Blogging for Dollars

Blogging for Dollars

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger's focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google's spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for the NotePage http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com product lines. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com , and http://www.small-business-software.net

New Trends In Traffic Generation

By Jean-Philippe SchoeffelWorried about the next Google slap? Do you only rely on Search Engine traffic? Don't know where to start when you need to drive traffic to your site? If yes, this article is for YOU! Whatever you do on the net, you will always deal with Traffic Generation...the holly grail.

To make it short, you have 2 main types of traffic :

1) Search Engine traffic

What is it? : organic traffic coming from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN

Pros :

- This traffic is free
- Traffic is highly targeted
- Volume of traffic can be very high

Cons :

- you don't control it
- you rely on robots to analyze your site and deliver some traffic
- you need to get indexed...without being de-indexed (once again, you rely on search engines policy and algorithms)
- short term

2) Referred Traffic (I know Search engine traffic is also a sort of referred traffic, but let's put SE traffic apart from this category)

What is it? Traffic coming from third party sites (other than search engines) and is a result of a "manual / human" action.

Examples : article directories, social bookmarking services, forums, partners, text link ads, banners, directories, rss...

Pro :

- you control it
- you have a lot of means to develop it (almost unlimited ; a lot are free)
- it's highly targeted
- You can pay to get better targeting and control over your referred traffic
- Long term

Cons :

- Time & resources consuming
- Repetitive tasks

Now, through my membership, my forum, my readings of other forums, I know that most webmasters mainly rely on search engines traffic, our first category.

The aim of the present article is to throw the light on a different angle of the Traffic Generation big box!

Summary : the right way to get into traffic generation is to forget about search engines.

Focusing on search engine traffic gives a too narrow vision of traffic generation. It does not reveal all the opportunities existing outside of the search engines (understand all the way to generate Referred Traffic).

In addition, as you've seen from the cons above, you accept to rely on something you never control, and this is a HUGE risk in your marketing strategy.

Warning : I do not say, you should not care about search engine traffic. I say that it should not be your priority, and the first door you try to open when dealing with traffic generation. It's a question of point of view.

Now, on the other hand, focusing on developing what we called Referred Traffic is a more positive, constructive and profitable attitude and marketing strategy.

Not only will you build traffic for the long term, but you will also "manually" control your traffic, either by submitting your content, your sites, your feeds, or by exchanging links, content, traffic with partners, being active on forums, blogs...

Doing it this way will give you a lot of power and effectiveness. Those sources of Referred Traffic only vanish...if you decide to let them vanish. Once again, you control everything.

Now, you have some positive side effects :

- By building Referred Traffic, you give a lot of food to search engines to index your site, understand them, and rank them well...

- ...thus developing naturally your Search Engine Traffic!

Try to develop Referred Traffic by submitting your sitemap to Google, and you will understand the difference between the 2 approaches :-)

Google and other search engines tend to change their algorithms quite often to produce more relevant content for users of their engines. Sometimes, your site is getting de-indexed in a day just because of this.

Are you lost, is your site dead? It could if you only relied on Search Engine traffic. It has no impact if you focused on building Referred Traffic.

In one case, you feel bad and like if you had wasted your time. In the other case, you don't even notice it (on the long run ; of course, you can see a fall in traffic coming from a given search engine)

But even then, your site has a lot of chances of being re-indexed when you've build Referred Traffic, simply because the search engines food is still there! And this is a HUGE difference and one of the most valuable asset you can develop.

If you're still with me, you should now understand my point : when dealing with bots, you need to act as a human...which means you should not try to talk to them :-) Give them some "bot food" that you build naturally by developing a Referred Traffic Generation Strategy.

Here are 10 easy "pieces" to do what we described above :

Once you have a site...

1) Find some related blogs, read them, identify trends, and post comments (no stupid comments, no spam of course) with a link back to your site where you're also discussing the topic

2) Do the same with related forums. Use search engines (!) to find relevant forums. Register and start being active on these forums. Use your signature to put a link back to your site

3) Create a blog (if you don't have one) and post on a regular basis on it. Use a service like feedburner to syndicate your content with other webmasters.

4) Submit your feeds, blogs, and site to niche directories

5) Find "authority" sites in your niche, analyze them and contact the webmasters to :

a) propose a link exchange (you should first put a link to their site),
b) if you're selling a report or an ebook, propose them to become an affiliate (give them a fre.e copy of your ebook first), and make it easy for them to manage their promotion
c) if they have a newsletter, read it, understand it, and then ask the webmaster if you can have a sponsored ad into it, or even better a solo ad where you could advertise your site, newsletter, ebook...
d) propose content exchange with link back to each other's website
e) build a relation with them

6) The most effective : write articles and submit them to article directories (some with big traffic, and some niche related ones)

7) Social bookmarking and social networking :

a) build a Squidoo lens (see Squidoo Profits for more details: http://www.squidoo-profits.com). You can find many sites like Squidoo and build pages about your niche on these ones too. You can link them to your main niche sites, you can link back to your blogs, or even to your other "squidoo" like pages, thus creating a "niche social net" all relevant to your niche.
b) build a myspace account and create a profile around your niche, then build your "list" of friends around this profile
c) submit your site to social bookmarking services (digg, technorati, del.icio.us ...)
d) You can also comment on the most popular entries with a link back to your site, blog, or squidoo lens.

