Direct advertising sales is arguably the best method to monetize a website. Finding advertisers for your site and actually closing the deals, however, is not as straight forward. Over the past 6 months I had more than 10 high profile companies sponsoring Daily Blog Tips, and through out this article I will share what I have learned along the way.
The Pros
More money: The first advantage of selling your own ads is the fact that you will cut the middlemen out, increasing your revenue potential. Suppose you sell text link ads on your sidebar through a certain company, and the text links sell for $50 monthly. Since you are using the company network to sell the ads, they will eat 50% of the price, and you will end up earning only $25 monthly for each text link. If someone is willing to pay $50 for a text link on your site, though, it means that they are getting $50 of value out of it. Why, then, should you share that with someone else?
Independence: Sure, large advertising networks have access to a wider pool of advertisers, and they have more credibility to close the deals. But if you have all the requirements in place (see the section below) and spend some time looking at the right places, I am sure that you will be sell your own ads just as efficiently as the larger networks.
Flexibility: The third advantage of selling direct advertising is that you will have much more control over where and how the ads will be displayed (i.e., you can avoid intrusive advertising). Google Adsense is nice, but unless you blend it with the content – annoying some of the readers – you will get terribly low click-through rates.
Credibility: Finally, having sponsors and direct advertisers on your blog might help your credibility. Even small and poorly crafted blogs can stick some Adsense units here and there. Having established companies that are willing to partnership with your site, on other hand, can signal that your content has quality and that the site is somewhat professional.
The Cons
Time consuming: While selling your own ads has many advantages, it is no panacea. The first drawback of this monetization option is the time that it will consume. This time will be spent optimizing your website for the ads, finding potential advertisers, negotiating with them, and handling the administrative matters (e.g., making payments, tracking statistics, delivering reports and so on).
Many requirements: Selling direct adverting is not as easy as making money from Google Adsense. As you can see from the section below, you will need to have a popular blog, a professional looking design, special software and the like.
Unstable: Unless you close deals for very long periods, which is unlikely, you will find your self looking for new advertisers or optimizing your website to attract new ones every other month. The opposite is true for most advertising networks, where you just need to plug some code and they will do the rest of the work. (If your site or blog is just a hobby, therefore, direct advertising might not be the best option)
What You Need to Have in Place
A popular website: Before landing direct advertising deals you will need to have a good amount of traffic on your site. There is no “magical” number here, but a good rule of thumb would be 1000 daily unique visitors. If you are below that mark you should focus on building traffic instead of looking for advertisers. Other factors like Google Pagerank, RSS subscribers and Alexa rank might also help. (Notice that small websites might also be able to sell direct advertising, but usually the time spent on that will not justify the results)
A clear focus: You might have the most popular site on the Internet (well, not as extreme as that, but you get the point), but unless your site also has a very clear niche and a defined audience, advertisers will not find it very attractive. This means that you should avoid rambling about 100 different topics on the website. Advertisers want to deliver a message to specific people, and the more specific the better.
A professional looking design: If you are planning to monetize your website through sponsors, you probably should invest some money into a professional looking design. Advertisers will be associating their product or service with your website, and not too many of them would be willing to get mixed with an ugly, MySpace looking site.
Give visibility to the sponsors: This point is connected to the previous one. Not all templates and themes will be suitable for selling direct advertising. Preferably you want to have an idea of what kind of advertising you will sell (e.g., 468×60 banners, 125×125 banners, text links) and design your website according to those objectives. Advertisers want visibility, so reserve a good spot for them.
Adserver software: In order to serve your ads, rotate banners and track statistics you will need to install an Adserver. If you are looking for a simple solution you should try WP-Ads. This Wordpress plugin will serve ads for specific ad zones that you create. The only drawback is that it does not count clicks (only impressions). If you need a more sophisticated solution check OpenAds. You will need to spend some time learning how to use it, but it offers virtually all the features you will ever need.
“Advertise Here” page: It is very important to have an “Advertise Here” page. On this page you want to give some details about the website, like audience, traffic and any other factor that might be of the interest of potential advertisers. Secondly, make sure that you have some link to that page on the navigation bar and if possible close to the zone where the ads will be displayed. You can see a perfect example of such layout on Copyblogger.com.
Standard letter to approach advertisers: While some advertisers will contact you after reading your “Advertise Here” page, the rest of them will need to be directly approached by you. In that case, it is a good idea to create a standard letter to contact the advertisers. There is no “one size fits all” solution here, but you can follow some general guidelines:
1. Introduce yourself and quickly explain what the email is about
2. Explain why you decided to contact them and what they have to gain
3. Give details about your site (traffic, subscribers, topic, audience)
4. Give details about the advertising options (location on the site, max number of advertisers, monthly price)
That is it, after that information the advertisers should be able to decide if they are interested or not. If they reply, then you will fix the details. Bear in mind that all the info I mentioned should be contained in 2 or 3 paragraphs. If you send an essay to potential advertisers they will just skip it altogether.
Accepting payments: You might have everything in place, but if you are not able to cash payments – or more importantly, if advertisers are not able to pay easily – you will end up losing deals. PayPal is the best option here. Notice, however, that a personal account will not suffice. You will need at least a premier account to be able to accept credit cards.
Where to Find the Advertisers
Once you have your direct advertising program established, you will start to receive inquiries from people. On the beginning, however, you will need to hunt advertisers down. Do not get discouraged if get turned down initially, provided you have all the aforementioned requirements, sooner or later you will find someone willing to take a shot on your site.
People linking to your site or articles: If a company is willing to link to your articles or to add your website under its “Links” or “Resources” section, it is also probably willing to discuss about advertising on your site. Keep track of those incoming links.
People leaving comments/e-mails: The same principle applies to people leaving comments on your blog or sending you e-mails. If among them you see an employee or the owner of a company that could be interested on your website, bingo! Contact him or her and get the conversation going.
