Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 5

It takes some research and creativity to find the right money-generating tools for your blog. It's all a matter of your personal tastes and there are so many to choose from it can be confusing. If you are new to the internet, try these suggestions.If you have been applying the other parts of this series (see Author Box below), you should be working diligently to produce good-quality, original content, on your blog and are attracting a decent amount of traffic. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money. Here are several ways to generate profits from the trafffic to your blog. First, Google’s Free Adsense program allows you to make money with ultimate ease. Visit their website at adsense.google.com. You will find more detail about their free advertising program there but here are some quick tips. Google Adsense is an easy, free, and automated way to monetize your blog because it scans your blog and only shows Ads that fit your blog content. You can even block certain types of Ads which may be Adult in nature or may be from your competitors. Anyway, when users finish reading your newest post, they are going to move on. You can catch them before they do. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. If they do click, ka-ching!, you have just cashed in on your first virtual pennies!Yes, pennies. Your profits will only be pennies for each click of an Ad but you can turn those pennies into dollars if you “do it right”! This involves placing your Google ads in the right places on your blog/website and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the Google Adsense site to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone, when looking at your blog, will click on a Google Ad. But, NEVER click the ads yourself thinking you will make money. This is called "Click Fraud". Google will catch you and you will be blackballed! Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the color of your advertisement text and links to blend in with your site design. You will want the Ads to match the colors on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple. Click the link in the Author Box below for an example.Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services. It's very important that you watch out for affiliate scams. I edit 15 blogs and all have affiliate links on them. These are advertisers I personally trust and I only display advertisers who offer a 100% Money Back Guarantee of satisfaction. I checked out each one before adding them. They are hand picked for their knowledge, expertise, and Guarantee. Your reputation is on the line when you place affiliates on your blog/website. Enough said.Anyway, referring back to our technological gadgets example that I have been using throughout this series, you do a keyword search and you discover "Gadget X" on a merchant’s website and they offer an affiliate program. After you have checked them out, you simply sign up for the affiliate program. Some words of caution are in order. Do Not Give Your Social Security Number to just any affiliate program that looks good. I stick with affiliates using Clickbank or Commission Junction. These are reputable middlemen who process the sales and who protect your personal information. This may be overly cautious but, with identity theft these days, I would rather be overly cautious.Do Not Believe the Testimonials in their sales page. Check them out for yourself. You can do this simply by searching for their product through Google or Yahoo or MSN. See what others have to say about it. Or, purchase the product yourself and try it. Then, create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on "Gadget X". Point out its benefits and bad points too and include a link (which is given to you by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase Gadget X through your blog. Be balanced in your review. If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant tracks your referral link and will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product and, for example, you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheck for you just for writing about ONE product. Now, affiliate programs are a popular way to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programs that are related to your blog’s theme? Just go to any major Search Engine and, using our example for tech gadgets, search for "tech gadgets + affiliate programs”, without the quotes. Another, slightly better way is to go to associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programs in your niche. Bottom line? There is money to be made when you construct and promote your blog/website smartly.

