Make Money

Blog RSS & Analytics

2011-05-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

What is RSS?
============

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a way of
allowing your blog visitors to have your blog posts automatically
delivered using a method of their choice rather than having to
manually visit your web page every day to check for updates. This
is particularly helpful when somebody reads many blogs as they can
use a tool called an RSS reader to read all of those blogs in one
place.

Each blog publishes a unique URL which is the RSS feed and this is
what your visitors will need to subscribe to your blog using RSS.
The good news is that all of the blog platforms including WordPress
all have the RSS technology built in so there is very little for
you to do. In fact, if you have chosen your theme well (see lesson
6) then the chances are that you have nothing to do at all.

What you should look for is that the RSS icon is prominently
displayed in the top part of your blog theme. If the reader has to
scroll to see it, pick another one. Make sure the icon is fairly
large and prominent. Basically, you want to ensure that your
reader's eye is drawn towards it. If it is hidden away then it
won't get used.

Take a look at my blog:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/

In the right hand sidebar, just below the large triple-header
section is a rather large orange square button underneath a heading
that says "Get Updates To Caroline's Blog". Most themes will
already have a section like this setup for you and if that's the
case then you're done. Notice that I am using a 3D version of the
RSS icon and you can now find all sorts of varieties of them now.
Check out this amazing list of free RSS icons:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/11/06/free-rss-icon-list/

Full V Partial Feeds
====================

RSS has a feature that allows just a snippet of your post to be
published to your RSS feed and if a reader wants to read the full
entry then they must click through to your website to continue
reading. By default, WordPress is setup to publish full feeds which
means that your entire post is published to the feed.

To check what setting you are on, from your WordPress Dashboard
click on 'Settings' and then 'Reading'.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. If you
provide a full text feed it means that your reader doesn't ever
need to visit your website again - they can get all of your
material directly through their feed reader. Some webmasters don't
like this because it means that those people won't see their ads
that they have on their site. However, all that has changed now as
Google has setup a system to allow ads to be embedded directly in
your feed and I will be discussing that in a later edition.

Now there is something to understand about RSS readers - these are
people who understand the Internet, they know what RSS is, they
have chosen their RSS reader, they have decided to subscribe to
your feed because they want to hear what you have to say and so
they are far less likely to click on an ad than somebody who
arrived at your website from a search engine. Also, these people
are hungry for information which is why they are using RSS in the
first place.

Using an RSS reader allows them to read all their chosen blogs nice
and quickly without having to navigate around a bunch of websites.
If you make your RSS feed partial in order to force the reader to
click through to your site, you are likely to find that many of
your readers simply don't bother to click and may even unsubscribe.
In other words - your content does not get read.

My recommendation is that if you are growing a social blog where
you want to build up an audience of loyal readers who read every
word you say then make the feed full. If you are creating a
commercial blog which is heavily monetized and you are not so
bothered about readership then make it a partial feed.

However, the best revenue from your blog does not come from on-page
ads! When you learn to use your blog to launch much bigger revenue
streams then it doesn't matter if people read your content through
your RSS feed or your webpage so for nearly all cases I would
recommend a full feed. Later lessons cover these revenue streams
in-depth!

Using Feedburner
================

If you use the WordPress theme unchanged then there is nothing you
need to do in order to allow people to subscribe to your feed but
you have no way of knowing how many people have subscribed. If you
care about your subscriber number and want to be able to track it
then the Feedburner service is for you. Here is the link:

http://www.feedburner.com/

Feedburner is a completely free service which is run by Google and
it is extremely easy to setup. Once you have signed up all you need
to do is to give Feedburner the url of your original blog feed and
it will create a new Feedburner url for you. Then you edit your
WordPress theme to use this URL instead.

This is one thing that I did not cover in my videos because RSS is
not necessary when building niche sites. Thankfully, my friend Yaro
Starak has also made some free videos about setting up blogs which
are also completely free. He has several on topics that I have also
covered but his video number 9 explains what RSS is and video 10
shows you how to integrate with Feedburner. Click the link below
for the download page:

http://tinyurl.com/6jx5jm

Google Analytics
================

Google Analytics is a nice piece of software that allows you to
track all kinds of stats about your website such as how much
traffic you have had, what keywords are used to find you, other
links that point to you, the location of your visitors and a lot
more. It's damn good software and it's completely free! Here's the
link:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Once you have signed up you will need to add a website profile for
your blog. All you need to do here is put in the url of your blog
and perhaps set your time zone if you want. You will then be shown
some code that you need to display on your pages - just click on
the code to copy it to the clipboard.

To put the code onto your WordPress blog, you can do it manually
but that involves editing your theme files and if you change themes
you will have to do it again. Instead, I recommend the following
WordPress plugin which manages your Analytics for you:

http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/

The download page above has full instructions on how to use the
plugin so I don't need to repeat it here.

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Using WordPress Plugins

2011-05-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

Plugins are little pieces of software that extend the functionality
of WordPress in some way which is why it is such powerful software.
The plugins literally make it infinitely expandable. In this lesson
I'll show you some plugins that really make your life easier as a
blogger and make your blog much more functional.

Now before I get to the plugins I'll show you how to install them.
One of the videos that I mentioned in the last lesson shows you how
to install plugins and some of the ones mentioned in this lesson
are demonstrated in that video:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/developing-money-making-niche-sites-with-wordpress-26-video-6-setting-up-plugins/

If you want to watch the rest of the videos in the series or
download the PDF version of the ebook then visit the main download
page at:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/niche-sites-wp/

Absolutely Essential Plugins for All Wordpress Installations
============================================================

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
---------------------------

http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html

Many plugins have updates released periodically. With this plugin
you can update all other plugins with a simple click of a button -
a HUGE time saver! Not only that but it updates WordPress itself
which is so much easier than doing it manually! Never be without
this plugin for any WordPress installation!

WordPress Database Backup
-------------------------

http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

Your WordPress database contains the entire content of your blog -
the posts, pages, comments etc. If something happened to corrupt it
your blog is gone forever! This plugin allows you to create a
backup on a regular basis. I have mine emailed to me daily. Another
essential!

Plugins For Blogs
=================

If you are creating an actual blog, as opposed to using WordPress
as a content management system then you might also want some of the
following plugins:

SRG Clean Archives
------------------

http://www.idunzo.com/projects/clean-archives/

I don't like the standard Archives page that is built with the
default WordPress software. This plugin creates an archive page
that looks like this:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/monthly-archives/

WP-Contact Form
---------------

http://www.marketingtechblog.com/projects/wp-contactform/

I am surprised at how many bloggers neglect to put a contact form
on their blog. Perhaps they aren't aware of plugins like this one
that make it so easy!

The installation of the above two plugins is the easy bit but they
are slightly complicated to setup so I have dedicated a lesson to
showing you exactly how to setup the contact form and archives page
on your blog. Look out for that after the next lesson.

Remove Max Width
----------------

http://dd32.id.au/wordpress-plugins/remove-max-width/

For some odd reason WordPress 2.6 works in a fixed width which is
rather narrow if you work on a widescreen monitor. This plugin
removes that restriction and allows the software to fill the width
of your screen. It's a personal preference whether you use it or not.

Plugins for Blogs With Comments
===============================

Now not all bloggers like to have comments as they can take time to
read and you invariably get some negative ones from time to time.
However, if you want to buid a popular blog, comments can really
help because they help to build a sense of community and when
people see that every blog post is getting lots of comments it
makes them want to subscribe and see what all the fuss is about.
I'll be talking more about comments in later lessons but for now,
install these plugins so that you're ready for them when people
start to come.

Akismet
-------

http://akismet.com/

This actually comes installed by default with WordPress. What it
does is detects comments that are spam and automatically filters
them into a special area where you can browse through them or do
what I do and simply click the 'delete all' button. It has caught
over 70,000 spam comments on my main blog!

Show Top Commentators
---------------------

http://www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-top-commentators/

This plugin allows you to add a widget to your blog that shows a
list of the top commentators on your blog within a given time
period. I show the top 10 within the last month. This is a nice
incentive to comment!

CommentLuv
----------

http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/commentluv-wordpress-plugin/

This plugin will modify the original comment left by your readers
and will scan their website address for a blog feed and if it finds
one it will extract the last post and will add a section that says
"John Doe's last blog post: ". This is another
wonderful way to encourage comments from other bloggers in
particular and it also adds a richness to the comment section.

Subscribe to Comments
---------------------

http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

Sometimes readers leave a comment and then they forget all about
your post. This plugin allows them to choose to be notified via
email when new comments are added. This is great if they have asked
a question that you have answered or if there is simply a good
conversation going in the comments section. It's an excellent way
to keep people coming back to your blog!

Edit Comments XT
----------------

http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/edit-comments-xt/

By default after a reader has left a comment there is no way for
them to edit it which is annoying if they've left something out or
made a typo etc. This plugin allows them to edit their comment for
a limited time after posting it - just a little nicety for your
readers.

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Blog Software

2011-05-16T03:56:00.001-07:00

Which Blog Software?
--------------------

There are many choices when it comes to blogging software but the
only sensible choice is WordPress and here is why:

- It is completely free
- It is constantly updated and extremely well supported
- There are thousands of free themes
- There are thousands of excellent plugins
- It is the most widely used blogging software in the world
- When people talk about blogs, they usually mean WordPress!

You can read more about WordPress from their website below but
don't worry about downloading the software as you can install it
very easily with a few clicks without having to do that!

http://wordpress.org/

Switching to WordPress From Another Platform
--------------------------------------------

If you already have a blog and it is not driven by WordPress,
reading the technical guides in these next few lessons may just
convince you to convert! WordPress has an import feature (from your
dashboard click 'Manage' and then 'Import') and that supports over
a dozen blogging platforms including Blogger, TypePad & Live
Journal which makes it very easily to make the switch.

Free Blog or Self Hosted?
-------------------------

If you are starting a new blog from scratch you can go to
http://wordpress.com/ and sign up for a free blog that is hosted on
their server. This is an excellent way to start if you just want to
play around with WordPress. However, you are not allowed to
monetize a WordPress hosted blog with AdSense or affiliate links so
if you are looking to build a profitable blog then this is not a
viable option!

If you have never blogged before and just want to experiment a
little then go create a free account but if you are creating a real
blog then invest the few bucks and buy a domain. Most hosting
providers such as the one I use allow you to set up WordPress with
a couple of clicks, and host as many domains as you like on the one
account with one fee.

I use BlueHost and as of November 2008 they charge $6.95 a month
and offer the following features:

- Unlimited amount of storage space
- Unlimited amount of bandwidth
- Host unlimited domains on the one account
- Full support for WordPress & many other server software
- Full support for PHP, MySql, Perl, Ruby & CGI

On my account I currently host 2 main blogs, my Traffic Rush
course, and a whole bunch of niche sites. I can continue to add
sites and never have to pay additional hosting fees. I highly
recommend BlueHost as I have now been using them for over a year
and I'm delighted with their service. Click the link below to have
a look at what Bluehost have to offer:

http://tinyurl.com/6rab4x

Creating a Blog
---------------

I have produced a free ebook and a set of corresponding videos that
show you how to setup WordPress, install themes & plugins and do
lots of the technical things that I will be covering in these
lessons. That eBook is geared towards setting up small niche sites
that are monetized with AdSense but just about everything that
needs to be done to create any kind of WordPress blog is covered so
I will be pointing you towards that in various places in the
lessons. It's all free and hosted on my blog - no need to sign up
for anything!

The main download page for the ebook and the links to all the
videos are here:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/niche-sites-wp/

This video will show you how to setup WordPress in literally just a
few clicks:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/developing-money-making-niche-sites-with-wordpress-26-video-2-installation/

Setting Up The Theme
--------------------

One question that people often ask me is whether or not they should
pay to have a theme designed for them or just use a free theme. I
was very lucky in that a designer offered to make a custom design
for me for free in exchange for some publicity which of course I
accepted. However, before I had that I used a free theme and there
are literally thousands of absolutely stunning free themes -
assuming you are using WordPress!

If you want some free themes, check these out:

http://themes.wordpress.net/

If you Google around there are thousands more!

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Regular Post For Your Blog

2011-05-16T03:54:00.000-07:00

This lesson primarily applies if you are starting a new blog from
scratch but you can also use it to prepare for a period of absence
from your blog such as when you might go on holiday for example.

Never launch an empty blog! When you first start thinking about
your blog you will know what kind of direction that you intend to
go in, what topics you'll be blogging about, your posting style etc
but if when you're brand new readers arrive at your blog all they
see is a single, "Welcome to my blog!" type post they won't know
any of those things and they'll have little reason to hang around
and subscribe.

As a blog grows it develops a large repository of past posts and
you can use these to entice new readers to subscribe but of course
you don't have this when you first launch.

Write 6 Posts (roughly) in Advance
----------------------------------

The trick is to compromise - in my case I choose to write around
half a dozen posts in advance. In this way when you launch your
readers have a nice selection of posts to read and hopefully you
will have given them enough reason to remember you and to subscribe
to your feed.

With my IM blog I was posting daily so I wrote the first six all in
one go and then used the WordPress timestamp feature to back date
them so that it looked like I had posted them over the period of
about a week.

For the second blog that I launched I actually posted them live and
simply held off announcing the blog itself until I had 6 posts
live. What I wanted to do was set out a schedule of posting (3
times a week - Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and show some of
the topics I would cover.

Introduce Yourself
------------------

Another thing to do in your first few posts is show something of
yourself, who you are and how you came to be writing this blog.
This may not be relevant in all cases but even the most technical
blogs can often benefit from a human touch as it encourages
interaction from readers when they are reminded that there is a
real person behind the writing.

Don't Make it ALL About You!
----------------------------

In the case of my second blog, it is deeply personal in nature and
much of what I write will come from my own history and so one of
the things I want to do is share my own background story so that I
can draw from it in future posts. As I started to sketch out the
chapters of the story I realised that I was looking at around a
dozen posts and that is way too much to dump on a new blog!

The problem is that if all you do is talk about yourself, the blog
becomes boring and unless the reader is very personally interested
in you, again you are not giving them any real reason to subscribe.
What I decided to do was post my story in weekly chunks - just one
post per week on Fridays. In this way I free up two slots per week
to show my real content and my own story acts like a bit of a soap
opera and in this way it may even encourage people to subscribe if
they want to know what happens next!

The strategy worked as I started to get comments from people on my
story posts telling me that they couldn't wait to hear what
happened next!

Using the WordPress Timestamp Feature
=====================================

When you write a post in WordPress there is a big button called
"Publish" that will make your post go live. If you just push this
as-is then your post is immediately published. However there is a
link there called "edit" and if you click that it opens up a
date/time panel that allows you to specify the date and time that
the post should be published.

This can work in two ways. When I launched my Internet Marketing
blog, I wrote 6 posts and then set the dates to several days before
so it looked as though I had been writing the blog for about a
week. However I will also use this time stamp feature to schedule
my posts for appearance in the future which is a great way of
ensuring that your blog does not dry up whilst you are away on
holiday!

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Introduction to SEO For Blogs

2011-05-16T03:51:00.000-07:00

Some people think that SEO is something that can just be 'done
later' but SEO goes into the way your blog is setup and into
everything that you write so it's a good idea to get an idea about
it right at the very beginning so that you don't have to go back
and correct mistakes later on which can be very difficult if not
impossible in some cases.

Why Bother With SEO?
--------------------

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines are an
excellent source of completely free traffic that continues to pour
in for years to come but it usually takes a long time for a brand
new site to begin getting traction in the search engines which is
another reason why it makes sense to consider it from day 1.

Here is an important point - ANY blog can build up a significant
amount of search engine traffic over time even if that blog does
not naturally lend itself to SEO. Why? Simply due to the sheer
amount of content that gets posted to a blog.

If you create a few good articles every week (say 3), that really
adds up over time. In a year you will have around 150 posts! Every
single one of those posts can rank in the search engines and even
though they may not all be individually optimised for specific
keywords, they WILL bring in some traffic.

The Importance of Backlinks
---------------------------

What I am going to talk about in the rest of this lesson is called
on-page optimisation and that is where you make sure that your post
is optimised towards your chosen keywords. However that is only one
half of the SEO process and is arguably the less-important half.

If Google has two pages that are equally optimised towards a
keyword then how does it decide which one to rank higher? There are
many factors but one very major factor is the backlinks to the page
and these are simply links from another website.

