January 20, 2013 by

Free Ad Posting Craigslist Alternative

Are you tired of Craigslist blocking your ads, ghosting, spammers getting away with murder, or not having your Vonage phone numbers validate your account? I sure am.

A real alternative is needed. That’s why I created BCSList.com and it’s ready for your ad posting. You do not need an account to post your ad, and it’s much more user friendly than Craigslist. For instance, people can contact you right from the service rather than needing their own email client, and it blocks spam with CAPTCHA.

Head on over to bcslist.com and post a free ad in your area today!

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Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: , , ,
August 30, 2011 by

How Affiliates Make Millions by Spending Thousands

Affiliate marketing is a goldmine opportunity, but it’s a tricky business. Those affiliates that setup newsletter campaigns and collect email addresses are small potatoes. The real affiliates are the ones that are making millions upon millions of dollars in the business. How do they do this?

They spend money

Any business can make millions if it has a marketing budget. But affiliate marketers really benefit if they use PPC and CPM campaigns as the tool to achieve that level of success.

My recent activities have me managing Adwords and Facebook campaigns to get millions of dollars in sales for ecommerce websites. Both of these sites I have an ownership stake in that motivates me to do my best.

In the ecommerce business, a successful Adwords or Facebook campaign relies on ones ability to select the appropriate landing pages for the right keywords and the right ads. Take for example an ecommerce site that sells engraved business items like pens or magnets. In this case, a person will want to specify keywords related to a specific product, and send users to the landing page related to that product. That’s how e-commerce websites make their millions. This is called targeted marketing.

In the case of affiliate marketing, the concept is the same. You need to send visitors to the right landing pages. This can be tricky however, if you are using Facebook for advertising.

Facebook hates affiliate marketers

They hate them so much that they do not allow affiliate advertising with squeeze pages. There is a trick to get around that though.

To get around the FB issue, simply create a few facebook ads, then when they go through the approval process, you can see their IP address. You are sending them to a page that you haven’t made available to anyone else.

If you use StatPress or a similar plugin, you can see their IP address. Then you proceed to filter and redirect their IP address to the page you created for them. That’s the page you submitted with your ads.

When the filter works, it shows Facebook IP’s your fake page, but your real visitors will see your squeeze page. That’s how it’s done.

Google is still the boss

Facebook aside, Google will be your biggest traffic source. Utilize their PPC for search, and direct them to your squeeze pages. Make sure you only use relevant keywords, or you can end up wasting hundreds or even thousands on clicks that will never convert to commissions.

Power affiliates start out spending $1,000 per month on PPC ads, and they repurpose their profits towards their PPC costs. The profit will gradually grow, as they make their millions.

It really is that simple. Now get to work!

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Filed Under: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Making Money Tagged With: , , , , ,
May 1, 2011 by

OIOPublisher Coupon Code for May 2011

A new months means a new coupon! I have my latest coupon for $10 off of OIOPublisher. I like to give these out every month when I remember. The latest coupon to use at checkout is SPRING11-FLING so make sure you copy and paste it during the checkout process.

In case you have no clue, OIOPublisher is the ad code I use here on my blog. It is the most versatile plugin for WordPress that allows you to place turnkey ads anywhere on your blog. They are automated so your blog can generate it’s own revenue while you sleep. In addition, it is a standalone script, so you can use it on static websites and your niche sites as well. Basically, you can use the functionality on any given website you may have.

Grab OIOPublisher by clicking on any of these links or click on the banner below! Remember to use SPRING11-FLING as your coupon during checkout to receive $10 off of the $47 price-tag.
468x60 1 OIOPublisher Coupon Code for May 2011

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Making Money Tagged With: , , , , ,
March 3, 2011 by

How Much of My Marketing Budget Should Go Towards Online Marketing?

Marketing Budget 300x172 How Much of My Marketing Budget Should Go Towards Online Marketing?Marketing today isn’t what it used to be. As a matter of fact, online marketing has taken over in many different industries. Advertising in general is one of those industries. To understand this, take a look at the phone book. How many of you actually use on? Most people go right to Google or some other source and look up information.