AdWords advertisers: Through out your search for advertisers you will notice that most of the established companies are not aware of the benefits of online advertising. If a certain company is already spending money on Google AdWords, however, it is very likely that it would also be open to other forms of online advertising. Think about some keywords that are related to your topic and Google them. Check the sponsored links that will appear and contact them. (You can also check the advertisers that appear on the Adsense units of related websites)
Other advertising networks: While Google AdWords is by far the largest advertising network on the Internet, there are many others that could be useful. Check the companies that are spending money on AdBrite, Text-Link-Ads, BlogAds, SponsoredReviews and so on.
Banner advertisers on similar sites: Check out popular websites on your niche and see what companies are advertising there. Provided you offer them an interesting deal (i.e., a reasonable price for your size), I am pretty sure they will be interested.
Create a “Potential Sponsors” bookmark folder: This technique produced outstanding results for me. I have a bookmark folder on my browser called “Potential Sponsors.” Every time I come across a company or website that could be interested in sponsoring my website, I bookmark it. Currently I have over 100 bookmarked sites on that folder, and I have not approached half of them yet.
How Much to Charge
You need to provide value: It is all about value. A potential sponsor or advertiser will want to see some returns for the money he will be spending on your site, and this can be seen as visibility (impressions) and leads (clicks and possible sales). Make sure, therefore, that your advertising deals will deliver.
The numbers: Remember that there are some pretty cheap advertising options out there (e.g., Google AdWords), and you will need to be competitive. Provided you reserved a good spot for the sponsors (sidebar or header, preferably) you could start charging a $0,5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). If your blog is generating 100,000 monthly page views, therefore, a banner spot on your sidebar should cost around $50. Start low and build your way upwards. Popular blogs (e.g., TechCrunch) have a higher CPM, sometimes as high as $10, but you will need a huge credibility to arrive there.
Cross-check: You can easily check if you are charging a suitable rate by using Adsense units on the places where you will sell direct advertising. Analyze how much you would gain with Adsense, and adjust your rates accordingly. Secondly, you can also check similar sites that are already selling direct ads.
Be flexible regarding the terms: Flexibility is key. First of all make advertising agreements on a month-to-month basis. People don’t like to commit to something they are not completely sure about. If someone proposes you a longer deal, offer a discount in exchange.
Offer test periods: Unless you have a very popular website, you will find potential advertisers reluctant to spend real money. If you are confident that the deal will create value for both parties, however, you can use that on your favor. Offer a free test period whenever needed. Some of the times the advertiser will turn you down after it, but other times they will confirm the deal. Either way you have nothing to lose.
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Sep 6, 2007
How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide
10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog
With that out of the way, let’s get started:
1. Contextual Advertising
Surprise, surprise. Advertising is easily the most popular blog monetization tactic, mostly due to it being the easiest thing to implement. Advertising comes in many forms, and contextual advertising is the most popular due to Google Adsense and it’s general success with blogs and niche sites.
I’m going to assume everyone reading this is familiar with it, but I think it should be mentioned that too many bloggers assume that Adsense is the best solution for their blog. For some blogs and topics it works great, for others, not very well at all.
My advice is to not limit your blog to one ad network or just one form of advertising. Other contextual options include the Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar, and others. It’s not easy to manually test all these though if you’re shuffling ad tags around and randomly allocating your impressions to them, using a ad network management tool like RMX Direct can help you manage, evaluate, and control your various ad networks.
2. Display Advertising
As I mentioned above, contextual networks aren’t always the best solution for blogs. In some cases there aren’t enough advertisers in niche topics, and in others the users just isn’t likely to click. In this case, you want to be working with ad networks that provide CPM display advertising. This means you get paid something for every ad viewed, opposed to only getting paid per click.
Just like with contextual networks, it’s important to use multiple display ad networks to get more variety from your ads, to not let any one network control your inventory, and to make sure you’re earning the most amount of money possible.
3. Targeted Advertising
The most desirable form of advertising is having companies that wish to pay good rates to advertise on your blog directly whether it’s text or image ads. Many bloggers feel that this is a pipe dream, but I speak from experience from running a wakeboarding blog for many years that you can make solid income from targeted advertising without having insane amounts of traffic.
There are a number of key things you have to do though in order to get this type of advertising:
Have a blog with leading content in your niche and a professional design
Create a “media kit” which is essentially a page on your blog that explains that you take targeted advertising, what your rates are, demographics of your users, your traffic levels, examples of the types of ads people can run, testimonials from any companies that have advertised with you, and a phone number and email address they can use to get more information.
Have obvious “Advertise On This Blog” links in key places on your blog.
Give a company or two in your niche free or very low-cost advertising in order to get the ball rolling. When advertisers see their competitors or companies similar to them advertising, they get the idea that it’s available. If all they ever see is Adsense ads, they might not realize it’s an option.
Be willing to be creative to help your advertisers achieve their goals, and lower your price to get the deals.
Provide statistics and results to your advertisers. Use an ad server like RMX Direct, phpAdsNew, or something similar which has the ability to create reports per advertiser.
Once you’ve set your blog up properly, start approaching companies in your niche who will want to reach your traffic. You don’t need to go after the biggest companies, there are many small companies who are looking to get better results from the web, and they might not even know about your blog. You don’t need to be an ad sales professional, you just need to present your case well on why they’re missing out if they don’t advertise on your traffic. Make it easy on them to work with you, help them create ads, help them determine what sizes to use, and work with them to make sure they get the results they need. It seems like hard work at first, but after you get a solid base of advertisers going, it’s a great source of income and it starts to streamline.
4. Text Link Advertising
Another somewhat unobtrusive form of advertising is using services like Text Link Ads or Adbrite to sell text ads directly to companies. This is pretty low effort and often doesn’t take up too much space on a site, so it’s easy to implement and try out. It should be noted though that you need significant traffic for it to be a big source of income.
5. Affiliate Links
One of the older web monetization methods is still as good today as it’s always been. If you’ve got a blog in a specific area, there’s a very large chance that there are companies out there that sell products or services your users are interested in. You can earn some nice income recommending or linking to those products.
Amazon.com is probably the most common affiliate merchant used by bloggers, but I’d advise finding other unique merchants who may pay better and be more specific to your topic. Amazon is always there as an option, but you’re more likely to get more help from the merchant if you go with a smaller company.
