mean the 20% of activities that account for the 80% of results you get. In this case it’s the 20% of things you should spend the most time regarding optimizing your website to get the 80% of results in search engines. Wasting time with the other 80% that produces 20% of the results is obviously not a good idea. If you are at all familiar with this principle, and you will be if you read my blog regularly since I reference to it a lot, then you know that the 80/20 equation is not a strict mathematical rule but definitely is something that every business should heed.

There are very few variables in any organisation that account for the majority of results. When I say variables I mean anything from people, marketing methods, customers, infrastructure, systems, suppliers, products, pricing points, seasons - anything and everything, can usually fit nicely into a 80/20 relationship. In this case I am discussing the 80/20 of search engine optimization techniques - these are the activities that you should spend the majority of your time on.

The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques
I’m going to list the top 8 techniques that Brad discussed in the seminar. Bear in mind that I’m only going to briefly review them since it wouldn’t be fair to Brad, Perry or any of the guys selling this stuff if I simply reposted all their materials. The fact is I couldn’t do it anyway, it would take a 50 page post to cover everything Brad discussed in the audio CD. If you are interested in having a listen to this CD I suggest you try Perry’s Renaissance Club.
Brad broke down his top 8 list into two categories - On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (usually talking about incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page since you can action these items immediately and test results.
On-Page SEO

1. Title Tags
If you are at all familiar with SEO then I’m sure you would have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven time and time again, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in natural (organic) search results.
Brad gave an excellent example of how he played with slight changes to the title tag of his Wedding Favors home page causing a dramatic change to his search engine result page (SERP) placement. He was sitting at number 2 on Google and was testing methods to get his site into number 1. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results. His results were often quite dramatic, dropping to number 9, then completely gone, and finally finding the combination of title tag phrases that resulted in a number one ranking. He now owns the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo!.

During this process Brad recommended that you optimize for only two to three key phrases per page. The keyphrases that start the title tag (the ones on the left) have the most power, so should be selected very carefully. His example was interesting because it showed how his three key phrases for his homepage were adjusted to create a number one ranking for all three of his phrases (Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors). It wasn’t very complicated, just moving words around and seeing what happened. Not rocket science, just practical testing. I have since added an entry to my ‘to-do’ list for BetterEdit.com to start testing title phrases again.

2. Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. There is no strict rule or percentage to aim for but Brad offered a very sound practice to determine what works - copy what your competitors do. Search for your key phrases, the phrases you want to show up for in the search engines and see what the current top result site’s keyword density is.

To do this Brad gave away this fantastic little gem of a resource - go to this website - http://www.ranks.nl/ and use it to test out the keyword density of your competitors pages and your pages. See how the number one site handles their keyword density - how often in title tags, heading tags, alt tags, body content and other areas of their site certain keyword phrases appear and then copy their techniques. Once you have your on-page keyword density equal or better than your competitors then all you have to do is worry about your off-page SEO to beat them (and test test test!).

3. Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. Brad didn’t talk too much about this and I know why - he’d need a full seminar just to explain all the different things you can work on! However I think there is one really important thing to mention regarding site structure and I know Brad would agree with me - it’s your sitemap - whether you have one to begin with and how you structure it. My suggestion is you do Brad’s free e-course that covers a lot on site structure and in particular sitemaps. It’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

4. Internal Links
You have to remember that Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take great care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The beauty of this technique is that you can control it, it’s an on-page technique that in lets you add backlinks to your own pages (What is a backlink and why should you care? Read this - The Backlink FAQ and this - Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?).

The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. Make use of a footer by linking to all your most important pages using the appropriate anchor text keyword phrase (especially your sitemap) and make sure your navigation structure links with keywords, not just blanket statements like “click here”.

Two words of warning with this - don’t forget about usability and don’t over optimize. Brad mentioned that Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. Afterall your goal with all this SEO is to get humans to your site and there is no point if they can’t figure out how to navigate to what they want because your linking text is all the same or poorly labeled.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization in Part 2
That’s it for the on-page SEO tips. In part two of this series I’ll go through the final 4 tips Brad Fallon mentioned regarding off-page SEO and then you will have a complete picture of the top 8 most important search engine optimization factors. Part two will be posted in the next couple of days.

