Believe it or not, ad placement on your website can make a big difference to your money making ability. Just as advertising quantity is important and if there are too many ads, you’ll turn people off, having the ads in the wrong place will also reduce your chances of making money online. Keep ads above the fold and in view for people on the site.
Whether you have a content site or a blog, if you’re using advertising like Adsense, banner
s from Commission Junction or PepperJam or another affiliate program, placement is important. If you can imagine where the reader’s eyes will go when they read your article, that’s where the ads need to be.
So, if you’re writing blogs to make ad revenue, you’ll want the ads near the entry that the reader is looking at. Don’t put the ads all the way out of the way at the bottom of the page. Beside, above or directly below the text the user is reading can work the best. Blending your ads in with your website colours is also helpful because the ads look natural.
Experiment with the placement of the ads until you start to see results. It may take a few experiments to find the perfect blend and remember, the best way to get someone interested in clicking an ad is to leave enough to the imagination in your content that the user is bound to click the related ad looking for more info.
Social networking can make a huge difference in your success online but there is a bit of a fine line between marketing or networking and spamming. Let’s look at some examples:
Marketers build e-mail lists and market selectively. Spamming would include many tactics such as anonymous email blasts, ignoring those who try to opt out or selling lists. If you want to build an e-mail list, consider giving away something for free, having a valuable newsletter or doing something else to build a list of people who are likely going to be interested in what you’re selling.
Valuable articles will give the reader some information and may direct them some place they can go to in order to find out more information. They don’t generally contain affiliate links and they do provide value. If you try to spam through article marketing you probably won’t get very far because most e-zine sites have requirements and terms of service that prohibit spam.
While it’s perfectly fine to do advertising on your blog, you want valuable information there as well otherwise it’s considered a splog (spam blog) and you won’t have too many repeat visitors. Visitors who do arrive probably won’t buy anything or return again. Give people value and you’ll have more chances of making sales and having them do some of your marketing for you through social bookmarking.
If you’re constantly asking people on social networking tools and forums to Digg or Stumble your entry but never do it in return and never participate in discussions in a reciprocal way, eventually everyone will just ignore you. Reciprocate a little in your online marketing efforts and you’ll find a bit difference in how people receive you.
(photo credit: www.sxc.hu)
Being an active member of an online community such as MySpace can take up valuable amounts of time each week. Some people end up getting sucked into spending more time on these sites than they do promoting their business and figuring out how they can sell more online. There’s a point when social marketing and Web 2.0 can turn into a time waster.
That’s where you need to be wary of how many online communities you join. There is no definite number, and what one person finds to be unmanageable might be just the right amount for someone else.
The key to getting the most out of your own online communities is to find out what your happy number is. If you get to the stage where keeping up with them all is getting difficult – and your work is suffering as a result – then you know you’ve got too many.
It can also depend on how particular online communities are set up. Some are much easier to understand and use than others, and by their very nature it’s going to be the easy to use ones that will get to stay if you find you need to start paring down your efforts in this area.
But you should also consider which sites get you the best response, and funnel the largest amount of traffic over to your website. Those will ultimately be the ones that should stay, since they are bringing in the largest volume of interested people.
Social networking has great potential when it comes to locating the target audience for whatever you are selling. When the sites don’t allow you to advertise directly to other members, you can still make a name for yourself because people will start looking for you and your website.
So choose your online communities wisely. Sometimes less really can be more.
When you create a new website or blog, you’re anxious to see some results and if you don’t do anything to get noticed it could take time for the search engine spiders to find you and index you. Optimising for search engines will help you get indexed faster. Here are a few tips to help you get noticed quickly.
Here are places where you can manually submit:
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
Go to sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us and bookmark your site. These sites will bring traffic to your site as well. You can also get traffic and attention by trying to get noticed on places like Technorati, Twitter and Plurk. Be sure if you have other sites, you link from them to your new site thorugh blogrolls or link pages. Blog about your new site as well on your other online homes and write a few articles for article sites with links to your new site in the resource box. Spending a bit of time getting search engines to notice your website could shave days or even weeks off the process of getting organic search engine results.