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 4

Optimization is the art of turning a blog or website into an interesting experience for visitors and, hopefully, a money making endeavor for the owner. There are tactics you must know to make it happen. This article, written for new-to-the-internet folks, will guide you in the right direction.In previous parts of this series we taught how to get back-links to your site or blog. If you missed those parts you can click the link in the Author Box below. You should start with Part-1. If you have followed Parts 1-2 and 3, Part 4 will who you that getting back-links from other websites is not the only Free way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic. The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to take advantage of all the content you already have posted on your blog. You can literally multiply your visibility across the internet with this simple, yet powerful, method. I use it often. I'm talking about making your blog posts available to millions of people by posting them in Article Directories.Focus on your posts that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to Article Directories. These Article Directories collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day. Best of all, it's Free!When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On all article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. Most importantly, you include a link to your blog! This is where you can truly leverage for Free traffic! Once you get the hang of it, do a Search for "Article Directories". There are literally hundreds of them. I personally post to over 350 Directories, with one button, on a regular basis. If you go to my blog (see Author Box) you will find the software I use. The software is not free but it cuts hours off posting to the directories.Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that are based on your niche. Using our example web site in previous parts of this series, to find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter "technological gadget + forum", without the quotes. You want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members and, preferably, always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum to see how active it really is. When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to add a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog. Traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affiliate since they are already convinced you are an “expert” in the field. A word of caution - do NOT blatantly advertise in your forum signature! Only use the signature to point to your web site/blog. See my Author Box below as an example.The next strategy is word of mouth. Suppose you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift of an ebook and posted it on your blog saying that, if the visitor will refer three of their friends to visit your blog, the gift will be theirs for free? If your small report or gift is topical enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to you! There can be one problem with this. If you have a blog that does not allow you to upload your report to their server, you will need to find a separate web host to upload your gift to. Then, when a reader wants the gift, they click the download link which takes them to your web host where the gift can be had. I do this for several Christian ebooks. Readers click the links and are taken to the source for downloading.Since I am on Blogger.com myself, I am currently looking into Free and paid web hosting as I have a number of Free Viral eBooks I want to offer my readers for download. What is a "Viral eBook"? That is for another lesson but, in short, it is a way to make money from ebooks written by other people.Finally, whatever you do, be sure to use the “blog and ping” technique that everyone is talking about. I use this every time I post on my blogs. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping many portals at once by using free services such as: pingomatic.com or the one I use most, pingoat.com. When you ping you are telling the search engine spiders you have something good to eat and they will come crawling. This is a major method of getting listed (indexed) by the Search Engines for Free! Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertising space. Keep in mind, when buying paid traffic, always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads against expenses. I should not need to tell you that, if your profits do not offset the expense, you will end up losing money. Choose wisely. I know that sounds like common sense but, believe it or not, people throw away thousands of dollars simply because they do not know how to track the performance of their Ads. Personally, I have not purchased Ads or links nor do I plan to in the near future. Until you master traffic generation by Free methods, hold onto your money and learn much more about it. It is definitely a gamble for a novice. It is sophisticated stuff in spite of claims to the contrary. Going the Free route takes longer but it is financially safer so watch out for claims that promise to make you rich overnight by buying advertising on the internet.Yours for success in life.