I am not saying that you should have your business in the phone book, or ignore offline marketing methods completely. That would be crazy. Just because you have a ton of people moving towards the internet doesn’t mean you want to leave out the millions that still view other advertisements. I still get popular science magazine and look at the ads in the back, because they are just cool! What I am saying is that your budget should edge towards internet marketing.

Some of the paid marketing methods online that will help establish your brand and bring you traffic and sales are:

  • Google Adwords – This is something you most likely know about. But did you know that you should combine your PPC (pay per click) campaign with a good CPM (cost per thousand impressions) campaign as well? The difference is that the CPM only allows you to advertise on the network. That means any website that published Google Adsense is a potential target for your ads. The thing I love about CPM is that I can target my ads for a specific website, and in many cases, different spaces on that website. You can end up paying $3 for a thousand ad impressions compared to $3 for a single click. What if you get 40 clicks from that same $3?
  • Facebook Ads – Another program that allows you to target a specific demographic. Facebook ads are very effective because pretty much every type of person uses the website. Just like with Adwords, you can probably find a coupon code online for $50 in free advertising too!
  • BuySellAds.com – This site is an ad network, and a lot of bloggers use them to sell ad space. You can find different niche blogs on there with different ad spaces and sizes available. Their stats always seem to be off on the blog’s traffic, Twitter followers, and Alexa Traffic Rank, but that’s not a huge deal. The ad spaces can be worth it.

raven affiliate take back time campai 04 How Much of My Marketing Budget Should Go Towards Online Marketing?

  • OIOPublisher – Not only is it the BEST plugin EVER for selling direct ad space on your blog, but they have a marketplace on their site that lists the many blogs using the plugin so you can advertise on them based on your target niche.
  • Fiverr.com – This website is brilliant! You can hire people for anything on there. You can find people to create text or video reviews raving about your business. You can find people who will post positive reviews about you on their established blogs. You can find people who will take care of the tedious tasks of getting Twitter followers and Facebook likes for you. The list is endless, and each will only cost you $5!
  • Paid Blog Reviews – You can actually pay blogs (like mine – see:advertising page) to write reviews about your product or service. Look for the blogs (like mine) that provide true and tested reviews though with objectivity. If I have cons that go with the pros for your product or service, then it will only work in your favor. Trust me. The quality reviews actually cost more though. Take for example my blog. I charge $500 for a paid review here, and I only allow one paid review per month. This adds to a paid review’s legitimacy. If you go for a $20 paid review on a respectable blog, chances are that they do those in volume and will have less of an impact for your business.

I only listed a few things here, but trust me when I tell you that there are tons of great ways to create an online marketing campaign. Some of the good ones cost a pretty penny, and should account for the majority of your paid marketing budget. But don’t let that stop you from utilizing the many free internet marketing methods to drive traffic and leads to your business.

To find some of those free marketing methods, simply hop around this blog and blink. I have tons of free tips on here. Don’t forget to subscribe to my rss feeds!

Drop a comment below and tell me how much you spend on internet marketing.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Business, Internet Marketing, Marketing, reputation management, Sales, Traffic Tagged With: , , , , , ,
February 27, 2011 by

Tips for Launching an Established Blog

Launching a blog is always exciting, but it’s also stressful because you know how tough it’s going to be establishing it. What if I told you that you can establish the blog on day #1 and it will only cost you $50?

There is this wonderful little tool I like to call Fiverr.com, where you can hire anyone to do pretty much anything for $5. Some of these things include internet marketing, article writing, etc.

Fiverr1 300x206 Tips for Launching an Established Blog

If you were to hire a few people on Fiverr right after you launch your blog, you can have immediate traffic, blog comments, and backlinks before you know it. It’s important to get things done of value though. You don’t want to hire someone to get you “traffic” because there is a good chance that they will be using a fake traffic software that’s only meant to inflate your statistics. You want REAL traffic, such as that brought on from social networks.

A few of the things that bring real traffic from Fiverr professionals include but are not limited to (these are real Fiverr.com listings I have seen):

  • 33 StumbleUpons.
  • Posting your link on a Facebook Page wall with 30,000 likes.
  • Guaranteed 500 Facebook Fan Page likes.
  • Tweeting your url 1,000 times in 50 Twitter accounts over the course of a week.

