Internet Marketing Blog

There is a lot of information available for free when it comes to making money on the Internet. There is a lot of basic information that you’ll find on blogs and websites and some experienced marketers will even give away a lot of information for free as well. There are also things available for a fee.

When are you ready to go from learning about earning for free to paying for secrets?  The answer is simple.  When you have a thirst for more and can’t find the information for free it might be time to find an internet marketing guru.  Once you’ve started earning some commissions or hit payout with Google Adsense, you might be ready to take your internet marketing career from that of a newbie to the path of becoming a guru.

Never stop reading the free stuff as you’ll find that new information and new angles continuously develop but there may come a time when you decide you’re ready to pay some money for information. Do yourself a favour and spend time researching before you take the plunge!

Reading Product Reviews

Product review sites are all over the Internet.  Some of them offer great information on what’s available. A good product review site will have purchased the products they review and offer valuable positive and negative information as well.

It’s a good guess to assume you’ll find affiliate links on these sites but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t valuable. Take time to look at a few reviews before you make your decision about buying an affiliate marketing e-book or a membership.The reviews should do more than tell you a product is great. They should provide insight about how to use it, what features and benefits it has as well as what type of results the reviewer got.

What are you doing when it comes to promoting your blog? Are you recording every post you make in all the social bookmarking sites you can find? Are you pinging it every time you update it in some way? How about your website – do you link to it and mention it on more than one page?

Who Is Promoting Your Site?

A lot of internet marketers do everything they can to spread the word about their website, but when it comes to promoting their blog things can go slightly awry. Some of them seem to leave the promoting to other people, hoping that every visitor who finds them will tell everyone else and send waves of traffic flowing in their direction.

Real life is not so wonderful of course. You should be promoting your blog by shouting from every rooftop you can find. If you have business cards make sure your blog URL is printed on them. If you fancy the idea of one of those neat metal strips on the outside of your car, boasting your web address and an eye catching quote from your blog, why not splash the cash and get one made up?

Blog Self Promotion - Every Little Bit Helps

Sometimes all it takes to be promoting your blog in a way that will get you noticed is to do it differently from everyone else. Try printing up some slips of paper on your computer with a cryptic message or tantalising question that leaves people wanting to know more. Add your URL and stick those bits of paper wherever you can think of that’s relevant.

If you write about internet marketing, stick a piece of paper in every internet marketing book you can find at your local library. Get creative. Be different. It’s what will get you found when you are actively promoting your blog.

If you want to monetize your blog, Google Adsense is a great option. Once you have Google approval for one blog, you can add it to other sites without having to ask for approval each time.  You do need to be sure you’re following Google’s TOS (terms of service).

Getting Approval From Google

The fastest way to get approval from Google is to show them what your plans are.  Start a blog and post regularly in it before you apply for approval. Wait a few weeks before you apply so Google can see regular posting and content on your site. If you send in an application and don’t show Google that your website is valuable, you might not get approved. They do want to maintain integrity in their program and if you look like a spammer or splogger, you won’t get very far.

How much money can you make on Google?

Google doesn’t reveal their formula for money making potential but there are website owners and bloggers  that have significant Google earnings.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by trying to make all your money from one online source but adding Google to your multiple streams of income is a great idea.

If you’re using a niche blog to make income through various revenue streams like affiliate marketing and Google Adsense,  make sure your blog is friendly to humans and to search engine spiderbots.  Here are a few tips for making it both search engine friendly and reader-friendly.

SEO Tips For Your Blog

On your blog you’ll want to do on-page and off-page search engine optimising. This means that on the blog you do things that make search engines want to crawl you such as having blog tags, categories, using links inside your blog to other blogs posts as well as links to outside sites through your blogroll and your blog entries.

In terms of off-page SEO, you might consider visiting other blogs in your niche and linking back to your blog through blog comments.  Also use sites to catalog your blog such as Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog which can draw visitors in from other pages. Being friendly to search engines with SEO will get you more rankings and more visitors.

Visitor Tips

Once the visitors arrive, give them a warm welcome! Talk to your visitors in a friendly tone in your posts and stop by and visit their blogs to return the favour when they’ve been kind enough to comment or to link to you on their blog.  When someone leaves a comment that asks a question or compliments your site answer them and consider leaving a comment on their site as well.

Don’t overdo it on the advertisements. You may be in the blogging business for the ad revenue but if your blog doesn’t provide any value, you won’t have many visitors and you definitely won’t get any subscribers. Carefully managing your blog to appeal to the people and the search engines will help increase your chances of online success.

Finding a niche to profit from online isn’t difficult in terms of finding available options. If you look, you’ll see all sorts of subjects that are paying high profits.  Some of the popular ones include health, technology, weight loss, hobbies and marketing. If you haven’t yet decided which subject you want to dabble in for blogging or affiliate marketing, here are a few tricks and tips:

Choosing Your Niche

Are you passionate about a subject? Is there something you could endlessly learn about? If so, this might be a good niche for you because the more time you spend researching, learning and developing a niche the better your chances of attaining success and fulfillment.

Look at what’s out there. There are countless lists available talking about the most profitable niches. Read up on them and drill down until you pick a favourite.

Lookat free keyword search tools and see what you find in the news, on sites like Technorati which will make the tags for the most popular comments the biggest, Google Trends and Alexa which will give you a good inclindation of what people want to know about.

After you’ve decided on a starting point, you’ll find loads of information through websites and blogs and to get information delivered right to your e-mail box, consider using a tool like Google Alerts to send you messages about new information in that niche. We’ll talk some more about Google Alerts tomorrow.

