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30 Keyword Tools to Use for Your Website (from www.vandelaydesign.com)

2007-11-03T02:45:00.000+02:00

Part of having a successful website or blog is targeting the right keywords and phrases. This sounds like it would be an easy task, but with endless possible combinations of words and phrases it can be quite difficult to find keywords that will generate traffic from search engines without putting you in competition with too many other sites.

Fortunately there are a number of tools available online (some free, some not) that can help with the process. I’ve included some basic information about 30 of these tools in this article. Some of these tools are designed specifically for creating and managing pay-per-click campaigns, but they can also be helpful if you’re just trying to optimize your site.

Free Keyword Tools

Keyword Density
Cost: Free
Type in a URL and you’ll see what phrases are used most commonly throughout the page. You have the choice of including meta tags, alt tags, and the title, as well as the choice of 1, 2, or 3 word phrases.

Keyword Research Tool from Apogee Web Consulting
Cost: Free
This tool allows you to see what words and phrases are used in your competitor’s keyword meta tag.

SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
Cost: Free
One of the more useful and unique free tools, SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool not only gives you related words and phrases, but it also shows the search volume and provides links to the results from other keyword tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. The links help you to save time by not needing to visit a lot of different sites and perform repeated searches.

SEO Book’s Keyword List Generator
Cost: Free
Are you having trouble coming up with a list of keywords for a PPC campaign? Type in your URL and a few keywords and this tool will generate a list for you.

SEO Book’s Keyword Misspelling Generator
Cost: Free
Sometimes searchers will spell words incorrectly. You can benefit from knowing common misspellings and using them in your PPC campaigns. This tool eliminates the need for you to figure out possible misspellings. Type in a word or phrase and you will get a list of possible mistakes.

Yooter Keyword Suggestion Tool
Cost: Free
Find search volume and related phrases with this free tool. It also allows you to export the results into a spreadsheet program (like Excel) via a .CSV file. Requires registration.

McDar Keyword Analysis Tool
Cost: Free
When you enter your URL and a keyword or phrase this tool will provide information on your page and compare it to the top 10 ranked sites by Google for the word or phrase that was entered. The data includes total pages indexed, links and PageRank.

iBusiness Promoter
Cost: Free
IBP is a free tool that shows you search volume and the level of competition for keywords. It also shows you which keywords your competitors are using. Requires download.

Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool
Cost: Free
One of the most frequently used free keyword tools. Enter a word or phrase and Overture will show you related phrases and search volume for each.

Google’s Keywords Tool
Cost: Free
A fairly simple and valuable tool that shows related keywords, search volume, and levels of competition. Provides a large number of suggestions based on pages that are ranking well in Google for the phrase that is entered.

Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker
Cost: Free
Enter a keyword of phrase and get up to 100 suggestions as well as an estimate of their daily search volume.

Bookmarklet from SEOproToolz
Cost: Free
With the bookmarklet you will drag a link to your browser’s toolbar and the tool will be usable. It will analyze any page that you are visiting to generate related keywords with prices for Google AdWords.

Meta Tag and Keyword Analyzer from Submit Express
Cost: Free
Enter a URL and the tool will show you the meta tags of the page, keyword density, load time, file size, and links found on the page.

Good Keywords
Cost: Free
Includes keyword suggestions, misspelling suggestions, phrase builder and more. One of the more simple programs that still includes multiple tools. Requires download.

Keyword Research Tool from Webmaster Toolkit
Cost: Free
A simple free tool that will help you to find related keywords to a specific word or phrase. It will analyze top-ranked pages in a search engine that you select and report on words and phrases used by those sites.

Keyword Tools with a One-Time Cost

Rapid Keyword
Cost: $69.99 (one-time payment)
Rapid Keyword helps you to find the right keywords by showing results from both Google and Overture’s suggestion tools, as well as by providing possible misspellings. You can analyze the competition by seeing how many competitors are on the major PPC programs for particular words or phrases. Several keyword management tools are included. Offers a one-day free trial and a 60-day money back guarantee.

The Permutator
Cost: $49.99 (one-time payment)
The Permutator includes a keyword suggestions tool as well as various tools to help create and manage lists of keywords. It also includes a typo tool and an ROI calculator. A trial version is available.

Keywords Analyzer
Cost: $97
One of the more popular keyword tools, it will help you find search phrases that have low levels of competition for PPC ad campaigns. Keywords Analyzer also helps you to analyze your competition and manage PPC campaigns.

Web CEO
Cost: There is a free version as well as $189 and $389 versions.
Web CEO is SEO software that includes a keyword tool. The keyword tool provides keyword suggestions, search volume, competing sites, and much more. Requires download.

The Dowser
Cost: There are several tools that range from free to $297
You can research and manage keywords with the free tool, or purchase tools for keyword harvesting, misspellings, and more.

Keyword Elite
Cost: $167
With Keyword Elite you will be able to see the keywords that your competitors are bidding on. You’ll also be able to do keyword list generation and management.

Keyword Cruncher
Cost: $37
A keyword analysis tool that works with Wordtracker. With Keyword Cruncher you can import data from Wordtracker and manipulate and analyze the data. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Keyword Tools with On-Going Costs

Wordtracker
Cost: $299 for a 1-year subscription (weekly and monthly options also available)
One of the leader keyword tools, Wordtracker will help you to find the right keywords and other phrases in which they are commonly used. There is an option for a free trial.

Marketo
Cost: Standard version is $49 per user (the first user per organization is free) plus 7.9% of the amount spent on ads managed by Marketo
Marketo is a complete PPC management program. It features keyword tools, bid management and optimization, and testing tools. There is an option for a 30-day free trial.

Keyword Discovery
Cost: $599
Compiles statistics from over 180 search engines. Features include keyword research, suggestions, misspellings, seasonal search trends, and more.

Adgooroo
Cost: Starts at $99 per month
Adgooroo will show you the search phrases that are generating most of the traffic for your competitors. It’s tools help you to identify more specific phrases that will bring more traffic. There is an option for a 10-day free trial.

NicheBot
Cost: $9.97 - $19.97 per month
NicheBot provides a variety of keyword research tools as well as keyword list management tools. It also includes an affiliate product finder.

SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool
Cost: The tool is limited to premium members, which currently costs $49.00 per month
This tool is used to analyze the competitive landscape that exists for particular search phrases. It is intended to show how difficult it will be to achieve high rankings for specific terms.

HitTail
Cost: Basic version is free, HitTail Plus is $9.95 per month
HitTail shows you real time statistics on what keywords visitors are using to find your website. Widgets are available for Blogger, TypePad, SquareSpace and WordPress.

Wordze
Cost: $35 per month
Wordze offers tools such as keyword research, historical keyword data, analysis of competitors, importing keywords, managing projects and more.

Name a website with 22bn page impressions? (By John Oates, www.theregister.co.uk)

2007-11-02T01:57:00.000+02:00

Cyworld is a South Korean phenomenon - it's a social networking site which is ridiculously popular over here and will soon be launching in Germany.

The site launched in 1999 but only really became popular after it was bought by SK Communications in 2003 - a division of SK Telecom. The firm has 200 staff.

Users of Cyworld set up their own homepages - called minihompy - and link them to friends' sites a bit like MySpace.

But the finances of the site are incredible. Apart from the 22bn monthly page impressions, the site also sells digital items so users can decorate their pages.

The basic page is free, but decorating it costs cash. A background, or skin, for instance, costs about a dollar a week. Background music for your page will cost about 30 pence. The site brings in about 200m Won a day or about £115,000. Sales of digital items account for 78 per cent of revenue, while 10 per cent comes from mobile services - you can check and update your site from your phone, and adverts make up the remaining 12 per cent.

The reach of the site is enough to give your average marketeer a heart attack - 92 per cent of Korean 20-somethings have a minihompy.

The site operates in China, Japan and Taiwan and is opening in Germany and the US this year. It has a million users in China since launching in April.

The company is looking for a partner in Germany because it accepts that cultural differences are important - initial trials have shown German women did not react well to the more "cutesy" aspects of the site. The company is looking for a German firm with a similar open and liberal corporate culture. We were told an agreement has almost been finalised.

Cyworld has had offers from other telcos, including France Telecom, because of the huge data traffic it creates. The site, and related instant messaging service NateOne, uses a data centre housing 3,000 servers. The network manager told us they knew what was going on in the real world by looking at the traffic. World Cup matches involving Korea sees traffic disappear - until half time when there is a huge peak.

Cy means relationship in Korean and that's the most important part of the site - once a certain number of relationships are formed, users stay loyal. .

92% of Korean youth have an account on this one website. With one organisation of 200 staff and this idea is spreading. Basically your page at the website is free, but decorations, audio, video etc. on your page are sold, it is very simple and seems somewhat viral and it is spreading to other countries.

