A WordPress Squeeze Page
What’s a Squeeze Page?
Very simple - sign up as a subscriber or leave.
In the context of a blog, it might be subscription to a mailing list, or more often than not, nowadays, an RSS feed.
A squeeze page is probably of less value than it used to be - users are wary about giving up an email address, even a disposable one… But, depending on the sector your blog is operating in, it might pay a dividend…
Since the purpose of the page is to obtain the visitor’s email address (if we’re going to be cold-blooded about it) any additional content could distract or send them elsewhere - so keep content to a minumum, just enough to appear on the search engines.
Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly email summary of your latest blog posts direct to your vistor’s inbox - so that cuts out a lot of work, but doesn’t supply any new content…
A WordPress plugin for creating a subscriber form and db table, at first sight, seems to work ok
New WordPress Theme:Squeeze Page
I was helping a friend with the design of a squeeze page today and it inspired me.
It’s a single column, widget ready theme, with 3 column sidebar at the bottom and a page menu at the top.
Download Squeeze Page | Preview Squeeze Page
Search Marketing By The Book
Posted in: David Berkowitz, Search
When planning search engine optimization strategies, what if you tried to promote your site like you’re promoting a book?
It’s a timely question, as some social media gurus have recently capitalized on SEO best practices when releasing their books. It’s a great time to read many of your favorite bloggers in print, including Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (whose book is the best you can read on social media), Rohit Bhargava (whose book is next on my list), Joe Jaffe (whose book I panned - nothing personal, of course), Geoff Livingston (whose book I’ll eventually order), and the 103 authors of “The Age of Conversation “(I’m one of the hundred, so I’ll refrain from a review).
An underlying theme in promoting these books is getting bloggers involved. Here’s why:
1. Bloggers will link back to the authors’ sites and book blogs. The added links ultimately lead to higher rankings in search engines. The authors want to make sure they rank well for any terms related to their books, and after book sales die down, the benefits of the links remain.
2. The other blogs rank for relevant book terms, too. Assuming that most of the book reviews are positive (all of the above average at least 4 stars on Amazon except Bhargava’s, the newest, so it hasn’t yet been reviewed), the reviews add to the pool of favorable search results.
3. Bloggers perfectly complement book reviews from established media sources. A book review in The New Yorker has the weight of authority, but a book review on one of your favorite blogs comes off more like the advice from a trusted friend.
4. Bloggers make it easier to buy the books. Even if you read The New Yorker in one hand with a Kindle in the other, there’s still a disconnect between the review and the purchase. Blogs tend to make it easy to buy.
A few case studies demonstrate how this all comes together.
Interviews Included with Personality Not Included
Rohit Bhargava, who coined the term “social media optimization,” found a way to get guaranteed coverage ahead of the launch of his book, “Personality Not Included,” before anyone even read it. On his blog, he offered exclusive five-question interviews to any blogger who agreed to post the Q&A, and then he linked back to those interviews. Bhargava had to answer 250 questions, so he worked for his links, but he got them, along with all the content about his book, and then the general buzz around it (full disclosure: I took part).
Bhargava then picked a dozen of his favorite interviews (full disclosure: mine was one of them) and opened it up to voting, with prizes going to the top five winners (full disclosure: I bombed in the reader’s choice). Now he had a dozen bloggers all blogging and Twittering and Facebooking and working their social media mojo all to drive people to his site, and he allowed room for a write-in candidate. That meant more links, more buzz, more content, and more search dominance.
As of Monday, five of the top 10 first page links in Google for a search on the book’s title (without quotes) were other blogs’ interviews. Amazon had the top spot, Bhargava’s blog claimed listings two and three, and in the middle were a Flickr page with the book’s cover from a Mumbai blogger and then the book’s official site that Bhargava set up. In sum, Bhargava controlled eight first-page links, with Amazon taking one and a Flickr fan the other. You can’t do better SEO than that.
Ready, Aim, Buy with Conversations’ Bum Rushes
Imagine you’re a manufacturer and you tell all your potential customers when you’d like them to buy something of yours, which sales channel to buy it from, and to kindly share the word with everyone they know. That’s the definition of chutzpah, and the mascot, gold medalist, and chairman of the Chutzpah Olympics is the indefatigable Joe Jaffe.