Another nice thing about affiliate links is that they fit well with quality content. Reviewing products and services for your users is valuable content, and if you can make money off it as well it’s a great combination. A word of warning though that you shouldn’t change your reviews or be biased due to the fact you can make money off a referral.
While traffic also helps for affiliate links, it can sometimes be an easier way to generate income without high traffic levels like advertising requires. As an example I did a review of a web analytics application a couple of years ago, and this blog had very little traffic at that point. I referred two sales through that review though that still earn me $150 a month every month two years later.
6. Selling Your Content (Ebooks, Videos, DVDs)
If you’ve got great content, another option is to package it and sell it. There are numerous bloggers who have created ebooks and even real books based on their blog content and made great income selling them. You can also expand to infoproducts like videos, DVDs, audio CDs, and printed books on demand.
This can take some significant work and it requires great content to actually sell, but it can be a nice income stream that lasts a long time.
7. Consulting
Depending on your topic and your level of expertise, you can sell consulting services. If you’re a web analytics expert, you could offer web analytics consulting services on your blog for an hourly fee. This takes very little work to setup beyond creating a page outlining your services, getting a standard contract, and having a way to take payments from companies. Again though, it just takes a little bit of effort to let people know that consulting services are available.
8. Donations
Not quite as common as it once was, it used to be fairly common for bloggers to ask for donations on their blog through Paypal or some other service. This only works if you have a dedicated userbase, and a large enough number of users that their donations add up. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re also putting a lot of advertising and other monetization methods on your blog. You’ll come off as a bit too greedy in that case.
9. Selling Products
Besides infoproducts, you can sell real products like t-shirts, bumper stickers, clothing, or whatever other kind of merchandise makes sense for your topic. Companies like Goodstorm, CafePress, Lulu, and others make it easy by creating the products based on your design and letting you set up a shop. There is no risk to bloggers, which makes it a great opportunity.
10. Selling Your Blog
Perhaps the most extreme of the blog monetization methods, but it can be lucrative! If you aren’t attached to your blog and are willing to part with it, you can usually find a buyer for it. Your blog must be pretty good, and have a level of traffic worth buying, and it really helps if you already have some income streams going for it. Blogs usually sell for 12-24 times monthly revenues, and there are numerous places you can sell them like eBay and the Sitepoint Marketplace.
Conclusion
It definitely takes some work to monetize your site well, and having good traffic really helps out. Work on building a blog with a solid userbase, and you should be on your way to generating income using any of the methods above. Good luck, and please share any blog monetization experiences you have in the comments.
Promote Your Blog with Blogg-Buzz
A funny thing happened the other day. When I was checking my website statistics for Monetize Your Blog, I noticed a heap of traffic from a referrer called Blogg-Buzz. Now I had not heard of Blogg-Buzz before then, but I headed over pretty quickly to find out what it was.
The following is the blurb from the Blogg-Buzz front page.
Blogg-Buzz is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting!
After looking into it further, it seems that you can use Blogg-Buzz to submit Blog Posts that you think are worthwhile sharing. Once you have registered with Blogg-Buzz, you canA submit blog posts, buzz (vote for) blog posts and make comments on blog posts. The idea is that the better posts will get a better ranking and bring them to the attention of other readers.
Upon reading the Blogg-Buzz FAQ, I found out that as well as submitting posts from other blogs, you can also submit your own posts. They stipulate (among other things) that you should only submit good quality posts, and this makes sense otherwise you might get yourself a reputation and no-one will read anything you buzz. But if you have a post which you think would be of interest to others, you could submit it and see if anyone else likes it.
Anyway, I found out on Blogg-Buzz that Chris from blog-op had buzzed my post on Adsense Section Targeting and it seems a number of other Blogg-Buzz readers liked it as well. My post was displayed in top spot on the main page. That explained all of the traffic.
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Sep 5, 2007
Make Money with money4blogs
money4blogs offers bloggers a chance to make money by adding a link from your blog to a web page belonging to one of their financial companies. You get paid just for the link, not for the number of times the link is clicked.
To find out how much you can get by placing a link on your blog, go to http://money4blogs.com/ and fill in the form on the main page. You will need to provide the following details:
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your blog's url
- The page rank of your blog
Payments are made via Paypal. The amount of the money you will be paid seems to vary according to the page rank of your blog. If your blog is still fairly new, it may pay to wait until your blog has a higher page rank as money4blogs is purchasing the link for one year.
http://monetize-your-blog.blogspot.com/2007/02/make-money-with-money4blogs.html
Sep 4, 2007
Blog Tips for Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization for a blog is similar to optimizing a website but since they are updated frequently and use very little html search engine results are much higher than static website pages.
Keyword(s) In Your Domain
When ever possible you should try and purchase a domain for you blog that uses a primary keyword you want to become optimize for. This is something that I did not give any thought too but have noticed that others that have used this method are more successful for being optimized for a particular keyword.
Primary Key Phrases
Primary key phrases such as “make money online” a key phrase that took the bloggingworld like the black plague. Insure your phrase is included in the title of your blog your phrase and it should also be included in post titles though out your site. Keep in mind though if you are optimizing for a key phrase such as the one above you will have steep competition - maybe consider using a different variation of it for better results.
Keywords In Your Post
Use keywords sporadically in your posts; body text, links to posts (deep linking), images, and outbound links. Now identify a keyword(s) that you hope to get indexed by Google. Keyword(s) should be used though out your article and insure that you use it in the title of the post and it’s within your first two sentences. Remember do not spam your articles with your keywords because it’s off putting to readers.
Get Backlinks
I been successful for get getting backlinks with the following methods; review blogs for link back, commenting dofollow sites, blog networks, free directories, good content and speed linking. Read more about these methods of getting backlinks for search engine optimization.
Update Regularly
Using the rules outlined above update your site daily with quality content. This principle is thoroughly taught by SEOs and they establish principles as to why this is beneficial to search engine optimization. My opinion on updating; it takes good content to keep you readers coming back, linking to your articles. Then eventually search engines will take a hint and index your article to the top by the amount of interest it has.