Over time you will want to grow your backlinks as much as you can
as this helps you rank higher and higher. With my Internet
marketing blog I must admit that I rarely pay much attention to
on-page SEO as I tend to just write what comes to mind without
really worrying about keywords but over the last year I have
attracted thousands of backlinks which means that whatever I do
choose to write about will still bring me search traffic because my
blog ranks quite well for terms in my posts.

You don't need to worry too much about building backlinks at the
beginning but you do want to know how to do the basic on-page SEO
so that when you start to create your first few posts you can be
sure that you are getting it right.

SEO is a massive subject and is an industry in itself. SEO
consultants will often charge companies thousands of dollars to
optimise their websites because of the power it has to draw so much
traffic. Now I am not an SEO expert by any means and this is a
blogging course and not an SEO course so I'm only giving you the
basics here. If you want to learn more then by far the best
resource for the individual is the training program run by Aaron
Wall. He wrote the original SEO Book and has now converted it into
an in-depth training program with over 100 modules:

http://www.seobook.com/2467.html

Optimising Your Posts For On-Page SEO
-------------------------------------

The first step in optimising your posts is knowing what keyword
phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one
but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasise here
is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you
have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don't
worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content
than thinking about search engines. But if you're writing a blog
about digital camera's for example and writing a post about a
particular model then it makes sense to optimise that post to the
model of the camera as that is something that would be searched on
in Google.

There are several places where you need to ensure your keyword goes:

1) The title - at the very beginning if possible. This is the
single most important element.

2) The post content - you need to make sure you are writing about
what you want to target! Don't overdo it but make sure it appears a
handful of times throughout the post.

3) Tags - WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add
tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.

4) The URL - if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to
do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title
into the URL and I'll show you a video that demonstrated how to do
that later in the course.

These are the most important places to put your keywords and this
is all you really need to know when you're starting out. By the way
if you don't know how to do this stuff don't worry because soon in
the course I'm going to be getting onto the technical stuff and I
have a bunch of free videos that show you how to do this techy stuff.

What If You Have An Established Blog?
-------------------------------------

If you already have a blog and this is the first time you have
thought about SEO there are some things that you can do to tweak
things. One thing that you should NOT do is change your post URL's
because Google will still be indexing the old ones and if you
change them you will have broken links.

However what you can do is change your titles and the copy text in
your posts. One mistake that people often make is putting their
keywords at the end of their title rather than at the beginning for
example if you are targeting the phrase "make money blogging" which
is best out of these two titles:

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today!
- Make Money Blogging - 10 Killer Ideas!

The latter title is more SEO-friendly as it puts your keywords at
the beginning so you can go back and tweak old posts in this way if
you like. You can also check through the post itself making sure
the keyword appears a few times and if your blogging software
supports tags then make sure you tag it with your keyword.

Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up
and act on it so don't expect results overnight!

Note that if your URL's are not optimised then it is possible to
restructure them to better ones and do something called a 301
redirect to tell Google that the link has changed. However, I'm
going to pass the buck on this one and plug Aaron Wall's membership
site again as I don't know how to do this properly myself and I had
to get help when I had to redirect one of my domains recently.
Here's the link for the SEO Book program again:

http://www.seobook.com/2467.html

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Initial Blog Planning

2011-05-16T03:49:00.000-07:00

With the overall direction of your blog defined, the next step is
to take a little time and plan what you want to do with the blog
and how you are going to run it. This is something I didn't do with
my Internet marketing blog - I just launched it and hoped for the
best! The kinds of questions to ask when starting a new blog are:

- What will it be called?
- What topics will you discuss?
- How often will you post?
- What will your writing style be?

The Naming Game
---------------

My Internet Marketing blog is called "Caroline Middlebrook" and the
domain is at caroline-middlebrook.com. I agonised for ages over a
name - I was trying to think of something relating to making money
online but I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound cheesy so
I just plumped for my own name.

I had a feeling this would have repercussions later if I changed
direction. I am still very much involved in IM, but I might not be
forever so that could still come back to bite me further down the
road. If you are branding yourself with the intention of marketing
your personal services then naming your blog after yourself is a
great move as you will always be able to use it to promote what you
do but if you are building a blog around a specific topic which may
not be part of you long-term then you may be better off with a
niche-related name and domain.

Moral of the story - really think carefully about a name for your
blog. How long will you have this blog for?

Topic Selection
---------------

When I first started my Internet Marketing blog I had just quit a
day job as a software developer and my initial plans were to write
software and sell it over the internet so that's what I thought I
was going to be blogging about. However as the months passed I
found myself learning and blogging about topics I didn't know about
at the start, like niche marketing, social media, ebook creation,
list building and so on. Now one year on I find myself coming back
to my software roots!

Whether you are starting a blog from scratch or you have an
existing one, use what you thought about in the previous lesson to
think about what direction you are going to take your blog and
sketch out some of the specific topics you can cover.

When it comes to writing your posts you will be able to organise
them into categories which makes it much easier for new readers to
find your posts and its easy for them to see at a glance what your
blog is about. When you just post a mish-mash of posts on all sorts
of topics that are not really related then it can be more difficult
to turn a one-off visitor into a regular subscriber.

Re-do this exercise every time you change direction on your blog.

Posting Schedule
----------------

When I started my IM blog I posted every day, including weekends.
Many people advise you to blog every day when launching a new blog
with the theory being that the more you post the more people will
come to your blog. However as a blog reader I find that blogs that
post every day or even multiple times a day are simply too much - I
can't keep up with them. I eventually settled on a frequency of 3
main blog posts per week with perhaps something light at the
weekend.

Now I have to add that as time has gone on I rely less and less on
schedules. I prefer to write what comes to mind at the time but it
can be helpful to have some kind of schedule at the beginning until
you find your blogging groove.

One trend that I see with many blogs is that the blogger starts out
enthusiastically by posting every day or even many times per day
but over time he either loses steam, finds it too time consuming or
simply runs out of stuff to say and then the schedule starts to
slip and the posts become less frequent. This is noticeable to the

reader and it does not look good! On my own blog I felt awkward
having to post explanations as to why I was blogging less.

It is much better to start out with a much gentler blog schedule
and see how it goes for a few months rather than over-commit
yourself at the beginning and then burn out a few months down the
line. This is what I did when I started my second blog.

Moral: start as you mean to go on!

Posting Style
-------------

Some people suggest that you alter your blogging style to fit your
target audience but in my experience I find that it never works to
try to blog in a style that is not uniquely you. Your blog is a
reflection of you - your thoughts, your findings, your interests
and passions.

My advice is simply to blog in your own style, whatever that means!
Some people are very conservative, some people use very colourful
language, others like to be controversial, others are very dry and
matter-of-fact. Whatever you are, simply be who you are and write
as yourself.

Similarly, I see people asking questions such as, how long should
my posts be? This again is down to personal style. I have a
tendency to write long, verbose posts and other people post lots of
short, succinct posts. Each to their own!

It really doesn't matter what your style is because the readers who
like your style will stick around and subscribe and the ones who
don't, wont! Simple as that really! There is no way that any single
style is going to appeal to everybody so don't try! No matter what
your posting style is, there will be people who like it and some
who don't, but it never pays to try and be something that you are
not.

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Defining Direction For Your Blog

2011-05-16T03:47:00.000-07:00

Before starting a new blog it helps to define what your goals are
for it as that will guide you in every aspect of its development.
Somebody who wants to build a blog to promote an existing business
will do things differently to somebody who is blogging for a
political cause for example.

Whether you have already got a blog or are about to start one, take
a moment to think about the following factors and as you work your
way through the course have your answers in mind.

Target Audience
---------------

Think about who your target audience is for your blog. Are they
male / female? What is their income? Are they married? Have
children? Are they tech-savvy?

A young tech-savvy male is far more likely to Digg your posts than
a mom who doesn't even know what RSS is for instance. Your audience
will respond differently to monetization also. The same tech-savvy
male is much less likely to click an ad than the mom.

Is your target audience somebody who is likely to carefully read
through your posts in detail trying to glean as much information as
possible (older crowd for instance) or are they a
"give-it-to-me-quick" kind of person? These factors will affect
your content and writing style. The former may respond well to
in-depth how-to posts whereas the latter will likely prefer quick,
easily-scannable lists.

If any of the things I've mentioned here don't make sense to you,
don't worry as I will cover them all in the course! I'm just trying
to give you examples so that as you take the lessons you'll better
understand what aspects will be more applicable to your particular
blog.

Monetization
------------

From the outset you should try to have a clear idea of how you want
to monetize your blog. For example, if you are planning on selling
private advertising then you'll need to make sure that your blog
theme is designed to support the sizes and shapes of ads that you
want to run.

If you are promoting something that is already in existence such as
your services, or an existing business then you will want to make
sure that you prominently work your promotional content into your
blog seamlessly.

For example, look at my Internet Marketing blog:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/

First of all, scroll up to the top - there is a large header
section split into three parts and each one of those heavily
promotes something I have produced. One of them is the course you
are reading right now!

Now over to the right in my sidebar you'll see a handful of small
125x125 banner ads. As you can see, these are not as prominent as
the products in my header section but they fit nicely. When I first
launched my blog the theme I was using wasn't really designed to
support either one of these.

Other monetization options such as AdSense are usually easier to
slot into just about any theme as there are many shapes and sizes
of ads that you can use but then you need to ask yourself the
question, do I place ads straight away or should I incorporate them
later?

In my opinion, if you are blogging in order to earn an income then
incorporate some ads on your blog straight away. The details don't
matter at first as you'll have no traffic anyway but there is a
good reason for doing it up-front: As you begin to build your blog
readership they will come to expect that you are blogging for money
and expect to see your ads. If you suddenly introduce them some
time later some of your readers will complain, accuse you of being
a sellout and so on!

Another benefit to placing ads straight away is that the audience
that you build will often contain your future advertisers but they
won't think to advertise with you if you're not in the habit of
having ads on your blog. Start as you mean to go on!

Branding
--------

Later in this course I will be talking quite a lot about social
media which is one of the ways in which I have brought in thousands
of people to my blog and established myself in the niche. One very
important thing about branding is that it is very difficult to
change later on.

Right from the start think about what image you are trying to
project. Are you promoting yourself like I am in my blog or are you
promoting your blog name as a brand within itself (think
Lifehacker, TechCrunch, BoingBoing)? If you are promoting yourself
then think about graphics - do you have a standard avatar for
yourself that you can use? Make sure you do because when you get
social media right that avatar gets *everywhere*!

Changing Direction?
===================

I have to admit that I have changed direction a bit on my blog over
the first year. That is one of the reasons why I am writing this
course - so that you can think about things up front rather than
have to keep changing things mid-stream as you learn new things.

If you have an already established blog think about where it stands
currently on the points mentioned above. What kind of audience does
it currently attract? Is that the audience you want? What
monetization are you using and are you happy with it? Is your
audience responding well to it? Finally, what image are you
projecting, if any?

If you need to change anything that is ok, just think about the
direction in which you would like to take your blog and bear that
in mind as you work through the rest of these lessons.

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

Make Money Blogging

2011-05-16T03:44:00.000-07:00

Over the last year I have learned quite a bit about blogging and I
now run a popular blog that generates a 4-figure income for me
every month and has done for many months. When I first started
blogging I didn't have a clue what I was doing! I managed to find
quite a lot of information out there on blogs such as ProBlogger
(http://www.problogger.net/) but there was a heck of a lot of out
of date, time-sensitive or irrelevant material to wade through as
well as the good stuff!

I've developed this course as a way of distilling everything I have
learned about blogging into easily-digestible weekly chunks that
you can instantly apply without having to wade through a ton of
fluff!

Now I have to admit that a couple of months after starting my own
blog, I joined the paid coaching program, Blog Mastermind by Yaro
Starak. My results really soared after I began to apply what I
learned in there. It's not cheap at $497 but if you have the time
to work through the lessons you'll get results much faster than
with my course. Read all about Yaro's Blog Mastermind on his sales
page here:

http://tinyurl.com/6zu7xt

What Will Be Covered?
=====================

The way this course is designed is to walk you through the steps of
creating a blog from scratch. Obviously if you have a blog already
and you've already done the installation, setup and so on then some
of the content in the first few lessons will be familiar to you.

Unfortunately this is unavoidable as everybody who signs up for
this course will be at various stages with their blogs but at least
this way I can design it so that each lesson builds on what has
been taught before so that over time you can build up a really
solid blog which will hopefully bring in thousands of readers and
thousands of dollars!

Even if you have started a blog already, I'd still urge you to read
through the first few lessons as they come in as you might still
find some little nugget that you didn't know about! For example, I
use plugins on my blog now that simply weren't around a year ago.

What Can You Expect From Your Blog?
===================================

There will always be some people who blog simply for the sheer love
of it and they are not concerned with readership, traffic, revenue
and so on but I suspect that if you have discovered this course via
my own Internet Marketing blog
(http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/) that you are interested
in blogging for income, branding, exposure etc.

Income
------

First of all, blogs have the power to earn money and there is so
much more to earning an income through blogging than just slapping
up a few ads! I'll be talking about lots of different ways to
monetize your blog. 99% of the revenue that I have generated in the
last year (many thousands of dollars) has come either directly from
the blog or from a product that was launched via the blog.

Make no mistake - blogs can earn you a decent income! And don't
think you have to have a gigantic readership either. My Internet
marketing blog has a few thousand readers which is good but nowhere
near the numbers of some of the mega-bloggers out there yet it
still makes me a very good income.

Branding
--------

When you combine blogging with social media you develop the power
of branding. Whether you simply want to brand yourself as a person
or you're branding a product or company name, blogs built with
social media in mind can put you 'out there' like no other medium.
People begin to see you everywhere, recognise your face, they begin
searching for you in search engines. In short, blogs can make you
quite famous in your little corner of the Internet and if you
happen to be promoting your products or services, this can become
quite profitable.

Authority
---------

In order to build a successful blog you will need to learn how to
drive traffic to it and make it popular as a blog with no traffic
is not going to make you much money. However there is another side
effect of building a popular blog... as your blog begins to gain
authority in the eyes of Google it becomes a powerful asset in
itself and can then be used to launch other websites with a helping
hand. Once you've built your first big blog it becomes easier to
develop other Internet properties.

Start Blogging Today

I teach everyone free, how to Make Money with Free Blogs at my new website www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com.

How To Make Money With Your Own Online Business

2010-06-17T04:58:00.000-07:00

This article is created to serve as a guide to persons who are ready to start an internet business and leverage the power of the internet. Enjoy it!

How to start online business

Starting a successful online business has to do with your ability to discover what people want, their problems, and proffer solution to them. I want to use this space and time to enlighten you about some known facts which successful netpreneurs use which is hard to reveal, first of all you have to understand the reason why people come to the net, majority of people that browse the net are not looking for some stuffs to buy rather they are looking for a solution to their problem, they will pay anything to anyone that has the answer to their problem. like I have explained in my previous write ups here, you can make money online with what you know, or leverage from people that know,hey!let me quickly show you how best to start your online business.

Start with keyword research

Whatever type of online business you want to do, you need a thorough research about it, keyword is simply what people search for on the net, the words people type in search of in search engines like google and yahoo, these are words which are highly optimized by search engines, and they help you to discover the following

1. Helps you estimate and drive unlimited traffic to your website
2. Helps you know how many people are doing that kind of business on the net
3. How many sites have been developed on that particular keyword
4. How many people (customers or prospects) that are looking for your service, product.
5. How much you can pay to advertise your service to the world using the search engines and a lot more which you can determined through keyword research.
To sum it up keyword research shows you the POPULARITY, PRICE, AND COMPETITION (PPC) of the business you want to do on the net.

How to determine PPC

Several tools are available which can be used to determine this,the common ones are seen in yahoo and google sites.let us use the one of yahoo, go to www.searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/
Click on keyword selector tool, type in any word you like e.g. gardening and click ok, you will be amazed at what you find out. What you have on your left is the number of times people searched for that keyword last month, and other words related to your keyword. this shows you the popularity of the keyword, more specialized analysis is required to determine the competition and how profitable that keyword is in the chosen niche, like the R/S ratio of the keyword where R is the result and S is the search, this is vital in knowing and choosing your online business.

THE SECRET OF SELLING ON THE INTERNET

The art of selling whether on the internet or offline is as old as man, it is a way of life, and there has always been a way of exchanging goods and services for monetary benefits. Selling on the internet is an art that should be mastered in order for one to excel in it; a lot of materials, CDs and e books are on the internet which teach on how to make sells, what am sharing with you here is a proven method that I use in making sells on the internet which most netpreneurs won’t teach you.