Finding Advertisers for Your Blog (from www.problogger.net)

2007-09-22T14:33:00.000+03:00

Alistair asks - ‘Having a niche blog means that I will never have the same amount of visitors as some of the larger technology/media blogs. This means that advertisers such as blog ads will not allow me to use their ads as they see me as having lower visitor numbers. Traditionally manufacturers in my niche are wary of the internet even though they have websites - I have contacted a few and state my visitor numbers etc but still they are unwilling to even trial. I think it is because my blog is “personal” but in my niche I can get away with that as it is classed as a diary. Any advice?’

Tough one Alistair. I could write a lot on this (and have actually asked Chad, b5media’s Ad Sales guy to write some posts for me on the topic too) but here are a few tips that come to mind. I hope you don’t mind me compiling them as a list as they’re somewhat random ideas:

1. Show them what they’re buying - one of the most powerful strategies I used in my early days of selling ads to people was to show them how I ranked in Google for their keywords. Compile a list of words that you rank for that you can pull out next time you’re talking to an advertiser. If when people search the web for information on products that they sell they end up on your site you have a key selling point.

2. Traffic is a Powerful Motivator - there’s no getting around it - to many advertisers traffic numbers are key. I hope that this trend is changing (what I saw at ad:Tech in Sydney recently confirms this as advertisers are looking to get more niche in their focus) but in the mean time it does count. Keep working to build traffic and be ready to share your numbers and back them up with graphs/tables etc.

3. Collect Demographics - every ad agency I ever spoke with about buying space on my blogs asked about the demographics of my audience. Do some surveys and collect this data as it’ll help sell your case.

4. Start with Small Advertisers - when I first started trying to sell advertising on my blogs I aimed too high. On my digital camera blog I went for Canon, Adobe etc. Of course I failed. So I decided to go to the opposite extreme and started approaching smaller digital camera stores and websites. The tactic worked - they bought up ad space at reasonable rates quite quickly. In time however traffic grew and the bigger campaigns started to appear - having advertisers already on board helped convince the big guys though.

5. Put together an Advertiser Pack - compile your stats, rates, advertising options (ie what you offer) reader demographics and any other relevant figures into a professional looking document that you can email to interested advertisers. Include your contact details and references from other advertisers if you can get them.

6. Sell the Niche Angle - the fact is that most of us will never compete with the broad publications that are out there - so don’t compete with them by trying to fool advertisers into thinking that you’re bigger than you are - sell the fact that you’re different and that you can reach a narrow and targeted group of people that makes the money an advertiser spends much more effective. ‘Spend $1 on a big site and you might reach a lot of people who are mildly interested in your topic - sell $1 on our site and you’ll reach people who are obsessed with your topic….’

7. Key Influencers - do other bloggers read your blog and pick up on what you write? If so - sell this too. You’ve got influential readers - not just passive ones!

Blog carnival (from www.wikipedia.org)

2007-09-22T14:29:00.001+03:00

A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.

There are many variations, but typically, someone who wants to organize a carnival posts details of the theme or topic to their blog, and asks readers to submit relevant articles for inclusion in an upcoming edition. The host then collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates them (often in very creative ways), and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog.

Many carnivals have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different blog each time.

Communities of blog readers, writers, and edition hosts form around specific carnivals. The carnivals provide a nice aggregation of recent posts by the community on a given topic, and the host provides a level of editing and annotation that helps readers find posts they are interested in. Writers who submit their articles to blog carnivals are rewarded with traffic (if the host decides to give them a link and, perhaps, a positive review).

A recent variant is Synchronised Blogging, or synchroblog, where a group of bloggers agree to post on their own blogs on the same broad topic on the same day. The titles are circulated a day or two beforehand, and each blogger includes links to the other blogs.

The earliest blog carnival, so named, was the Carnival of the Vanities, announced at the Silflay Hraka blog in September, 2002.^[1]

Blog Carnivals and Stolen Content

The blog carnival host collects articles and links, and publishes these on his/her blog. However, there is an opportunity for unscrupulous bloggers to steal content, host it on their own blogs, and submit these entries to a blog carnival host. In order for ethical blog carnival hosts to refrain from promoting stolen content, they need to verify that these incoming articles and links are indeed the original work of the blogger who submitted them. Without this verification, it is possible that otherwise ethical hosts are promoting stolen content.

List of Blog Networks v2 (from www.blogherald.com)

2007-09-22T14:25:00.000+03:00

My first effort at putting together a list of blog networks received a fair bit of attention and my thanks to everyone who has emailed and left comments. There are a lot more networks out there than I imagined, and there are blogs on networks I read where I didn’t even mentally place them as being part of a network, either way blogging continues to grow and so do blogging networks. The diversity of this list is a testament to the strength of the blogosphere and the many wonderful things people are developing and doing online.

Rather than try and edit the original list here goes version 2 with a few comments as well, there are some real gems here that are a great read, even if it means another heap of Bloglines subs get added to my bloglines account. I’d note again that this list is for blog networks only so I’ve excluded corporate sites that also have multiple blogs (CNet being a good example) because they are not blog networks but companies that just happen to also have multiple blogs. Im also excluding joint advertising networks because although they are “networks” by name they are really just individual blogs who are pitching advertising collectively (such as the Music Blog Network, FM etc..).

Weblogs Inc.,
The No.1 blog network from Jason Calacanis

Gawker Media
Nick Denton’s gossip, tabloid and soft pawn empire

9rules
collaborative network which I still think wins the award for nicest looking blogs

Blog Logic
Paul Short’s multi-blog network

Darren Rowse
technically Darren hasn’t got a network in name, but he certainly has a network of blogs, some that are also part of the Breaking News Blog Network

Maxira
Brad Jasper’s network of blog and webmaster related blogs, tools and forums

Duct Tape Marketing
9 marketing blogs under the same banner

Blog Carnival
More blogging for adsense than anything else but still a blog network none the less

Weblog Empire
my little effort to be on this list

SBNation
The Kos does sports

Corante

About Weblogs
Wow! I’d not seen this one before, general consumer niche topics running on Nucleus and run by Shai Coggins, who also writes the blogging pages at About.com

Weblogssl
Spanish Language blog network

Shiny Media
It was really, really bad of me to not put these guys on the original list, given I’ve blogged about them before, great network out of the UK

Daily Pixel
Canadian blog network

Spreeblick
German language blog network with 6 blogs

Space42
German language blog network: I’m not sure of the relationship of the blogs here (ie network through agreement or ownership)

NinerNiner
US blog network, new one to me, decent list of blogs and emerging sites, possibly one to watch

Blogo
Italian langauge blog network, good list of blogs with some great dot it domain names

Creative Weblogging
Got to admit I didn’t like this network at all when it first launched because the design was just awful and you had to scroll past the ads to read anything, they’ve recently give the network a makeover and I’m plesantly suprised: all of a sudden I’m taking these guys a lot more seriously

Mink Media
UK blog network

Ist network
again, another stupid oversite on my behalf, I’ve promised to never write another list on the fly again, great and well read network of news/ gossip blogs

Trudy W Schuett
Despite being a contributor here at the Blog Herald I missed Trudy off the list and I will be forever damned for it: Trudy is one of the few people I know who writes more blogs than I do, although she has the same issue as Darren Rowse, a network of blogs without a network name, but what better way to start a network than from a position of strength.

Revenews
Im only just adding Revenews because it technically is a network of blogs but they appear more as categories within one blog, but I think this is more a design issue than a technical one, plus I’m enjoying some of Jim Kukral’s work there lately as well

Seeking Alpha
Investing and financial blogs

Writers Write

Social Media Group

Digg it

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (by randfish - www.seomoz.org)

2007-09-17T15:56:00.000+03:00

A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optmization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).

Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etitquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowedging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occassional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bulllet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestable block of content.
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Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occassional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occassional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be offputting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.

p.s. Note to self - starting long blog entries at 11:30pm is not conducive to a good night's sleep. At least Angela got kicked off Project Runway tonight.

Promote Your Blog (from www.rss-specifications.com)

2007-09-17T15:53:00.000+03:00

Syndication is conceptually simple. It allows publishers to distribute content that can be displayed in another location or context. Using RSS, publishers are able to easily create and disseminate content feeds that include news headlines, blog summaries and related links. RSS is the defined syndication standard that has become mainstream. All types of information are now available in a syndicated format.

1. Blog Submissions / RSS Submissions
There are a number of blog directories and blog search engines where you can submit your blog. A large list of sites allowing blog submission and RSS feed submissions can be found in the left column at: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Similarly, there are RSS feed directories and search engines like http://www.rss-network.com . Be sure to submit the URL of your RSS feeds to the RSS search engines listed on the RSS specifications website.