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Top Blogging Is Not For Everyone
Top Blogging is not for everyone! Starting a new top blog site has to be one of the hardest things that I can think of that someone can attempt to do in life. After you have the site completed and you think that all the bugs are worked out there are most times always extra things that have to be done. Such as with a Wordpress blog, I started this blog 10 February 2007 and I have been installing and tweaking almost everyday it seems.
Anyway so finally you think you are out of update hell and your site is ready to show the world but wait a minute there are 11.5 billion or more other websites on the net. Now being faced with that it is time to give up right, no this is where the hard work comes in and never stops it’s constant!
Take it harsh/blunt or however you like if you can not communicate/write then you should delete your blog now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again content is key and with out it you will fail regardless if you want to make money or give advice/stories away free. If you have not deleted you blog just yet then I would suggest asking yourself a few questions such as:
Can I communicate well?
Can I write effectively?
How computer savvy am I?
How determined am I?
What is my blogs short & long term goals?
Answering questions on paper (or in word) is quite easy. Now all you have to do is come up with the content! The most important aspect of your site, original content that people want to read and then tell others about. The thing that makes a personal blog superior to other websites is that it’s a personal site that allows interaction and bond forming with readers.
Top Blogging is not for everyone and that’s why only a mere 1% out of 100% succeeds. Any Thoughts?
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Blogging and the Reality Time Management
When I decided to address time management I did some research and thought about the courses I have taken in the past in my university studies. This subject can be long and discussed forever but that is not truly necessary in my opinion. Personally I think when it comes right down to it everyone knows what it takes in order to effectively manage time but only a small percent of people actually take those steps. The number one reason in my opinion is laziness and the unwillingness to except change and work hard towards that specific path!
When it comes to blogging time management becomes something that you are hit with right in the face! My personal situation is I’m married with two children and work a full time job so time management plays a big part in making or breaking my continued rising success.
Blogging from looking from the outside may seem very easy to the untrained eye but to actually maintain a family, job and write one article daily can deem to be impossible sometimes with out the discipline of following a success plan.
What is my plan? Simple, kick myself in the a** and then an article takes me about an hour to write and at least thirty minutes to gather my thoughts before hand. When am I able to write my article? The average time that I am able to do this is between 7:30 p.m. & 9:00 p.m. Then any time I have free for; commenting, emails, tweaking, optimizing, researching and reading I take it.
Manage your time by making decisions and acting on them.
Establish a plan for success.
Decide what your priorities are and then concentrate on them.
Apply all to 80/20 Principle of Pareto / Juran.
Time Management Education:
Time management defined is simple just the management of your time into the most productive path for successful outcomes. As simply as it sounds it seems that so many people out there are lacking in this area to an instant that they reach the end of their lives without actually ever succeeding in this area. The time is now to take action and start making decisions that produce results.
There are many time management systems out there that try and entice you into paying money for what ever their given system may be at that time. The reality here is that these plans take your money and distract you from actually accomplishing what it is that you set out to do in the first place. The fact is until you establish a plan that you are willing to go forth with you will never successfully manage your time effectively. Start by finding out what you feel is your blogs purpose and use that reason to coerce yourself into making those needed improvements. Now decide what your blogging priorities are and then start concentrating on them.
Apply the 80/20 Rule by Pareto he established that 20 percent of people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran’s work he identified that 20 percent of defects caused 80 percent of the problems. Ok so given this the 80/20 basically means that 20 percent is essential and 80 percent is inconsequential.
Using this method what you should do is remind yourself daily what 20 percent of blogging is important for success and begin focusing on it first. What are your thoughts on time management and blogging?
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5 Tips How to Find Advertisers
How do you find advertisers for your blog? This is the second most difficult problem you will be faced with in the blogging world if your goal is to become a top blogger! Original content is the most difficult in case you were wondering. There are two methods of finding advertisers; find them yourself and using ad networks. Below are some simple methods of finding advertisers yourself.
Premium Ad Locations
First you must determine the number of advertising spots that will available in your inventory. Then place an advertising page that is easily found on your site with clear instructions of what advertisements you offer. Key: people never liked to be first insure that you have added a few links or ads to sites of your choice to feel the emptiness of the ad location. It’s even possible to make money from blog posts!
Commentators
Most of the time readers that are commenting have a strong interest and a site that is related. Contact them and ask if they would be interested in advertising with your site.
Sites that link
When a company/site has already linked to your site or one of your articles the chances of discussing advertisement on your site has increased significantly. Always take the time to check out sites that link to you and then contact the related sites.
Sites That Advertise
Most companies use some form of advertisement and are already aware of SEO advantages. The key here is to pay close attention when surfing the net and start tracking these sites & related companies that are already advertising with companies such as; AdWords, BlogAds, ClickBank Ads, Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe, Azoogle Ads and then contact them.
Search Niche Sites
This has been the most successful method for Ja Kel Daily. Simple & straight forward open up Google start your start with keywords that are related to your niche. When the search results return the key is to email every site that comes up in relation to your site and eventually you will get a sell – persistence pays off. On this method set up a goal of emailing 5 sites daily!
Stop paying ad networks to sell all of your advertisement and increase site profits by utilizing the simple methods above and start taking responsibility for selling a percentage of ads on your site. A healthy mix of you marketing your site and the ad networks will pay off in the long run - just stay persistence.
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Sep 3, 2007
How writing paid posts MAY increase Google Adsense
Many people are terribly afraid of the mention of ‘paid posts’. I have read and seen so many naysayers telling us that we are going to be struck down dead and left to rot by the Big G if they ever found us writing paid posts. A few probloggers have called us whoring for a few bucks. I don’t totally agree nor do I totally disagreed. It’s my business what I want to do with my own blog so they can jeer all they want.
I believe bloggers should have a balance number of non-paid posts and paid posts. Even a paid-post bloggers can make their blogs interesting if they have the flair for writing. And non-paid post bloggers do produce boring craps even when they are writing solely for the sake of blogging.
However, my topic today is how writing paid posts MAY increase our Google Adsense income. Note that I emphasize the MAY because it is just my own theory and based on what I noticed.