Selling is a stage in marketing in which your goods or services are being offered to customers in exchange of money, it should be a relationship rather than ordinary sales.

There are two different ways in which prospective customers can see your product, there is one in which you have to send messages, adverts and even look for your prospects on the net, this is called the out bound marketing, here you are trying to let people know what you are offering them, most times they are not really in need of your product.

The other method is the inbound marketing where your customers will have to beg you with there money to have your product, I know you are thinking now how can a customer beg for a product? yes!it happens with marketing gurus who have mastered the art, Actually the first time I heard that people can beg you for online products I felt the same way you are feeling now until I saw it been demonstrated by my mentor,

I also have had the opportunity of prospects calling me to have my product. Which of the two methods do you prefer? I know you will surely want a situation where people will call to have your product and not you looking out for them. The secret about it is simple, chose a profitable niche and presell your customers.

Finding a profitable niche

This involves selecting the area you intend to go into, you must find your prospects ever before creating your product or service. This is the most important thing to do, here you make use of the search engines like yahoo and google to know how profitable your area of interest is, I have dealt extensively on this topic in my previous article about online business,you can check that out.

Presell your customers
After you must have chosen a niche and packaged your product, please don’t ask your prospects to buy at this time rather you need to presell your product to them first, preselling involves giving your prospects FREE information about your product, you have to make them understand what they stand to get from using your product i.e. the benefits in your product.This should be clearly written and outlined in an article. Everything about your product should be fully explained, this is aimed at building up the confidence of your prospect, the article or e book should answer the following questions on the customers mind.

Feel free to request for this free ebook which will help boost your internet business.

How to Make Money Online

2010-06-17T04:49:00.000-07:00

The Internet is the largest community in the world with 1.8 billion people worldwide. This has made it possible for us to leverage the opportunities it provides to make legitimate money doing business. It is possible to start an online business and make legitimate money. You are going to find out how in this post.

It will be a good tool for creating jobs and businesses for yourself and others and not wait to be employed because to be sincere there are no jobs that can give you satisfaction and freedom like when you are doing ‘your own thing’. Here, am going to show you businesses you can start today on the internet and make money, even if you have a paid job you can still work part time and combine it with your job without stress. Let us first look at the advantages of doing business on the Internet.

Bill Gates once said, “In some years to come, all businesses shall be on the net, you are either on the Internet or you are out of business.” This has started to happen especially in the developed parts of the world, with online shopping, online study, online marketing,etc.

Doing business on the Internet is far better than traditional industrial age businesses and I have highlighted the advantages below:

1. It requires little or no start up capital: you can actually start an online business with little capital because this kind of business does not necessarily require an office or business premises, equipment, or things that make up your ordinary brick-and-mortar business (i.e. ordinary business), you just need internet access and about an hour or two, even from your bedroom, office, hotel room, cyber café etc.you can do business.

2. Anybody can do business on the Internet; I mean anybody can do it if you know what to do and how to do it, you must not be a computer guru, or a programmer, or web designer before you start doing business on the Internet. No special qualification is required, as long as you can read, type and move the mouse, you are already in the business.

3. It is a kind of business that gives you freedom, you can work anytime you want, at any place, and you can actually determine your income. You don’t need to work 9 to 5,you can work part time or full time, which means you can combine it with your normal job and make multiple streams of income that will make you financially free.

4. You can start this business with what you like to do, that is your passion. You don’t necessarily need a business plan. You can make money on the Internet with what you know, just anything can be business on the Internet you name it. Someone will always pay you for what you know. Simply put: do what you love and the money will follow.

5. The Internet gives you a wide reach to unlimited market. Your customers are unlimited and from different parts of the world. You can actually imagine the number of customers (targeted customers) you will have through the Internet. Think of how many people that is online now from different parts of the world, that is the limit of your reach.

6. This kind of business goes on automatically, that means you don’t have to be present all day to monitor the business. The business makes you money even when you are sleeping, yes! when you are sleeping or on vacation.

7. You have unlimited opportunities doing business on the Internet. You can also incorporate your offline business (normal business) that is if you have a business running now and establish a web presence for it and that gives you an edge.

8. There are little or no risks involved in this kind of business if you know what to do and how to do it. I must not fail to add here that like every business you need to be shrewd, focused and dedicated too.

Business as we know, requires you to provide good services, ideas, products that the people are in need of. You can create your own product or leverage from the product of others through Network Marketing. Some of the businesses you can do on the Internet here in Nigeria or anywhere with or without your own website using little or no start up capital are:

YAHOO SEARCH MARKETING AND GOOGLE ADWORD / ADSENSE.

Who on the internet does not know that Yahoo and Google are the biggest, most common and widely used search engines on the Internet today. We all use it to send mails, search for information, products and services on the internet. You can also make money advertising your own product or help other people advertise their product on Yahoo and Google while you get paid for it. This exposes your product to unlimited number of people that use these search engines. This is one of the easiest ways to make money on the Internet. There are two ways you can do that using the Adwords and Adsense. If you have ever searched for anything on the internet using Yahoo or Google you must have seen adwords and adsense being used, they are those little adverts you see on the right hand side of the result of what you are searching, they are similar to what you are searching for, you can also see them in some personal sites. You can make money through them if you know what to do and how to do them. It is very simple to set up:

1. Look for products, services, ideas you can sell online; You may develop your own product. Better still, you can sell other people’s products to learn the ropes. You can go to www.amazon.com and click on earn commissions and see the array of products with commissions you can choose from. You can also use www.tripleclicks.com and many other sites.

2. Sign up for free as a reseller.

3. Use Yahoo and Google to advertise the product you got from 1. above to the targeted and unlimited buyers that need the product.

4. Set up a medium from which you can collect your payment online, you can get paid by cheque, or through your normal bank account. At the end of every month you will be amazed at how much you have been able to make through these adverts or via your product sales. It is as simply as that.

YOU CAN MAKE MONEY WRITING ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS AND WEBDEVELOPERS.

Writing articles that website developers use can make you money on the Internet, you get paid when you write as a freelancer or a ghoshwriter, you will be needed to write about 300-600 words or more than as the case may be. Webmasters need articles because they don’t have time to write them so they look for people that will write articles that are highly optimized in search engines, and they will pay them. It is one way to make money on the net. You have freedom to choose the niche or topic of your choice you can write well in. you can even write a whole book for people and get paid for it. You can get writing jobs at www.freelancewriting.com, www.articlemarketer.com and other sites.

YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN INFORMATION PRODUCT AND MAKE MONEY WITH IT

I told you earlier that you could make money from just anything you know and get paid for it; you can also leverage from what other people know and make money from it. You have unlimited opportunity to make money through your information products because everybody that comes to the internet is looking for some information so you can be the solution of what they are searching for, you know what I mean! These products can be in the form of e-books, newsletters, reports, how-to-do articles etc. Digital products as they are called, sell like hot cake on the Internet so this business puts money in your bank account at any point in time. You have no limit to the amount you can make on one information product because Information rules the world!

There are many other legitimate businesses you can do online and make money, you just need to start from somewhere and you will be amazed that you are now exposed to other online businesses, but basically this is a good way to start making money while you even browse and do your normal stuffs on the net at your pass time, and don’t just waste your time like that. You have nothing to lose

Affiliate Marketing

2010-06-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

Affiliate Marketing

It’s estimated that in the last year, $95 billion was transacted online as a direct result of affiliate marketing. And those affiliates earned over $6.5 billion in commissions.
Whether you’re getting paid for sharing your traffic, or maximizing sales through your partners, affiliate marketing can help you grow your business and supplement your income.

The concept of Affiliate marketing is simple, the affiliate promotes your website and the merchant gives him/her commission on the sales he/she generated or the click through's they send.

Joining an affiliate network is easy and free.

According to facts in August 2004, 37% of men and 28% of women who accessed the internet had made an online purchase within the last 12 months. Into 2006 the figure had more than doubled to 86% of men and 84% of women. This continuing trend of online purchasing has lead many businesses to start trading online with different strategies in an attempt to gain a market share.

Internet marketing strategy is any form of on or offline means to increase visitors to your website. The main strategies are:

Picking the right affiliate scheme

Picking the best scheme is down to personal choice and how well you feel you can sell a merchant's product or service. However you should also consider your relationship with the merchant and whether they can be trusted. Remember if a scheme is offering less commission but has a good reputation, and you have a good working relationship with the merchant, you could be better off in the long run if you choose it. Where as another scheme that pays higher commission, but it is irregular, and the merchant is difficult to get on with may end up costing you more.

I am affiliate marketer for Strong Future International and I would recommend you join because it is easy and free to join. Moreso, they provide you all the training materials you will ever need in the business.

If you want to start your own home based internet business with SFI, then click this banner to join:

Alternatively, you can request for this Free Book, Six Figure Affiliate Blogging, by filling the form below:

How to Find a Niche for your Blog

2010-03-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

Hello again and welcome back.

I'm glad your still with me and I hope you have been following along with a blog of your own. In case you are feeling all alone in your endeavors I want to introduce you to one of my readers that has taken the bull by the horns and started his first blog and is proving to be quite prolific. His online nom de plume is Black Hat Jack and I will get back to Jack in a moment.

First I will give you a little glimpse of what I have in store today. I am assuming that everyone now has a blog set up according to my previous lessons. Last lesson I told you to find a niche. I didn't go into much detail about this at the time as I figured I would let you stew over it for a few days. Some of you may have come up with a decent paying niche but I'm sure most of you are still scratching your heads wondering how to find one. My favorite email this week came from Cindy H. (hi Cindy I told you I would mention you - there I did) and all she wrote was

Subject: NICHES

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

Subtle and effective - I like that. I received several other emails looking for help as well. (by the way there are 33 of you that are corresponding with me over these lessons so you are not alone and anyone I haven't heard from please join in, I would love to check out your site). Anyway, I will cover niches in some depth today so you can all stop fretting over it. I will mention now that I am going to advise you to purchase a program later and yes it will be through an affiliate link - this means I will make a few dineros off of you if you buy it. Before you roll your eyes at me I haven't come this far just to plug a product, in fact I have avoided trying to sell anything as much as possible as I am trying to build up a base of like minded people who can all share and help one another succeed online. There is far more value to having online friends than making the odd one-off sale. (more on this later)

In fact I am just warning you ahead of time that I want to discuss 3 programs that I use a lot and have no qualms about recommending. Having said that I will tell you that two of them are not necessary at this stage of your development but you will need them later if you stick with this. The third program is something you probably should look at now if you are in any way serious about making money online. It has everything to do with finding the right niches. (for those that can not afford it I will help you out using my version until you get up and running - more on this later)

The long and short of it is that if you do end up purchasing these programs then I have used my links because I can't think of a better person for you to give your money to than me. (OK maybe sick kids) The intent of this lesson is not to make sales but to discuss the things you will have to do and the programs that do it. As I said, I don't want your money but if you are giving it away anyway...

All right, that's it for the pre-amble, let's get to the meat.

Update 2010 - Please note that the following site has long since been abandoned and the following example is now moot but I haven't had the time to find a new example and rework this post. My points are still valid in spite of the lack of cohesion with the site I use as an example.

First let me show you what my new friend Black Hat Jack is up to. After following the lessons Jack sent me an email and asked me to take a look at his new blog. He said he wasn't adverse to me "ripping it to shreds" so here is my review of Jack's blog. You can see it for yourself here: Internet Marketing Rant and I wont be too critical as I think he is on the right track.

Jack's first post was Feb 13, 2007 and he has kept up a pretty stiff daily posting schedule which is impressive. The site is not yet indexed on Google and I would like to throw out a few tips that he could use to tweak the site;

Readability

- at the moment the site is user friendly for people but he might consider using a larger font. I have found that a lot of people can't see very well and have noticed a longer visit length (using my stat reports) on the blogs that I use a larger font on. Blogger lets you customize the fonts in the template section "Fonts and Colors". I find the "

Georgia

" font enlarged 1x gets the best results for text posts. Try and use one or at most 2 colors on your blog. More than this can be distracting and takes away from the aesthetic look.

- while user friendly for people he has not tweaked it for the search engines yet. By this I mean that his blog is quite broad in the sense of topics and the search engines like to pigeon hole sites by the keywords used. In Jack's case Google will not have a clear idea of what his keyword (niche) is.

From the title "Internet Marketing Rant" we know that "Internet Marketing" is his main keyword but his posts don't back up the title. This is easy to fix. Without changing his post subjects he simply needs to add his keyword at the beginning and end of each post and if possible make one instance in bold.

For example his last post begins

List Of Article Directories Part 2 (The Header)

"It's been a busy week so not had chance to post more of my article directory list. Here is part 2 I will try and post part 3 tomorrow." (the Post)

To optimize his keyword I would make the following change.

Internet Marketing - Article Directories List | Part 2 (for the header)

and at the end of his post I would add a quick recap blurb such as;

"Look for Article Directories List Part 3 on my next post here at Internet Marketing Rant."

By making these additions the search engines will know the blog is about "Internet Marketing" (main Keyword) and also "Article Directory Lists" (secondary Keyword).

Use your keyword at least 5 times for every hundred words you write. In Jack's case the search engines will pick up the keyword "Article Directory" as he uses it a few times but will not register "Internet Marketing" as a keyword.

Note: Do not use your keyword(s) more than 6-7 times per hundred words or your site will be flagged as a spam blog and dropped from the search engines - this is VERY important.

Adsense

Jack has optimized his adsense ads correctly. Always place adsense in the top left corner or top center (these ads always get more clicks than any other location) The next best location is in the side panel and finally at the bottom. Studies have shown that the most viewed area of any site is the top left and decreases as you move down and to the right. In fact the lower right corner of a website or blog is dead man's territory as hardly any one reads this section.

Keep this in mind when designing your blog. People view pages on the internet differently than a magazine or newspaper. They SCAN first and read second. Most people do a quick once over and look for anything interesting when viewing a new page. If you want to get them to read something then make your main points jump out at them in the top left corner by using a bold header. You must grab them immediately or they will leave and never notice that you were offering $1,000,000 free to the first person who emailed you.

When in doubt think about how you read pages on the net. Do you start at the beginning and read every word through to the end? Probably not. Most people check out the headlines - then the index (still looking for headlines). If they haven't found a title that interests them by this point they usually leave. You may well have all the info they want but without an eye catching headline you will lose them.

One last thing I want to talk about before leaving Jack's Blog. Jack is zeroing in on an area that all you beginners can benefit from. He lists the top search queries from several important directories. Jack didn't take long to zero in on one of the most lucrative aspects of blogging - I'm referring to hot niches. If you want some quick ideas on what you can build a blog around then his lists are perfect. Britney Spears is blog fodder. She is always in the news for good or mostly bad reasons and people want to read about her - I of course shake my head in dismay at this aspect of our culture - but know a cash cow when I see it. Everyday thousands of people search out the latest gossip on celebrities or hot products, new music, movies and so on. Build a blog around the hottest trend and "they will come".

Keep in mind that this mostly falls into the spam blogging sphere and you simply milk a subject till it cools off and then move on to another "Hot" subject. I will get into this in more detail in another post so stay tuned.

A few General Tips for getting Indexed

Feedburner

Go to feed burner and set up an account. This service is free and allows you to syndicate your blog to others. It also allows you to add all the little features you see at the bottom of my posts such as "Submit to Netscape | Save to Del.icio.us | Digg This!" etc. These services are very important for getting indexed using the "Tag" system.

For example Google loves Delicious - if someone Tags your post on delicious Google will see it and index you much quicker. You can Tag your own posts (do it) but it is even better if a friend with a separate IP address does it as well. Technorati is also loved by Google and should be Tagged as well.

Once you get one blog indexed you can use it to post links to other blogs and this will speed up the indexing of them as well. Be sure the other blogs are related however as you don't want links that are irrelevant. Very Important - ONLY link related blogs!

Feedburner also provides a stats page for you which will tell you where your traffic is coming from, what pages are popular and more. They also tell you where your traffic goes when leaving. This is important if you are providing links for affiliate products. You want to know how many people click on these links as this will tell you how effective your sales pitch is. If you post an article about how wonderful FeedBurner is then you can follow up by seeing how many of your readers actually click the link and go to FeedBurner. If there are no clicks then you know that you need to work on your pitch. (I'll let you know how many people click the FeedBurner link on this page next time)

Keep this in mind - there are thousands of affiliate products you can sell online and you want to find the ones that convert the best. By using the "outgoing" stats you can eliminate the programs that don't convert and concentrate on the ones that make you money. Let's say that I have two products I want to test. I find that the links for both get clicked 100 times a day. I'll keep the product that shows up in my sales column and ditch the loser. Of course a loser is only a loser if it generates zero sales. If you only get 1 sale every 100 clicks you just have to get more traffic - simple. (OK traffic isn't simple but we will get to that subject in due course.)