If you wish to automate your blog and RSS submissions consider using Dummy Software's Blog and RSS Submit Software http://www.dummysoftware.com .

Like a website, its important to select the appropriate category for your blog. Use a clear title that contains descriptive details but is not excessively long. The Blog description should further expand on the purpose and general theme of the blog. Incorporate important keywords related to the blog's theme in both the title and description. This will help bring targeted traffic that is genuinely interested in the contents of the blog.

2. Post Press Releases to Online Resources
Write a press release announcing your blog to the world. Keep it factual and submit the release to the free press release directories. This will provide incoming links to the new blog and get it started on its way to popularity. There are a number that allow for press release posting free of charge. The releases on these sites are occasionally picked up by publications looking for information or filler content. Another side-benefit to these listings is increased link popularity, which helps with search engine ranking. A list of sites that allow for press release posting can be found under 'press release posting' . A number are available at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/pressreleases.html

3. Post Announcement on Usenet
A number of Usenet groups allow for posting of announcements or press releases. Most of the announce groups in Usenet contain 'ann.' in the domain address. If your blog is focused on a specific topic, search Usenet newsgroups. To locate topic-specific announce groups, consider searching http://www.newsguy.com to locate groups specific to related topics.

4. Post to Forums
Forums also contain sections in which you can post announcements. If the application is a niche product, consider searching for topic-specific forums in addition to the general software announce forums listed below. Be sure to post any announcements in the appropriately marked 'announce forum' . The following are related blog forums, some of which allow for posts.

Favorite Feeds - http://www.feedforall.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
Your Blog Announcements - http://www.forum4bloggers.com/viewforum.php?f=12
Got Blog - http://www.blogomania.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=7
Announce Software, Blogs or Relationships - http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5

5. Promote & Auto Detect Blog Feeds
It has become a standard that nearly all websites that have RSS feeds available use colorful graphics to indicate the presence of an RSS feed. The graphics were initially bright orange rectangles, but as the popularity has grown, webmasters have bent the rules a bit. NotePage has made a free online RSS graphic tool available that allows users to quickly customize buttons by selecting the text on the button and the color scheme of the button. Once the color and text is entered, a custom graphic is instantly created. Webmasters can easily match the style of the RSS button to a website's theme.

Graphics experience is not required. Simply select alternative colors and insert text to personalize RSS feed graphics. The RSS graphics tool can be used by clicking the following URL http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm or choose ready made graphics from: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-graphics.htm .

Include information in the HTML code of a website so that RSS Readers automatically detect that an RSS feed exists for the material contained on the site. Aggregators will automatically detect RSS on a website if you add a small bit of code in the header field of an HTML page.

After publishing an RSS feed it is important to let visitors know that the feed exists. Aggregators will automatically detect RSS on a website if you add a small bit of code in the header field of an HTML page. [link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml"]

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with the URL to the RSS feed and replace the brackets with "<" (less than) and ">" (greater than) symbols.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.

10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog (from www.conversionrater.com)

2007-09-17T15:50:00.000+03:00

I’m co-leading a discussion session at Wordcamp about Monetizing Blogs, so I thought I’d also touch on it here with a post about 10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog.

First, I should preface this discussion by saying you first need to seriously evaluate whether you want to work at monetizing your blog. Steve Pavlina has a very thorough post that goes over what’s necessary to really do this well, and why the majority of people who try end up not generating significant income.

Second, you have to make sure that making money from your blog directly is your goal. For example, for this blog direct income isn’t my goal. I didn’t have ads at all untli recently, and the only reason I added them was to use the ad network management application I’ve been working on called RMX Direct. It’s quite possible that your blogging goals may just to network, write about something you’re interested in, or serve some business purpose that isn’t direct income generation.

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.

all about RSS (from www.rss-specifications.com)

2007-09-17T14:53:00.000+03:00

1. What is RSS?

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines and descriptions of specific information. While the majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are broad.

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. Using this standard, webmasters provide headlines and fresh content in a succinct manner. Meanwhile, consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content viewed in the RSS reader or news aggregator is place known as an RSS feed.

RSS is becoming increasing popular. The reason is fairly simple. RSS is a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships.

2. Create an RSS Feed

RSS feeds are created in XML. Feeds can be created using tags that are enclosed in brackets <> very similar to HTML.

Software to Create Feeds
If you are not as confident and would like software to create the feed we strongly recommend FeedForAll an extremely easy to use feed creation tool that allows webmasters to create, edit and publish rss feeds.

If you want to create an RSS feed using a text editor a step by step walk-through at Make RSS Feeds will help.

Online Feed Creation Tools
If you just wish to create a single feed and do not need to edit or update the feed you can use an online feed creation tool.

GoArticles - Syndicate articles appearing on GoArticles a large article repository.

BlogStreet - online feed creation tool, only works for blogs hosted on BlogStreet

Online RSS Feeds - Online feed creation tool

Blog Harbor - online java script blog generator

Create RSS - resource for creating RSS feeds

UncleFeed - RssFeed editor

I recommend FeedPublish.com for RSS feed creation

3. Submit Blogs and Blog RSS Feeds

Blog Digger - submit your rss feed for your blog

ReadABlog - submit your blog

Blogarama - submit your blog

BlogStreet - blog submissions

Globe of Blogs - submit your rss feed for you blog

Kmax Blog Links - blog submission

BlogDex - submit your blog

Blog Universe - blog submission

BlogSearchEngine - submit rss feeds for web logs

BlogHop - submit feeds for blogs

BlogWise - rss feed submission for blogs

EatonWeb - submit feed for online blogs

PopDex - feed sumbission for web blogs

Blizg - submit rss feeds for web logs

Blo.gs - blog submissions

BlogCensus - submit your rss feed for your blog

BlogTree - blog submission

BlogStreet - rss feed submission for blog

BritBlog - blog submission

BlogLines - submit your blog to the directory

Bloogz - submit your blog

Australian Blog Directory - submit your blog

BoingBoing - submit blogs for review

RootBlog - enter the URL of a RSS feed you want to added to the database.

Weblog Directory - submit blog to directory

BlogoSphere EcoSystems - add your weblog

Blogz - add your blog

BlogWatcher - submit the url of your web log

BlogMatcher - submit your blog url

BlogPulse - automated trend discovery system for blogs

BlogCatalog - The Ultimate Blog Directory - Search For Blogs

Blogdir - spanish blog community

Blogs R Us - add feed

Blogs By City - add your blog!

FeedMap - submit a blog!

BlogSearch - submit blogs

PubSub - blog feed submission.

BlogSweet - blog feed submission.

BlogFlux - blog feed submission.

Blogtastic - blog feed submission.

Blog Introduction - submit blogs.

Finding Blog - blog submissions

Bulletize - blog submissions

BlogTopSites - blog submissions

Blog Fuse- blog submissions

Blogion- blog submissions

AddUrlBlog- add blogs

Blogbib- add blogs

BOTW Blog- add blogs

Blog Directory Submit- add blogs

BlogTopSites- add blogs (they will provide required code that must be inserted in your website, in order for blogtopsites to rank your blog)

iBlogBusiness - add business blogs only

BlogSiteZone - manually add blogs to directory.

BlogTopList - adds blogs to directories.

BlogBurst - adds blogs to directories.

Podcast Submissions

Podcasting Station - submit podcasts

Podcast Submission Directory - submit podcasts

all about BlogRush (from doshdosh.com)

2007-09-17T14:40:00.000+03:00

John Reese, a renowned internet marketer, recently launched BlogRush, a content syndication network that claims to be capable of sending free, targeted traffic to your blog.

How is this possible? Through the placement of a simple blog widget on your blog and the blogs of others. The widget will then display the headlines of your latest posts, which are pulled from your feed.

Apparently, Blogrush was only launched yesterday and at the time of writing this article, I have not yet obtained any statistics ever since I placed the widget on my site 12 hours ago. More data and use of the widget will allow for greater analysis but for now here’s a review and introduction to BlogRush.

Introducing BlogRush: How Does it Work?

Understanding how BlogRush works isn’t difficult, although it can be a little confusing initially. Blogrush utilizes a viral concept which operates via a pyramid-style, multi level structure. This simply means that you get more traffic when you refer more people (who in turn refer others) to sign up and use Blogrush.

I would recommend taking a look at BlogRush’s video introduction on the home page to get an good feel of how their network functions. For those of you, who would prefer to read, here’s how Blogrush works:

Sign up for a free account and register your blog by submitting your blog feed and picking a category. Place the widget on your blog and 5 links to other relevant blogs will show up within the widget (see my sidebar for an example).
Earn one credit whenever a page on your blog loads: this means that your latest post will be shown 1 time on other blogs with the widget. For example if your blog has 100 pageviews, your latest post will be displayed 100 times within the widgets on other blogs.
Refer others to sign up and install the widget. The number of pageviews your referee gets will be added to the number of times your blog titles will be shown within other blog widgets. For example, Tom signs up under your referral link and his blog has 500 page views.
This means that your blog title will be shown 500 times on blogs within your category, in addition to the number of views you are already getting for displaying the widget on your own site. This goes on for 10 referral levels.