Jaffe launched a “bumrush” for his book “Join the Conversation” where he asked everyone who planned on buying the book to buy it on the same day. It wasn’t the first such event; he chronicled the Bumrush the Charts history when he ran it last October. Yet he did help popularize the concept, and in the course of a day, his book went from number 4,840 on Amazon’s sales chart to number 26 overall and number two among business books.
Last month, “Age of Conversation,” a massive collaboration whose proceeds were donated to charity, took the same approach, and thanks to round-the-clock blogging and Twittering from many of the authors involved, it jumped from number 102,282 to 262 overall and 36 on business.
The bumrush isn’t a surefire tactic. There needs to be a built-in fan base, a dedicated evangelist or group pushing it, true market potential for the product, and an appropriate sales channel. When there is that perfect storm, it creates a community (or groundswell) posting, linking, and spreading the messages.
While the focus with all the examples mentioned involves blogs due to their potent SEO cocktails of links, content, and buzz generation, all of these authors are using a mix of supporting tools that provide awareness both among bloggers and their general audience: groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, wikis, Flickr, video, and heavy doses of Twitter.
The best lesson from them is that these authors figured out new ways to generate awareness and sales when launching a new brand (the book) supported by an existing brand (themselves). They’re constantly experimenting, racking up far more hits than misses in the process. That’s something you can bookmark and highlight, whether or not you follow what’s in their books.
Entireweb Newsletter * May 27, 2008 * ISSUE #443
Beginners Affiliate Marketing - Learn The Basics
There are many steps to take when you are trying to make money online through affiliate programs. The most tedious and most important step will always be the marketing aspect. Beginners affiliate marketing should begin with knowledge. Read everything that you can to find out the different paths that are available.
As an affiliate, there will be millions of products and services to choose from. You should always choose a product that is in a similar niche to that of your websites.
A website that is based on technology should not have ads and affiliate programs about curtains and bedding. You can choose to display shoe ads if your website is about shoes, or you can select products that will go well with that topic such as clothing and accessories.
Whatever you choose as an affiliate program, always try to start with a product that you have used. As an affiliate marketer, you are recommending these products to your visitors, and they will not be pleased to find out that the product is subpar after they have purchased it.
You want to suggest a product that you know and love. By telling your website visitors about the honest experience that you have had with a product, the more they will grow to trust your word. Always be honest with your customers. As large as the internet is, it is still small enough and a few bad reviews about you and your website, can travel quickly and destroy your reputation before it has even begun.
A great way to receive and keep new visitors, is with a free offer. When free products are available, other websites will at times link to that web page so that they can tell their own visitors about the great deal. This helps you to get back links as well as new visitors who may decide to check out your website. This can help you to gain new visitors as well as repeat customers.
A well made site can become self sustaining in a short amount of time. This means that you will be able to simply add new content, done by yourself or through a freelancer, while you do other tasks, such as setting up more affiliate websites. You should always keep an eye on all of your web pages, to update and to make sure that there are no problems with your site or server.
While you are still learning, it is best to start with one affiliate program before moving to others. Trying to do, too much too soon can be a recipe for disaster. Put all of your efforts and concentration into making your first affiliate program a success.
Once you have learned how to put your skills into effect, your beginners affiliate marketing techniques can move on to new websites, blogs and affiliate programs.
With the knowledge that you have gained through your first website, you can begin to apply the same techniques to duplicate your previous success. However, you should always remember to check back with websites, ebooks and blogs, so that you are kept up to date on the new affiliate marketing techniques that are available.
About the Author: Jude Wright has been the owner of http://aboutaffiliatemarketing.com since 2002. Stop by and pick up her free report, Newbie’s Affiliate Guide.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
One webmaster found Google unwilling to index pictures located in an images directory, but some extra content apparently left the site afoul of Google’s guidelines.
Editor’s Note: Duplicate content presents an issue for webmasters: search engines like Google will punish sites for it. But what if that content is merely a cached copy held for reference? Have you found one of your subdirectories dropped from Google over cached pages on your site?