Articles.

I've said this before and it's worth repeating over and over again. WRITE some articles and post them on GoArticles.com and ezinearticles.com. Google absolutely loves these two sites and always ranks them high in the searches. Besides getting traffic to your site and backlinks, these two sites will help you get indexed fast. Because Google crawls these sites daily they will find your article and follow your embedded link back to your blog. Voila! You have been found and if you have optimized your site properly you will then be indexed. The more articles the better. The articles I post on GoArticles.com are usually found doing a Google search within a few hours after posting them. That's fast folks. The trick to getting indexed is simple - get your backlink on a site that Google loves and presto! Using these directories is an easy way to do this compared to asking a page rank 5 site to post your link. (They won't unless you pay them, use blackmail or kidnap their kids)

Yahoo Answers

As much as this sounds crazy, since they compete with each other, but Google loves Yahoo Answers. You will regularly find Yahoo high in Googles listings. Go to http://answers.yahoo.com/, register and then start answering questions relevant to your site. Be sure to leave your link at the end of the answer. This will get you three things - traffic (sometimes lots of traffic if it's a popular subject), a great backlink and you will get indexed as Google crawls the site endlessly. Use this technique a lot - answer a ton of questions and you will get a lot of traffic. It is a very popular site.

Note: You'll notice that I didn't use a hyperlink for yahoo's URL. This is because I try and avoid two way links as much as possible. Yahoo answers has links pointing to this page and I don't want to reciprocate. Remember the search engines value one way links and frown on two way. Always keep this in mind when using links on your pages.

I will give you some more tips in future posts but I want you to concentrate on these for now. You have to get indexed before anything else can happen. This is why I hinted above about making friends online. Get to know others and you can all help each other out by doing things for each other that speeds things up. ie. Backlinks, "tagging" posts from different IP's, voting for best answer on yahoo, ranking articles on GoArticles.com etc. These are all things that you can't do yourself - if you vote for your own answer on Yahoo they will know - but if 20 other people vote your answer the best then you will get a lot of traffic. (You can also help each other make some money by clicking you know what that G**gle doesn't allow me to say - but I'm sure you have figured that out by now. Just remember don't go overboard - G**gle can spot a recurring trend a mile away.) If any of you want my help just send me an email - I don't and never will spam you. Eventually I want to get all of you introduced to one another and you can begin working with each other. I will always ask your permission before doing anything.

On a personal note I have to say that everyone I have met so far is wonderful - there really are a lot of good people online and I hope you discover this for yourself. Best of all I still find it amazing that people from all over the world can get to know each other so easily and that this was next to impossible prior to the "net". Ok drum roll please...

NICHES

Finally got around to what this post was supposed to be about. Not that I'm long-winded or anything.

First off - the 3 products I use constantly.

Keyword Elite

SEO Elite

Brainstorm Generator

With a few exceptions these are all the tools you really need to get your blogs producing money. Let me start off by saying that there are other comparable products and I don't profess to know which is "better". These are the ones I use and since they provide everything I need I have no need to try the competition out. You can always check out the forums like Warrior or WhyDoWork and get opinions on what others think are the best. I do know that Wordtracker is considered a top notch keyword tool but I didn't like the monthly payment bit. I prefer to pay for something only once.

SEO Elite is probably considered the best tool for optimizing your sites but again there are others that may do most of the same things.

I haven't found another product similar to Brainstorm though. If any one knows of one please let me know and I will post it. Brainstorm finds the best keyword niches.

Note: You do not need any of these tools as you can do everything they do manually. This is fine when you are just starting out with one or two blogs. These tools should only be looked at once you begin to get the hang of this and a little money starts coming in. These tools simply save you an enormous amount of time and that will become very important once your little blog empire starts to take off.

Alright - how the heck do you find a niche and moreover a niche that is likely to produce some income. I am talking about long term profitable blogs and not the spam variety. (Jack's blog will give you plenty of ideas for short term blogs.)

To do this manually you can pick any topic you think might be good and using a free keyword tool (Overture - if it's working again, Good Keywords, Keyword Explorer, etc) enter in your main keyword - let's say "Gardening" and run a search. You will get back a list telling you how many searches were done for that term the previous month as well as a list of related terms and their search numbers as well.

This will tell you how popular your term is.

Next you need to find out how many competitors you will be up against. Do this by using Google Search. They will show you a listing of relevant sites and how many pages are listed with your keyword. This is always shown at the top of the page.

A search for "gardening" shows me that there are 60,700,000 pages listed for that term. This is huge and tells you that this may not be a good niche for you to try and tackle right away. I say may not because it might be depending on the R/S factor.

R/S Ratio

This is a ratio of Results (competing pages) divided by the number of Searches done for the keyword. Your keyword tool shows you how many searches were done. Let's say that "gardening" was searched 1 million times last month. This would give an R/S ratio of 60 which is high but not impossible. Think of it this way - everytime someone did a search there were 60 pages of results for it. The more pages the harder it will be for you to compete.

Ideally you want a keyword that returns a R/S of 50 or less. To find these keywords you have to use two and three word keywords or more like "organic gardening" or "how to grow an organic garden". You may find that they only get searched 500 or 600 times a month but this is great if there are only 1000 pages of competition. You can easily beat out 1000 others to rank number 1 on the search list. At number 1 you may get most of the 600 searchers to your site and if you have the right product you will make money. Remember if this generates $100 a month in sales it will keep on doing that over and over again without you doing a thing. 10 sites doing this and suddenly you are making some decent money - recurring money.

The more general your keyword the more competition you will have. The more detailed your keyword the less competition and ironically the more likely you will make a sale. Huh? you say. Hear me out on this as it's important.

People searching for the term gardening are just browsing - they aren't looking to buy "gardening", how could they. They have a vague interest in something about gardening and are just out sunday driving. If someone searches for the term "How to grow bonsai trees" then you know they have a particular interest and are more likely to buy a product like an ebook that tells them "how to grow a bonsai tree". Get the picture. The more refined your keyword the more likely that the people who do find your site will be looking to buy something.

KEI

After figuring out your R/S ratio you want to find the KEI rating. This is a complex formula that somewhat tells you how profitable a keyword might be by using a lot of factors that I won't get into right now. Generally the higher the KEI factor the better the keyword. I'm not sure how you can get this figure without a special tool like Keyword Elite aside from Googling "KEI" and copying the formula. Don't get too hung up on it though as most people don't put a lot of stock in KEI. It works better at telling you which keywords won't work as opposed to which will.

Adsense Ads

Next you need to know how many adwords ads there are for your keyword. Google your keyword and count the ads listed on the right side of the search listings under the column "Sponsored Links". If there are no ads you might want to find a new keyword unless you have a killer product for the term. Generally “no ad” signifies that there are few searches of the term and probably no products either.

You will also want to know how much money the adwords ads cost the advertiser when clicked. Overture gives this info but Google doesn't.

One more thing - you can find out how profitable your niche is by tracking the adword advertisers. If you see different ads everyday or every week then that means nobody is doing well and they keep changing their ads or they stop advertising completely. If you see the same ads for weeks and months at a time then you know they are making money. Advertising is expensive and why would you keep spending money if you weren't making sales?

Oops... almost forgot. When you start to hone in on a good niche do a Google search using the " (quote) sign before and after the term. This will return a list of competitors that are optimized for the EXACT phrase and not the GENERAL phrase. I will explain.

If you do a search like this - how to grow and care for a bonsai tree - Google will return every page in the universe that has any or all of those terms in it - and they can be in any order. A page that tells you how to grow a big fat pumpkin will show up if they also mention that they quit growing bonsai's to concentrate on pumpkins. What I'm getting at is that the list generated by Google does not give you a good indication of how many REAL competitors you have. The pumpkin site really isn't a competitor of the bonsai site yet it is listed. By using the " symbol, you are telling Google to give you a list of sites that only contain your term exactly - the same words in the same order. This will give you a much smaller list - sites that are optimized for your keyword only.

To compare the difference - how to grow a bonsai tree - gives a general list of 536,000 pages.

The exact phrase - "how to grow a bonsai tree" - gives a list of 48,000 sites.

See the difference - this will help you in deciding on your keyword as you want to know how many REAL competitors you have. By the way I just picked Bonsai trees out of thin air but seeing these results tells me there is a market here - only two adword ads though which means not a lot of adsense income. If you had an ebook about Bonsai's this could be profitable as 48,000 competitors would be easy to out rank. Using this example I would now do a keyword search and see how many people are searching for the term. I just cheated and used Keyword Elite and this is what I found out. The table below is not how it looks on Keyword Elite - just the result of my quick cut and paste. I really should learn how to do this the right way. That's right - I'm too lazy.

Keyword --------Results---------Searches
grow nursery----1,360,000-------No Keyword Search Results
indoor grow-----1,650,000-------No Keyword Search Results
bonzai pots-----259,000---------No Keyword Search Results
tree soil-------10,100,000------No Keyword Search Results
pine tree-------3,360,000-------22,083.28
ficus bonzai----55,100----------359.08
nursery tree----1,350,000-------7,002.01
tree seeds------2,190,000-------9,066.71
elm tree--------1,640,000-------5,206.63
tree trunk------2,160,000-------4,368.78
pruning tree----1,270,000-------2,304.08
grow pots-------1,270,000-------1,526.08
tree roots------3,840,000-------4,458.55
grow pot--------1,900,000-------1,526.08
tree species----21,400,000------3,471.08
grow seeds------1,590,000-------209.46
grow indoors----1,230,000-------89.77
grow soil-------2,900,000-------149.62
tree types------39,000,000------1,047.31
how to grow a bonzai tree-------N/A-----No Keyword Search Results
how to grow a bonsai tree-------N/A-----No Keyword Search Results

Keyword---------R/S Ratio--Google Campaigns
grow nursery----N/A--------3
indoor grow-----N/A--------10
bonzai pots-----N/A--------10
tree soil-------N/A--------6
pine tree-------152.15-----8
ficus bonzai----153.45-----8
nursery tree----192.8------10
tree seeds------241.54-----10
elm tree--------314.98-----4
tree trunk------494.42-----2
pruning tree----551.2------8
grow pots-------832.2------10
tree roots------861.27-----1
grow pot--------1,245.02---1
tree species----6,165.22---1
grow seeds------7,590.88---6
grow indoors----13,701.77--6
grow soil-------19,382.99--2
tree types------37,238.26--4
how to grow a bonzai tree--N/A--N/A
how to grow a bonsai tree--N/A--N/A

Before knowing these results I would have thought there might be a market for this keyword. These results tell me otherwise. Neither the main keyword nor the associated keywords have low enough R/S ratios for me to look at them further. Too much competition for me. Notice how the keyword tool will find mis-spellings in the list. This is something you will want to pay attention to when selecting keywords. You can rank high for a mis-spelling as well. I'll bet as many people search for a Banzai tree as they do for a Bonsai tree or a Bonsai tree. Words like this guarantee mis-spellings. You will face less competition for the mis-spelling and find it easier to rank high as a result.

Take a site I have on Betta Fish. I optimized on page for "Betta Fish Compatibilty Chart" and another page for "Betta Fish Compatability Chart". Guess what. I get more traffic from Google for the misspelled keyword phrase. (I rank number 1) Traffic I would not get if I hadn't created the second page. If you find a profitable keyword and it has an obvious mis-spelling then create a second blog using the misspelled word.

By now you can see that finding keywords can be a tedious task and can take hours to weed out all the relevant info. This is manageable for one or two blogs but you can now see why you will want a keyword tool eventually. The Bonsai Tree is a good example as I came up with it after doing a few Google searches. At that point it looked promising. Had I continued on manually I would have spent an hour getting all the info just to find out it was a no go. The keyword tool came up with my answer in a couple of minutes.

Keyword Elite is all fine and dandy if you have already got an idea for a keyword. It doesn't find your ideas for you though. And this is the real trick to making money. I'll discuss SEO Elite in another post because I really want to discuss Brainstorm Generator as it will be of the most use to you.

Brainstorm Generator

This program does the guessing for you. You can sit down and start writing out ideas of what you think might work or you can have Brainstorm Generator do it for you. It is a simple little program - actually there is not much to it, just a small screen on your console and nothing much to learn to operate it. Basically you pick a couple of parameters like telling it you only want keywords with a R/S less than ten or a KEI higher than 200 and a few other variables. Then you hit go and it searches the net for keywords that meet your criteria.

This is an example of what it spits out.

Keyword------------Search-Result-----R/S--Adwords--Bid---KEI
asics shoes--------8162---171000-----20---8--------$0.61-389
embroidery machine-23589--1130000----47---8--------$2.35-492
book bag-----------19005--1400000----73---8--------$0.57-257
rain boots---------23128--1350000----58---8--------$0.00-396
glowstick----------20757--317000-----15---8--------$4.41-1359

Each time you use the Generator it will give you 25 keywords just like this - random things that you would probably never think of. I just listed a few of the terms from a list I generated months ago. These results may not be valid now if some of you are thinking of using them. The point is that this tool comes up with ideas that you wouldn't and provides all the info you need to make a decision and does it all in one step.

All of these keywords are likely candidates but the keyword "Glowstick" jumps off the page. 20,000 searches and only 317000 pages of competition - thats not even a hiccup to overcome for top ranking. There is 8 adword ads for adsense income and the clicks will pay you roughly $2 a click. The KEI is very high (1346 it got cut off in my pasting hack job) - anything over 400 is good. Over 1000 screams money to be made. Best of all - Glowsticks are a product that can be sold! This is the ideal kind of Niche - lots of ways to make income, low competition, high click $ and lots of searches. This is why I love this program - it gives me ideas that I would never think of and best of all things that others will never think of. No competition. This, my friends is the real secret to making money in amounts worth speaking of.

Anyway this has been an opus and I think it's time to stop for now. You now have an idea of how to track down a niche. For those that can afford it get Brainstorm and you will have 25 fresh ideas in an hour from now. (There is a video on how to use it and it takes about 1/2 an hour for it to generate a list) The instructions are quite simple. By the way it gives a different list each time it runs so that everyone using the program doesn't get the same keywords. (There are many variables you can use to get different lists with it).

For those of you that can't afford it just send me an email and I will send you a fresh list for you only. (If I post the lists on here everyone will use the same keywords) Each of you will get a different set of keywords. This will get you going till you can afford the tool yourself. If you give me your blog I can have it generate a list specific to the kind of blog you already have set up. This is a very cool feature.

Anyhow, get cracking.

Make Money Marketing with Blogs

2010-03-06T13:52:00.001-08:00

I have written this post to encourage those of you who just don't want to put the time and effort into blogging to reconsider. Reaching page 1 on Google is worth the work. Think on this. It doesn't matter what or how you sell something online - you will still need customers, aka Traffic to make money. Getting your site on page 1 of Google gets you traffic - Free traffic. You can spend money and build a website or you can follow my directions and build a blog for free.

How to turn Traffic into Money

My make money blog is not set up to market products and as a result the "Project Payday" traffic is not earning me anything. I'm not an affiliate of "Project Payday" so people who read my review and sign up will not benefit me in any way. However my "make Money" blog is set up for other purposes which I will discuss later. I do have several other blogs that are optimized for selling products and I have got most of them listed on page 1 of Google as well. These blogs only do one thing. Sell the product. Google sends the traffic for free. I post 1 article a week to each of them and other than that they are forgotten. I spend my time creating new blogs and repeating the process over and over again. They don't all make money everyday but everyday some of them do. Combined they are averaging $106 a day. This might not seem like much to you but that's $3000 a month and my expenses are ZERO. Think on that before you say that you don't want to do the work.

Now that I have shown you the basics of setting up your blog let's discuss making some money with it.

Step 1.

Find a niche that will make money. This is all important as some niches are ready made for people who want to spend money and other niches won't produce enough cash for a cup of coffee.

Before running a keyword search you have to ask yourself what kinds of things people are willing to spend money on online. Music, electronics, books, travel, how to stuff, get rich quick stuff, personal development products and shoes all come to mind without thinking very hard. There are, of course, a lot more profitable niches than this.

The point is don't pick a niche that doesn't have an associated product or ebook that can be sold on it. You also want to be sure that there are adword advertisers for your niche.