You see, if we are merely blogging about our dogs, our homes, our kids and stuffs like that, we hardly hit on any important keywords. Keywords make all the difference. There are magical keywords that will give you lots of moolah. And if you haven’t already noted, most of our paid posts have very high paying keywords. The advertisers asked us to insert those few terms like DUI, ohio lemon law, debt consolidation and etc. Do you realise that these are high paying keywords?
Let’s see what these keywords estimates are. I copy them from the Top Adsense Keywords. Pardon the wrong alignment. And don’t believe everything you see there.
Below are the top 50 highest paying keywords from our database.
Keyword Clicks / Day Average CPC
federal loan consolidation 2.2 $60.04
term life quotes 2.7 $58.40
indiana lemon law 0.9 $58.21
home equity loan rates 6.4 $57.26
equity loan rates 7.3 $56.98
mesothelioma lawyers 0.62 $56.01
life insurance quotes 22 $55.72
student loan consolidation 17 $55.15
home equity line credit 3.6 $54.90
equity line of credit 24 $54.17
term life insurance quotes 5.2 $53.39
miami dui lawyer 0.05 $53.15
donate car 45 $52.57
home equity line of credit 22 $52.30
term insurance quotes 2.3 $51.96
term life ins 3 $51.77
debt consolidation loan 15 $50.95
conference calling services 0.83 $50.51
home equity 37 $50.20
equity line 5.7 $49.79
student loan consolidations 0.76 $49.76
Now, I am sure many paid posts blogger notice these are familiar terms that we have used many times over in our paid posts. Do you see the benefits of taking the occassional paid posts on our blogs? If not for them, we probably are still writing about the foods we ate, the shoes we bought and never realised those loans and insurances keywords will make better income for us. If our post gets on the search engines and someone clicks on our adsense, we benefit. So, writing paid posts is actually a win-win situation in the long run. Just don’t over do it.
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“I make eggs (zero income) from my Google Adsense!”
I was in a group MSN chat the other day and wasn’t really paying attention to the whole topic until I saw that someone ‘have three eggs’ per day. I was like, WOW, those cholesterol! They only realised that I thought they really mean chicken eggs.
Actually, they were lamenting that sometimes, their Google Adsense have zero income, i.e. 0.00. Well, let me share a bit about my Google Adsense ride because I just realised that I have official earned USD8K in the last two years. I joined Google Adsense in August 2005. Before that I was banned once due to fradulent clicks. Yay! I earned the ‘Bad blogger’ status before.
Here are what you should know before having ideas that Google Adsense is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Hmmm..google, goose, adsense, no cents. Nice eh?
1) If you have no traffic you can ditch your Adsense or you may end up with depression and a serious issue with your self-esteem.
2) Google Adsense is like that ‘Exit’ door to many people who are noobs. So, if you are blogging for tech geeks and those who are in the more ‘literate’ group, you can forget about it. But if you are catering to kids and grandmas, then, it is worth putting that ‘Exit’ door. In fact, I have never clicked on a single Adsense for as long as I remember. LOL.
Why Exit? Because when someone ‘fell’ into your blog, they need to get out somewhere. So, those Adsense are their way of ‘going out’ of your blog.
3) Expect zero income for months if you have no niche topic.
4) If you read about people earning big money from Adsense, I can tell you that 80% of them are lying.
5) Google Adsense is like a time bomb, about to detonate anytime. You never know when your account is going to be suspended. And income is never stable. One day you get a lot, next whole week, nothing much, then it spikes and up and down it goes.
How to earn money from Adsense then?
a) Build your blog content, focus on specific topics;
b) Build your traffic;
c) Spy around those blogs that you look up to and try to use the same format they use;
d) Forget that you have the ads there;
e) Read my blog and especially those topics under the specific category related to making money
Source
Have you changed your Text Link Ads to tinyurl yet?
I didn’t get any email from TextLinkAds nor ReviewMe. I am not sure why but my email seems to have dropped off from their record and many times, they ended up in the spam bin.
I heard that Text Link Ads wants all their publishers to change their links to tinyurl. So far, I only managed to complete one blog. Sigh..so much work to do. I suspect the tinyurl will not look so obvious to Google. BTW, you are aware that TextLinkAds cannot be found on the first few pages of Google searches, right? I noticed that since June and had blogged about why TextLinkAds is not on Google searches.
You get LinkWorth if you Google text link ads. This is one reason why you should sign up with LinkWorth now because advertisers who are looking to buy text links are likely to stumble on LinkWorth. Or the other alternative is Kontera but this is the link placed within our posts.
TextLinkAds works very well for me on my other blogs and many of them have sold all the 10 slots. I get a constant income totalling USD700 from TLA alone, which is very good as I do not need to do anything except collect my payment at the end of each month.
Now, those of you who received the notification from TLA, can you tell me if I need to change my plugin as well? I only change my affiliate banner and links so far. I am not sure when I am going to get an email from TLA but I have asked them to mail to me the notice to change to tinyurl.
I have a category for TextLinkAds detailing how to sell your links successfully and how much I earn in the previous months. Give TLA a try. The company has been doing great until recently when they are dropped off Google. I heard some quarters said they are serving porn ads but I do not believe them because the publishers have the choice to select their advertisers. I used to have a penis enlargement ads in Spanish and I think it is mighty funny until one of my local advertiser mentioned they refused to advertise on my site. I told TLA and they took off the ad immediately without question. So, basically it is our choice, really.
Source
Aug 30, 2007
Is Blogging Really Paid Well?
Well, we being pretty busy with our startup and also recently we are building up and testing our SEO effort with the objective to capture long tail search engine traffic by improving our “landing” page. This being a very rewarding week for us. We still pretty much in the “SEO” mode yet.
We know our reader is not that technical to hear what we want to say about SEO. So we decide to cover more interesting and simple blogging topic such as how to get paid to BLOG rather then more on internet marketing and SEO.
We think get paid to blog is more like a getting a job rather then a business. Anyway, it’s the simplest way to start out to start make money online besides “taking survey” and “paid to browse”. And we believe this fit in perfectly for “start small and think big”, and definitely better then taking survey and paid to browse because who know what blogging might bring you …
Here is our story. We have to go and check it out ourselves.