Here’s the short version: don’t stick cached content in a directory you want Google to index. Chances are the Googlebot will freak out and run screaming from your server.Michael VanDeMar wrote at Smackdown how a simple test of indexing images in a subdirectory ended up with Googly accusations of webmaster malfeasance.Opening a discussion on a Google Groups webmaster help discussion eventually attracted the attention of a Google staffer, John Mueller, who took a peek into VanDeMar’s images subdirectory and found some terrifying creepy-crawlies therein:
In particular regarding your /images/ subdirectory I noticed that there are some things which could be somewhat problematic. These are just two examples:
- You appear have copies of other people’s sites, eg /images/ viewgcache-getafreelinkfromwired.htm
- You appear to have copies of search results in an indexable way, eg /images/ viewgcache-bortlebotts.htm
I’m not sure why you would have content like that hosted on your site in an indexable way, perhaps it was just accidentally placed there or meant to be blocked from indexing. I trust you wouldn’t do that on purpose, right?
VanDeMar keeps those cached copies to support his discussions, as such pages can and will change regularly, or disappear altogether from sites. Doing this in a place where Google expects not to find such content evidently put him in a tough spot with the search engine, as Mueller suggested it ran counter to Google’s webmaster guidelines.
The difficulty appears to be in the nature of the cached pages. Mueller thinks it’s duplicate content, VanDeMar believes it isn’t, based on his reading of the guidelines; he further questioned why the entire subdirectory received a delisting from Google.
| Turn clicks into customers with advanced targeting. Facebook Ads. |
The obvious solution, as one commenter suggested, would be to place the cached pages into a different directory and tell the Googlebot to stay out of it. Whether or not it’s the fairest solution for webmasters won’t figure into the decision, as Google has really dug in on quality issues it perceived over the past year.
Keeping cached copies of content sounds like a prudent course of action to take. It helps keep site visitors from clicking into a non-existent page, which makes the linking site look bad. If Google consistently dumps subdirectories that mix cached and original content because the company thinks duplication is in effect, webmasters will have to alter their linking structure to accommodate the fussy Googlebot.
| Comment Here |
|
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via email at dutter @ webpronews dot com.
The Dark Art Of Search Engine Optimization
The title of this article is designed to illustrate the point of this article. Today we won’t be taking a look at black-hat search engine optimization tactics. Admittedly, I’ve toyed with them in a “know your enemy” kind of way but I’m no expert on advanced cloaking techniques nor effective link sp@mming tactics. What we’re going to cover here are the hidden (i.e. dark) areas of effective optimization strategy.I’ve written numerous times in past articles and blog posts that using tricks to rank your site highly is, in the end, ineffective as tricks imply a manipulation of the ranking formula and will eventually become obsolete as the search engines work to advance their algorithms and shut down such possible abuses. But here I’m going to illustrate some of the tricks we use to drive traffic to our site. Is this a conflict? Not really; these “tricks” aren’t so much directed at search engines as they are website owners and visitors. These are marketing tricks, not SEO tricks - they just happen to help you with your rankings.
Before we begin let’s review an important point about Google. When most people think of Google they think of the dominant search engine (and in that they would be right) HOWEVER if Google was primarily a search engine they would be much smaller than they are now. No, they are an advertising company and the world’s largest at that. To this end they need traffic, market share, and clicks. They need you to love Google.com, visit it often, visit their other properties and offerings such as Gmail. If you do this, the odds of you clicking on one of the paid ads increases and their primary function is fulfilled. It is driven by this purpose that Google has developed the most complex search algorithm that has ever existed. Their search is their primary source of traffic. The better their results, the more you will return, the greater the likelihood you will click an ad, the more revenue they generate (thus leading to their continued increases in reported revenue quarter-after-qu arter). Why is this important? Because this is the driving force of their current algorithm and will be for the foreseeable future we can assume that any action that increases relevant traffic to your site, increases the stickiness of your site and/or increases the number of links from relevant sites to yours will help your rankings and it will help Google keep their visitors loyal.
Building A Sticky Site
A point I’ve made in past articles that I will reinforce here as opposed to “contradicting” will be that of the importance of a sticky site. Of course, monitoring your statistics to assess your visitors’ behavior is an important practice for the conversions on your site however it’s importance from a search engine optimization perspective is often overlooked. I’ve mentioned before and I’ll mention again, the search engines have the ability to monitor the length of time a visitor spends between visits to that engine. If you are on Google, enter “seo services” into it and visit the Beanstalk site but only spend 5 seconds there before hitting the back button Google can infer that the site was not what you were looking for. If it was 5 or 10 minutes before you returned back to Google they could thus infer that you found content you found useful to your query.