Spam on your blog means a few things. On a positive note, people are finding you and that’s a good thing. It doesn’t sound like such a good thing when it becomes a pain to manage but one thing is for sure, your blog is valuable enough to make spammers want to utilise your site. They’ll post trackback spam and bogus comments filled with hyperlinks to their adult websites. You can’t let it go on but there are things you can do.

But what is an internet marketer to do?

If you are using Wordpress for your blog, consider using the Askimet plug-in.  This will catch a big portion of your spam and save you considerably on moderating time.  You can also set your your comments as moderated only which will stop the spam before it’s published. You can quickly view the comments and manually approve the ones you want to let through. You can set up some blogs so that commenters are approved automatically after they have one approved comment but be careful about this because some crafty spammers can take advantage of this loophole and post one useful comment only to come back later and try to post spam on your site. You might need to de-approve some commenters.

All in all, you want to be choosy about who is allowed to link to your site because association with certain kinds of sites can bring your own search engine ranking down. The good news is that search engines seem to be finding your site and people think it’s valuable enough to try and capitalise on your success!

(Image courtesy of sxc.hu)

Have you ever felt like you could use a break from writing for your blog? It’s not as if you’ve lost the passion for it or anything; you just think a change would do it good.

Well here is a solution that can pull in some more traffic as well as giving you some time off. Why not think about inviting someone to do some guest postings for you? This is also a great solution if you’re very busy or away for a week on vacation.

Where To Find A Guest Blogger

Finding someone to do this isn’t actually as hard as you might think. The first step is to think about where you might find such a person. You will want to use someone who has already made a name for themselves in your particular niche, and maybe has done guest postings before.

Make your offer enticing by saying that you will include a permanent link back to their own site or blog in return for a couple of guest postings on yours. If you pick a niche blogging guest who has a successful and well established site already you will probably find that some of their traffic and following naturally comes over to your site to see what they’ve got to say for themselves in their guest postings.

Spice Up Your Blog

Guest postings can really spice up your blog, especially if you feel it’s gotten a bit stale. By introducing a new point of view into the mix you can make things more interesting for your existing visitors and readers, and attract new ones as well. If your blog is a good one, you can expect some of the fans of your guest blog poster will stay with you even when they return to their own site.

Always keep an eye out for people you could invite to say a few words. It could be the start of a fresh new era for your blog and their regular viewers could start subscribing to your blog as well.

Making money with Google can take time and effort and there’s a twist you might not have already thought of. In terms of monetizing a website or blog with Google Adsense, you might already know that your content will determine the types of ads that come up.  But, did you know that your content will also have a large part in whether or not your visitors actually click those ads?

The Curiosity Factor in Online Advertising

If you write a blog post about how to build a house and you tell everything to the reader, there’s no reason to click, is there?

However, if you pique the right amount of curiosity in your copy and manage to pepper in some great keywords, you should get advertisements that directly relate to your customer’s interest so that they’ll click the ads to learn more.

Providing Value Without Revealing All Your Cards

In terms of copywriting tips for Google Adsense ad revenue, you want to give enough value to your visitor that they want to read more but don’t feel cheated like you’re simply telling them nothing. It’s tricky to strike the perfect balance between value and piqued interest but getting there can result in people clicking your advertisements and helping you make payout every month with Google.

In internet marketing, there are two schools of thought with respect to link cloaking. Link cloaking involves making your links to affiliate websites look like regular links instead of affiliate links which many people recognise by strange letter combinations or URL names.

With school of thought number one, you might think it’s better to be up front about being an affiliate selling a product either by saying so or simply by presenting your link with your code in it without worrying about cloaking. On the other side, some  suggest people are more likely to buy your product if they don’t think they’re being sales pitched or sold to. For some reason, a lot of people don’t feel good about someone getting a commission off their purchase. Some will even try to avoid your affiliate link if they really want to buy it and you led them there. This is why many affiliate programs will credit you with the sale due to a ninety-day http cookie.

You might consider conducting experiments and seeing what bodes better for you. If you choose to cloak your links, there are free tools like Tinyurl.com that can take a long URL and turn it short as well as make it difficult to see where someone is about to click through to.  This type of tool can be useful for more than just affiliate marketing. It can be great in micro blogging environments like Twitter and Plurk or anywhere else that has a 140 character maximum.

Link Cloaking Tools

If you’ve decided that cloaking is something you want to do, there are link cloaking tools that are free and available for a fee. Do be careful you’re not cloaking beyond recognition or you could impact your ability to get paid through companies such as ClickBank.

A blog is only as good as the traffic it gets. Trading links with other bloggers in your niche is a good idea. Even those in competition with one another will often share one another’s links, especially in the blogosphere. Many people blogroll others as well as do guest posts, post blog comments or create a links page. This can be great as it can help you build your search engine rankings because it is like getting into a clique where every one involved gets to be a bit popular.

Finding Blogs in Your Niche

If you want to find people to trade links with and you’re a blogger, check out other blogs in your niche. Have a look at tools such as MyBlogLog and Blog Catalog which can help you find blogs to check out. You can find plenty of blogs with similar tags and join their neighbourhood. By doing so, you’re also increasing your own profile. Comment on other blogs and link back to your own blog (without spamming, of course) and join blog neighborhoods through the Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog tools. By doing this, you’ll also get interest from other people interested in your subject matter

Link Love

If you give other some link love on your blog by posting a link to their blog, they will often return the favour. They might write a post featuring something you wrote and they might put you on their blogroll. The blogosphere is a vast place but within specific niches is actually quite a tight knit group and when people like what they see and think they’ll get something out of your blog (whether it’s link love reciprocation or valuable information) they’ll probably visit often.