We pick the 4 blogging networks that we feel good about, and see how good is their online customer service. Here is our first 4 lists:
PayPerPost.com
ReviewMe.com
Smorty.com
Bloggerwave.com
We sign up for PayPerPost.com first since they have receive $7 million venture capital funds, we thought they might be the best. Well, guess what, their server is “very very” slow, and it’s took forever to load just a few pages and how they approve our blog and their interface seem very confusing for us. Very disappointed!
ReviewMe.com by far is the best for us, instantly login, quick approver. I guess they really did they homework and have some automation tool that detect our PageRank and Alexa Traffic.
Well, we still waiting for Smorty.com and Bloggerwave.com for approver. But we can’t be too hash on them since we just sign up today. * We did go for PayPerPost and ReviewMe first * yesterday. We heard pretty good story from Smorty, but we need to check it out to confirm. Well, bloggerware.com being buying a lot of ad and even go extra length to other blogging network to paid other blogger to blog about their service. With that at lease we know they have some budget and we are looking forward to test out their service.
Just like adsense, we are publisher and advertiser at the same time. If you want to make money online, you need to know what is the tools are available to help you to grow your business.
Anyway, we will let you know once we start getting paid from those blogging network we just sign up. And we will review and compare them one by one.
Ultimate Way To Make Money Online With Blogging!
Sure, they are so many way to make money online with blogging. But we think the ultimate way is Recommendation With Commission Or Affiliate Program.
But Not All Blogger Can Do It
In order to make this happen, you must focus, have a flagship blog, be credibility and most important things is your reader must like you and listen to your recommendation.
If you create blog just for Adsense or advertising money, you are missing a very important element of making money using blog which is INFLUENCE. With Blog, you are very very POWERFUL, you just like a mini-station that allow the world to tune in and listen to you. If you are not using that strength to put in to your action plan to make a lot of money online or “live life to the fullest with wealth” strategy, you just cash in too fast and selling it short.
Very Good Example
Oprah Winfrey book club, do you know much they make? The figure will shock you, and I can promise it’s even ten times better then most of the highest pay blogger out there.
Well, when we said it’s ultimate is also mean the hardest to do, you can’t expect this to happen in months. You can only build your credibility and brand by continue deliver and bring value to your reader, create win-win, care about helping … and those take times to build. But we think that’s the true potential for blog to make money online.
Question, Aren’t You In For Making Money?
We all know for sure that you can’t straight away be credible. The the main question is how your make money online while still be credible? We don’t have the right answer for you as we are still learning the way. For now, what we can say is you need to set your rule of conduct through blogging EARLY, always be ethical, be honest, and credible. And with that, you still can make some money online through advertising money, ethical paid-blogging and recommendation for the affiliate product you think that will benefit your reader greatly rather then making a quick buck.
What Do You Think?
LinkBait : Pragmatic Way To Unleash “Content Is King”
Well, we ask a lot of successful blogger out there, what is their secret to be a successful blogger. And they answer is …
Content Is King
A lot of marketer out there will disagree with “content is king ” and say without help of promoting the content, no matter how good is your content, no-body know about it!
So they come up with a better word for content is king, a content without the linkbait nature, it’s useless. So linkbait is the pragmatic way to unleash “content is king” power.
Anyway, this is just our logic to explain why linkbait is important - Don’t take this seriously
3 birds In One Stone
We think LinkBait is the number one things to do if you have a new website to launch,. Seriously, write quality content, and promote it as linkbait.
First, if people like your content, they will link to you and might become your reader. (Readers)
Second, with linking, search engine will love you. (Search Engine)
Third, with great content, you are start creating brand. (Brand)
Well, you can’t find many online strategy … a strategy that can kill 3 birds in one stone, can you? Bummer, after launching our website for 3 months, now we know … duh.
No More Theme Sponsor Link In Themes.Wordpress!
There is a lot of talk about whether Themes.Wordpress should allow theme sponsor or not. Now it’s confirm theme sponsor links are not allow anymore in themes.wordpress! Just kidding, it’s just on weblog tools collection.com, but they are leading the movement.
And themes.wordpress.net might just consider the idea to ban sponsor links someday.
Personally, I don’t see it’s unethical to leave a sponsor link there as long as it’s stated that it’s a sponsor wordpress theme download. Blog theme designer need to make a living too. And to have proper incentive is what make our system great in the first place (capitalist).
You got have something to motivated people!
But Are We Taking It Too Far?
Is the whole theme sponsor thing is taking too far? As you know, it’s very valuable to have a theme sponsor on a blog that have google page rank 4-6 and have more then 200 postings. That’s mean the sponsor will get 200 different page rank quality in bound links with little costs. This is why a lot of online marketer have use this to exploit the opportunity. And sometime, you will see 2-4 sponsor links. I said good for them.
Well, as long as it’s inform people that this is a sponsor links theme, and use it as your own risk, we don’t have a problem with sponsor links. But it’s definitely not right not to inform that this is a sponsor theme, and use coding to hide your sponsor link. This is just not the right way to improve your google ranking and make money online.
The Way We Look At It
We don’t like the decision because we think it’s should give incentive and credit to the sponsor who actually paid the bill. But when you look at how the system being exploit and affect those who like to make money online, then you know this stand is necessary.
I know a blogger who write solid content and have good quality incoming links. But his blog can never get a good google page rank. With my little help, we found out that he actually got penalize by Google because of having a sponsor link that link to the “bad neighborhood”. Hmm, this is definitely a sad thing for him and since he has lost so many hair try to figure out what has happen.
Imagine that you are that hard working blogger who is waiting to make some money online and want to see your google page rank go higher and higher, and want to see your traffic coming more and more from google search engine. And it’s never happen! This is why we can see it’s necessary to take the stand now, because base on themes.wordpress, they don’t have the resource to check one by one for the “bad neighborhood” or “sponsor links that go too far”. It’s necessary to protect those new bloggers who know nothing about SEO, but like to make a nice living online. Well, we think …
This is not a right decision, but is the best decision for lacking of resource to check the bad neighborhood.