So let’s put that more obviously, having a site on which visitors find what they’re looking for quickly, easily, and in a visually pleasing way will increase their time on your site which will thus increase the assumption by the search engines that you are relevant for the phrase the searcher has queried. This will reinforce that your site does indeed belong among the top site. As a disclaimer: this works on a mass scale so don’t go running off and clicking through to you competitors and quickly hitting the back button. First, it’s unethical (like clicking their paid links) and second, it doesn’t work like that (how big a hole would THAT be in the algorithm) so it would only be a waste of your time.
The how to of building a sticky site I will leave to designers (being an SEO - my skills lie more in understanding mathematical formula).
Clickability Counts
The engines know when your site appears in a set of search results and they further know how often your site was click on when it appeared. The more often your site is selected when presented in a set of results the more relevant it is assumed to be and thus, the more entrenched it becomes in that set of results (assuming your stickiness issues are dealt with).
What this means is that your title and description matter, not just as part of the classical search engine optimization tactics we’ve used them for since the 90’s but also to draw visitors to your site. Fortunately the end goal of the engines closely matches what your own end goal should be for your site - maximizing traffic. Let’s take a look at two example titles that the Beanstalk site could have:
An old-school over-optimized title: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting
Our current title: Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk
Can you see the different? While our title changes periodically as we test new titles for clickthroughs we always keep it short, easily read, and always such that the whole title will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites.
The same applies to your description tag but the rules are a bit different. With your description tag you want to make sure to include your targeted keywords and make the copy compelling to a searcher. The reason for this is that when searched keywords are including in your description, is is typically the description that appears in the SERPs. This give you an opportunity to determine how your ad to the world appears. You write your title, you write your description - write both well and your clickthroughs will increase. And when your clickthroughs go up, the implied relevancy the engines will assume your site has to that phrase will increase with it and thus, so too will your rankings for that phrase.
Getting People To Link To You
We’re not going to bother discussing reciprocal link building, directory submissions or the other usual suspects. There are countless articles out there on those topics; what we’re going to focus on here are the tactics for getting articles picked up widely the resources you want to get them onto (and if you’re reading this - you know it works) as well as ways to get the links that both you and the search engines will love the most - the ones you don’t ask for or work for outside of creating a great site with useful content. The best part of these links is that they not only work to boost your link popularity but they also tend to drive great traffic to your site. Let’s begin with articles.
When you’re working to publish an article there are two main audience members: the readers and, more importantly, the editors (I say more importantly as they’re the ones that determine if you have any readers at all). There are some tactics for increasing both:
- Write a compelling title. This gets back to the point I was making in the first paragraph. Everyone is interested in black hat search engine optimization, even those of us who don’t practice it. Readers will be drawn to it as it receives relatively low coverage and editors like to publishing something that they feel may draw some controversy. While this article doesn’t get into black hat tactics as some editors may have hoped, it will draw them in and get their attention.
- Find quality related resources and get the article published there. I generally use a tool like PR Prowler to find good, quality resources to submit articles to. You can do it manually through a search engine, PR Prowler just speeds up the process so much that after its first use it’s paid for itself. You want the places you submit to, to be related to your industry and you want them to provide a link back. If you can setup that link as anchor text instead of your URL - all the better.
- Keep a list and add to it. If you’re going to publish multiple articles don’t start from scratch every time. Keep a list and try to add a few sites to it with each submission. This will keep your list growing and get you more exposure links as time goes on.
- Keep a good relationship with the editors. They are the end-all-be-all of whether this tactic will work or not as a link and traffic building tactic. Make sure you’re polite and don’t write nasty emails if you get declined. Read what they say and make sure to take it into account with future articles.
But what if you don’t want to build links with articles, what if you want to get links the old fashioned way (and I’m talking about the old old old way - you know, before there was any SEO value to it). What if you would like to get people to link to you simply because they like your content (I know, shocking but it actually happens !!!) There are a few different factors that you need to take into account to accomplish this. Here are a few important rules to follow:
- You’ll need to create content that others will want to link to. This is an art in-and-of-itself. I wrote about some of the basic rules involved with this in a past article “Building Link Bait” and so I won’t repeat it here.
- Get the bait into social bookmarking sites. This will get people interested in your topic aware of it. If it’s good, they may link to it. Don’t just focus on Digg and the other majors, look around for some industry-specific bookmarking sites. For example, when this article is complete I’ll work to get it into Sphinn, an SEO bookmarking site.