These are just a few of the services that people post on Fiverr.com.

While everything sounds great, it isn’t always so. I have had some great providers on Fiverr.com, but I have also had some disappointments. One disappoint was when I hired someone to post my link on their Facebook Page wall, but they accepted too many jobs at once and my link disappeared from the top within seconds.

To ensure you are getting a good service, check the listing and see if there are any previous customer reviews for that particular service. If there aren’t any at all, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad service. It just means that it either hasn’t sold yet, or the buyer wasn’t polite enough to rate the service. But you may come across listings with negative reviews. In that case, at least you checked and saved yourself $5.

I always go for the services that aren’t over-hyped. For example, why would I go for a “traffic” service when I can get 33 StumbleUpons for 33 different blog posts of mine? Or 33 StumbleUpons from 33 different accounts on the same blog post? That’s more likely to drive real traffic to my blog.


getimage.asp?m=2642&o=3882&i=47643 Tips for Launching an Established Blog

You can also hire someone to post legitimate comments on your blog. When I say legitimate, I mean they actually read the post and comment on it with something valuable to say. You can get comments by blog hopping and guest posting too, but why not supplement it on a new blog with zero traffic?

When all is said and done, you can get some serious action on your brand spankin’ new blog by spending $50 out of pocket. It is definitely worth the money.

Do you use Fiverr.com?

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Internet Marketing, Marketing, search engine optimization, Traffic, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
February 25, 2011 by

Guest Blogging Contest: Win 50 Ad Banners

It’s been a little while since I held a guest blogging contest, so I wanted to make this unique. So the prize this time is going to be 50 custom designed ad banners to help you promote your blog or website.

The cool thing is that I am going to allow the winner to specify the ad sizes they want designed. You can see some 468×60 banner ads here. You may not want all 468×60, but rather a mix between that and 250×250, Skyscrapers, etc.

To win this contest, you have to get the most legitimate comments on your guest posts. The more guest posts you have published on this blog, the likelier you are to get the most comments on a single guest post.

I will be cross-promoting all of the guest posts by blog hopping and linking to them in CommentLuv areas, and I will be promoting each of them on my social networking accounts. In addition, while I am getting more guest posts here, I will be guest posting on other blogs such as ProBlogger to drive even more traffic to this blog. This will help you even more.

So let’s get the entries. If you already have a contributor account here, login and start submitting your best materials! If you don’t, then visit the guest posting page to learn the requirements and contact me to setup a contributor account for you.

The deadline for final comments is April 15th, 2011. Good luck!

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December 4, 2010 by

Your Marketing Plan Template

During my research for popular search terms, I found that “marketing plan template” was on the rise. I decided to take advantage by writing a post about it. The research that provided this data was performed using Google Insights, which is a tool that I use regularly. Using this along with Google Trends, and you have yourself an excellent tool for finding out what hot topics will bring your blog some traffic.

Google Insights 300x82 Your Marketing Plan Template

Marketing Plan Template

Your marketing plan template should include solid research to determine what would bring in the maximum amount of traffic with the least effort. The good thing is that it is easy for regularly updated blogs to dominate key popular search terms. As a matter of fact, when you do a search, you are likely to see multiple blogs turn up on top with articles related to what you searched for. I find myself often seeing blogs pop up on the first page no matter what I am googling.

Research is a must for pretty much anything you are doing. You may be a niche site expert, and you know how vital it is to do your research before choosing a profitable niche. Or perhaps you are into statistics, and obviously you must do research. The problem is that people who unfamiliar with industries that require this kind of research do not know how important it is.

Video Marketing & Branding

Luckily, after your research, the next parts in your marketing plan can be fun. One thing I have noticed that people neglect, is their video branding. Not everyone who is trying to utilize YouTube for traffic brand their videos. When they are new to the video marketing game, they simply do not know and they risk potential theft by unethical internet marketers who do know about branding.

When I speak about video branding, I am clearly talking about the text that you add over the video. It is generally your URL where you want people to go after watching the video.