Part 2 is now available - The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 2

**Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/
The Auther : Yaro Starak

How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

2008-01-21T02:38:00.000-08:00

How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

Back in August 2005 I wrote a three part series of blog posts about how I have made money online. This was one of my first pillar article series and forms one of the foundation content pillars that this blog was built on (my business timeline and typical day in my life articles were other foundation pieces I wrote in 2005, during this blog’s early days). These article types are concepts that are crucial to a blog’s growth during the first few months and are part of the methodology I teach in Blog Traffic School (and yes, the course is still coming, the mentoring program will be released first though).
I thought it was about time I updated my how I make money online series since I now make a significant proportion of my income from blogging. I was asked in my last post were I revealed that I made $6549.52 from blogging in March to break down specifically how I did it, so in this post I will explain the particulars for you.

How I Make Money Blogging - Video Explanation
I’ve explained how I monetize this blog in a 23 minute screencast video. It’s a 60MB video or 10MB audio only download, so I recommend this only for my broadband readers. If you have problems with the video I suggest you wait for it to download completely rather than watch it streaming.

Click the graphic below to open the video in a new window.

If you like the video and want to see more screencast presentations like this, stay tuned for my blog mentoring program as I will be using screencasts throughout the program.
March 2007 Income Breakdown
I maintain a monthly income spreadsheet, which lists revenues generated from my blogs and websites. Here is a snapshot from March, minus some private data that is not appropriate for release to the public.
As you can see, the income comes from Text-Link-Ads.com, ReviewMe.com, private text link campaigns, private banner campaigns, affiliate sales and a sprinkling of AdSense.
AdSense Income

The AdSense income of $875.46 does not come from my blogs. This money is generated from a network of mini bike site forum communities, which I purchased late last year and manage with a business partner, Robert Kingston. The sites were purchased using money I generated from blogging and my Internet business, which is one way I reinvest my profits and diversify my income streams. We plan to add blogs to the bike sites later in the year.

Buying and selling websites is a completely different topic, one I have discussed previously on this blog (see How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit). I will discuss what is going on with this project in a future post.

Text Link Brokers and ReviewMe
Text-Link-Ads, as many bloggers know, is a great service, especially when your blog is well established. My inventory is always sold out despite the fact that I have raised the price recently (I emailed Text-Link-Ads and asked them to increase the price). In March I made $560.02 from Text-Link-Ads. I also make on average around $75-$125 per month in affiliate referrals to the text-link-ads service ($25 per sign-up). In March the affiliate income was $75.
I made $176.37 from another text link brokering service, LinkWorth. The links appear on the mini bike forums, so this income does not come directly from this blog.

ReviewMe.com charges $250 per review on this blog and the other blog I operate, SmallBusinessBranding.com. I receive 50% of the income, so $125 per review. I don’t take every review offered, only the ones that I feel capable of writing something about of value to my readers and I have time to research and produce. I average about three reviews per month across the two blogs and in March the income was $375.

Direct Advertising Sales
I make a large chunk of my monthly income from selling banners and text links directly to sponsors. In March I earned $750 for direct sales of text links on both blogs. Banner revenue was $300, however the main banner sponsor, GetResponse, is booked in for six months so I did not realize that income this month and received the money as a large payment at the end of last year.

Affiliate Income
Affiliate income is the most significant source of revenue I have for my blogs. In March I generated $3354.87 in affiliate commissions. This was larger than usual because a few big once off payments came through. Generally though because affiliate programs pay out erratically, I can count on around $1000 - $3000 in affiliate commissions each month.
Some affiliate income is recursive, which means the money comes in from sales I may have referred months or years ago because I referred people to subscription sites. Some of the continuity affiliate programs I promote include:

AWeber
GetResponse
1shoppingcart/MarketersChoice
Rich Schefren Coaching Program
Russel Brunson’s Dot Com Secrets
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club

There’s one cheque I receive for $30 that I have no idea what it’s for. It just says “affiliate center” on it and so far it’s come through twice. If you have seen The Secret you know about the guy who intents cheques to come to him in the mail, and how he goes on to explain that they just started coming. Originally I was like “yeah, sure, random cheques in the mail hey” but now I know what he’s talking about :-).