8) Use videos and sites like youtube.com (and similar) to drive traffic to your niche site. Produce a short video (2-3 minutes) around your site, your niche and you. Link to your Videos from your "niche social net" (see 7) ) Also, ask webmasters to put a link to this video (once you have build a relation with them) - Or they can upload it to their server and brand it with their affiliate ID, if you have an affiliate program

9) Make it viral : your best source of (new) traffic...is your (current) traffic!

Use some "Tell a friend" features on your site to have them promote your site. You can provide incentives (such as a free report, a coupon for your ebook...)

10) Paid Traffic : yes...all the above techniques do not cost a penny...(unless you pay for advertising on a partner's site)

You can pay to get targeted traffic : you can advertise through text link ads, banners, that will appear on high traffic sites.

You should seriously consider paid traffic. Do not see it as a cost, but rather as an initial investment to boost your site. Also, if your site is correctly monetized, then paid traffic is the easiest way to get some quick metrics about this, and to make it profitable quickly.

As you see we could easily expand this list. But, those are, in my opinion, the most important sources of Referred Traffic.

Now, compare the above list with Search Engine traffic, and you will see why your approach should focus on generating Referred Traffic and not Search Engine Traffic. This type of traffic will come naturally anyway...

About the Author: JP Schoeffel is a full time Internet Marketer specialized in Site monetization and Traffic generation. He operates a monthly membership (http://www.Niches-In-A-Box.com) where he provides a complete business to his members, month after month, as well as comprehensive training center.

Source: www.isnare.com
Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=208443&ca=Internet

Do-It-Yourself" Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Ranking high in Google's search results can have a phenomenal impact on the success of your business. You can either engage the expertise of a Search Engine Optimisation company, or if you have the time, there are some changes you can make to your website yourself.
Step 1: Keyword Research What keywords do you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services? A keyword can be one word (e.g. "optimisation"), but multiple keywords or keyword phrases are usually preferred, because they are more specific and more likely to be what your customers are looking for (eg. " Search Engine Optimisation Australia").

Write down as many as you can think of. Brainstorm with your team. Think of alternative words. Consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customer (e.g. "house cleaning Hornsby"). Also, get some ideas from your competitors' websites. Try to make a list of 20-30 keyword phrases.

Choose the two keyword phrases you think would be searched for the most. But also remember, the more competition there is for a keyword, the harder it is to achieve top rankings. If you want to rank high in Google for the keyword "insurance", you have a very long journey ahead. So try your best to select two keyword phrases that are the most relevant to you business but that are not vague nor competitive. It's a good idea to have 2 or 3 words in each phrase (e.g. "wedding catering services")

Once you've selected your two best keyword phrases the next step shows you how to make some improvements to your home page.

Step 2: Web Copy Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince Google that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. The more prominent they are, the better. (Keep in mind that as important as search engines are, customers come first, so make sure your copy also reads well.) Here's how you can increase each keyword's prominence:

* Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading;

* Include keywords towards the top of the page;

* Bold or italicise keywords where appropriate;

* Instead of having a link to another page that says "Click here to read more ", reword it to include your keywords, e.g. "Read more about our seo copywriting Services".

An important tip is to also include these keywords in your HTML "title tag". Use your content management system to make these changes yourself, or perhaps ask your web developer to do it if you're unsure how.

Once you have fine-tuned your home page, consider adding new content, such as detailed descriptions of what you offer, FAQs and informative articles about your products and services. (If you don't want to write these yourself, they can be located for free on the internet - do a search for "articles directory").

It's also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.

Step 3: Linking Each link from another website to your website (not from your website) is considered by search engines as a vote of popularity for your business and will improve your rankings.

But it is the quality, not quantity, of the links that is crucial. The other websites should be relevant to your industry, and preferably highly regarded themselves. Ten quality links count far more than 500 links from arbitrary websites. In the same way your personal business network can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so too the online network you build on the internet. Brainstorm all the relevant websites that could link to you, such as non-competing companies, and industry bodies and organisations. Write a friendly email to each describing the benefit their visitors would get in knowing about your business, and request them to create a link to your website. Most people will not respond first time round, so a follow-up phone call is usually required.

How do I monitor my results? Monitor your rankings in Google over the next few months by typing your chosen keywords into the search box, and recording your ranking. Also look at your hosting reports to understand what search terms your visitors are using to find your website.

The above process can be also be repeated for each page of your website. Remember to keep updating your content, and continually increase the number of links to your website.

As you see your rankings climb you should see a corresponding increase in web traffic and a substantial increase in sales enquiries. Be sure to record the source of your customer enquiries, so you can measure the success of your marketing efforts.

Remember, if you measure it, you can improve it. About the author
Philip Shaw is the Director of CleverClicks, a leading search engine marketing company in Australia provides ethical, result-oriented SEO, PPC and web copywriting services. Contact mail@cleverclicks.com.au or call on +61-2-8003-5664