Tags, Categories, & All That Jazz

Something I have noticed in blogs owned by my clients, is that most of them have noindex, nofollow on tags and categories. This is functionality created by the All in One SEO plugin and others. It is the default setting for the plugin, and clearly the developers of that plugin knew nothing about search engine optimization and blogs. Your tags and categories are not recognized as duplicate content, but rather an alternate method of locating certain content within your blog. By not allowing these pages to be indexed and followed, you are closing doors on opportunities to get ranked in natural search. I have had multiple tags and categories outrank specific articles on some of my blogs, and I quickly make sure these are all indexable when I setup a new blog.

What is important is to make sure you are not abusing your tags. You want to use maybe 10 of them that are truly related to your content. This helps your search engine optimization immensely.

Make Your Article Important

There is one great way of showing search engine how important your content is. That is by linking to related pages that have already been indexed by search engines. Do you ever notice that articles you read often link to Wikipedia articles related to that subject? That’s because Wikipedia is loved by Google, and referencing a related article in the Wikipedia database is showing Google that your article is very relevant to that subject.

I often avoid linking to Wikipedia, and I opt to interlink to articles on my own blog instead. This helps my older articles attract commentary, and it shows Google that even my old content is updated and receives traffic.

Your article is only as important as you make it though. As I write this article, I am very much aware of the keywords I am using within the article, and what tags I am using around specific words and phrases. Notice up above where I bolded and italicized marketing plan template. Also, by using the word just now, I added to the keyword density of this article for that phrase while accounting for the amount of words I am using in this article.

Keep in mind the various seo obstacles that you face when writing an article. People always want to show off and say “just focus on the reader and not the search engine”. Well, I say that you can do both without sacrificing quality. I can easily insert a bit of seo by simply pointing out the techniques I am using in this article itself.

Blog Hopping is a Science

You obviously know by now that blog-hopping is an immediate way to get traffic. Did you know that how you blog hop is important as well?

What I mean by “how” is that for example, if I want to sell some ad space on my blog, I would use my direct link to my advertising page rather than to my homepage. When someone clicks my name from a blog that I commented on, the first thing they would see is my ad placements and rates. If I wanted to sell a service like web design or search engine optimization, then I would link to those pages instead.

For the purposes of seo, if you are smart and listened to what I said about categories and tags, then you can link directly to one of those from a related site. When Google follows the link, they would see updated content on those categories or tags often as you update your blog with new content. Are we connecting the dots here?

I like to think of blog hopping as a targeted marketing method. Not just because you blog hop on relevant blogs, but because you target specific content on your blog with your hopping activities.

Relevancy of Advertising


getimage.asp?m=2624&o=3630&i=45565 Your Marketing Plan Template
Do you take money just because you need it? I don’t. Well, I don’t really need it as much as I used to because my business is fairly successful. But if you are new to working at home, or simply not yet making money, then it could be tempting to accept advertising that is not relevant to not only your blog but your specific article.

Did you notice the ad to the left? It is related to what I am talking about right now… Working at home. If I placed an ad pushing beauty products, then it would obviously not be targeted advertising. I am sure there are some beautiful women who read my blog, but I wouldn’t target them alone. I am targeting my entire community of readers because we are all interested in working from home.

If you checked out my advertising page, you would notice that I offer a paid review service. Did you notice the cost. Presently it is $500 for one paid review, and I only offer one paid review slot per month. This ensures I do not mess with the quality of my posts in lieu of cash. I am not that hard-up, sorry. I have had to turn down money on this blog many times because the product either was irrelevant, or not containing the quality that I would recommend to my readers.

Discussion

Based on the many things I discussed above, it is important for your marketing plan template to pay attention to detail. Focus on quality while not taking away from search engine optimization. Make sure your content is in the right place before it gets published.

What steps do you take to ensure your marketing plan is on par with the top blogs in your niche?

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Filed Under: Advertising, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Research, search engine optimization Tagged With: , , , , ,
September 7, 2010 by

Income Blogging Requires New Strategies in This Day and Age

If you started blogging back in the late 90′s up into the early 2000′s then you are most likely a successful blogger today. Back then, it was the newest and greatest thing to do on the web. Now-a-days it takes much more effort because everyone and their mother is doing it. The problem isn’t necessarily that the market is saturated. The problem is that society is used to blogs now, and people can be very critical about the content that they read.