You will note that every affiliate program listed above closely relates to the topic of this blog, I currently use or used previously and can blog about with some authority. They are all relevant, which is key in successful affiliate marketing.

Outside of the recursive programs, I also affiliate sell the following products:
Butterfly Marketing - Mike Filsaime
Butterfly Marketing Manuscript - Mike Filsaime
Product Launch Formula - Jeff Walker
SEOBook - Aaron Wall
Definitive Guide To Google AdWords - Perry Marshall

Again, I own every product listed above and have either written reviews about them or mentioned them in blog posts. I know these products, they have directly or indirectly made me money, I can write about them with an honest opinion and some of the readers of this blog benefit from buying them too because they are in a similar situation to me.

When they were still available, I made sales of Stompernet and Pipeline Profits (a large chunk of March’s affiliate revenues came from Pipeline Profit commissions). Other significant Internet product launches contribute to my affiliate income as well.

There are some other products and services I promote that are not listed above, including conferences and seminars, ebooks and courses. Whenever I feel I can adequately review something, it’s relevant to an article I’m producing or something I am personally involved with, I will promote with my affiliate link.

Blog Monetization Strategies
As you can see, to make money from blogging you can dip into many different income streams. That’s a good thing because you diversify and reduce your risk. If one income source tanks in a month you don’t suddenly have no money coming in. The entire Internet would have to be down for your money to dry up completely.

The one downside is that you need to maintain different advertising systems, but as is the case with my situation, I focus on building recursive and low maintenance options and reduce my dependence on any income stream that requires significant ongoing labor. I could just use AdSense across all my sites but I’d probably earn about 10% of what I currently make, so it pays to take some time testing different money making techniques.

Of course it’s a good idea to keep blogging every month, that is a labor activity, but chances are you enjoy it (as I do) if you are in the blogging game to begin with. By testing different monetization methods I’ve been able to come up with methods that suit my blogging style and work well enough that I can earn a full time income working part time blogging.

Thanking Sponsors

Before I end this article I want to send some thanks to the sponsors of this blog since they are responsible for a significant proportion of the financial rewards I receive from blogging. In no particular order, a big shout out and thank you to:

WebBizIdeas
GoBigNetwork
GetResponse
Venture Capital Update
PreCharge
Free Business Cards
WordPress Tutorials
Project Management
Business Coaching
Blog Design
Internet Marketing With Gobala Krishnan
Online Marketing
Cash Advances
Lead Generation
Audio Conferencing

Also thanks to all the past sponsors of my blogs. If you want to be like these sponsors please check out the advertising page.

That’s it for how I make money blogging. Bear in mind I only cover a small sampling of the entire world of blog monetization methods. There are MANY more ways you can make money and it’s important that you keep testing different methods AT THE SAME TIME as you focus on producing great content. Through testing you can make more money, but I recommend you avoid investing too much energy in monetization as you can become too focused on the dollar and your own ego, which is detrimental to your blog’s health (and can be to your own health too!). Balance is key here people!

**Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

The Auther : Yaro Starak

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting

2008-01-21T02:24:00.000-08:00

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting

In this the installment of my series on how I have made money online I take a look at running my most successful web business, BetterEdit.com, and one of the most popular online business, web site hosting. If you missed the other parts of this series you can read them by following these links:

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

A Services Web Based Business
That title sounds a bit vague but BetterEdit.com is an example of a services web based business. I’ve talked about BetterEdit.com a lot on this blog and through it and MTGParadise.com I’ve gained most of my Internet business skills.

BetterEdit provides editing and proofreading services to students and business, although presently we are moving towards focusing on only the student niche. BetterEdit is a perfect case study in creating and operating a profitable web based business. It’s too complex to discuss in detail in this article but no doubt if you subscribe to this blog and go through the archives you can get a good feel for how exactly I operate BetterEdit and have experimented with marketing to keep it growing.