How Much Traffic Will I Get from BlogRush?

Given that Blogrush has only launched yesterday, the amount of traffic you get is currently unknown. I assume it has to do with certain variables, such as the amount of traffic your blog has, your referrals, the actual click through rate, the placement of the widget on other sites as well as the category of your website.

BlogRush is open to blogs of various niches, ranging from categories such as entertainment, technology, health or sports. Do however note that BlogRush is only available for english-language blogs with non-adult content.

Their pyramid referral scheme means that first movers and early birds will get an advantage. Supposedly, the more users you refer, the more traffic you get. Then again, this depends on your referrals’ traffic levels and the widget’s algorithm.

Trying Out BlogRush for Your Own Site

I’m really not a fan of blog widgets. There’s a lot of hype about BlogRush at the moment and I am personally doubtful that it’ll actually generate traffic that’s worth the real estate on my blog. Why? Because the click through rate may not be fantastic as it will also depend on where the widget is placed on other blogs.

However, Blog Rush has only launched recently and I do think it deserves a little experimentation before one can gauge if its worth your time. I may run the Blogrush widget a little longer to test the traffic levels. It will undoubtedly be removed if I seem to only send out traffic and not receive any in return.

A lack of data prevents me from fully recommending Blogrush; I cannot guarantee that you’ll get lots of traffic for your site. It is however cost-free and if you are really interested in testing it on your own blog, you can do so by registering here.

** Referral links were included in this review.

5 Secrets of the Most Successful Blogs (from http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com)

2007-09-16T13:40:00.000+03:00

Blogs are becoming more and more popular. If you don’t already have a weblog of your own, you’ve at least posted a comment to one, read one, or heard the term used in everyday conversation.

You may also have noticed that only a small number of blogs are truly known in each industry. As is true with most major media, “the cream rises to the top”. The best weblogs have a large following and are valuable sources of information for thousands of readers. There are five primary reasons why some blogs become popular and others don’t:

1. Focusing on a Popular Content Area. One of the most important characteristics of a successful blog is appropriate content. In order to gain a large following your blog must cover a topical area that is broad enough to be of interest to a large number of individuals but specific enough to have meaning.

Weblogs that provide information on obscure topics can never have a sizeable audience because the topic is of limited interest. So, if you’re going to start a blog of your own, make sure that your content area is broad enough to appeal to a large audience.

2. Content that’s timely. The best way to keep your blog readers interested is with timely content. Your blog should cover current events, opinions, and topics. Popular weblogs often comment on current events tied to their particular subject area or industry. Not only is the content meaningful to blog readers, but it encourages them to interact with your blog posts by placing comments.

Timely content is anything that is of current interest. Your best sources for timely content include daily newspapers, magazines, Internet news sites, and industry journals. Be sure to choose timely content that can be discussed and debated. This improves the overall effectiveness of your blog posts.

3. Updated Daily. The blogs that attract the most readers are those addressing popular content areas, covering timely topics, and refreshed on a daily basis. If your weblog adds a new post everyday, then readers have a reason to return. Providing daily updates on a consistent basis helps users to develop the habit of visiting daily. Updated content builds a loyal following while encouraging word-of-mouth referrals about your posts.

4. Comments from Industry Experts. Nothing speaks with more authority than an interview with an expert. The most popular blogs integrate interviews, commentary, podcasts, and other posts that include an expert who offers their thoughts and opinions on a given topic or current event. This is an essential reason why so many people return to the most popular blogs over and over again.

If you’re wondering how to recruit experts for your blog, than look to current best practices for blogging and Internet marketing… simply ask. Industry experts are always looking to share their ideas. If you can’t arrange for an in-person or phone interview, email the expert a list of questions and ask for their responses.

5. Use Interactive Media and Visuals. It’s difficult for blog readers to read flat, boring text day in and day out – regardless of how stimulating a topic may be. The most popular bloggers know this and have enhanced their blogs with audio, video, external links, screenshots, and more.

The best way to improve the overall popularity of your blog is to present blog content in a variety of formats. Visit other blogs and determine what type of interactivity would work best for your blog. You don’t need to go overboard, just add interactive content where it makes sense to do so.

By following the lead of today’s most popular blogs, your blog can thrive. Follow the blog secrets listed above for enhancing your blog and improving readership. The key is to plan your blogging activities carefully and encourage interaction with your readers. This enhances the overall effectiveness of your blog and makes for a truly great blogging experience for everyone. Happy Blogging!

About the Author:

Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert and the president of www.MarketingScoop.com. He has more than 12 years of marketing experience and has appeared on The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Visit his marketing blog directory for further details.

Find a Sponsor for Your Blog (by www.problogger.net)

2007-09-15T12:50:00.001+03:00

A great opportunity to monetize your blog is to go on a hunt for a sponsor

You might not think that your blog is big enough to find sponsors (and you might be right) but even if you’re unsuccessful in finding one you will hopefully learn a thing or two about finding sponsors and might even start a relationship that could be fruitful at some point in the future.

Getting a sponsor for your blog (or selling an advertising spot directly without relying upon an ad network like AdSense) is a great thing for numerous reasons - not the least of which is that you cut out the middleman and don’t have to share the revenue with a company like Google!

It’s not always easy to land a sponsor - but it’s a skill that bloggers wanting to make money from their blogs should learn - even in the early days.

A few tips for finding a sponsor:

1. Before you go out and start asking companies to sponsor your blog read these two posts - Finding Advertisers for your Blog and 10 Ways to make your Blog more Attractive to Advertisers. A big part of finding an advertiser is to get your blog in order first and to be prepared for what they might ask you.

2. If you have a smaller blog and haven’t had a sponsor before don’t aim for the stars straight away. It might be worth starting out by approaching smaller retailers, websites or companies in your niche and see if they’d be interested in some sort of partnership rather than aiming for the very biggest ones right up front. I did this a couple of months after starting my first digital camera blog and emailed 10 online digital camera sites to see if they’d be interested in advertising. 3 of the 10 bought small ads on my site (I think it was for something around $15-$25 a month). It wasn’t a lot of cash (and I didn’t have a lot of traffic to send to them) but I learned so much and made a little money in the process.

3. Target Potential Advertiser Carefully - before you start approaching potential sponsors think carefully about your blog and the topic that you write about and about who might want to reach your readers. Brainstorm a list of companies and websites that might fit the bill.

4. Wondering who to approach? Why not check out who is advertising on other websites and blogs in your niche. Quite often they’ll also be open to running a similar campaign with you.

5. If a sponsor isn’t sure whether to go with you or not - give them a discounted or free trial. I’ve done this a number of times and found it beneficial on three levels:

It gives the sponsor a taste of what your blog can offer
It can help get your readers used to the idea of advertising on your blog
I’ve found that having one advertiser (even if it’s a free one) can actually attract other advertisers (or at least make selling sponsorships easier)
You’ll learn a lot by getting the ad up, finding out how it converts and at a discounted rate you’ll even earn a few dollars

6. Find an Angle and Sell it - don’t just email a potential sponsor asking if they want to advertise with you - sell yourself. If your blog has a loyal community of core readers then sell this, if you get a lot of search engine traffic for certain keywords that the advertiser would want to have, sell it to them on this, if you have an audience who is researching to make purchases - this is a key selling point and if you’ve never had an advertiser before on your blog - turn this into a selling point. You need to give a potential sponsor or advertiser a reason to align their brand with yours.

7. If you can’t attract anyone - run a campaign of your own. Pick a part of your blog that you want to drive traffic to (perhaps a post, or a category, or a subscribe page) and develop a button or banner ads to drive traffic to it. I’m doing this here at the moment in the 468 x 60 banner position here at ProBlogger at the moment (there’s a number of different campaigns running there including some internal ones). The beauty of this is that you can test your conversion rates on different positions. Run a heat map test and you’ll learn a lot.

8. If you do manage to sign up a sponsor give sponsors as much value as possible. Do everything you can to over deliver on the campaign. Announce the sponsorship on the blog with a post, mention it any other newsletters or lists that you have, position it high on the page, consider throwing in a bonus text link in another part of your blog etc. The more traffic you can deliver to your sponsor the more chance of getting them to renew.

Adsense Secrets: Getting More Clicks on Your Ads (by http://google-earn-money.blogspot.com)

2007-09-12T01:22:00.001+03:00

More CTR (Click Thru Ratio) means more clicks on your Google Ads. But, is CTR all about position and colors of your ads? No! It's a lot more than that. CTR also depends upon the quality of traffic, relevancy of ads, and even the subject of your website. Let's get in detail:

Do you own a High CTR website?