As of 2010, bloggers have to take on a new approach. The most effective approach today is patience and time. You can really build a blog into a success if you have the time (approximately a year or two), and the patience to see that timeframe all the way through. Of course time means nothing if you are not adding value to your blog in the form of research and content. But that is not what this article is about.

Growing a blog can be fairly easy in action, but can get very tedious in practice. What I mean by this is that the basic act of commenting on blogs every day to drive traffic, and posting articles on your blog can get very tiring when you feel that the momentum is not growing automatically. But that automatic momentum takes time to happen. Eventually, you will get visitors and comments without having to go to blogs on a daily basis. You still should comment on other blogs and not “sell out” on those that have made you a success, but it isn’t necessary for traffic at that point.

If you are already an established online presence somewhere other than your blog, you can utilize that presence to drive traffic to your blog. Let’s say for example you have a forum with hundreds of members. You can send out newsletters to those members letting them know of your new blog. You can post advertisements on your forum and bring in clicks. Using outside sources that are already established is one of the fastest ways to bring in immediate traffic and commentary to your blog. Of course, not every blogger will already have online experience or existing websites elsewhere.

Specials & Promotions

So you all know the power of free. That’s what guys like me who teach blogging talk about a lot. We tell you to offer an ebook for free in order to build your newsletter. But did you know that free ebooks and contests are not the only way to new readers and traffic? As a freelance web designer and seo expert, I have been able to offer promotions (not free) and trade my discounted time in exchange for traffic and subscribers. Say for example I were to offer a 30% discount on internet marketing services only to my newsletter subscribers. That would equal a valuable incentive to sign up.

Take into account what you have a talent in. What are you good at? Offer that expertise or service as a special or promotion and build your list.

Newsletter List Building Minus Unsubscriptions

When you first get your newsletter all set up, you are eager to make that system work to earn you some affiliate cash. But wait! There is no rush. If you are only in this for the money, then you will not listen to me anyways and your list will suffer. So will your income.

Why Wait? Look at it like this. Let’s say you have 40 subscribers. You send out a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter, and one or two subscribers unsubscribe using that handy link you provide in your newsletter. In my expert opinion, that single newsletter only being displayed in front of 40 people was not worth the loss of a subscription. You want your material to get in front of as many people as possible!

How can you correct this problem? How about you just build your list, and don’t send out a newsletter? I know that seems counter-productive. Especially because you obtained those subscribers with the intent of sending them a newsletter. But wouldn’t it be more effective if you waited until you had 500 subscribers before you sent your exclusive article out to them? It would save you some creative material, and inside of your newsletter on top of the free stuff you can link to affiliate offers. You can even offer the newsletter as an advertising option on your website because you have a decent sized audience.

There is nothing to be gained from greediness. Patience wins the prize.

Offer a community

You will notice that right here on my blog, I offer a free marketing forum. It is like a whole new extension of my blog but an entire community in and of itself! I have noticed that I get members signing up in my forum that have not taken part in my blog commentary at all. My reach has expanded greatly and all it took was a little creative thinking. The forum is a separate entity, and it has it’s own list. If you don’t have the subscribers in your blog newsletter, then you may very well have forum members that have opted to receive messages from the forum. In that case, you have an entire 2nd list to market to!

By offering a community with your blog, you are making your blog web 2.0 in the social sphere. Think about why Facebook and MySpace have had so much success. They provide reasons for members to come back on a daily basis. You may not want a forum, but you may like the idea of opening up a profile blog space for members to write something of their own right on your blog site. You can even offer revenue sharing for regular guest posters on your blog. There are free handy plugins for WordPress that allow for that functionality.

How’s your expert status?

I have been riding the opportunity for expert status for a long time. I have even appeared on a major news talk radio show as a call-in expert. Today, I decided to pick up the “Writer’s Market” book from the library to help me locate some trade magazines that may be interested in featuring my articles. Aside from the obvious exposure, some of these magazines pay $1,000+ per expert article.

Being an expert practically entitles you to traffic on your website or blog. Once a reader finds you in a trade magazine that they subscribe to, they have become your loyal reader as well. You will want to gain that potential source of new readers. You can also publicize your published works in trade magazines on your site. That way, when readers on your blog discover you, they can locate your column in the trade magazine which will solidify your expertise in their eyes.