- Get the bait into forums and/or blogs. I’m not talking about blog sp@mming here, I’m talking about finding blogs and forums that are RELATED to your topic and who’s visitors could be genuinely helped by the tool, information, etc. that you’re providing. Don’t worry if the blog has rel=”nofollow” on the links. The purpose is webmaster awareness, not getting links from the blogs (I’ll leave that to a different article).
- Promote the bait on your site. Use banners, links, your blog, etc. to build awareness.
- Provide the code to link to your bait. The easier you make it for people to link to you, the more of them will. Provide the code with a text and banner option and you’ll increase the number of people who will link to you.
- Put out a press release. If it’s big enough news, put out a press release. If the media grabs it you’ve won the lottery both in publicity and in high valued links.
- If the topic of your bait is searched on the engines, rank it.
 |
|
|
Here are the latest updates from feedblitz
“Internet and Businesses Online: Traffic Building Articles from EzineArticles.com” - 34 new articles
1.Qualify Your Identified Website Company Visitors For Lower Lead Acquisition Costs
2.Did You Say Pay For Traffic?
3.You Have To Drive Traffic To Build A Big Online Business, Period
4.Myth - Get Rich Quick Online And Myth - Free Traffic
5.How To Drive Traffic To Fuel A High Ticket Business Online
6.The Top Traffic Generators In Internet Marketing History
7.Keyword Research For Targeted Web Traffic
8.The 3 Best Questions You Must Ask Yourself When Deciding Which Traffic Generation Tactics To Use
9.Step By Step Plan To Get To $15000 Per Month - Traffic Generation Part 1
10.The Myth Of Free Traffic Online - Part 2
11.5 Simple Affiliate Marketing Directions For Driving Qualified Prospects To Your Website
12.The Myth Of Free Traffic Online - Part 1
13.Step By Step Plan To Get To $15000 Per Month - Traffic Generation Part 2
14.The Ugly Truth About Generating Traffic Online - Secrets No Big Dog Want You To Know
15.2 Secrets To Generate Highly Targeted Traffic Without Spending A Dime!
16.Traffic Exchanges Revealed - How To Get The Best Traffic In 3 Quick Steps
17.Ultimate Traffic Generation Strategy For The Year 2008
18.Backlinking To Build Your Online Business
19.Five Free Tools For Guaranteed Monster Internet Traffic
20.The Quickest Way To Get Cheap Sustained Website Traffic
21.Getting More Traffic With Pinging
22.Announcing 3 Killer Ways To Generate Free Targeted Traffic
23.One Easy Way To Test Different Traffic Sources
24.3 Simple Tips To Generate Massive Traffic
25.Viral Internet Marketing - How To Use Power Of Tell A Friend Script To Skyrocket Your Traffic
26.Free Traffic Tips - Generate Massive Traffic Using Free Ways Of Advertising
27.How To Find The Best Traffic Exchanges - Manual Traffic Exchange 101
28.Free Traffic Generation Secret - How To Explode Your Traffic Using The Power Of Traffic Exchanges!
29.Who Else Is Losing Money By Not Using Anchor Tags Properly
30.Easily Drive Traffic To Your Website
31.Solving The Traffic Exchange Riddle
32.Driving Qualified Traffic To Your Website
33.More Recent Articles
34.Search Internet and Businesses Online: Traffic Building Articles from EzineArticles.com
10 Killer Ways To Defeat Your Competition
http://marcandmartypetrizza.com/t/9818675/649011/211295582/2/
1. Offer free original content. It’s important to give
your visitors information they can’t find anywhere
else. If you’re the only source, they’ll visit your site.
2. Give people free software. Most people like to
find good deals on software for their computers. If
the software is free, that is even better.
3. Hold free contests or sweepstakes. Most people
like to win things. If you can fulfill that need, people
will stop by to visit.
4. Provide a free web directory. Create a directory
of web sites on a popular topic that will attract your
target audience.
5. Offer a free e-zine. Most people love to get free
information that’s e-mailed to them regularly. This
saves them time and money.
6. Make your web site look professional. You want
to have your own domain name, easy navigation,
attractive graphics, etc.
7. Let people read your ad before they get to your
freebie. When you use free stuff to lure people to
your web site list it below your ad copy.