Yes! CTR varies from Industry to industry too. It depends upon the keywords you are using to make your web page. It has been observed that more technical the topic is (but not necessarily) less CTR it will give you (for example Search Engine Optimization, Affiliate Network - exceptions are always there), but still works if the Ad content is well written.

However, this is only one condition; there are many undiscovered conditions that affect the CTR of keywords. At times, a particular season also has an effect on the performance of keywords. For example family of 'Turkey recipe' keyword is more active around November and December only and a quite sluggish rest of the year. It becomes really necessary to study the behavior of keywords before starting a massive website of Adsense around a topic.

Your Ad Position and Color: Old, but very effective

Google heat map helps improve the CTR (Clicks Thru Ratio) of your website by suggesting you the most converting areas for your Adsense Ads. You can have a glance at the Google's Survey that illustrates the ideal placements of ads on your web page.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html#17954

https://www.google.com/support/adsense
/bin/static.py?page=tips.html#17954

Darker the area, better will be the performance of your ads. Your visitor tends to click on these darker areas more often than the other areas of the web page. Ads placed near rich content usually do well because users are focused on those areas of your web page. For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the concluding part of high quality content tend to perform well, as the visitors are left with no other choice except clicking the Ad block.

Get Targeted Traffic - The Most Essential Part

Traffic that is interested in your content (also called targeted traffic) is interested in your ads too. Thus, there is every likelihood that your ads will be clicked more frequently. Targeted traffic means more CTR, more earnings, and enhanced ad convertibility. On the other hand, the untargeted visitors are not interested either in your content or your ads, so keep your website's traffic targeted.

You can gather highly targeted traffic for your website by web promotion strategy and effective optimization of your web page structure. Effective web promotion strategy requires an appropriate Anchor text and more back links from relevant websites. And, to develop an effective web page structure, you have to optimize your Title Text, internal linking of your website, and most importantly your web content, in the best possible manner.

Choose the Right Anchor Text for Back Link Campaigns

Choosing the right anchor text for back links promotes your website to the traffic you exactly need from the search engines. Choose the Anchor text that directly speaks to your visitors and pulls the traffic that your web page requires. Targeted traffic results in increased CTR of ads. It helps promote your website to that segment of traffic, which is precisely searching for your content (or you can say the traffic that is most profitable to you). Targeting irrelevant keyword reduces your CTR by gathering the traffic which is not interested in your content or ads.

Wisely Choose the Title Text of Your Web Page

Title text of your webpage appears in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) as the Title link to your web page. Therefore, it is the title Text that directly speaks to the surfer on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) about your content's theme. It acts like a Free Advertisement Link to your website. If your title text does not interest the surfer, you lose considerable amount of much-needed traffic. Figure out a Title text that directly communicates with your potential visitors, brings targeted traffic, and enhances the CTR of your AdSense Ads. Don't overdo your title text, and use less than ten keywords in your title text.

Help Google Detect the Theme of Your Web Page

There are many on-page and off-page elements that affect your ad relevancy. Better targeted ads increase both your CTR and EPC. Here is how to optimize your ads:

Meta Tags

If there is NO CONTENT on your web page, the Google Mediabot will consider the Meta Tags while displaying ads. Meta tags have a considerable affect on the relevancy of your ads. It is advised never to leave this space empty. Also, try to make it as easy as possible for Mediabot to understand the theme of your web page.

Title Text

Google Mediabot gives good weightage to the keywords used in the Title text, which in turn gets reflected in your ads. Choose effective keywords for your Title text. Even the order of words in a keyword can affect the ads that are appearing on your web page. So, choose your keywords wisely.

Headings

Google Mediabot gives importance to the Heading text enclosed in

Boost Relevancy Artificially - Use Google's Section Targeting

Now, you can enhance Ad relevancy by using Google's Section targeting. Using this technique you can advise Google mediabot about the areas of your content which should be considered or ignored while matching the Ads with your content.

For more information on the same topic, visit:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168&topic=371

For more information on the same topic, visit:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense
/bin/answer.py?answer=23168&topic=371

Use Channels for Analyzing Your Ads' Performance

Try to relate your traffic logs with your CTR stats. You will get to know which Traffic source is giving you what CTR. This will help you recognize the traffic segment which is most converting for your website. Channels allow you to analyze your ads' performance, so that you can pin point the changes that your website needs to boost your AdSense income. There are two types of channels available - URL Channels and Custom Channels. You can use the URL channel to track your performance, without modifying your Ad code. Through URL channels, you can analyze the performance of individual page or a group of pages, based on the directory system of your website.

Custom channels can help you measure the performance of different Ad formats presented in your web pages. And, by pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track CTR, Impressions, number of clicks each individual ad format is generating, and compare its performance with other web pages.

Block Junk Websites and Competitor Websites from Showing Ads

There are many junk websites that might be displaying ads on your website. These websites steal the traffic from your website and recycle it on their own Adsense ad blocks. Recognize such websites and stick them in Adsense Competitive Ad filter. Also, you can block your competitor websites using this competitive filter.

This trick can sometimes double or triple your Adsense income, augment user experience, and makes look your Google ads more genuine. For more information about this tool, visit:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=21593&ctx=sibling

This trick can sometimes double or triple your Adsense income, augment user experience, and makes look your Google ads more genuine. For more information about this tool, visit:

https://www.google.com/support/adsense
/bin/answer.py?answer=21593&ctx=sibling

Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines - The Top 5 Tips (by www.searchengineguide.com)

2007-09-10T12:24:00.001+03:00

Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this - they naturally attract search engine traffic.

Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages.

They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.

If you haven't already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good's Top 55 list at MasterNewMedia.org.

But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.

These are my top five tips for lucrative blog search engine optimization.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic.

Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a "lucrative keyword".

Whatever you call them, here's the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

You may be surprised to learn that there isn't always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries.

The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

It isn't just the four word phrases that get converting traffic - there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales.

Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.

As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you'll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #2: Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme.

You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #3: Timely Posting

Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn't been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update or ping just once during one of three sweet spots in the day. Here's one that you can use today.

Check your web site statistics. If you're getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the date of your last spider visit was.

An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update. (This is a little harder to explain, as I've mentioned, but I have a resource that explains this process in-depth at my site.)

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Get Linked

Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good's guide can get you some great one way links.

If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.

Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.

For example, my main site gets spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster.

Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.

You'll be happy to know that you don't have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.

Bottom line: A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog (by ezinearticles.com)

2007-09-10T12:22:00.000+03:00

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

15 Best Tips for Success with Blogads Advertisers (www.quickonlinetips.com)

2007-09-07T14:09:00.001+03:00

The biggest advantage of Blogads is that these are huge ads and give premium advertising space which really showcase a site well with a right mix of images and text. Blogads are heavily targeted on celebrity and political sites, yet some modifications to templates and pricing probably should help you get more advertisers for your site. Below are top tips to sell more Blogads from your site.

Best Blogads tips and tricks

1. Sell Premium Ad Space- Blogads advertisers like to really show their ads well and are most willing to buy the most visible space on your site. So place the Blogads code on top of your blog and above the fold.

2. Blogads Compatible Templates - There is too much content to keep on top above the fold. Choose a template that keeps your blogs top content and the Blogads both on top. I switched from 2 column to 3 column wordpress template so that I could get the Blogads code on the top of the sidebar while keeping my search box and feed icons on top too.

3. Blend Ads - Just like you blend your Google Adsense ads, blend the Blogads into your template so that the advertiser gets those clicks they need. On the other hand, depending on your template, you can contrast them with your content if that works better. The control panel allows you to easily customize the CSS to blend these ads.

4. Join Hives - Advertisers often target a group of publishers by purchasing ads from a hive. A hive is a group of related sites publishing similar content. You decide which hives you want to join, email Blogads, and they send you the hive leaders email address. Membership in Hives is at the sole discretion of the hive administrator, the blogger who manages the network.

5. Rotate Ads - When you accept ads to run live, give them all an equal chance to hit the top of your premium advertising space by rotation. Select “any” position to easily rotate multiple blogads on your site.

6. Competitive Ad Pricing - How much should you charge for Blogads? All publishers in their marketplace can easily be visualized by traffic and category. See the advertising rates for different ad specifications in sites with similar niche and traffic and adjust your prices similarly. The official recommendation is

“Price hi-rise at 4 times your standard prices and minis at half your standard. Price classifieds at 10% of your standard prices. Alternately, price hi-rise at $4 per thousand impressions, standard at $.80 per CPM, mini at $.40 cent CPM and classifieds at $.10 CPMs.”