New bloggers who don’t try to get creative tend to completely pass this up as a marketing tactic. You will find a lot of bloggers posting on EzineArticles and Associated Content as well as other well known article websites. They often never realize that it is very possible for them to appear in print magazines too! Never underestimate the power of print. These trade magazines tend to have a huge subscriber-base. That is afterall, why they can afford to pay $1k for a 3,000 word article.

Features and Options

People love options. I would classify options as a way of making it easy for your readers to come back to your site and read you more. Examples of effective features would be a “bookmark this site” link; “email a friend” this article; “share this article on Facebook”; and others. Features and options make your blog interactive, and allow your readers to find you fast or promote your blog for you. I would say that being user-friendly is the single most important part of your blog. Sure you may find a blog that you love and lacks even the basics of social bookmarking buttons, but would you take the time to go and manually promote that blog article if it wasn’t convenient?

You should never make it inconvenient for your visitors. I find it inconvenient when I want to comment on a blog, and they do not have a “subscribe to comments” feature. It makes me mad because I have no idea if someone was replying to something I said. It makes me look like a jackass that doesn’t really take part in that blog when it wasn’t even my fault.

Your readers are what will make or break you, so don’t make their life harder than it needs to be. Spoon feed them everything from easy access, to easy sharing. Besides, free is the best form of marketing.

Obvious ignorance

Chances are that if you got into this with money on the mind, then you looked up the short cuts to get you there quickly. Chances are also good that you did not research it totally, and are doing obvious spamming black hat seo methods.

If you are doing any of the following, please stop immediately:

  • Keyword repeating – the act of placing your keyword in an invisible layers like the <noframes> tag. An example would be “make money blogging, make money online, blogging for money, make money blogging, blogging money, online make money, make online money….etc”.
  • Keyword jamming – the art of placing keywords on the bottom or top of your site and making the font incredibly small. What a great way to get banned from a search engine.
  • Hidden keywords – placing keywords in invisible text like that of the noframes tag; font the same color as the background; placing keywords in comment tags or the style sheets.
  • Stacking keywords – you found out that alt tags are a great way to add keywords into your code. So you added keywords to every image you have, including spacers. Horrible idea. The alt tag is for describing the image. Leave the spacer alone as it is supposed to do nothing other than add space. As for the other images, actually describe what they are with a few words. They do not have to be keywords unless that image actually matches a keyword.
  • Dynamic automation – You may have thought it was a good idea to have the meta tags, on-page content, or title of a page change every couple of days. But guess what… Search engines already thought of this. Be realistic, and you will win. Be tricky, and you will end up with a useless domain.

There are many obvious pitfalls of bad seo technique. It’s best to simply ignore any of the techniques that are black-hat. And sure enough, there are many I didn’t even mention. Invest your time into your blog/site and figure out them all by yourself. You will love yourself in the morning.

Newsgroups aren’t 80′s after-all

Newsgroups are often associated with spam. But there are actually millions of loyal newsgroup users out there. The trick to becomming one of them is to actually take part in the newsgroups and not think like a marketer. Most people try and get away with providing some quick freebie with their url plastered across it. If you stick with that scenerio then you will most likely be classified into the spammer group.

You can actually take part in a newsgroup and establish yourself as an expert. Then, just like a forum or article would, the newsgroup will bring traffic to your blog. It is all about image and branding yourself in front of an audience. You can find tons of free newsgroups online, and you can bring them up right in your outlook express or windows mail program. What… you didn’t notice that newsgroup link in your email client?

Let affiliates promote

I know you want to sell things. But selling isn’t everything when you are focused on building. With that in mind, it is a good idea to have an affiliate program running to promote one of your premium ebooks or some other product. I always prefer my own affiliate program for control issues I have. But when you are first starting out, you may want to utilize the huge network that places like ClickBank already have in place. There are literally thousands of people who may end up promoting your blog and your product.

Affiliate programs are a great source of traffic for any website. You can offer the product right on your website, and hopefully the visitor will look around and become a regular blog reader. Maybe even a subscriber.