8. Attract the target audience that would buy your
product or service. A simple way to do this is to
survey your existing customers.
9. Test and improve your ad copy. There are many
people who write an ad and never change it. Make
sure you get the highest possible response rate.
10. Give people an urgency so they buy now. Many
people are interested in your product but they put
off buying it until later and eventually forget about it.
Quote of the Day:
“Never let formal education get in the way of your
learning.” — Mark Twain
Thank you for being a valued subscriber Geronimo!
Sincerely,
Martha Petrizza
http://marcandmartypetrizza.com/t/9818676/649011/211295582/2/
P.S. Making money online is easier than you think… Start
NOW with The Home Biz Guy’s Plug-In Profit Site service at:
http://marcandmartypetrizza.com/t/9818675/649011/211295582/2/
Martha Petrizza
1012 Aquia Drive
Stafford
Virginia 22554
United States
7 Make Money Blogging Tips Revealed
Entrepreneurs, small businesses and large corporations are using the power of blogs to increase their bottom line. Unlike the complexities of starting a business off line anyone can make money blogging on the internet and here are 7 tips to help you do just that:
1. Using Affiliate Links - earn a commission for every person who visits your blog and purchases a product or service you referred through your affiliate link. Most affiliate programs are free to join and simple to promote.
3. Make donations fun - add a donation link to your blog and offer some quality information products for donations. This will also create some buzz about your blog and perhaps others will come by and give a few bucks.
3. Sell Holiday Themed Products - during the holidays sell personalized products that your readers can buy and give aways as gifts. Have the products designed with your logo and site url and make some extra cash.
4. Virtual Real Estate - yes, your blog is like a home and you can put it up for sale and if it is built to make someone else a lot of money they will absolutely make the investment.
5. Writing Means Money - many people don’t like writing and prefer to outsource that task to others. If you love writing it will show on your blog and you will have people coming to you asking if they can pay you to write articles.
6. Be A Star - if you can provide valuable content on your blog consistently regarding a specific niche you may be offered lucrative speaking opportunities. Once you establish yourself as an authority people will seek you out and the sky is the limit after that.
7. Advertising - there are thousands of opportunities to add promotional banners, links and widgets to your blog and earn pay-per click or sales commissions for free. What you want to avoid is making your blog too busy with them. Keep them at a minimum and you will get more activity.
Now that you have 7 options to maximize your income and now know that to make money blogging is not as difficult as some people make it seem,
you can begin taking action immediately before you get left behind.
About the Author
Jimmy Adames Will Show You How You Can Legally Rob These Behind The Scenes Make Money Blogging Secrets That Will Give You A Leg Up On Your Competitors. Also, Receive Your Free Massive Blog Traffic eCourse and a bonus. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
Source: http://www.marketingpixels.com/articles/
Blogging Is Writing - Five Great Tips To Make Money Blogging
Got a blog? Great. Then you know that blogging involves writing, and the more writing you do, the more money you will make blogging. Let’s look at five tips to help you to become an expert blogger.
1. The more you write, the more you earn.
As a blogger, your primary task is content creation. This is because without content, you won’t have traffic, and without traffic, you won’t have an income. So content comes first.
However, there are many ways you can create content.
My favorite way is to speak, rather than write. I use a speech recognition program on both my Mac and my PC, to help me to create content more quickly.
Although you’ll need to train yourself to dictate your thoughts, the time you spend with the program in the first few weeks is amply repaid, because you’ve got more content on your blog or blogs, and thus more traffic.
2. Plan your blog posts each week and month.
Planning your blogging is vital. I teach bloggers, and the first habit I encourage them to acquire is the habit of planning everything they do. Planning your content is vital, because some days you just don’t feel like writing.
On these days, your plan gets you blogging, because you know exactly what you’re writing about on any given day.
One of my favorite tactics is to create series. Once you’ve planned a series of posts on a particular topic, writing the series is easy.
A series can be anywhere from three to ten posts long. Here’s an idea: create a “30 days” series - this gives you 30 blog posts to plan in advance.
Once you’ve done the planning, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can write the series.
3. Create a network of blogs - One blog, or a network of blogs on the same topic?
Initially, focus on one blog, at least for the first year. Your first, primary blog will build traffic via the search engines, and this foundation of traffic is a real blessing - once you have hundreds of readers each day, you can USE that traffic.