One of the first websites I set up is about Betta Fish. It's a nice site with lots of info related to Bettas. After doing all the work and incurring the expenses involved in a website, I found out that there wasn't a lot of products that could be easily sold on the net for Betta fish. There were lots of adword advertisers though and I thought I would make some money from that at least. Wrong!

One of the ironies of setting up a good informative site is that if you do too good of a job people will stay on your site and read something that they came looking for. Then leave. This is fine if you have something to sell. I, unfortunately don't. This is when I started to think that I was providing to much info. To test this, I set up a series of free blogs on Betta fish but this time I put crap on the sites. (Yes I admit it) I still used all the right keywords so that they are optimized for the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) but now when traffic shows up they depart in a hurry. Usually they just close the page but a number of people click my ads. Bingo - I get more ad revenue from the crappy blogs than I do from the real website. This seems to work rather well with certain niches like pets. People are attached to their pets and when they need info they are determined to find it. The blogs are useless to them but when they see the ads, which appear to have the answers they need, it's easier to click the ad than do another Google search.

I am not saying that this is right or ethical. I am saying that people who make money with adsense use these techniques. As I have said before, no one in the business likes to admit this and they certainly don't divulge this to beginners.

Note: If you have been sucked into enough programs that promise to make you rich you start to realize that most of these programs give you just enough info to get you started but always seem to leave out the key ingredient. All the programs available that promise to show you how to make money with adsense are exactly like this. They tell you how to optimize your site, how to research keywords, how to find traffic and a few other details - everything in fact that you need to know to make money from adsense. And you will - maybe $1 a day. They don't tell you that you will need hundreds of sites to make any real money. Then again maybe they do but it's between the lines. The "lines" in this case would be the software that they flog. Stuff that generates unique content articles, programs that upload content to your sites automatically, automated forum posting, automated directory posting, automated guestbook posting, automated blog builders, automated website builders and the list goes on.

Why do you need automated software for anything? Because it's all about the numbers. To make money you need to create lots and lots of sites and you can't do this manually. Automated programs are spam programs - in the loose sense of the word. Spamming means many things and spam blogs are included in the definition.

I have received a number of emails asking me for info on these programs. I have been reluctant to tell you for a number of reasons. First, you need to know how to set up a "real" blog properly before you start duplicating it. Second I fear you will start down the spam path without knowing what your doing and spend a small fortune in the process. Thirdly, on a personal level, I have corresponded with many of you and realize that there are real people reading this and I like them, hence my conscience is weighing in on this. It's one thing to sell stuff to anonymous people who happen to find your site but it's harder when you know the people on the other end.

A few facts.

- most of the available software - while effective - requires some or a lot of knowledge about various aspects of computers, codes, operating systems, html, php, java script etc. Most beginners don't have the ability to work through this stuff and the producers of this type of software don't tell you about all the "bugs" and "fixes" needed to run the software before you buy it.

- every program I have used to date has "bugs". Most developers will issue fixes and updates as they get them but the fact is all software has bugs (Windows XP had hundreds when released) and this can't be helped as there are so many different computer setups that programmers can't take everyone in to account when building the program. They tend to build it for the most common applications .ie. Windows XP, 32 bit etc. In this instance a Mac user may have problems.

- this stuff is expensive.

- if you don't use the programs properly you will leave a spam footprint a mile wide that Google, among others, will see and at best your sites will get dropped and at worst you will be banned from adsense.

That said I will give you a list of some of the more popular software but without any links. That way I receive no affiliate fees and my conscience is clean if you pursue this avenue.

VooDoo Blogger - this program is designed to create thousands of crappy blogs. Has bugs but there is support given. This is a notorious spam program that doesn't make any bones about what it's for.

RSStoBlog - this is a legitimate program used to post content feeds automatically to your blog. Nothing wrong with this as lots of people use it to keep their sites up to date with fresh content. As with most automated software it can also be used to send content to all the spam blogs as well.

Forum Equalizer - this is simply a spamming program that lets you post messages on thousands of forums in order to leave a backlink to your site(s).

Guest Book Equalizer - same as the forum equalizer but you send posts to guest books instead. (leaving your backlink)

The following are not spamming software per se but can be used in conjunction with these other programs.

Article content generation software. There are too many to mention by name but they all do the same thing. (Google "Article Content Generation" for a list) They take articles that have already been written and change enough words and phrases to make it unique and then produce hundreds or thousands of unique variations of the same article. These can then be posted to thousands of blogs using RsstoBlog or a similar program.

I admit to using one of these programs but I only use articles that I write. This is to be certain that I don't get nailed for copyright infringement. If you don't set enough variables in the content generation program you could effectively produce an article that is only slightly different from the original and be guilty of stealing someone else's work. Be careful of this - I strongly suggest that you write your own articles. By the way there is no program that can create a readable article from scratch so beware any that advertise as such.

Article Submission Software - this allows you to automatically submit your articles to hundreds of directories. (a very time consuming process if done manually) You can Google this phrase for a list of available products. A word of caution - make sure your articles are well written before you submit them as most directories review articles before inclusion. Humans can tell if your article has been produced by spamming software and you won't get them posted.

Before spending a lot of money on this stuff I have put a link on the site to a program called "The OTO GoldMine". I came across this site in my travels and it seemed to be an ideal choice for beginners. You can join for free and make money by selling the products listed on the site with nothing more than an affiliate link. This is no different than other affiliate programs except that the product list here is as huge as any I've seen and has several very useful products. I also want to point out that they will try and sell you all these products when you sign up. The cost is $67. I mention this because a lot of the products in the list do the things I have just been describing - content generation software, blog submission et al. The price is astoundingly cheap for this kind of software that would cost hundreds of $ individually. (dam - that's sounds like a sales pitch and I don't want it to... old habits I guess)

What I am trying to say is that if you are going to invest in this stuff anyway then save yourself a lot of money and get it from this site. You can learn how to use the stuff and see if it is for you for a paltry sum in comparison to what you will spend searching for this separately. Anyway, whether you buy buy the products or not you should join for free and take advantage of the huge collection of products that you can promote on your site(s) and you only need one affiliate link. The nice thing about this is that they do all the selling - you just send them traffic and collect commissions.

This also applies to "The Ultimate Supertip" and "$7 Dollar Secrets" and the other programs I've listed before. These are ideal for beginners as they will sell faster and easier than most products. Why? They are cheap and they are easy to build a blog around. Optimize each blog as I have outlined previously using each program's name as your keyword. Write an article or two about each one and post them on your blog. Create a different set of articles for submission to the article directories like GoArticles.com and then move on to your next blog and product. Remember the more articles you submit the more backlinks you will get and the sooner you will get indexed in Google. It took me a month to get to number 1 for "project payday" and if I was selling that program I would be making money from it already from the free traffic Google is sending to my site. Is one month too long to wait? I am making money from all the sites I use to sell products and everyone of them gets free traffic and cost me nothing to produce.

Once you have enough sites up and running the money will start adding up. You may only make a few dollars at first but you will be surprised at how it will multiply in six months from now.

Get to it.

That's it for today. Next post I will look at several "tweaks" that you can use to increase your backlinks and a few other novel treats.

Later folks.

Indexing Your Blog Faster

2010-03-06T13:35:00.001-08:00

Blogs have become the one of the most stable internet money-making medium. Many people have started their own blog foremost for money-making opportunities attached to it.

I have written these lessons in order to show beginners how they can set up and run a successful online money making blog and to do it with out spending a lot of money. However, the lessons are serial and you may need to read earlier posts before this one. The previous lessons in the series are:

Make Money Using Blogs - Lesson 1

Make Money Using Blogs - Lesson 2

At this point you should have set up a new blog at Google's blogger.com and published at least five posts on it. The first post should be your welcome message and the rest article should be on your chosen keyword (topic/niche). If you have a problem choosing a keyword or niche now, then write on just any topic that comes to your mind, and make sure the post is good enough to be commended by others

As well you should have joined GoArticles.com and posted a second article in their directory. The second article should have been a re-write of your blog posting - enough changes in it to avoid the duplicate content rules of the search engines.

This lesson is fast and easy and no, you don't have to write any more articles.

Getting your new site indexed.

If you had followed my instructions your site should have been optimized on-page for Google when it gets around to crawling it. There are a few things (known as off-page optimization) that we can do to speed up the process.

You'll be happy to know that you have already completed one of these techniques.

Writing Articles.

There is no better and faster way to get your site indexed and ranked by Google than writing articles. While providing traffic to your site, articles also get you back links and these backlinks gets you page ranking and ultimately a high placement in Google's search listings.

Here's a list of the most popular Article Submission Directories. The more articles and more directories you use the faster you will get ranked and indexed by Google. This is not a secret, just a well-known fact to all the successful bloggers. It is very effective because 90% of would be competitors either don't like to write articles or don't want to pay for unique articles and most of them resort to duplicate content when filling up their pages. Content, I might add, that comes from the 10% of us who write the articles embedded with our back links. Your competition is one of your best allies as they are the ones sending you back links.

Here is the list.

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/
http://www.amazines.com/
http://www.articledashboard.com/
http://www.article-directory.net/
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/
http://www.magportal.com/
http://www.isnare.com/
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/
http://www.article-hangout.com/
http://www.webarticles.com/
http://www.articlecube.com/
http://articles4content.com/
http://www.article-buzz.com/
http://www.free-articles-zone.com/
http://www.newarticlesonline.com/
http://www.articletogo.com/
http://www.articleworld.net/
http://www.impactarticles.com/
http://www.articlealley.com/
http://www.directorygold.com/
http://dir.salon.com/
http://www.articlefever.com/
http://www.content-articles.com/
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/marketing-article-directory.html
http://www.niche-article-directory.com/
http://www.jogena.com/articles/articleform.htm
http://news.collectors.org/
http://article-niche.com/
http://blogtelecast.com
http://superpublisher.com/
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.article-emporium.com
http://www.ebooksnbytes.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.internethomebusinessarticles.com
http://www.site-reference.com
http://www.stickysauce.com

Technorati

Go to Technorati and create an account. Then, Log in and "Claim your Blog". Each time you post an article on your blog, you need to ping technorati so they will come and crawl your site for the new content. Why?

Because Technorati is the "Google" of the Blogoshpere and you want to get indexed in it's directory. The more directories and search engines that you get indexed in, the better. Google, Yahoo, Msn, Technorati and Digg are all you really need and must be indexed in.

Back in the days, Technorati will get you traffic if you give the proper "Tags" (keywords) for your website. Lot's of people search technorati using tags or keywords to find articles on various subjects.

The nice thing about technorati is that it gives users a list of articles based on how recent they were posted. If you are looking for posts using the tag "make money" you will get a list of articles starting with those posted a few minutes ago and working back in time. This is very important and you can generate your own traffic because of this. In blogger, the labels serve as Tags and are therefore the same as Technorati "Tags".

But Technorati has changed it's system and content is now used.
How?
Let me tell you about a little traffic generating trick. This is strictly for making some quick money with adsense. If you go to technorati you will see a list of "Top Tags". This list is really just a list of what people are searching for the most at any given period of time. You are no doubt aware that Anna Nicole Smith died recently. For the last few days the top searched tag at technorati has been her name. If you were to write an article about her and ping technorati you will get 40 - 50 people to your site about 15 minutes after posting and pinging. Here is the best part - you don't have to post a unique article. You can use other articles (as long as you provide the credit and link back to the original author). This is simply a way to make some quick adsense money and you don't care about Google indexing your site.
I'll explain this in full if I have confused you.
I mentioned back at the beginning of these lessons that you want to create a few decent blogs for ranking in the search engines. These blogs will be for the long term and eventually you can use them to sell products as well as use them for adsense revenue. I also mentioned that you will set up hundreds or thousands of "crappy" blogs. These will be used to generate back links for your good blogs but can also be used to generate adsense revenue.

This is a scenario for a crappy blog. For instance, I have a whole group of what I call "My Celebrity Blogs". When ever a celebrity does something to get themselves on the front pages of the news I quickly post articles about them and ping Technorati. I just use the headline and a few sentences of someone else's article and then include a link back to the original article if people want to read the rest of it. I will post a half dozen of these snippets on my blog. Ping technorati and then wait 15 minutes and sure enough the traffic rolls in from Technorati users looking for info on the celebrity. For this to work you must Tag your post with the celeb's name. As soon as someone searches for articles using that Tag the most recent articles are displayed for them - not the most relevant or the best written - simply the most recent. Technorati is not like Google - they don't care about your content or backlinks or anything else that Google deems important. They simply list articles in order of posting - the most recent gets top listing.
Timing
To get the most visitors you have to time your posts. To get the largest audience of English speaking people you should post your articles between 7:00 and 9:00am, between 11:00am and 1:00pm and between 5:00 and 7:00pm all central standard time in the

USA

. These are the peak hours of readership in North America. You can also work out the best times in the

and

Australia

as well.
If you have 10 Celeb blogs you can post the same snippets in all ten blogs. Simply post each one 15 minutes apart during these peek times. This will keep your blogs at the top of the listings for 2 hours or more during the peek readership times.
Is this ethical. Hell no. But it makes fast cash. When Mel Gibson ran into trouble my 10 little blogs got more than 10,000 hits in four days on technorati. I made just under $200.00 for my efforts. I never wrote a single article. Ethical... well that's for your own conscience. I took the money.
That's it for this lesson. Go and get acquainted with Technorati. Claim your blog and play around with TAG searches. Get to know what this directory does as they will make you some decent money once you understand how to use it. As always if you have questions just send me an email or post a comment below.

Pagerank Required To Make Money With Free Blogs

2010-02-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

Basic Concepts of Blogging

You need a very good explanation of blogging if you want to build an online business from a blog. If you really have been itching to blog, but you just don't know where to start, then here is a good material that will get you started.

As I mentioned in the first lesson, the best place to begin is with your own blog. Why? Simple... Blogs are free and they are an excellent way to learn the basics of online business without spending money to do it.

Start with one blog and learn how to optimize it using SEO techniques that I will give you as we move along. Ultimately I want your blog indexed by Google. If you do this correctly, Google will eventually start sending traffic to your site. How long does this take? It depends on many factors but I have found that my main blogs have all been indexed within a few weeks and in one instance - 3 days. (the blog you are reading now)

Before moving on let's clarify a few terms so you have a better understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.

Indexing - This term refers to the search engines. Simply put - Do the search engines know that your site exists? If they do, then you have been indexed. That is the search engine has read and recorded your website content on its server.

How can you tell? Just query the search engine using your website address, for instance, http://blogbanc.blogspot.com. If they find your site then you have been indexed. If it says that no page exists by that name then you aren't indexed.

There are many search engines but we are only interested in the top three; Google, Yahoo and MSN. These 3 engines account for 75% of all search engine queries carried out on any given day with Google processing the most queries by far, 50% estimate.

If you go to Google and type in a query - let's say "how do beginners make money online" - Google will look through all the pages it has indexed (read and recorded) from all the sites it continuously crawls on the Internet in order to present you with a list of the most relevant sites concerning your query.

The brains at Google have come up with algorithms that determine relevancy based on several factors, some we know about and some we don't. The factors we know of include things like page content, the age of a site, keywords, sheer volume of unique content, page rank and most importantly, relevant back links.

Let's look at these factors a bit more closely.

Page Content.

Google likes unique content. You will get indexed fast if you use original material on your blog. If you copy and paste content found elsewhere on the Internet you won't get indexed very fast and usually not at all. You can also get into copyright troubles doing this.

The age of a website or blog

The older the site the better. This is not crucial but Google will give older sites a higher preference over new sites simply to eliminate all the spam blogs and sites that are created daily from dominating its index. This can be overcome with the proper technique.

Keywords

The term keyword simply refers to what your topic is. If I wanted some info on Nokia N95, I would type in "Nokia N95" on Google and it would present me with a list of sites related to Nokia N95. Google uses keywords to generate its search. If you have a website or blog that discusses Nokia N95 and you have used this keyword enough times in your posts then Google will rightly assume that your website is about Nokia N95. If you only used the keyword once while talking about Australian fashion then Google will probably not use your site in its list for Nokia N95 but may decide that your site is about Australian fashion instead.

Keywords are very important for getting your site listed in the proper category. If you are starting a blog that sells Nokia N95 then you had better make sure that the search engines know what your site is about. This is done by using your prime Keywords in your page titles, post titles and sprinkled a few times in your articles. Beware that using your keywords too many times will get you into trouble as Google will see your site as a spam blog and delete you from its index. The rule of thumb is that you don't want to use your keyword more than 2 or 3 times per one hundred words. (keyword density should not exceed 3-4% of your total article) This is very important.