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 3

Optimizing your blog or website to attract visitors and maybe make some money can be a mind boggling experience if you are a newbie. That's because the tech-talk is over your head. Well, this series will make more sense to you.In Part 2 of this series, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. Check my Author Box if you missed the first two parts. You need to check them out.This time, we are going to explore further into linking strategies and how to determine and obtain "high quality" links. We are also going to briefly explain the much promoted PageRank system used by the major Search Engines. First, examine a regular link. A link is nothing more than a piece of text. It is what appears in your address bar at the top of the browser you are using right now. It can also be an image that links to your blog but, for our example, we are using text. Some of the factors that matter most are:1) The website location which the link takes you to.2) The actual text of the link. What does the link tell the Search Engines?3) The PageRank of the page on which the link takes a Search Engine to. For learning purposes you need to understand this information. You naturally want the link to take the Search Engines to your blog but to which page of your blog? Do you want to link to an individual post or to your blog home page? Since your blog should be a constantly updated website, it is always wise to point to your main page instead of individual posts because individual posts tend to be very time-sensitive. One of my blogs, on News and Commentary, is a good example of this. Usually posts are outdated within hours or days of posting. The Search Engines will still list some of your posts based on the keywords. Remember Part 2 of this series? If you have not read the earlier parts of this series, click the link in the Author Box below.The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Continuing with our example from Parts 1 and 2 of this series, your blog is about "technological gadgets". Suppose there is another site that has a home page link that says "Miss USA Pageant" in it and on their site is a link back to your blog. This would not make much sense, right? You only want links to your site that contain the terms "technological" or "gadget" to greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. You see, links from other similar sites with your keywords is what the search engines read. The more accurate the keywords of the sites linking to you, the better you will rank in the search engines. Hence, it is essential to put some thought to requesting links from other web masters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.Now, about PageRank. We will use Google as an example. Page Rank (or PR) is basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. It is claimed that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent the Search Engine robots will visit the website to index it. It is also claimed that the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank might bring you many benefits if you can get to the top.Now, there is much debate among web masters about PageRank. Some web masters say it really does not make much difference. They are half right. Page Rank, in itself, is not the key. The actual power of search engines to affect your blog's visibility is in the keywords of your blog. When people do a search, using your keywords, you will automatically get a high PageRank if your keyword combination is unique, a low-competition keyword or phrase, and matches what the surfer types into the Search Engine box. In other words, targeting keywords is more important because your site will automatically go onto the first page the surfer sees if the keywords match what they are looking for. Again, see Parts 1 and 2 of this series.Remember this: Page Rank is only a side effect of our real goal which is to get people onto your blog. People do not search according to Page Rank they search with keywords they type into the search box. If your keywords are poorly thought out you will not rank at all. For example, search any keywords you like. What do you get? You get the top ranked web sites with those keywords in the title and/or description of their sites. It is called “niche marketing”. You can find people looking for every topic, by keywords, on the Web. When you have the information they are seeking you will be on the first or second page of search engine results.Your new blog will start out with no PageRank at all. Once the search engine robots find your blog, through links on other sites, or through articles you post in Article Directories (see Part 4 of this series), your blog will start gaining PageRank. Then, depending on the PageRank (keywords) of the referring page, your blog PageRank will climb even more. The referring page is the website/blog that is linking back to your blog. Search engines will find your link on their referring page and follow it back to your blog. Simple, eh?Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors to your blog, who are interested in your niche, thus enabling Search Engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank you higher in search engine results.They call them “keywords” for good reason! Yours for success in life.

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 2

Building traffic to your blog or website can be a daunting task if you are new to this Internet thing. There are simple tricks of the trade applied by techies that any newbie can apply when understood in plain English! This article does just that.If you haven't read Part 1 of this series, see the Author Box below. In Part 1 of this series we optimized blogs to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we inserted. This is called on-page optimization. Onpage optimization affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, you do not want to skip it. Every little bit helps when you are competing for search engine rankings!Now, let's tackle off-page search engine optimization. These are factors that are not inserted into your blog but affect your search engine rankings greatly. There are many off-page factors. I will cover the major ones in this article.The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog. These are links that point back to your blog from other locations/web sites on the web.As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, keeping to our theme of technological gadgets, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites, when you have a tech blog, would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like S.W.A.T. storming a meth lab.Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for them. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information, chances are the webmaster of the site you want to get a backlink from will link to your blog to get the information you are providing.How should you ask these web masters of authority to link to your blog? A word of caution here. Only apply this technique if your blog is really content rich and offers high quality information. No webmaster will link to you if all you are offering are reprints of articles not written by you. They want original content, written by you! That said, the most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster and request a link back. Here's how.First, look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that your are targeting. In this case, do a search for "technological gadgets". The first few results will likely be commercial sites. Ignore those because we are looking only for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Besides, the major commercial sites likely will not link to your small blog anyway. When I searched I found Gizmodo.com. It would be a good option for our example. A word of caution - stay away from Link Farms or Reciprocal Linking sites. You do not want hundreds of links overnight. This will be seen as spam and you know what happens, right? La-La Land for your blog!If you were actually editing a technological gadgets site, you would compose an email to the webmaster of Gizmodo.com (whose email address you can find on the site). Start by stating how you came across their site, i.e., "looking for gadget information, I came across your site". Do NOT say "looking for link partners."! Tell them how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really nice about their site. Take some time and look over their site and maybe make a comment on a particular article or feature that you like and you think your readers might like it too. Then, suggest that such-and-such content on your own blog will be a good fit to their site. Ask that you be allowed to put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to forge a mutually beneficial relationship between their site and your blog. This is very important - all your emails, no matter to whom they are being sent, should have a link to your blog in the signature of the email! This means that everyone and anyone getting an email from you will see your blog address and this can mean even more traffic. This also gives web masters an easy link to click to check out your blog to see if it is worth linking to. Make it easy for them!In your email message you can even suggest what your link should say if they decide to add you. "Your Source for TechnoGadgets"- is an example you can suggest to them. Along the way, you will find many web masters who will not even respond to your email. Forget about them and move on if they have not responded to your email within one week. You can set up a folder in your email program to store your link requests so you can go back and see who has responded and who has ignored you. But, really, if they do not contact you within a week, forget them. There are enough quality sites who will link to you.Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up and, before long, you should have quite a few good sites linking to you. You can repeat this process on a monthly basis to build your back-links slowly. In Part 3 of this series, we will explore more advanced off-page factors and ways to improve upon them!