After your first year, I advise that you hive off some of your blog’s categories to make new blogs.
This is because an enormous blog becomes unwieldy. Posts get buried, and it’s hard to give previous posts the attention they deserve.
4. Where’s the money? Set income goals for your blog.
You must set income goals for your blog. Start small: a dollar a day. Then increase your income goals by ten times as soon as you reach a goal. So your first goal is a dollar a day, then ten dollars a day, then $100 a day, then $1000 a day, and so on.
5. Boost your traffic: the more readers, the higher your blog’s income.
Finally, as important as writing and content creation in general is, nothing beats marketing your blog. To get more traffic, you need to market your blog.
So do it, every day - it’s not optional, you MUST market your blog.
So, there you have five tips to help you to make money blogging - use them and prosper.
About the Author
Discover the secrets to making money blogging with Angela Booth’s blogging bestseller, “Blogging for Dollars”. Angela’s blogging ebook has a companion blog, the Blogging for Dollars Blog, which offers you daily blogging tips.
Source: www.isnare.com
Source: http://articles.exospy.com
How To Successfully Make Money Blogging
If you are thinking of setting up a make money blog that reviews ways to make money online or lists methods of making money blogging, don’t - especially if you are relatively new to making money online.
Don’t get me wrong. It is not impossible to make money with a blog - just very much harder to do so in the money niche.
Why is that so?
Firstly there is just too much competition. Unless you are a prolific writer who can research stellar articles other bloggers in your niche cannot match up to, it will be nearly impossible to get a slice of the money pie.
Secondly, readers of make money blogs are internet savvy people who are blind to ads and won’t click on your affiliat link unless you are a top blogger with thousands of regular readers.
Most importantly, getting to the front of search engine results page will be an uphill climb. When your article appears on the first page of SERPs, it means an explosion of traffic as more people are exposed to your article. As a result, your blog becomes more well known.
There are over 50 million pages on making money online. What are your chances of overtaking these millions of pages, many of which are highly popular sites with tens of thousands of daily readers?
But that’s not to say you can’t make money blogging. Just choose a less competitive niche. If you take a look at the top money making niches, you can see there are many other possibilities you can tap into.
The most profitable niches at the moment are:
1. Making Money Online
2. Weight Loss
3. Quit Smoking
4. Credit and Credit Repair
5. Weight Gain and Building Muscles
6. Running a Home Business
7. Training Pets
8. Learning Techniques such as Memory, Speed Reading
9. Learning a Language
10. Relationships and Divorce
11. Gaming eg. Runescape, World of Warcraft
These will be very competitive since they are high earners. How about going even more niche? For example, instead of focussing on training pets, go more specific - training dogs.
Or even more specific - training chihuahuas.
How do you know if there is a market for this niche?
Use a free online keyword service such as Wordtracker or AdWords Keyword Tool and see how
many searches a month there are for related keywords.
Then do a search in Google and see if there are any ads on the side of the search results. If there are many advertisers, then there must be a market.
Sometimes, the most mundane topic can be the top money earner. Guess what are some of the top paying keywords? They are loan consolidation, insurance quotes and structured settlement.
Hardly exciting topics to write about. In any case, these will be too competitive unless you manage to discover a sub niche of these profitable topics.
The ideal scenario would be to find a niche topic that you are passionate about so that writing won’t become a chore. However, you will find that it may
not be possible.
So ultimately, you have to decide what you want from your blog. Is it merely an online journal to document a hobby or do you want to make money with it?
About the Author
More articles on www.moreblogmoney.com, a make money blog for useful tips on beginners to make money online blogging and ways to make money
from home. Download FREE ebook: The Ultimate SuperTip To Make Money Online. No email required.
Source: http://www.smarticles.org
Mark Abrahams | Article Marketing
I have selected the best questions to answer.
1) Building traffic
This is the challenging part of internet marketing.
There are only really a few traffic sources worth
considering.
The main types to get are:
1) Article marketing
2) Pay per click
3) Ezine advertising
4) Search engine optimization
5) Web 2
6) Viral traffic
2) My biggest problem is making a profit with article marketing
You need to setup a marketing system that will
convert visitors into paid custoners. This starts
out by having a squeeze page with a winning sequence
of autoresponder messages. Most people will only
buy after the seventh email contact from you.
Conversion is one of the big challenges on the internet.