Content Volume

The more pages you produce the better. Search engines like content - the more the merrier. If you keep adding pages to your blog or website, the search engines will crawl you regularly and your site will get listed more often when your keywords are queried. Why?

Think of it this way. If you write just one article about a subject, how much info can you give in three or four hundred words. A bit but you will leave a lot of pertinent info out. Take Nokia N95 for example. My first article might discuss the history of Nokia N95 and where to buy them.

This is fine and I may get listed whenever someone queries the following keywords; "Nokia N95", "Nokia N95", "Nokia N95 features", "Nokia N95 Purchase". The problem is that I won't get listed if someone queries "Price of Nokia N95" or "Nokia N95 repair tips " or "Nokia N95 Casing".

Are you getting the picture. The more articles you write the more content you give the search engines to list your site under. If my site has a thousand pages on everything there is to know about Nokia N95 then I guarantee I will get listed for every query made about Nokia N95. The more you get listed the greater your traffic will be and the more clicks your adsense ads will get.

I have used the Nokia N95 keyword so many times in this article that it will fool Google into thinking this post is about Nokia N95 and it will get listed for that query - the unfortunate user will find out that this is really about making money online with blogs. My apologies to anybody who found this page while searching for Nokia phone.

Page Rank and Back Links

Page rank is closely associated with back links. To separate the wheat from the chaff Google has devised a page ranking system that it uses to determine how important your pages are. For example, if you followed the first lesson, then you have now created a blog on Googles' Blogspot.com.

At present you only have one post on it and it is highly unlikely that Google has found your blog yet but if it has, then you would be indexed for whatever topic you picked. Someone looking for your post using Google search would likely find your site listed a couple of hundred pages deep in the search listings. This is effectively like not being listed at all.

I have had traffic come to my site from the first page and even as deep as six or seven pages back in the Google listings. The sad news is that most people will not search more than the first two or three pages of Google Search result. Ideally you want to be on the first page to get the most traffic. To get on the first page you need, above all else, back links. Only the sites that Google deems as highly relevant get on the first page.

Let me explain this further.

Every site is ranked between 0 and 10. The higher the number the more important your site is. If your site is a 10 then I guarantee your site will be listed on the first page and no doubt in the top position. Currently the new blog you set up has a ranking of 0 (zero). Content and the age of your site will gain you some ranking over time. If you do nothing else but post unique content then you might get a ranking of 2 in a year from now, possibly sooner. A ranking of 2 will not get you much traffic. How can you speed up your ranking? Simple... get back links and get lots of them.

Google has removed the weight it used to give to pages with high page rank. As a result page rank now has little to do with how well your site will rank for a targeted keyword. I have left this info on the page but it no longer is of much concern. I have dominated many keywords in the search engines with low PR sites and pages.

Back Links

What are back links? They are links placed on other websites or blogs or forums or directories that connect people to your site. In other words they are click-able links that point back at your site (called hypertext). The theory is that the more sites that have links pointing back at your site the more important your site must be. This makes sense. If other sites are sending traffic to your site then you must be some kind of authority for your niche or topic. As a result Google will give you a higher page rank because of your importance. With a higher page rank your site will then get listed higher in the searches.

There are some rules to this however. The back links that count must be relevant to your topic. If your site is about "Dog Grooming" then links from pet sites and animal care sites are great. If you have links from a site like mine then Google will ignore the links because my site is in no way relevant to dog grooming.

The page rank of the sites giving you links is very important. If you get 1 hundred links from pet stores to your dog grooming site but all the incoming links are from sites with o page rank then you might get a ranking of 1 or 2. If you get half a dozen links from relevant sites that have a page ranks of 5 or higher then you will end up being ranked a 4 or 5. If you can get a link from a page rank 7 or higher you will vault up the rankings quickly and the age of your site will not matter.

Getting thousands of links from sites that have no relevance to your site won't help you much. I mention this to caution you against using link exchanges or link farms. These types of links worked in the past but no longer as Google ignores them. By the way if Google nabs you linking to sites that are not relevant to your site you will be penalized and lose ranking. This is how link exchanges work - people buy or sell links to anyone else regardless of relevancy. Steer clear of this.

You will gain more from one way links. Lots of sites that are relevant to your site will trade links with you. They link to you and you link to them. This is called a two way link. Don't bother as this won't help you much. The exception would be if the other site has a high page rank. In this case go ahead but in reality high page rank sites only want links from other high ranking sites. They will not link to you unless there is an advantage for them. One way links are the best because Google sees them as a confirmation of your importance, ie. other sites think you important enough to give you a link without getting one in return.

The good news is that it is easy to get lots of relevant backlinks. I will get back to this shortly.

The Google Sandbox

You may or may not of heard about the sandbox effect. When it comes to Google nobody really knows the whole story on how they tweak their system. One of the most confusing programs they employ is the sandbox a system that keeps your site off the charts for a indeterminate period of time. This is in order to stop spam sites from getting listed fast. A new site may sit in the sandbox for 6 months collecting quality backlinks and lots of unique content and still not get listed in the searches. Then one day you find Google suddenly recognizes all the back links and content and bumps your site way up the charts.

I have several good sites that have been in the sandbox for several months now. This is normal and I have learned to be patient and use the time to get good backlinks and keep adding content. The confusing part is that this particular blog you are reading spent zero time in the sandbox. Google indexed this site in 3 days and has credited me with 135 backlinks already. This has meant traffic has been coming from the search engines since practically day one. I still don't have a ranking yet (all the backlinks are from O page rank sites) and yet my keywords are being placed on the first few pages of the listings. This blows me away as this blog is less than two months old and I am already high in the listings for certain keywords. I should mention that Yahoo and MSN has me even higher. (it's normal to get listed in Yahoo and MSN long before you get any listings in Google).

I mention this because I know what I did different in this blog and my guess is that Google approves and has rewarded my efforts. This is the same technique that I am going to teach you.

I received an email asking how much I was going to charge for these lessons. Apparently the fellow thought I was going to give away a few tidbits to get you all hooked and then hit you up for money before I gave you the really good stuff. Don't worry - there is no fee and there won't be one. Spreading this knowledge around doesn't hurt my business at all and to be honest these lessons will make great content for my blog.

OK, that's a lot of background and we haven't got around to today's lesson. Actually it's pretty simple but you will have to make yourselves do it. Write an article about your Blog's subject matter and post it.

The rules

Try for about 400 words. (Longer is also good but not necessary)
Use your Keywords a couple of times throughout the whole article.
Use your Keyword in the Blog Post Title
Use your Keyword in the first sentence.
Use your Keyword in the final sentence.
Try and Put your Keyword in Bold type at least once in the article - a sub headline is a good way to do this.
Put your link in the link field so that the post links back to your site.

Your link is http://yourblog.blogspot.com - replace "yourblog" with your websites' url name.

Post your article on your Blog.

After you have finished on your Blog go to GoArticles.com

Select Submit/Edit An Article

Fill out the info to join GoArticles.com (It's free) and then I want you to re-write your article leaving all your keywords the same but use synonyms for all the rest of the main words. Synonyms are words that mean the same thing as the original word. ie. "New" is a synonym for "Original". (Sorry if I am insulting your intelligence but some people won't know this)

I'm asking you to do this so that you have two articles that say the same thing but are written differently. You will post the second article on GoArticles.com. (It's easy to do and the site explains how)

If Google finds duplicate articles they will not index the pages that the articles are on. (This is the theory at least but isn't quite true - a story for another day) This way you will get your blog indexed. The GoArticle posting is what will get you those free and easy backlinks I was talking about earlier. I will explain more about this in the next lesson.

Before posting the second article I have to show you how to embed your sites backlink in the first sentence of the article. I will explain the reasons for this next lesson, for now just follow my instructions as this is very important.

Example. Let's say your keyword is "dog grooming".

Your Blog Post Title should be just "Dog Grooming". The less extra words the better. You could add more keywords though... like "Make Money Dog Grooming" or "Dog Grooming for Profit"

Your Sub Heading should be something like "Everything you need to know about Dog Grooming". Remember to put this in bold print in your blog post. (GoArticles will not let you make it bold.)

Your final sentence in the article would be something like, "Thanks for visiting my Dog Grooming site".

And now the important sentence... the first sentence would be like this...

"If you think dog grooming is hard then please read this article."

I will now show you how to put your sites link where you typed "dog grooming" (this is only for the GoArticles post - not for your blog post.) You can see what I mean in the first sentence of this GoArticles post here Dog grooming

<*a href="http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/">dog grooming <*/a> (replace dog grooming with your keyword and "makemoneyforbeginners" with your sites url name)

This is the code to make a hypertext link - the two * should be removed as I had to put them in as spaces for you to read this code. With out the * you would see this dog grooming If you hover over the link you will see the backlink pointing to makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com in your browser window.

Highlight the entire block of code, copy it and paste it after highlighting the keyword in your first sentence. The final sentence will look like this;

"If you think dog grooming is hard then please read this article."

You have now put a backlink into your article that will point back to your site from whatever sites end up downloading your article and posting it as content on their sites.

Note: GoArticles has an authors box that allows you to put a backlink to your site in it. When people publish your article on their site they are required to post the whole article and your Author Bio (containing your link) as well. Sadly a lot of sites will just post the first few lines of your article and tell their readers that they can find the rest of your article at Goarticles.com by using a link that says "More, click here". This effectively cuts out your backlink in the author's bio which is located at the end of your article. By putting your link in the first line of text they can't eliminate your back link if they don't publish your whole article.

If you haven't figured it out yet, this is how you will get lots of backlinks to your site - one way backlinks, the best kind! You will be surprised how many times others will use your articles as content on their sites.

People don't want to create their own and are happy to download someone else's work. Keep in mind that you will be downloaded more often if you have picked a popular niche. If you are still writing about "pre-Cambrian rock formations" you may not get any downloads.

The sites using your article will likely not get the page indexed as Google will hit them for duplicate content. You won't have to worry because the GoArticles post is different from your Blog post. While your competition is busy not being indexed using your article you will be getting indexed because of your unique content.

Your competition actually helps you by giving you backlinks while you hurt them by giving them duplicate content. Imagine there were only ten sites on the net that competed for dog grooming. Your site uses unique content and you supply the other 9 sites with duplicate content embedded with backlinks to your site. What would Google see? They would rank you at the top as the authority because all the other sites are pointing at you.

Obviously you will never get all the competition pointing to you but out of every 1 million competitors for every keyword I bet 99% use duplicate content which is how the 1% that use unique content get listed on the first few pages. Out of a million competing sites you really only have 50 to 100 real rivals, others that know what they are doing and are working on their rankings. You just have to out perform these sites to get top ranking. Stick with me and I will show you how.

That's enough for today, my fingers are tired.

Always visit this site for Make Money with Blogs lessons

(notice how I snuck my Keywords into the last line - and bold to boot)

How To Create A Free Make Money Blog

2010-02-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

SETTING UP A FREE WEBSTE

I have been silent for so long after opening this blog. My many months of absence has been invested into building a blog that actually makes money, and I can confidently tell you to go ahead if you want to make money online through blogging, because there is room for every one.

If you are starting out, you probably don't know how to go about setting up an online business, so my first shot wouldbe to introduce you into the wonderful world of internet business.

I am sure you have lots of questions you want answered, which may include but not limited to:

Do I need a website?
Do I buy one or build a free one?
How do I build my own?
How do I find a niche market?
What is a niche market?
How do I sell stuff?
How do I set up adsense?
What is adsense?
What is adwords?
What tools do I need?
How do I generate traffic (visitors) to my site?
What's the secret behind making money?

etc...

I'm sure the list could go on till forever.

The point is most of you want to know where and how to start an online money making venture. The trouble is that all the online marketers are only too happy to tell you what to do... as long as you buy the product(s) that they offer. Everyone has a different scheme for you to try. A sure-fire magic system and guaranteed way to get rich! You have heard this enough I'm sure. You may have even tried some of them only to find that they fall short of their promises. Don't worry, I am different and I am going to offer you my own tutorial for free.

Let's get down to the basics, before you start spending money needlessly. Forget about websites, forget affiliate marketing, forget adwords, forget MLM and JV's, forget everything and start from scratch.

Let's start with "Google Adsense" and Blogs.

This is the cheapest and fastest way to get started making money online. You can set up a blog for free. Google will provide advertisements for your blog for free. You will earn an immediate commission from Google each time some one clicks an advertisement on your blog.

Once you get your blog up and running you can diversify with affiliate marketing and other methods of making money. A blog is very simple to manage. Google's Blogger program is a beginners dream as a complete computer illiterate can set up a blog just following the onscreen directions. Once you have a blog you will then learn how to market it - get traffic to your site. When you have learned how to do this you can transfer this knowledge to websites and other online ventures. A blog will teach you the basics and you can learn without spending gobs of cash in the process.

I'm sure you have seen screenshots of people who are making hundreds of dollars a day from adsense. Is this bullsh*t? Nope. They earn what they say but beware that they are not telling you the whole story.

There are several strategies for making money with Google Adsense but let's look at the two most common.

1)Using Adwords or other paid advertising to generate traffic to your Adsense sites and hence generate Adsense clicks.

2) Getting free traffic using SEO techniques (Search Engine Optimization) and harnessing the power of multiple Blogs to generate Adsense revenue.

So what is the trick?

Using Adwords

This is what they don't tell you.

A lot of those screen shots show you the money they brought in. They never tell you how much they spent to earn that income. They may make $300 a day but if they are using adwords to generate traffic then they likely spent several hundred a day as well. They always show you the gross, not the net. This doesn't mean that they aren't making a profit - they are or they wouldn't continue day after day - but that their profit is a lot less than they lead you to believe. This is done in order to make you believe that the product they are selling will help you generate profits of $300 a day. If they were completely honest they would admit that it might generate SALES of $300 a day - not PROFITS.

Using free traffic

This is what they don't tell you.

This is the best way for a beginner to start out. Build a blog on a particular niche(topic), create good quality content for it, have Google index and rank your page high for your keyword (topic) and sit back as Google sends hordes of visitors to your site. Finally, count your money from all the Adsense clicks. Right? Well almost.

This is the procedure but they don't tell you that to make serious money at this you will need to create dozens of blogs. Yes, you heard right. Your main blogs will have decent pages addressing the needs of your visitors and suitable for marketing products. The majority of the blogs however, will be set up to simply generate Adsense clicks. The articles will be unique but crappy and visitors that end up on these blogs will quickly leave - hopefully by clicking an ad that will take them to where they were trying to go in the first place. This is called spam blogging and as unethical as it seems, it is how many people make a lot of money with Adsense. No one talks about this aspect of making adsense profits. No one wants to admit that they use this tactic and yet this is the main method of generating decent money with Adsense with out spending money to get traffic.

This is also the system (modified a bit) that I recommend to all beginners. It's the cheapest way to start earning cash, it will teach you all the main aspects of Internet marketing and you can start immediately. However, you will have to decide if ethics or making money is your top priority first.

Decided?

Let's begin.

We will keep this simple to start. In future posts I will explain more and more techniques as we go. For now we need to get a few blogs set up.

Now I am going to teach you how to create your own free website that you would need to make money online,and here it comes!

Blogspot is a blogging medium provided by Google that enables us create free Blogger.com web logs.

Create A New Email

First,you need to open a new email address that would serve as a username for logging in to your Blogger account. A Gmail account is preferrable for this purpose,but you may also use any other email provider such as Yahoo, AOL, etc.

To open a new:

Gmail Account,click this link Google Mail Signup
Yahoo Mail account, click this link Yahoomail Signup

After opening your new email address, you will need to open a free blogger account using the email address and password of your new email.

Create a Blogger Account

In order to get started with Blogger, you need to create an account.

First,go to the Blogger homepage

Click the "Create Your Blog Now" button close to the top right hand corner:

On the following page( that is the page that loads) fill the form you see. (If you are using gmail, click the Sign in first link at the top right hand corner of this form.

If you are using Yahoomail or any other email address,just read on.)

Note: Look to the right for instructions about each box you will fill in.

Enter the new email address you just created and its password( 8 Characters) in the spaces provided for such.

Display Name is the name that appears after each post you make.

Finally, Enter the word verification and click on the empty box to accept Blogger's Terms of Service.

Then click the red button that says 'Continue'.

The next page Says: Name Your Blog

For Blog Title, type TEST. (Don't worry,you will change this later.)

For blog address(url) type your full name,(Don't worry,you will also change this later.)

For instance my name is Chinyeaka Onam, so I will write chinyeakaonam (that is in small letters and without any space.) as my url.