Anyway, it’s crucial to know a little bit SEO for blogger just like any business owner starting a business without know how to do marketing can cost the business greatly.
How to check bad neighborhood?
Well, you must be wondering how you can prevent this so that you don’t lose all your hair:) You are definitely in good had if you read our hoobin.com blog ( shameless self-promoting trick learning from john chow ). Try this tools Bad Neighborhood Link checker tool here
Anyway, we do favor “black hat” or “quick and easy way” method sometime if it’s ethical and for the best, but honestly we think to learn “white hat” method is best return of investment(ROI) since it’s always apply and relevant for the next 5 years.
By the way, Nate is honoring us the Power Post Blog. This really motivate us to write more great story, compile more information and share our little experiment with what is best to make more money online.
The Number One Challenge For Make Money Online!
If you ever ask what is the number one challenge for us to make money online is GETTING TRAFFIC. You can get google page rank 10, or have all the monetize things going on in your blog. But if you don’t have any traffic, you can’t monetize or earn anything!
That’s why we talk about getting online traffic most of the time. This is our number one priority if we want to make money online. Once you get the traffic, it’s much easy to test out and maximize your monetization plan on web conversion.
There are million of blog and website out there. How you share or get traffic is our number one challenge.
How People Find Your Blog?
We have blog about a bit dry and technical topic subject such as search engine optimization(SEO) and we going to cover more about blogging and social network.
If you check, how people actually find your blog?
Search Engine & Blog Search Engine
Social Network Blog
Blog Community
Other Blogs
News Website & Website
Forum
Offline Media
We being focus on search engine tremendously because we think people who actually search online is beginning to look for information how to make money online, this will be our best target audience.
Using search engine to drive traffic is definitely a tough market to be break in, since it’s getting more competitive in search engine result. But the reward to master search engine can be tremendous. And the easy way to get good result in search engine is blogging.
Through observation of many blog out there, blog that post one post a week wouldn’t get much traffic from search engine, even though they have great quality content! We have seem it. Of course, it’s best you have good quality content and blog more often. But what really make a different to get more traffic from search engine is you need to blog often, blog frequent, blog consistent and blog about your variety topic of your niche subject. One of the main reason is by blogging often, you have more contents, you stand a better chance to capture “long tail” keywords traffic. Besides that, by having bigger size blog, you will get higher page rank too.
I think we have talk a lot about SEO and blogging, maybe too much. For the next couple weeks, we hope we will cover more about how to bring in more traffic using social network web 2.0 site. But our main point is … let tackle the toughest problem first : How To Bring In Traffic!
Well, what is your number one challenge to make money online?
Top 10 Ways For Doing It Right In Blogging
We read a lot about how to doing it right in blogging. We think the most solid advise come from Robert Scoble in his book, Naked Conversation. Here are the top 10 list of his tips how to do it right in blogging:
- Get the title right for search engine result
- Read bunch of blog before you start
- Keep it simple. Keep if focus
- Demonstrate Passion. Show Authority
- Add Comment
- Be Accessible
- Tell A Story
- Be Linky
- Get out into the real world
- Use your referrer log
Money Blogging Risk! Is There Any?
Blogging is cheap, very cheap (that’s good to hear) Your expenses and financial risk should should be minimal. But we are sure there is some risk involved! And we think ..
Biggest Risk
We think the biggest money blogging risk involved is “our lost of opportunity”. Blogging take time, and the time might be much well spend to pursuit some opportunity. So in blogging, our greatest risk isn’t that the mistake that we make, but is the mistake that we didn’t make, the opportunity we didn’t pursuit and the time we didn’t learn!
Time Is Money
Time is money, lost of opportunity might be our greatest lost after few years of blogging.
This is our concern. Even though we blog for money, we try every possible way to do new thing to make money, we try every possible new way to build traffic, and we try every possible way to learn from the mistake. Then at least we know are pursuit and maximize every opportunity.
Anyway, we see most of the successful money bloggers out there always try something new, push the limit, and go for every possible opportunity to build traffic and to monetize their blog. And they are doing it to minimize their blogging risk. Sound weird huh? We know:)
Anyway, this is just our personal opinion about blogging risk for money:) How about you? What do you think of your biggest money blogging risk?
Why Social Media is the New Internet
The New Dot Com
In 2003, when a renowned IT and computing publisher and conference organizer, O'Reilly Media, first used the term 'Web 2' they were heralding what was considered a major shift in the way the worldwide web was organized, accessed and used. Since 'Blogging' began, in the mid 1990's, with its unique personal agenda and dissemination of user generated content, more and more people began using the web for networking: based on shared interests and concerns. With the launch of MySpace in 2003 and YouTube in 2005, this trend for User Generated Media has exploded and referring to the unique characteristics which caused and propel this explosion as 'the second generation of the worldwide web', or Web 2, might begin to seem more and more prescient as time passes.
The term 'Web 2' specifically referred to what was then perceived as a second generation of the web, or web based communities functioning on the web, which had originally begun their days as message boards, bulletin boards, newsgroups and Usenet. This new usage, by web based communities, was allied with a new way of hosting services to target and facilitate collaboration and sharing among online communities; together, these characteristics are represented by the term 'social media'. The characteristics of Web 2, and of Social Media, websites are therefore of content creation and distribution being predominantly motivated by individuals and social groups. The creation, submission and sharing of 'home grown content', or 'User Generated Media' lies at the very heart of such websites as MySpace and YouTube.
Where 'Web 1' reflected the publishing model; what Social Media achieves is a transition from interaction on the social scale in the real world of human affairs, to an online interaction which reflects, and in some cases replaces, that interaction. Where you might have interactions between networks of families, friends, neighbors, colleagues, associations, organizations and institutions; online you have blogging, MySpace, Friends Reunited, YouTube, and even eBay. What these sites create is an environment where 'chat' takes place along with the exchange of photos, videos, music and any other digital media in an environment of personalized 'spaces' which reflect and reinforce the character and disposition of the users. It is not the 'linear' environment of the old web, where website publishers, or webmasters, created content geared towards their particular personal or professional agenda; Web 2, and Social Media, are 'non-linear' and 'organic'. Some say: they represent the democratization of the web and many strongly defend the wider freedom of speech and activity which is allowed in this medium.