A service based business often starts with the owner providing the service. I didn’t go this way although every now and then early on I was tempted since the margins are obviously a lot better when you complete the work yourself. Although I would have been doing my business a dis-service if I did do the editing since I’m not nearly good enough. I’m adequate, but compared to our current staff, not great. Consequently very shortly after starting the business I had a contract editor working for me. This format actually works great because the editor only needs to focus on what he or she does best, editing, and I can focus on client attraction and business management, certainly areas I prefer to work in.

The formula is really quite simple - find a need and satisfy it at a profit. Sure there are a lot of variables to control but when it comes down to it I found a need, hired the best people to satisfy that need and tested which marketing methods work best to find the target audience with that need. The rest is history, and ahh, the present too.

Earnings: I advertise that I make $2000 - $8000 per month from Internet business. It’s true. However note that is not gross profit, that is revenue. I have expenses and I choose to invest most of that money in growth so I don’t pocket the money myself at this stage. I can honestly say that I do generate at least $2000 in sales per month with the highest month so far peaking at just over $11000 (there is a Goods and Services Tax component, 10% to be exact). Things are growing and I’m starting to generate income from other sources, but that’s all the info you are going to get out of me for the moment.

Web Hosting
A quick (…or not so quick) note about web hosting. What an industry hosting is! Every kid is signing up to start a web hosting business, spending the $10 per month required for a reseller account and then promoting the crap out of their template designed hosting site. I was one of those kids not too many years ago.

Hosting is by far the most saturated industry online and yet I still wholeheartedly endorse anyone starting a web hosting business. Why you ask? Because you can niche your market locally and work your network contacts to get new clients. If you play your cards right and cull the not profitable pain-in-the-ass clients you have a nice income source. Most people build a website and let it sit there and for that you can collect a $50-$200 a year or more per client. Multiply that by 100 and you have a pretty good living. Plus you can market things like search engine optimisation, online marketing, domain names, PPC advertising (AdWords and Overture) and a whole host of additional services (pun not intended).

Remember too that despite the web hosting business being saturated the demand for websites is not going to stop. The Net is becoming one of the most important commerce and marketing tools around and more and more people are going to want to be a part of it. If you can service your 10 friends-of-friends word of mouth should keep you growing.

Ironically though I don’t think web hosting is a good business to market online unless you are the only player in your area. Yes nicheing your market can work, especially geographically or industry based (Brisbane’s best band hosting service for example if you are well entrenched in the music scene with contacts), but the thought of being another webhost in a sea of millions is not a prospect I liked and hence I stopped operating my business. I also hated that every client wanted a web site built for them too and that was certainly not a service I wanted to get into. However if you are a web designer then web hosting is definitely a service you should be offering for some nice recursive income.

To be successful at web hosting you must become that “reliable web hosting guy/girl” in your area that everyone refers to. Don’t expect to get random clients signing up online, that’s not an easy strategy to work since another million copycats are out there doing the same. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but you have your work cut out for you if online visitors can’t distinguish your hosting service from your competitors.

I still have a few clients from my web hosting days. Occasionally I send out an invoice and collect my cheque and every now and then I get a support email with a password request or similar. Web hosting is a great business if you love the web and love dealing with customers (which I think there are maybe like 5 people in the world that do). If you can handle the support and have the tech skills to keep things running then web hosting is a good first choice Internet business or part time occupation for some extra income. Heck I’m starting to convince myself now…

Earnings: Nowadays I bring in about $1000 per year from the handful of clients I still have but they are slowly leaving me. All of them came from friends or family referrals. A few years ago I had about 10 clients paying between $50-$250 per year and I was at one point planning on growing that to 50 clients as my main business. I stopped because I got sick of building websites and doing server migrations. If you have ever had to move 10 domains from one server to the a new one you know what a nightmare it is. I enjoyed other web projects more so I stopped proactively marketing myself as a web host and yet I still get one or two new $50/year clients coming in every now and then.

*****
That concludes my roundup of how I have made money on the Internet. I’m still experimenting now with other methods and no doubt I will start another crazy business website that may or may not go anywhere (writing articles like this always gets the idea juices flowing). Note that in every method mentioned in this article series where I have made significant money it’s been because of a lot of persistent, consistent work and I’ve been lucky starting the right project at the right time. The trick is to keep trying ideas you believe in by taking action and building something.