7. Start Cheap - Its a good idea to start with lower ad pricing which will get you advertisers quickly and then you can gradually increase your rates. The marketplace displays the number of running ads on the publisher sites. If your site is running 2 blogads, it will attract more advertisers that a site which hosts no ads.

8. Earn affiliate referrals income- Blogads often gives its popular publishers some Blogads invites to let other members join the network. Try to pass on these invites to popular bloggers who earn lots of money from Blogads and you get a referral commission. You will earn 5% of the ad revenue sold by bloggers you sponsored.

9. Great Adstrip name- While browsing through the Blogads marketplace, attract the advertiser by choosing a crisp name for your adstrip. Use terms like “Premium”, “Above the fold” or “Top of Sidebar” to quickly convey where your ads are located. Let them check out your site.

10. Free Blogads - You might decide to giveaway free Blogads for a week to select advertisers, contest winners etc. by a special code which lets them set up ads for free. Create an Offer code to allow friends to by-pass PayPal and order a free ad on your blog.

11. Custom Blogads - Got no advertisers? Create your own ads and fill up the space. Its hints advertisers that they too can buy that premium online space. Use the “create ad w/ offer code” link.

12. Blogads Sale - Drop your prices for a week, 2 weeks, or maybe a month and see advertisers queue up to fill your blog space in a day!

13. Pitching your Blog - Create a great adstrip pitch to highlight your blog features. Let advertisers know your pagerank, number of page views and blogads position on one page easily.

14. Multiple Blogads Units - You can create 2 different sets of Blogads codes. Create a Premium space and a Standard Space. Premium Advertisers stay on top, may not rotate and are charged higher. Standard or cheap ads may be charged lower and be placed at bottom of sidebars etc. If you get lots of Blogads, this might work for you.

15. Enable Multiple Ad Types - Blogads allows multiple ad specifications ranging from

Hi-rise - Image size is maximum 150×600 pixels, 35kb jpeg/gif file size or 70kb flash file size plus 300 characters of text
Standard - Image size is maximum 150×200 pixels, 16kb jpeg/gif file size or 32kb flash file size plus 300 characters of text
Mini - Image size is maximum 150×100 pixels, 5kb jpeg/gif file size or 10kb flash file size plus 100 characters of text
Classified - A maximum of 500 characters of text and no edits after the ad has been submitted

Enable them all so that you can target a broad range of advertisers with each ad type. I might like the Standard type ad, while you might be interested in the High rise. Enable Flash ads for even more options.

Blogads is often the most popular income source for high traffic blogs. I hope these Blogads tips and tricks will help you increase your blogads advertisers and help you succeed with Blogads, while earning more money too. Buy Blogads on our site.

Need a Blogads sponsor? I have Blogads invites to giveaway to top bloggers.

10 Best Wordpress Plugins for Google Adsense (by www.quickonlinetips.com)

2007-09-07T14:06:00.000+03:00

Google Adsense has become the most popular online contextual advertising program. Wordpress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpress using plugins. Listed below are 10 best Adsense plugins which help you work smarter with wordpress.

Adsense Deluxe - offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Adsense Deluxe+ claims to have a an improved ad limiting algorithm.
Adsense Injection - inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog.
Adsense Inline - inserts Google adsense in blog posts
Adsense Beautifier - makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings.
AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar - Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
MightyAdsense - allows you to host the code in wordpress without having to modify the templates. Ads are displayed in post item and you can specify how many blocks its going to show up in a page.
AdRotator Wordpress Plugin - rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
Adsense Earnings Wordpress Plugin - displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
WP-AdsenseProfit - shows your profit from the adsense program to the public by adding a simple call to the function in your template.
AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System - allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
Author Adsense Wordpress Plugin - allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.

Promote Your Blog (by http://tools.devshed.com)

2007-09-05T15:04:00.000+03:00

Well, you've joined the others and have created a blog. It is time to tell the world about your online journal.Most blog services generate an RSS feed. If your blogging software does not create an RSS feed, consider using software like FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com to create an RSS feed. Like blogs, RSS is growing in popularity and is a great way to spread the word about a new blog.

Syndication is conceptually simple. It allows publishers to distribute content that can be displayed in another location or context. Using RSS, publishers are able to easily create and disseminate content feeds that include news headlines, blog summaries and related links. RSS is the defined syndication standard that has become mainstream. All types of information are now available in a syndicated format.

1. Blog Submissions / RSS Submissions
There are a number of blog directories and blog search engines where you can submit your blog. A large list of sites allowing blog submission and RSS feed submissions can be found in the left column at: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

Similarly, there are RSS feed directories and search engines like http://www.rss-network.com . Be sure to submit the URL of your RSS feeds to the RSS search engines listed on the RSS specifications website.

If you wish to automate your blog and RSS submissions consider using Dummy Software's Blog and RSS Submit Software http://www.dummysoftware.com.
Like a website, its important to select the appropriate category for your blog. Use a clear title that contains descriptive details but is not excessively long. The Blog description should further expand on the purpose and general theme of the blog. Incorporate important keywords related to the blog's theme in both the title and description. This will help bring targeted traffic that is genuinely interested in the contents of the blog.

2. Post Press Releases to Online Resources
Write a press release announcing your blog to the world. Keep it factual and submit the release to the free press release directories. This will provide incoming links to the new blog and get it started on its way to popularity. There are a number that allow for press release posting free of charge. The releases on these sites are occasionally picked up by publications looking for information or filler content. Another side-benefit to these listings is increased link popularity, which helps with search engine ranking. A list of sites that allow for press release posting can be found under 'press release posting' . A number are available at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/pressreleases.html

3. Post Announcement on Usenet
A number of Usenet groups allow for posting of announcements or press releases. Most of the announce groups in Usenet contain 'ann.' in the domain address. If your blog is focused on a specific topic, search Usenet newsgroups. To locate topic-specific announce groups, consider searching http://www.newsguy.com to locate groups specific to related topics.

4. Post to Forums
Forums also contain sections in which you can post announcements. If the application is a niche product, consider searching for topic-specific forums in addition to the general software announce forums listed below. Be sure to post any announcements in the appropriately marked 'announce forum' . The following are related blog forums, some of which allow for posts.

Favorite Feeds - http://www.feedforall.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
Your Blog Announcements - http://www.forum4bloggers.com/viewforum.php?f=12
Got Blog - http://www.blogomania.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=7
Announce Software, Blogs or Relationships - http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5

5. Promote & Auto Detect Blog Feeds
It has become a standard that nearly all websites that have RSS feeds available use colorful graphics to indicate the presence of an RSS feed. The graphics were initially bright orange rectangles, but as the popularity has grown, webmasters have bent the rules a bit. NotePage has made a free online RSS graphic tool available that allows users to quickly customize buttons by selecting the text on the button and the color scheme of the button. Once the color and text is entered, a custom graphic is instantly created. Webmasters can easily match the style of the RSS button to a website's theme.

Graphics experience is not required. Simply select alternative colors and insert text to personalize RSS feed graphics. The RSS graphics tool can be used by clicking the following URL http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm or choose ready made graphics from: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-graphics.htm .

Include information in the HTML code of a website so that RSS Readers automatically detect that an RSS feed exists for the material contained on the site. Aggregators will automatically detect RSS on a website if you add a small bit of code in the header field of an HTML page.

After publishing an RSS feed it is important to let visitors know that the feed exists. Aggregators will automatically detect RSS on a website if you add a small bit of code in the header field of an HTML page. [link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml"]

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with the URL to the RSS feed and replace the brackets with "<" (less than) and ">" (greater than) symbols.

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for making, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a SMS and text messaging software company.

15 popular web advertising that Violate Google Adsense TOS (by www.quickonlinetips.com)

2007-09-05T12:06:00.000+03:00

Google Adsense program is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Bonus:
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral.

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. - Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. More.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

You want my company to start blogging? How do I make money off that?(by Mack Collier)

2007-09-02T17:35:00.000+03:00

Do I think that the same person/title in every organization should be blogging? No. Do I think every organization should encourage their employees to blog? Yes.

The problem is, when a company is presented with blogging, their first question usually is 'yes, but how do you MAKE MONEY off that?'. Until you can quantify the process and show CEOs a figure on a balance sheet that says 'last quarter we had X number of dollars in increased sales for every blog post', then most companies don't see the need for blogging.

That's not how blogging works. It works by letting companies and their customers BETTER UNDERSTAND each other. Blogging can also change a company's entire culture. Just the other day I ran across a blogger from Sweden who was 'outted' as a blogger by a member of the company's marketing department. Since that time, the entire marketing department has started turning to her to teach them about blogging and social media, and now they are trying to get the company's CEO to start blogging. A few days ago no one in the company was publically blogging, now the entire marketing department is getting into this space.