Then click on the link that says check availability and wait for confirmation if it says Sorry, this blog address is not available,then add 101 to your name, so for me it will now be chinyeakaonam101.

Then click on the link that says check availability again and wait for confirmation and

if it says: This blog address is available.

Then Click 'Continue' button.

You are taken to the Choose a template page.

Just scroll down and click Continue.(Do not worry! I will teach you how to design the blog soon.)

The next page should say:

Your blog has been created!

Click the Start Blogging button you see below and wait for the next page to load completely.

Then you are required to create your first post.So in the box called Title:, Copy and paste this:

Welcome To My Website

Then, click inside the bigger box, then copy and paste the text below there:

I am making my first post now and I wish to discover more details about blogging at my mentor's website address which is http://www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com

You will not recognize my blog when you come back to it in the future because http://www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com will have helped me transform it totally.

Then click the red button called PUBLISH POST.

The next page confirms by saying: Your blog post published successfully!

Click on the link that says View Blog and what you see in the page that loads is your own blog.

Hurray! Your blog is available for the world to see.But,not yet ready.

Before posting let's go into "Settings" and make a few customizations.

Fill in your description. Make sure you use your keyword at least once in your description. (Update - see Common Blogging Mistakes and Common Blogging Mistakes - Part 2 for more details)

After your description scroll down the page and hit "Save Settings". Don't change any of the yes/no settings. Leave them on default.

Select the "Publishing" tab.

Select "Yes" where it says "Notify Webogs.com" and hit "Save Settings" (the default is NO) This will help notify the outside world each time you post something to your blog.

Select "Formatting"

Change "Show" to 1 posts on the main page. (Default is 7)

Select your time zone.

Set "Show Link Field" to Yes.

Leave everything else as is and hit "Save Settings".

Select "Comments"

Select "Show" for Backlinks.

Select "Yes" for Pop up Window.

Select "No" for Word Verification.

Enter your email for comment notification.

Hit "Save Settings", and leave the rest of the options on default.

Select "Archiving"

Make sure the frequency is set to "Monthly" and the "Enable Post Pages?" is set to "Yes".

Hit "Save Settings"

Select "Posting" and we are ready for your first post.

You will notice that you have a Title Field, a Link Field, and a big box where you will type in your post.

It is important that each and every title you use has a keyword (a term you want to rank for) in the Title. (Again this relates to SEO - and again just trust me without further explanation at this point.)

In the link field you want to type in your blog address so that the post links back to your blog (your home page or the post page).

My link is typed as follows; http://beginner-blogger-basics.blogspot.com/ - this is the URL of my homepage.

Replace beginner-blogger-basics with your address.

My first post is short and to the point. It will mention my keywords at least twice.

It reads as follows;

Welcome to Blogger Basics for Beginners. This site provides tips and techniques for beginning bloggers in order to make money online. If you have questions not covered in Blogger Basics please feel free to email your question to bla bla bla

Make your first post the same way. Use your keywords a couple of times and then hit "Publish".

Then hit "View Blog"

Congrats - you are now a blogger. Simple wasn't it?

Now you can customize your blog. You will notice that your title is a hypertext link pointing to your site. On the right hand side of the page is a section called "Blog Archive" and below that is an "About Me" section.

You can add and remove any section you like by selecting "Customize" from the top right corner of your screen.

I am going to remove the "About Me" section and add a new section for Adsense. Always leave the "Blog Archives" so that visitors can find your previous posts.

Select "Customize"

Click the edit link on the "About Me" box. I am going to select the "Remove Page Element" option to get rid of this but if you want to keep the "About Me" section just fill in the info boxes and click "Save Changes".

Let's Add a Page Element. From the main customization screen click the link that says "Add a Page Element" (Use the right hand column box - not the one on the bottom of the page.)

You will get a pop-up screen with a lot of Page Elements listed on it.

Let's add Adsense to our blogs. Click the Adsense "Add to Blog" button. If you don't have an Adsense account follow the instructions to get one. You will get a publisher ID from Google that will enable you to post adsense ads on your blog. Once you have this pick a Format and use the Blend Template option regarding colors. (it's the default).

For right hand column ads I stick to the 160 x 600 vertical Banner Format.

Click "Save Changes" and you will notice that an Adsense box has been added to your right hand column at the top.

Click "View Blog" and see the results.

It takes a little while for Google to recognize your content and place corresponding ads on your site. At first you may only see public service ads or nothing until Google figures out your keywords. Just be patient as this is normal. Having said that, I was given ads related to Blogs/Make Money immediately and you may have got appropriate ads as well if you followed my instructions. Why? Remember I told you to use your keywords several times in setting up your blog. I did this so that the Google bot will have no problem figuring out what your blog is about. If your keyword is about something that has advertisements Google will find the ads. If you used the "Pre-Cambrian" keyword you may never get anything but public service ads as I doubt that there are many advertisers selling anything related to this keyword... I could be wrong though.

Let's stop for today and let you concentrate on the next lesson. You will have to sit down and write one decent article about your keyword. (I can hear you non-writers cringing at the thought) Later I will show you how to get unique content without writing your own but for now you will have to bare down and do a little typing.

Feel free to add and delete elements/Widgets on your blog. Play around and learn how to use the Page elements. You can also edit the Blog's type, fonts, colors and element positions. Experiment a bit. Just don't delete your initial post.

How I Make Money Blogging

2010-02-06T04:03:00.000-08:00

Start Blogging Today

If you are serious about making money on the internet, please read this article and make sure you Create Your Own Blog.

I invite you to visit the following websites to learn how people like you are making money with a website. Please do take note of all you hear from this people because they are speaking from experience. So Enjoy!

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over ~~$200/day~~ $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?
Continue reading at www.stevepavlina.com

There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.
Continue reading at http://www.dailyblogtips.com

In less than 2 years I went from not knowing what a blog was to making more with one than my corporate desk job. The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have.
Continue reading at http://www.christianpf.com

I get asked how much money my blogging makes me on a regular basis. These days I don’t go into specifics about it – all I will say is that it continues to be well over six figures per year (but less than seven figures). What you’ll find below are my top income streams – ranked from highest earnings to lowest.
Continue reading at http://www.problogger.net

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.
Continue reading at http://entrepreneurs.about.com

I have started following their advice and it's begining to pay off. If you want to see proof of this, just visit my own blog http://www.nairaplus.blogspot.com

Chloe Spencer makes $10,000 from her Blog

2009-01-24T02:28:00.002-08:00

Meet my newest discovery: The Youngest Money-making Blogger!
16-year-old blogger, Chloe Spencer is one of my mentors in blogging especially considering the fact that her 2007 income figure, $900 a month is my first target income in blogging.

At the blogher 2007 conference where Chloe shared her story of "making money while she sleeps" -- through the creation of a blog about the popular virtual pets site Neopets.com.

It all began when she was 15. Chloe turned to SEO and blogging instead of babysitting or running a paper route as her part-time job and turned her love for the Neopets into a profitable venture -- with the help of a few smart SEO decisions.

In early 2006, when Chloe was 15, she decided to devote a blog to Neopets, a virtual pets site popular with kids the world over. After performing some keyword research through WordTracker and Google Suggest for her blog’s title and section headings, she discovered that “neopets cheats” was a hugely popular search term to target for her blog. So she settled on the name: the “Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site.”

A good point to here is that, Chloe used the keyword research tools Google Suggest and WordTracker to select both the name of her blog and its categories. The name became "The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site" because it included the highly popular search term "neopets cheats." She set up her blog through WordPress.com, and within a couple weeks it appeared on Page 1 in Google for "neopet cheats".

She then used the free WordPress.com service to start the blog. Chloe’s site was able to ride on the coattails of WordPress.com’s trust and authority in the eyes of Google, thus sidestepping the “Google Sandbox” and jumping to page 1 in Google for the term “neopet cheats” within two weeks of launch.

Wanting to capitalize on her success, Chloe attempted to place Google ads on her WordPress.com blog, only to find that she was unable to monetize her blog due to WordPress.com’s restrictive Terms of Service. So Chloe migrated the blog over from neopetcheats.wordpress.com to her own domain, neopetsfanatic.com, powered by the WordPress software. She then went about building links through places like Blogger Stories.

Chloe also devoted a bit of time to link building, through trusted blogs like Blogger Stories.

Wanting to turn her blog's popularity into dollars, Chloe was excited to add Google ads onto her blog, but found out the hard way that this wasn't possible due to WordPress.com's restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Chloe soon moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com.

Some pages of her blog, NeopetsFanatic.com, sport more than 5000 comments. Chloe monetizes her page 1 Google rankings and 11,000 daily pageviews into cold hard cash with Google AdSense. She's a busy girl and only blogs once or twice a month, but still she makes between $10 and $40 per day -- money while she sleeps!

Worthy of note especially is the fact that Chloe's site currently ranks number 6 for "neopets" (out of 6.12 million results);Her blog's traffic has grown to produce $10 to $40 per day in AdSense revenue. Best of all, Chloe only spends a few hours a month blogging and maintaining the site. Not a bad ROI! That equates to somewhere around $900 a month, or approximately $10,000 per year. If Chloe wanted to earn something comparable through a typical minimum-wage first job at her age, she'd have to work somewhere around 25 to 30 hrs per week. Because she's built an income-generating asset, Chloe can take a paid vacation whenever she wants without affecting her take-home pay; one good reason for you to consider "making money while you sleep".

One of the key things to keep in mind about Chloe's story, is that she's proven that SEO is not "rocket science." Heck, a kid can do it! (Note that I've only given her a few hours of guidance, she has done this all herself.) So if you have a solid foundation of SEO knowledge, why work for a living when you can create assets that work for you?

Early 2008, Chloe launched her newest blog, QuizFanatic.com, full of personality tests for teenage girls, such as "How Boy Crazy Are You?"

Chloe has since spoken at BlogHer, SMX West, Ypulse and DMA08. She has presented a science experiment live on Denver's 9News to an estimated 1.2 million viewers. She also appeared on the Bay Area's ABC7 News as part of their coverage of the BlogHer conference. Chloe is an aspiring documentary filmmaker who lived in New Zealand for eight years, returning to Wisconsin last year, where she resides with her parents and two sisters.

I invite you learn How I Money With Free Blogs By visiting www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com now.

Ashley Qualls, Teenager makes $1 million from Adsense

2008-12-14T09:57:00.001-08:00

She's my hero!I Love her! Age is no factor her, I adopt her as my mentor- a passive one though since I will only be following her lead.

The Girl Power

No rich relatives? No professional mentors? No problem. Ashley Qualls, 17, has built a million-dollar web site. She's LOL all the way to the bank.

Late last year, Ian Moray stumbled across a cotton-candy-pink Web site called Whateverlife.com. As manager of media development at the online marketing company ValueClick Media, he was searching for under-the-radar destinations for notoriously fickle teenagers. Beyond MySpace and Facebook, countless sites come and go in the teen universe, like soon forgotten pop songs. But Whateverlife stood out. It was more authentic somehow. It featured a steady supply of designs for MySpace pages and attracted a few hundred-thousand girls a day. "Clever design, a growing base--that's a no-brainer for us," Moray says.

He approached Ashley Qualls, Whateverlife's founder, about incorporating ads from ValueClick's 450 or so clients and sharing the revenue. At first, she declined. Then a few weeks later she changed her mind. He was in Los Angeles and she was in Detroit, so they arranged everything by phone and email. They still have yet to meet in person.

When did Moray, who's 40, learn that his new business partner was 17 years old?

Pause.

"When our director of marketing told me why Fast Company was calling," says Moray, now ValueClick's director of media development. "I assumed she was a seasoned Internet professional. She knows so much about what her site does, more than people three times her age."

It's like that famous New Yorker cartoon. A dog typing away at a computer tells his canine buddy, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice--as long as the price tag wasn't more than $100,000--she responded, in effect, Whatever. "I don't even have my license yet," she says.

Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience--and she's a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of...nothing. They're free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.

According to Google Analytics, Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. That's a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined. Although Web-site rankings vary with the methodology, Quantcast, a popular source among advertisers, ranked Whateverlife.com a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror: Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.

And one more, which Ashley can't quite believe herself: "I'm ahead of Oprah!" (Oprah.com: No. 469.) Sure, Ashley is a long way from having Oprah's clout, but she is establishing a platform of her own. "I have this audience of so many people, I can say anything I want to," she says. "I can say, "Check out this movie or this artist.' It's, like, a rush. I never thought I'd be an influencer." (Attention pollsters: 1,500 girls have added the Join Team Hillary '08 desktop button to their MySpace pages since Ashley offered it in March.)

She has come along with the right idea at the right time. Eager to customize their MySpace profiles, girls cut and paste the HTML code for Whateverlife layouts featuring hearts, flowers, celebrities, and so on onto their personal page and--presto--a new look. Think of it as MySpace clothes; some kids change their layouts nearly as frequently. "It's all about giving girls what they want," Ashley says.

These days, she and her young company are experiencing growing pains. She's learning how to be the boss--of her mother, her friends, developers-for-hire in India. And Whateverlife, one of the first sites offering MySpace layouts specifically for girls, needs to mature as well. "MySpace layouts" was among the top 30 search terms on Google in June. Ashley knows that she needs new content--not just more layouts, but more features, to distinguish Whateverlife from the thousands of sites in the expanding MySpace ecosystem. Earlier this year, she created an online magazine. Cell-phone wallpaper, a new source of revenue at 99 cents to $1.99 a download, is in the works.

Running a growing company without an MBA, not to mention a high-school diploma, is hard enough, but Ashley confronts another extraordinary complication. Business associates may forget that she is 17, but Detroit's Wayne County Probate Court has not. She's a minor with considerable assets--"business affairs that may be jeopardized," the law reads--that need protection in light of the rift her sudden success has caused in an already fractious family. In January, a probate judge ruled that neither Ashley nor her parents could adequately manage her finances. Until she turns 18, next June, a court-appointed conservator is controlling Whateverlife's assets; Ashley must request funds for any expense outside the agreed-upon monthly budget.

The arrangement, she says, affects her ability to react in a volatile industry. "It's not like I'm selling lemonade," she says. Besides, it's her company. If she wants to contract developers or employ her mother, Ashley says, why shouldn't she be able to do it without the conservator's approval?

So the teenager has hired a lawyer. She wants to emancipate herself and be declared an adult. Now. At 17. Why not just sit tight until June? The girl trying to grow up fast can't wait that long.

Ashley is different from the recent crop of high-profile teen entrepreneurs. True, her eighth-grade class did vote her "most likely to succeed," but it's safe to say they were predicting 20 or 30 years out, not three years removed from middle school. She created her company almost by accident and without the resources that typically give young novices a leg up. Catherine Cook, 17, started myYearbook.com by teaming up with her older brother, a Harvard grad and Internet entrepreneur. Ben Casnocha, the 19-year-old founder of software company Comcate and author of the new memoir My Start-Up Life, is the son of a San Francisco lawyer and has tapped Silicon Valley brains and bank accounts.

But Ashley had no connections. No business professionals in the family. No rich aunt or uncle. In the working-class community of downriver Detroit, south of downtown and the sprawling Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, she bounced back and forth between her divorced parents, neither of whom attended college. Her father is a machinist, her mother, until recently, a retail data collector for ACNielsen. "My mom still doesn't understand how I do it," Ashley says. To be fair, she did go to her mother for the initial investment: $8 to register the domain name. Ashley still hasn't spent a dime on advertising.

It all started as a hobby. She began dabbling in Web-site design eight years ago, when she was 9, hogging the family's Gateway computer in the kitchen all day. When she wasn't playing games, she was teaching herself the basics of Web design. To which her mother, Linda LaBrecque, responded, "Get off that computer. Now!" For Ashley's 12th birthday, her mother splurged on an above-ground swimming pool--"just so she'd go outside," LaBrecque says.

Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.

By 2005, her traffic had exploded; she needed her own dedicated server. Ashley, who had bartered site designs for free Web hosting, couldn't afford the monthly rental, not on her babysitting income. Her Web host suggested Google AdSense, a service that supplies ads to a site and shares the revenue. The greater the traffic, the more money she'd earn.

"She would look up how much she had made," says Jen Carey, 17, one of her closest friends. "It was $50. She thought that was the coolest."

I'm doing what everyone says they want to do, "live like there's no tomorrow." --Ashley in her blog, "The Daily Life of a Simple Kind of Gal," July 1, 2006; 2:43 a.m.
The first check, her first paycheck of any kind, was even cooler: $2,790.