Blog Optimization for Profit - Part 1

Optimizing your blog for fun and profit can be a daunting task. There are tricks of the trade that separate newbies from techies but that does not mean you cannot do some of it yourself. This article is one of a series that lifts the curtain on this shadowland of optimization by showing you some easy steps from choosing key words to choosing money making programs.If you have read my article about how to write for your blog, you should have a blog filled with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen topic, as opposed to a lifeless fact sheet. If you have not read that article, click the link in the Author Box below to read it.Now, how do you get your writing where others can read it? No matter how delicious your content is, if nobody knows it exists you cannot generate profit from it. Traffic (readers) is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract readers, you must offer exciting and unique information. Simple enough, right? Common sense? Not exactly.You see, to get traffic to your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, to name the more popular ones. So, to get these people to visit your blog, your blog needs to rank high on results pages of these search engines. When people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog.The art of getting your blog or website high rankings on search results pages is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is a complex and technical subject to master, but do not let that stop you from learning some simple, yet effective techniques, to conquer the search engines. You can do it with certain keywords. More complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive keywords such as "fat loss". We will not look at those. Instead, here is how to overcome the competition by finding targeted keywords. We want to find the best keywords to optimize your site for. For example, we will say that your blog is all about tech gadgets. Now, you want to check in Google whether it is a very competitive keyword. At any given time there are about 29, 000 ,000 (twenty-nine-million!) search results for tech gadgets. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites at your first attempt using the same keywords they use? I don’t think so. In fact, I know absolutely that you cannot because your competitors have purchased those keywords to guarantee a top position. It cost them big bucks to buy the top rankings!Since you likely do not have a huge advertising budget, narrow your scope to keywords you can successfully optimize for. Search the keywords - “technological gadgets”. At this time of writing, Google lists 792,000 results. That’s more manageable but still way too much competition. You still need to search for more focused keywords. An example is - "technological lap top gadgets". However, let’s optimize your blog for "technological gadgets" just for the sake of learning. First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you are optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great.You should be able to change the title of your blog in the blog control panel of your blog service. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can do it on just about any blog engine. You may need to learn a little HTML. You will find some resources in the sidebar of my blog for optimizing your blog. See the link in my Author Box.Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you are optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your template code that is enclosed within the tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). What is a tag? Since we’re posting on a blog, the tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant. For example, write an article/post titled - "Cheap Technological Gadgets for Everyone!". It has your keywords in the title of the post. This is the tag that Search Engines will find when someone searches for “technological gadgets”.You should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint to the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. But, don't overdo it. Use of the term "technological gadgets" just a couple of times in your posts is quite enough. More than that and it may appear as spam to the search engines and, more important, your readers will feel the same way. Warning: The real downside to over use of the same keywords in a single article is that the search engines may de-list your blog and you will be cast out into the internet darkness. They may see it as spamming.So, keep this in mind: Write for humans, not for search engines, and use your targeted keywords sparingly in your posts!Yours for success in life.