What this means to an online business person, a marketer or webmaster is that the voice of public opinion is ever present and moves fast. The term 'viral' is often used in the context of this 'speed of message' which can occur within the networks of sites like MySpace. Even 24 hour news stations can't keep up with the organic distribution and dissemination networks online.
Viral Marketing is a form of marketing, advertising and promotion which takes advantage of the 'network' nature of human interactions. Viral Marketing targets pre-existing social networks and, online, social media to spread a specific message or increase brand awareness. Of course, the term 'viral' is resonant with a biological virus, since a successful marketing message sent to one person will be replicated as it is distributed around that person's network and then by each of those recipients' networks, and so on at an astonishing rate. The nature of the 'viral message' is always highly targeted to the network; typically, it will also contain humor or entertainment value or some benefit to the recipient which causes each recipient to want to send it on to their network of friends.
The accumulated impact of very many versions of one message being exchanged around the internet adds to the overall currency of the message. Saying of a message that it has 'gone viral' implicates a sense of the message having taken on a life of its own and no further initiation of the message is required since it is being actively passed about at a high rate of success. When a message takes on this independent quality it is given more attention for this fact: the concept of democracy within the internet community is one which gives greater credulity to popular messages. This 'quality' of a viral message is often imitated for the purpose of creating the impression of popularity or spontaneity, whereby a marketer or publicist might use manufactured networks of false identities or non-impartial distributors to give the appearance of a message 'gone viral'to attract attention to it.
Affiliate Marketing - Finding a ClickBank Product to Promote
Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
This article is intended to help you make money as an affiliate. Please leave us comments, questions, or success stories so that we can improve this guide. Be sure to check out our other affiliate related guides on the lower part of this page.
If you have decided that Click bank is the best place to find a product to promote then you will be pleased to learn that the process from registration to promotion is a simple one. The first thing you need to do is create an account: you'll be pleased to discover this is free to affiliates. When registering at Click bank you first create a unique username which will later be used to identify you for Affiliate commissions. The details you submit are reasonably few but do include an address so your earnings can be sent to you. Within a few short minutes you will be registered and able to begin browsing the marketplace for products to promote.
Click bank's 'Marketplace' is the 'clearing house' where merchants' products are listed. It is split into nine main categories: Business to Business, Health & Fitness, Home & Family, Computing & Internet, Money & Employment, Marketing & Ads, Fun & Entertainment, Sports & Recreation, and Society & Culture. Each category is further split into smaller subcategories. If you are new to Click bank it is a good idea to first browse the main Marketplace categories, then 'dig down' into the subcategories of those areas which interest you. When you have a few products or topic areas you are interested in promoting then you should type the relevant keywords into the keyword search field to begin creating a list of potential products to look at further. When researching products, never make a decision until you have compared the product and its available sales material with its competitors so it is advisable to create a list of at least three or four similar or related products for the sake of comparison..
There are three 'levels' of search you can conduct with the Click bank keyword search function. When you type a keyword such as 'dog training', or 'learn Spanish', etc, into the keyword search field you can then set the 'Category' and 'Subcategory' fields either to search 'All' or search within one main category, or search within a subcategory of a main category. You can also choose to list the results in order of popularity, or graded according to a number of other statistical attributes. You can also decide how many results you wish to see on a page, from 10 to 50.
With each product listing in Click bank, or result of your search, there appears four numbers: one is a dollar amount, two are percentages, and the fourth is simply a score. You can order your search results on the page, in ascending or descending order according to the values of any of these figures. The first number on the left is a dollar amount and indicates how much, on average, an affiliate will earn per sale on that product; this is a 'balanced' figure and takes into account Click bank fees and customer refunds of the product. The second number tells you what the affiliate commission is, as a percentage value of the full price; this is usually between 50% and 75%. The third number is the percentage of Affiliate sales of the product compared to total sales of the product; this is usually quite high. The last figure tells you the 'gravity' of the product - which is an estimation of the popularity of the product, among Click bank affiliates, based upon sales.
The Click bank figures, which accompany product listings, are useful in helping to decide upon which product to promote but should not be the only factor. Click on the product listing title to view the sales page; as an affiliate your efforts will be to send people to an identical page and it's a good idea to read it through to see how effective it is. If you spend a lot of your time, and money, promoting this product it is necessary that the sales page is effective, otherwise your efforts will be wasted. In addition to being well written and attractive, a good sales page should have a title which draws the reader into the body of the text, it should include testimonials by satisfied customers, it should have a picture of the product and should also have pictures of any bonus offers, there should be bullet points outlining the features and benefits of the product and it should have a clear refund guarantee and an easy to find 'buy now' link or button. Statistically, 'long' sales pages are the most effective. If you know the market the product is targeted at then you should read the sales page over to decide if it is well targeted or not. Any work you do as an affiliate will rely upon the effectiveness of this page to 'close' the sale so it is worth spending a bit of time reviewing it, and its competitors, before making a decision.
After you have viewed a few products and sales pages and have decided upon a product to promote, you will now create your own personalized link which will open your personalized version of the sales page. This is the link you will place in all your promotions and will identify you as the affiliate to which any sales commission shall be paid: Click bank calls this 'a hoplink' and it is, simply, a hypertext link to the sales page which has your unique Click bank username added to it. The procedure is deceptively simple: below each product listing there is a link named 'create hoplink'. Click on this link and a new window will open in your browser. Type your Click bank username into the top field and click 'submit' and within a few seconds the window will refresh and give you two links. The first link is the web address of the product sales page with your Affiliate ID on it, the second is the same address formatted in html to create a text link.
You can now go ahead and begin marketing or promoting this product, and as many others as you wish. Your efforts will be rewarded whenever a visitor clicks on your link and buys a product from the sales page you send them to. All you need are the 'hoplink' from Click bank and your 'wits'.