The point is, as Hugh MacLeod once said, that blogging makes things happen indirectly. Start blogging and you start talking to your customers. They start talking back. You start to better understand them, they start to better understand you. They realize that you are listening to them, you realize that they just want to be heard. Their expectations of you begin to change to meet your limitations, your processes begin to change to better meet their wants and needs.

End result? Sales increase. Costs go down. Customer satisfaction and service goes up. All this happens indirectly.

The Catch-22 is that companies truly can't see the benefits of blogging until they start, and many don't want to start until they KNOW they can make money off it.

Again, this is why I said yesterday that the stimulus for companies to embrace blogging has to come from the inside, not from the outside. Sure, in a few years every company may understand exactly why they need to blog, but for now, unless there are bloggers working for a company and passionately spreading the word internally, then they have no clue other than to ask the 'How do we make money off that?' question.

Making Money From Your Blog (by blog.zoundry.com)

2007-08-30T21:13:00.000+03:00

I'm starting to notice more blogs that cover ways to make money from a blog. One of the best I've seen is ProBlogger, which has a wide collection of articles on affiliate marketing, Google AdSense, and other money-making programs for bloggers.

It makes sense given the growing popularity of blogging. Not every blogger wants to earn a living from blogging (though a few lucky ones do), but many want to cover their hosting costs and make a little side money. There are generally two ways to make money from your blog - advertising and affiliate marketing. Both have their pros and cons.

Advertising can be easier if you know how to put ad code into the HTML of your blog. With a pay-per-click program like AdSense, Google automatically places ads it deems relevant to the content of your blog. You make money when people click through the ads. The downside is that you need to drive a lot of traffic to your blog in order to make any real money. And it helps if your content is related to high-value keywords in demand by advertisers.

Affiliate marketing requires a little more work in that you have to place links to merchants, but it can result in more money for lower-traffic blogs. Instead of being paid for clicks in the advertising model, an affiliate earns a commission on referred purchases. If you write just for your friends and family, you can probably make more money if you ask them to purchase through affiliate links in your blog than click on ads.

I'm biased because Zoundry is an enabler of affiliate marketing for bloggers, but you should try both and see what works best for you (or use both.) One last plug for the affiliate route: If you decide to syndicate your posts through an RSS feed, then affiliate links allow readers to purchase directly from your feed instead of having to go back to your blog and click on an ad. This will be increasingly important as more people use RSS aggregators like My Yahoo! or Bloglines, to read blogs and news.

How to advertise your web site (by Steve White - Addme.com)

2007-08-30T16:21:00.000+03:00

Advertising your onsite business is still critically important to many budding Internet entrepreneurs and marketers. I have avoided discussing it to date because I don't consider myself an expert and because the Internet is full of newsletters, articles and Spam email on how to advertise your site. Even so I have done my fair share of advertising from trade shows, magazines, ad agencies, banner ads and cold call telemarketing.

My first suggestion is to try to get someone that enjoys sales and marketing involved with your operation. Many entrepreneurs are specialists in a particular field. They are great designers, software developers, wine merchants etc., but not necessarily good promoters. If you don't enjoy it not only will you likely be bad at it, but you will also waste a lot of the time you could otherwise devote to the things that you are good at.

Whether finding sales and marketing help is possible or not, it is still important to have a good grasp of what is going on. Advertising can often be the single biggest expense you have. You need to know where the money is going.

So where should you advertise and how much should you spend? The answer; spend just enough in as many places as necessary.

It is a flippant answer but probably correct. I of course don't know anything about your business and I don't know how much you have. More significantly, getting this just right is the reason some people are multi-billionaires and most of us are not.

Even so, I can offer a few practical insights.

First, try to identify your customers. Who are they, where are they and what are they interested in. This of course is a huge topic that entire industries are devoted to answering. Assuming you know (which you need to do), then you want to target this group as closely as possible. Every ad that is seen by someone outside of this target audience is a waste of your money.

Here are some Traditional Options:

Trade Shows: Usually a very targeted but relatively small audience. Not everyone at Comdex is likely to walk past your 10x10 booth. Trade shows can be very expensive costing anywhere from a minimum of a few thousand dollars to well into the hundred's of thousands of dollars. Because of the relatively small but highly target audience, a trade show is usually a better place to make strategic alliances than sales. Some Flee Market type shows are the exception. In any case, they will demand a significant amount of your time.

Trade Magazines: Also usually caters to a highly targeted national audience. Prices again vary from a few hundred dollars to $40-$100,000+ depending on the circulation, size of the ad, ad location etc. Expect to spend a few thousand dollars to get something worthwhile. Using magazine advertising is easily overlooked but can be very affective for the right products.

Newspaper Ads: A non-targeted local audience. Prices again vary depending on the size and location of the ad but you can again expect to spend a few thousand dollars for something with a presence. Because of the local, non-targeted audience, newspaper ads are better used by local "bricks and mortar" operations than by cyber space only businesses.

Radio: Is similar in its coverage to local newspapers. Prices again vary depending on the audience size and the time of day. Radio has become popular with many ".COM" advertisers recently but I suspect it will pass. You had better have a good URL that is very easy to remember.

TV: Is very expensive, not only for the time spot but for the cost of the video. For a few hundred dollars I suppose you could always use your home Camcorder to shoot your mother and daughter for a 3am spot on a small station. TV is better left to multinational corporations looking for product or corporate branding.

Ad Agency: Will create and coordinate your advertising campaign, buy advertising slots and do all kinds of other wonderful things for you. Until recently you could get their interest for a little under a $100,000. With all the money being spent by Internet IPO financed companies it is a lot harder to hire their services these days. Once the IPO money is gone it will probably return to normal; which is still far too expensive for most of us.

Internet Banner Ads. Should be the obvious choice for most Internet companies. Their glamour was severely reduced when they failed to live up to their expectations. They are now so pervasive on Web Sites that they are easily ignored. The trouble appears to be that there are far too many web sites hoping to sell them and not enough that want to use them. This however can present a significant opportunity. When the supply is high and the demand is low, prices come down. Advertised prices seem to be all over the place but my guess is that there is a lot of room for negotiation. Expect to pay about $1000 to start but negotiate the number of clicks or impressions.

Opt-In Newsletters: Such as those seen in this newsletter have gained in popularity as banner ads have diminished. Newsletters can either be very targeted or general. None target newsletter ads are selling for $4-$8 per 1000 subscribers. Targeted newsletters are selling from $5-$15 dollars per 1000. Most newsletters charge a flat fee but some will accept clicks similar to banner ads. Prices start at under $100.

Non Opt-In Newsletters: Better known as Spam just don't seem to want to go away. They consequently must appear to be effective for someone. Because of their nature however, it does not need many Spam Advertisers to flood our email boxes. I suspect that they are most popular with failing businesses desperate to try anything.

Non Opt-In Newsletters (By Biz Stone)

2007-08-29T10:40:00.000+03:00

In chess, promotion occurs when a pawn reaches the eighth square. At that point, your opponent is challenged because this simple pawn takes on all the powers of a Queen—the deadliest piece on the board. Of course, the pawn may be promoted to bishop, rook, or any other piece but why? This only clues the other player in to your secret plans. That being said, however, promotions to knight can often be strategically useful depending on the situation.

What the beelzebub am I talking about? Let's not get too lost in metaphor. Suffice to say, the circuitous game of promoting one's blog in the blogosphere (without the proper armament) can often seem as difficult and unrewarding as a day-long chess match that ends in a draw. If you play your game right, however, that pawn can hit the big time. Ideally, the simple act of blogging in and of itself would attract enough traffic to please the author but there are cases in which more is better. Whether you are participating in AdSense for Bloggers and would like to see a spike in your profits, or you just want more comments on your posts, increasing hit-count is beneficial.

Toward that end, I spent my Labor Day snooping around the blogosphere. While I should have been eating potato salad and lounging by someone's pool, I was slaving over my laptop pulling together a bevy of accepted methods for growing the readership base of your blog. I hope you'll find them useful. In practice, the procedures fall into three basic categories involving settings, techniques, and actual marketing tricks. Some are very obvious and others, more subtle. It appears that many bloggers have found success with these solutions—I've tried a few and found that they do in fact increase traffic.

Blogger Application Settings

Blogger itself has an array of settings, many of which work to your advantage in this endeavor. This first grouping is quite simple and just requires that you sign in to your Blogger account and flip a few switches.

Set your blog to ping weblogs.com. Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. When this setting is activated, Blogger will notify weblogs.com that you have updated your blog. That means your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.

Activate Your Navbar. I did this and watched my traffic go up on the very first day (and continue to climb). The Blogger Navbar replaced mandatory ads a few weeks ago. One of the features on the Navbar is a button called NextBlog—click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog. It turns out this couch-potato like way of flipping through blogs is very appealing. As a result, the next blog button gets a lot of attention. So turn your Navbar on and catch some of that wave.