However, if you get your sales process to convert
you can make a lot of money.
3) NO 1 PROBLEM IS RECRUITING
If you are doing network marketing you need to use
an internet marketing system to generate leads and
follow up with. There are many people who promote
their network marketing business using a downline
builder for example Herbalife and Success University.
You need to tap into the system of somebody who is
already doing well building an organization using a
proven internet marketing recruiting system. If you
look around you should find some.
4) I cannot get my credit card facility working (probably
not really what you are wanting).
Use 2Checkout or Clickbank. This is the easiest way
to get your credit card processing sorted out quickly.
The advantage of 2Checkout is that they will wire or
deposit the money into your account and the transaction
fees are a lot less.
I cannot improve my rating of 2 for my website
www.languageonline.us after doing what I read was suitable
SEO.
You need to build a good quality site that people
will want to link to. SUbmit to the top directories
like Open Directory(dmoz.org) and Yahoo. You can also
submit to second tier directories. Write articles
and submit to the directories including a link to your
site in the resource box. Do press releases using
a free service like Prleap.com to gain additional
backlinks.
Submit your high quality posts to web 2 sites like Digg.
If they become popular you will get lots of links pointing
to it as people vote on it. Find sites that complement
yours
and ask for a mutual link exchange.
5) Mark: Finding enough opt in Web sites to send my
articles too. Some too slow in approving, some reject
articles
without any reasons. I have make about 6 lists of Web
sites, but half of them do not work for many reasons. JoAnn
The best directory is www.ezinearticles.com. Once you
become a platinum author your articles usually get
approved within 48 business hours. The article directories
are more useful for building backlinks to your site
and increasing your search engine rankings.
6) Finding the time to write anything worth someone
reading. I don’t want to publish poor quality or useless
articles.
If you are building a list short and concise 250-350
word articles work the best. If your article is too
long people will never make it to your resource box. I
would rather have imperfect articles out there working
for me building a list than have nothing out there.
7) Number one problem: Time.
I could break it down:
- Time to write articles
- Time to manage my site’s content
- Time to manage my part-time Web business while working a
full-time job
So far, I’m not buying into “easy solutions” such as
posting other people’s articles as my own. Maybe that’s my
problem, but that is my current approach. I promote my site
and I fill my site with content that I have written myself.
When I have the time.
This is a very important point. Many internet marketers
become very stressed as they try and do everything
themselves. Once you start making a good profit it will
become a
lot easier to run if you outsource many of the tasks
that take up all your time. All the big name internet
marketers do this.
building a list
The three best ways to build a list are article
marketing(include a link to your squeeze page in
your resource box), ppc advertising and having
a Squidoo page or Hub page optimized for search
engine traffic with a link to a squeeze page.
9) My number 1 problem is creating my own product.
I know what I want but I don’t know what product to make.
Creating something out of nothing is too difficult. Thanks
Start building a list in your chosen niche market.
Then send your subscribers asking them what their
biggest problem is in that area. You can create an
ebook based on that research solving those specific
problems.
Once you have written it format it using a pdf tool like
Adobe. You then need to create a killer sales letter.
So you will need to learn copywriting. This is an obstacle
that keeps many newbies from succeeding. Select a payment
processor like 2Checkout and a download facility like
E-junkie which makes it extremely easy to create and
protect your
downloads after people have purchased. It could take two or
three
tries to get it right and create a product that sells.
However, you will learn every time you fail.
10) Yes, the biggie for me is setting up the complete
system/s
Do not try to do everything at once. I suggest you first
start with the squeeze page then work your way the messages
you setup in the autoresponder. You can then start
promoting affiliate products and later include your own
products.
If you try to do everything at once it will seem to
complicated. If you break everything up into small tasks it
really does
become easy to do.
11) Finding time to write the articles. I’m a Mom of two
small children and also work for myself too so time is
always hard to
come by.
Article marketing is time intensive and can take up your
whole day to do 10 to 20 articles a day. If you get your
marketing system to convert into sales you can outsource
this and
still run at a profit.
12) Conversion
Conversion is very challenging. If you can’t get your
site to convert you will not make any money. When you
start out you will not make money from the products
that you promote. You need to track and test different
products to see what your list actually buys. I have
found that there are certain products that sell like
hot cakes while others do not sell at all. Things depend
a lot on the n