"It was more than I made in a month," her mother says.

"It made me want to do even more designs," Ashley

You too can earn a full time income by Blogging Part-Time with a free website.
Hurry now to www.makemoneybanc.blogspot.com for the free tutorial on how to start from scratch.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html has the full story

Bookmark your Blog Here

2008-10-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser.

I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites here from a number of sources for your use.

Visit some of the sites provided here. Create an account. Then bookmark interesting and useful things in the areas of your interest or expertise. By doing so you create a useful Feed. Once you’ve done that you intermittently, (or aggressively), add useful and interesting items, (perhaps also from your own content), that could use additional exposure.

Make an honest effort to contribute USEFUL information and links. This is all about sharing and exposure. Done properly, you can be as aggressive as you want to be about sharing information. You can share your blog(s), links to your informational/resource sites etc. Think about the fact that when you share links to other’s resources, you’re also effectively promoting their content as well.

Happy Bookmarking...

Site

Alexa
Rank

	60094	6
BlogMarks.net
Social Bookmarking with thumbnails. Atom enabled.

	438516	3
Blauer Bote Bookmarks
Bookmarak Manager in German and English

	9781	7
LQ Bookmarks
Social Bookmarking, tagging and annotating all things Linux and Open Source.

	295993	6
de.lirio.us
Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes. Mmmmmm, Notes.

	2180	8
del.icio.us
Currently the most used software application.

	0	7
digg
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

	2378882	5
feedmarker
A free, Web based RSS/ATOM aggregator and bookmarks manager.

	672284	1
FriendSite
Get free storage and share your photos & videos, get your own url and customize your page, create free evites and invitations, add friends, message people, create discussion forums and groups, blog, share and store your bookmarks & much more...

	445264	5
frassle
Frassle helps you read and publish weblogs, track bookmarks, and find relevant content organized your way.

	1928721	0
FuzzFizz
FuzzFizz is a brand new social bookmarking site, where users vote for the most interesting and important news stories.

	125861	5
Jumptags
Jumptags.com is a revolutionary Web 2.0 social bookmarking web service for collecting, storing, sharing and distributing web bookmarks, notes, RSS feeds, contacts, and much more. Based on AJAX and other next generation web development techniques, Jumptags.com offers the easiest, fastest, most intuitive and productive way of maintaining and collaborating bookmarks and other internet resources online.

	833758	5
linkroll
Linkroll is a free link blogging service. At a personal level you can bookmark, categorize and comment on all the great web pages/links you find. All your bookmarks are then sortable and searchable by category and date. All bookmarks are also accessible, by category and/or user, in the form of RSS feed (for your news aggregator), or JavaScript (for syndication on your own web site)

	60011	4
loom
Collaborative bookmarking application written in PHP.

	181086	6
MyProgs
Social bookmarking for programs you use.

	1	7
Yahoo Search myweb2 beta
A social search engine integrating social bookmarking with search.

	0	0
NEWNOOZE
Social Bookmarking on just about every subject. A Digg.com clone site. Beta Stage.

	1328526	4
openBM
It's just linking cool sites together. openBM is a little tool for everybody. openBM just keep's your bookmarks and provides them for other people on the web.

	122873	6
Reader²
Share the list of books you read or recommend, find new books by tags/authors. Multilanguage.

	0	7
reddit
Social bookmarking where your votes affect your karma points.

	0	6
scuttle.org
amongst others are based on the scuttle software.

	0	5
Scuttle
Another open source clone of del.icio.us.

	0	5
unalog
Open source bookmarking software written in the Python programming.

	2308711	3
aworldofhelp
Users submit and rate links in numerous categories. The highest rated make the front page.

	1150083	5
beanrocket
Beanrocket.com is a community and a news reader.

	63378	6
BlinkList
Social bookmarking with slick interface and new ways for organizing tags.

	98113	7
CiteULike
Social bookmarking for academic papers.

	162993	6
commontimes
Provides community-based media distribution services and solutions along with BitTorrent hosting and consulting for individuals and organizations of all sizes.

	699250	5
Connectedy
This service allows the establishment of pseudonymous online link libraries. Users may impose arbitrary categorical hierarchies on their links and choose which categories and links to make public and which ones to keep private. The Connectedy site has par SEO properties.

	0	7
Connotea
Social bookmarking for scientists.

	0	0
dinnerbuzz
Dinnerbuzz is a social guide to restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. It's designed to make it easier for you to find a place for dinner or drinks anywhere in the world.

	0	4
Wiklink
Tools to synchronize bookmarks with your browser.

	0	5
FeedMeLinks
Social Bookmarking since 2002.

	0	3
FlipSkipper
social bookmarking manager that allows users to pull concurrent searches from Yahoo!, Google News, and del.icio.us when surfing.

	0	8
Furl
Similar to del.icio.us: stores copies of the pages saved, automates finding users with similar interests, archives can be exported in MPLA or APA citation format.

	0	4
GiveALink
Donate your bookmarks for academic research.

	0	4
IndiaGram
Allows social bookmarking. Aim is to develop a community that shares information about websites on diverse topics.

	0	6
jots
Jots is a collaborative bookmarking system that allows you to Store, Share and Discover relevant links. Store your own links and choose whether to share them with the world, with a select group of people or just for yourself to use. Discover new links based on specific users or topics of interest.

	0	4
leze.de and
German Internet Bookmarking Service

	0	0
LibraryThing
Deli.cio.us for books. Cataloging based on some 30+ libraries using the Z39.50 protocol.

	0	4
linkblog
Portuguese

	0	6
linkfilter
linkfilter.net is just what the name implies, a link filter. All links are posted and moderated by users. Links can be ranked on several levels: clicks, votes, age, or a combination of all three called points.

	0	5
Lookmarks (beta)
Search and share your bookmarks

	0	5
memestreams
"Don't hate the media, become the media!" - Biafra

	0	6
Netvouz
Social bookmarking using either categories or tags. Share your bookmarks online or keep them private. RSS feeds for all bookmarks. Add2Netvouz button for easily bookmarking new sites, import/export, automatic link validation and lots of other features.

	0	0
Network Menus
Social Bookmarking (or /wiki/Collaborative_Bookmarking title=Collaborative Bookmarking Collaborative Bookmarking) within a web browser toolbar.

	0	4
O Y A X
A fast and quick social categorized bookmarking service with groups.

	0	0
RawSugar
Socially enhanced web search based on hierarchal tagging of bookmarks and favorites. Include s multi-word categories, mechanism to define and rename categories, and hierarchy.

	0	5
Shadows
Social bookmarking with tags, comments and ratings. Shadows' toolbar puts users one click away from a discussion forum for any page on the web.

	0	6
Simpy
Social bookmarking with tagging and full-text searching.

	0	0
sitetagger
SiteTagger.com is a bookmark/favorite organizer. You can bookmark websites you find on the internet via a simple button/favlet/bookmarklet that you can add to your browser link bar. This button makes it as simple as a click to bookmark a website page that you are visiting. The true power comes from the tags.

	0	6
Spurl
Similar to del.icio.us: stores copies of the pages saved.

	0	7
StumbleUpon
Bookmarking, social networking, friends-network, random browsing within interest-groups.

	0	5
Sync2It's BookmarkSync
Effortless social bookmarking, millions of hand-picked sites, real-time RSS feeds, public & private collections. Features automatic clustering technology.

	0	4
taghop
Taghop is a collaborative thoughtblog. A thoughtblog is a combination of some of the existing ideas behind blogs, with some ideas of its own. It is a web site, search engine, wiki, blogging system, social network and community site all rolled into one - or at least the best parts of those! They have been inspired by the great work from sites such as Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43things, etc

	979342	0
Tagza.com
A very young Social Book marking web site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.

	0	3
Textnotes.de
Social notes manager. Easy integration of references to books, news and articles.

	0	5
TheThingsIWant
Universal wishlist service with Social Bookmarking and RSS feeds.

	0	3
URLex
Personal/Friends/Community bookmarking and rss feeds.

	0	5
Wazima
Coupons clipped by robots. Wazima scours the web and shows you the deals you are most interested in.

	0	5
Web Feeds
Web Feeds is a social bookmark site with a difference, users moderate and decide which items make it to the home page.

	0	6
Wists
Visual bookmarks, wishlists, photoblogs.

	0	6
wURLdBook
Share webreferences and rss feeds with others and more.

	0	0
Yoono
Social Bookmarking based on browser bookmarks (no tags needed), includes a search engine, an RSS Reader, web monitoring and sharing functions. Windows application and firefox extension.

Teenage Blogger earns $5,000 Per Month

2008-10-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

Jon Gales is a 19 year old and runs a blog using Movable Type. It’s called Mobiletracker.net. According to the webstats available from his site he gets about 8000+ unique visitors per day which is well over 200,000 per month. He delivers about double those stats in pageviews. His site has a PageRank of 6 and according to his archives the site has been operating since at least February 2003.

He runs one Google Adsense ad at the bottom of his site. Currently Google sends him cheques for about $5000 USD per month for the clicks that AdSense banner brings in. Not bad for a 19 year old still living at home.

This is a great example of a good quality site with a solid niche built up over time that targets an obviously lucrative market for AdSense/AdWords. Building a site that brings in 8000 unique visitors per day is not easy, but certainly attainable. Anyone that builds up good content, has a differentiation strategy and a focus on a niche market AND sticks to it over time can have success of this magnitude.

Fortune: Jon Gales loves Google, but not for the reason you might think. It’s a terrific search engine, sure, but what Gales really likes is that Google is making him money. Gales’s website, Mobiletracker.net, is a compendium of news and reviews about cellphones that after a year and a half attracts about 200,000 users a month. Google supplies the ads for the site, visitors click on the ads, and because of the site’s popularity, Google sends Gales monthly checks of $5,000 or more. That’s a decent chunk of change for any sole proprietor. But for Gales, the numbers are eye-popping. He’s only 19 and lives expense-free at home with his parents in Tampa, posting four or five items in the course of the day while parked on the living room couch with his laptop. Says Gales: “If things keep going the way they are going, I’ll be making more money than my dad next year.”

Blogging for Cash with Adsense

2008-10-28T11:32:00.001-07:00

Believe it or not, but it’s actually possible to make money from
blogging. One teenager has, in fact, earned $5,000 a month just
from making posts on his blog! Of course, not every blogger is
this lucky. It does take some skill, and some luck to make money
from blogging. What it also takes is some knowledge of how
exactly to generate income just by posting blogs. In this
newsletter, we will go over three specific methods of making
money on your blog: Adsense, Pay Per Lead, and Affiliate Links.

So how exactly do I make money on my blog?

You do it by working with another company that wants to use your
blog as a form of advertising. It sounds like selling out,
right? Not exactly. The advertising can be as in your face or
subtle as you want. And it can still make you money, provided
you have enough visitors to your blog.

What is Adsense?

Adsense is a program offered by Google. The program, if
installed, will display ads provided by Google.

How do I get Adsense?

You’ll need to go to Google.com, first. At the bottom of the
screen is a link for “Advertising Programs”. Click on that. Then
click on the link for “Adsense”. Scroll down on the page that
comes up and click “Click Here To Apply!” You then fill out the
form with information about yourself. After 12-48 hours, Google
will notify you via email whether or not your site has been
accepted. When you’ve been accepted, set up your ads by doing
either of the following:

1.If your blog is hosted on Blogger.com, you can set up your
AdSense ads by going to your profile, selecting
settings>template>add an element. Then select AdSense and login
with your account info. Next, you’ll configure your ads and save
the template. That’s it.
2.If you are self-hosting your blog, you’ll have to set up
AdSense in more of a manual way. You’ll create your ads(which
can be as small or as tall as you want) and then copy the
HTML/Javascript code Google gives you. Then you’ll paste it into
your blog(on the left, right, or top of the screen).

For the first few days, the ads displayed by Google will be
Public Service Announcements. After the ads have been up a few
days, though, the ads will switch to ads that are relevant to
your blog.

How does Adsense work?

Every time a visitor clicks an Adsense ad, you get a little bit
of money(usually around 30-60 cents). The amount you get for
each ad clicked depends on the number of unique visitors you
receive on your blog. The more visitors, the more money that can
be earned.

Google will then send a check or pay you through Paypal once
you’ve made at least $100 from the ads.

It is important to remember that Google will penalize you if you
click your own ads, or if you ask visitors specifically to click
ads. So don’t do that!

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is basically just like AdSense, except you don’t
just work with Google—you work with multiple companies.
BidVertiser is one such company you can sign up with to do Pay
Per Click advertising.

How do I get Pay Per Click

You sign up with a site like Bidvertiser and then follow their
instructions to set up the Pay Per Click ads on your site.

How does Pay Per Click work?

It works by paying you money each time someone clicks an ad that
you display. You won’t get paid for multiple clicks from the
same user in the same visitor, nor will you get paid for someone
simply visiting your site. You only get paid for legitimate
clicks.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are basically links which people pay you for.
Companies will actually pay owners of popular blogs to post
links on their blog. You can do as much Affiliate linking as you
want.

How do I get Affiliate Links?

You can get Affiliate links by searching for “Affiliate Link
Programs” on the internet. Once you find an Affiliate link
program that looks good to you, sign up for it. Then you can
follow their instructions for putting the link(s) on your blog.

How do Affiliate Links work?

Like the other two methods mentioned above, Affiliate links work
by paying you money each time they are clicked. You get paid for
each click per unique visitor.

So that’s it. There’s three legitimate ways to make money from
blogging. It is important to keep in mind that the amount of
money you are able to make depends on how many visitors your
blog draws. If you draw a lot, you’ll make a lot. If not, the
money you earn will be modest. But it’s still extra money, so
why not do it?

Making money using Adsense, Pay Per Click or Affiliate Link
programs is easy and effective. Start monetizing your blog
today.

Better Bloggers post on these Forums

2008-10-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

Reading forums and participating in forums is a great way to become a better blogger. Forums focused on blogging are the best means to get questions answered and become known within the blogging community. I don’t suggest that you participate in all of these, but instead pick one or two and become a valuable member. The real power of forums is to become well known within the forums’ community. You want to establish yourself as a valued member of the community and an authority blogger.

Here are my favorite blogging forums:

1. Authority Blogger Forum:

The Authority Blogger Forum is a forum created by Chris Garrett, the author of Chrisg.com. This Forum is pretty new, but I am finding it to be a great community of bloggers. It is also great for new bloggers.

2. Blog Traffic School Forums:

The Blog Traffic School Forums are forums provided by Yaro Starak. Yaro is the author of Entrepreneur’s-Journey blog. In addition to this blog, Yaro runs the Blog Mastermind blog mentoring program. If you are interested in being a professional blogger, I highly recommend join the Blog Mastermind program. I have been a participant since Yaro started it.

3. The Blog Experiment Forums: The Blog Experiment Forums are an extension of The Blog Experiment, but the forums are the focus of the community. This is an excellent community of bloggers. The forums are very active and very helpful.

4. Bloggeries Blog Forum:

The Bloggeries Blog Forum is one of my favorite forums for blogging. Bloggeries has an awesome revenue sharing program with its participants. Participants earn 50% of the Adsense revenues generated from their threads. Bloggeries’ revenue sharing program is designed to create a very active community.

5. Blogger Forum:

The Blogger Forum is one of the most active forums. It is a great forum and I highly recommend participating in this forum. If you are new to blogging the Newbie Section is a great resource.

6. Bloggst Forum:

The Bloggst Forum offers a lot of great forums. One of the coolest things about Bloggst is that you can submit your blog’s feed to this site and they will publish your posts to their forums. This is a great way to generate traffic and exposure.

7. Blogging Tips Blogging Discussion Forums:The Blogging Tips Blogging Discussion Forums are an extension of Kevin Muldoon’s blog, Blogging Tips. The forums are fairly new and at this point not too active. This presents a good opportunity to become a leading member of this community. Sometimes it is better to participate and establish yourself at these newer forums.

8. Performancing.com Forums:The Performancing.com Forums are an extension of Performancing.com Blog. I read the Performancing.com Blog everyday.

9. Digital Point Blogging Forum: :

The Digital Point Blogging Forum is a section of the famous Digital Point Forums. Digital Point is a hub for people making money (or hoping to make money) on the Internet. I encourage you to check out all of the forums at Digital Point. The amount of information on these forums is absolutely amazing.

10. The V7 Web Development Community Blogging Forum:

The V7 Web Development Community Blogging Forum is part of The V7 Web Development Community. The V7 Web Development Community focuses on Internet Marketing, Web Design and Blogging.

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