You can read the other parts of this series here -

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

Copy from : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising

2008-01-21T02:21:00.000-08:00

How I Have Made Money Online - Part 2 - Online Stores and Advertising

Continuing the three part series on how I have made money online today I look at operating an online shop and using advertising on a hobby website to generate an income. If you missed the first part of this series you can read it here - How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading

Online Store
My first online store was also focused on Magic: The Gathering and run through my Magic site. I had a captive targeted audience so it made sense to start a Magic store. I stocked my shop with product from my own collection but also started to buy cards from other sources such as players quitting the game and by buying in bulk from trading forums. I contacted wholesalers and started to sell new product which is called “sealed” product, which has not been opened yet and contains a random assortment of cards.

I never had a proper online shopping cart and instead maintained text lists on webpages. It was a hard slog maintaining the store and shipping products which had me making near-daily trips to the post office. Running the card store was my first taste of real online business — taking regular orders online including processing credit cards, buying at wholesale and selling at retail, customer support — and all the other functions that an owner-operator of a small Internet business must go through.

You can read more about my time running MTGParadise Mail Order and the events that eventually lead to its shut down in my business timeline - Part 2.
Earnings: My card store earnings were pretty good however I did not keep proper records. I considered it a hobby and the reality was that I never did take the business seriously. Unfortunately the margins for Magic product were pathetic and the labour certainly did not justify the rewards. I knew I would never make substantial income and I was already working a lot of hours to make marginal profit. The truth was I only made as much as I did because I was slowly selling my personal collection and I was “paid” in new product for my work as a reporter for Magic tournaments. If I did not have this “free” inventory my profit margins from wholesale product would not have justified running a store. Regardless of this I probably managed to sell about $200-$1000 per month in card sales, although my memory is hazy and I was also earning advertising revenue at the time.

Advertising on Websites
One of the most popular articles I have written is How to Make Money from Your Website Using Advertising. It’s popular because it’s practical and I talk about the exact steps I went through to generate a steady income from advertisements placed on one of my websites.
Advertising income is a great way to make money on the web. Finding advertisers and generating income is not the hard part of this strategy, it’s establishing a website with enough traffic to justify advertisers paying you that is difficult. I go into more detailed numbers in the above article but basically once you have a site that has a consistent 500+ unique visitors coming everyday you have the groundwork for a steady income from advertising. The best thing is that if your site is popular because it has a great community it is hard for you to lose that value. I was lucky enough to establish a geographically niched community focused on trading a commodity, Magic cards, which is a perfect recipe for a lively community and consequently an income from advertisers willing to pay to attract that audience.

If you build a popular site that doesn’t require much maintenance then advertising income can be quite passive. If you take this blog as an example I have to create new content on a regular basis to retain a readership and if I stopped updating for a long enough period of time this site would lose its popularity and consequently any income I might be making from advertising. Of course there are many ways around this which I won’t go into now but any smart business person will be thinking passive income as a long term strategy because one day they will tire of writing new content or performing whatever function they currently do to create value in their site.

My old Magic site is a good example of a formula to create almost passive income. The heart of the site was a community forum and in fact the forum received more direct hits than the actual index of the website. The forum was managed by a collection of volunteer moderators who chose to perform their function for free because they received some sort of intrinsic value - an increase in community status (moderators are “staff” and therefore in a leadership/power role within the community). New content was generated by the audience for free because they enjoyed writing about the game they played and talking about their achievements publicly. Free content and free forum maintenance left only site updates as my job, which was significant enough but took about an hour a day to maintain the status quo.

Earnings: When I first started off I brought in $30 per month from my first advertiser. I slowly added more and over about a 2 year period I generated a consistent $300 - $1000 per month through banner and email newsletter sponsorship.

*****
You can read the other parts of this series here -
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 1 - eBay, Garage Sales and Card Trading
How I Have Made Money Online - Part 3 - Online Services and Web Hosting
How I Make Money Online Part 4 - Blogging

Copy From : http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/