You always want to go where the people are. That’s why you turn to affiliate programs because there may be a single person who decides to promote your product, and they have an existing reader-base of 50,000. Ok, so that is a great scenerio to have, but it is realistic.

Are you building your blog properly?

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Internet Marketing, List Building, Making Money, Marketing, Research, search engine optimization, Traffic Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
July 4, 2010 by

Profits Aren’t a Trick, They’re a Numbers Game

Profits 150x150 Profits arent a trick, theyre a numbers gameI have always been a math nerd. To be completely honest, I will tell you that I flunked first grade because at that time, math was my worst subject. Not because I didn’t have the brain for it, but because I had a lot of stuff distracting me at home and at school with “friends”. Flunking 1st grade really affected me, and after that I made math my best subject. I found that I was a total nerd and numbers were my best friend. I often saw myself running numbers through my head like rain-man.

Everyday, I sit in amazement because I run some numbers through my head and realize that things like making money is really easy when you look at it from a mathematical point of view. I did some figuring with Google Adwords.

Let us look at an example of making money with Google Adwords. I know Adwords will cost you money, but you have to spend money to make money sometimes. In this case, a little money will go a long way. When you think about Adwords, you automatically thing pay-per-click which costs a lot of money out of your pocket. But the cool thing is that you can get much more exposure with CPM, and pay less money!

Adwords CPM works like this. You are paying a maximum bid for 1,000 pageviews. Let’s say you set a max bid of $1 for 1,000 pageviews. This means that your ad will be displayed on the network of sites 1,000 times before you even have to spend a dollar! You can target which websites in your niche that your ad will be displayed on. I would for example, display my web design or seo ads on Digital Point Forum which would get it in front of the eyes of industry people who would most likely outsource their work to me. Let’s say that I am running a PSD Layout Design special for $50. If I spent $5 per day on CPM at a $1 maximum bid, then my ad would be displayed 5,000 times for $5 per day! If only 2 of those displays turn into a sale, I would make $2,800 a month on a 28 day month. Deduct the $5 per day at 28 days and you are deducting $140. $2,800 – $140 = $2,660. I would call this a great return on investment!

If you were to apply this scenario to your $47 ebook, then you would make a good chunk of money without having to dedicate any of your personal time performing a service! Now landing your ad in front of the proper audience may take some tweaking, but at $5 a day can you really complain? Take the risk and make some serious money. All you need is a single successful formula here. Once you have a performing campaign, you can focus on another with the other on auto-pilot. If you have little expense, then you can reinvest your profits into your Adwords campaign so you spend more than $5 per day. This will result in more conversions which brings in more money.

Don’t have an ebook? You can use a service like InDigital Works which will provide you with products that have master resell rights which you can package together. Take these products and bundle them together which a squeeze page on multiple niche blogs built with Elegant Themes and you have a winning formula which you can clone and do all over again!

What do you have to lose in this numbers game?

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Making Money, Sales Tagged With: , ,
June 30, 2010 by

The Balance Between Comments and Articles

Apple iphone 150x150 The balance between comments and articlesComing from someone with experience, I am here to tell you that you can’t have your cake and eat it to. What I mean by this is that when you first start out, you want loads of blog traffic and comments on every single post. You may have come across blogs that have hundreds of comments on a single post. But those blogs with hundreds of comments have been around for years. Those blogs either collected that amount of comments over many years, or that blog is run by a celebrity or popular person and gets flooded with daily traffic.

As a new blog, you have to consider the following. Consider that if you post an article (or more than one) every single day, you are likely to only get a few comments on that post within the first week. Readers get overloaded with the vast amount of content you have available and they cannot comment on every single one right then and there. The reader may come back on another day to comment on an old article, but then they might end up not commenting on the newest article.

If you were to sacrifice your search engine optimization and traffic rank, you can spread out your blog articles and end up receiving more comments per post. The reason for this is that your articles stay on the homepage for much longer and readers have time to read them.

There is a very fine balance of going after both comments and article-count. The only sure-fire way to get that amount of commentary on daily articles is to actively promote your blog via Google Adwords CPM and other high traffic immediate sources. Another way obviously would be to break some serious news that nobody else reported yet (will the next iPhone whistle-blower please stand up?).

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Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Traffic Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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