Install Email This Post. News sites like The New York Times Online have had a feature like this for years, it allows people to simply forward an article to a friend via email. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you. That's good stuff.

Turn on Post Pages. If you're still only archiving by day, week, or month you are living in the past man. You've got to make sure you are publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages. That makes your entries way more link-able and more attractive to search engines. Links to your blog means traffic to your blog. This is an easy setting in Blogger.

Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, it means they are definitely going to read your post. The folks who subscribe to site feeds are the type of people Malcolm Gladwell calls "mavens" in his book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Long story short: these people will help you get more traffic so turn on your site feed.

Add your blog to Blogger's listings. This is a really obvious one but at some point during the blog creation process there's a chance many of you initially thought "Oh, I'm not sure I want to be public just yet. I'll mark that as 'no.'" Go back in there and mark it "yes." When you add your blog to our listings then it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic. Do it.

Blogging Technique Suggestions

This part of the traffic-grabbing techniques is a little more persnickety and not as readily activated. The basic gist of this section of methods is "If you build it well they will come." You'll need to incorporate the other aspects of self-promotion, but it's true that writing a great blog goes a long way towards repeat visitors and word of ~~mouth~~ blog.

Write quality content and do it well. Jen Garrett demands that you use proper punctuation, capitalize letters when appropriate, and don't overuse the ellipsis. She's being a bit of a grammar bitch, but she has a point. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to get a big crowd so fix yourself up a bit, pull it together man, have some respect for your readers, and discover a style that shines brightly through good blogging.

Publish regular updates. Danah Boyd once told me that she intentionally wanted to lower the traffic to her blog and she found the easiest way to do it was to stop posting so frequently. (Danah is an odd one, that's why we love her.) The reverse of her experiment is also true: the more you blog, the more traffic you will get. You've got to think about it like watering a plant—do it every day and the plant will grow. Hopefully your blog is not like the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. That would be bad.

Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to cultivate one. When you keep your audience in mind, you are focusing your writing. This helps you develop a stronger voice and is instrumental in creating the brand that is you as put forth through your blog. Again, this is more of an overarching, long-term technique for building traffic and won't have immediate results. Nevertheless, focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.

Keep search engines in mind. Note that sometimes your "audience" is whoever stumbles into your site from a web search. Search is a great way to bring in new visitors and there are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and blog page title tags along with your post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search. For example, a Google search for "Book Cover Design" features this blog post by the illustrious Jason Kottke complete with reader comments.

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Note the brevity of the aforementioned Kottke post. People will come back daily to read your fresh new work but spare them the one thousand word diatribes. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on. Think of you blog as a cumulative effect. This doesn't mean you should never practice some long form writing now and then, it's just something to keep in mind.

Marketing Action Items

The third and final group of promotional techniques are simple actions you can take to publicize your blog. This category is theoretically unlimited. You could build your own blimp and spell out your blogspot subdomain in twinkly holiday lights across the side, that sort of thing. Instead, I've limited these suggestions to more obvious, grounded tactics. (If you do got the blimp route, please: use helium, not hydrogen.)

Put your blog URL in your email signature. Whenever I see a blog url in an email signature, I always click on it to see who I'm dealing with. Especially if it's someone I've never met. Email gets forwarded all the time so even if you only send out a five notes a day to friends, the potential number of people clicking over to your blog is in the thousands. (That is of course completely theoretical, but you get my drift—it's worth it.) I can't give you specific instructions on how to edit your email client's signature because I don't know which one you use, but poke around. It's somewhere in the settings.

Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across. With the exception of Technorati, many of these sites are hobby or graduate student projects but they continue to gain visitors looking for interesting blogs to read, bookmark, and revisit. Not all of them have the power to crawl ever blog in existence so you can help them help you by dropping your url in the appropriate field.

Participate in meme games. A meme is an idea transmitted from person to person like a virus. If the flu was a blog, it would get crazy traffic. With all the sickness and disease analogies, blog induced memes are actually fun and can win you some extra traffic. How do they work? Basically a blogger will propose an idea like "Hey, let's post the first sentence of our favorite book!" and it will catch on like crazy with people linking to each other's submissions obsessively until the game dies down. A favorite meme for years was the Friday Five, if you're looking for something new, try The Daily Meme.

Advertise. If keyword advertising were affordable enough, I'd say go for it. For now, free is a good way to go. BlogSnob is a network of free, text-based blog advertisers that you can join right now. Host ads, place ads, it's all traffic. BlogSnob ads blend right into your site and are fully customizable. Bloggers who join the network can place free ads, while sometime in the near future real advertisers will have to dish out to get noticed. It pays to be a blogger.

Link to other blogs. This is a great way to get traffic. Here's what happens when you link to another blogger: she sees you in her referral logs, checks out your blog, and then very likely links back to you or at the very least makes a mental note to do so. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking. Don't be shy folks, it's not actually cash. Not yet anyway—who knows what bloggers will come up with.

Install a blogroll. This is similar to linking. Well actually, it's the same but different. Blog posts eventually drop off the front page and get archived. A blogroll is more of personal statement: these are the bloggers I like. Or, this is the crowd I'd like to be associated with. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs you read every day. This is in the same vein as linking. Leaving a comment on someone's post can make their day. Nothing beats getting those email notifications that whisper tacitly out at you from the screen, "You're thoughts have struck me dead in my tracks. I simply must acknowledge you and your greatness." (Or something to that effect.) Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

Pitch your posts via email to other bloggers. This is a touchy technique and should be approached with caution. Blogger Eugene Volokh has published a short treatise on how best to pitch one's blog via email and it's filled with great tips and advice. Assuming your blog is actually worth pitching (of course it is), here are some tips from Volokh.

Pitch the post, not the blog.
Include the full text and your URL.
Submit only your best posts.
Don't only pitch to high traffic blogs.

Print your blog URL on cards, stickers, etc. Basically, if you plan to have anything printed up, put your blog on it. These days, more and more business cards have blog addresses listed on them along with email and phone number. I wouldn't be surprised if I started seeing bumper stickers with blogspot addresses on them soon. There's a lot of traffic on the 101, that bumper in front of me is prime advertising real estate.

Speaking of the 101, maybe you've spotted the giant orange SUV with the license plate that says BLOGGER while driving south towards San Jose? No, that's not Evan Williams as you would suspect. It is, however, a nice piece of creative publicity. If there's one thing we've learned from my Labor Day investigation of blog promotion it's this: Don't be that guy with the BLOGGER license plate but think like him. That's the kind of take-charge technique you should open your game with. That's how you can turn your pawn into royalty.

Biz Stone works at Google on Blogger and writes books about blogging.

How to Make Money Blogging 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately (by www.doshdosh.com)

2007-08-28T01:06:00.000+03:00

You can make money from blogging. It can pay for your bills. It does work for everyone. There’s no secret and you’ll just really need to know how to get started and which blogging framework to follow.

It’s not a difficult process at all and this post will provide 7 distinct methods you can use to generate substantial income from blogging. These seven methods are strategies you can adopt right from the beginning, preferably before you set up your first blog.

You can think of them as guidelines which point out the different options you have, if you’re serious about using blogging as a method of making money online.

1. The “Flagship” or Big Blog Route

This is simultaneously the most profitable and most time-consuming blog venture. The flagship method directs all your focus on a few blogs in order to make them incredibly popular in their niche. Flagship blogs should have a large audience as well as high daily visitor traffic numbers.

These type of big blogs have a wide variety of monetization options with direct advertising sales being a big part of it. Know that not everyone can successfully create a big blog so attempt this route only if you absolutely believe that you have the networking skills, niche knowledge and marketing know-how that’s needed.

Benefits: Fame as well as more monetization options/potential for your blogs, alongside personal satisfaction. Another advantage is that big blogs usually market or promote themselves automatically once a certain level of fame has been achieved.
Disadvantages: Very time-consuming especially if you are not outsourcing the content creation or marketing duties. Expect a lot of work and experiment with creative promotional ideas if you decide to go this route.

2. The “Pay per Post” or Get Paid to Blog Route

This is rather simple. Set up multiple niche blogs on either your own domains or free blog hosts like Blogger. Maintain them over a period of time and focus on writing content and building up their Google PageRank, link profile and Alexa Rank.

Submit all of your blogs to multiple get paid to blog websites like Blogitive, Blogsvertise, Review Me, Sponsored Reviews, PayperPost, LoudLaunch and then start writing sponsored posts. I highly recommending using PayperPost as they simply have the largest amount of paid offers available.

Benefits: The greatest strength of this method is that you don’t even need a large audience to make money. 20 people could be visiting and reading your blogs everyday and you’ll still be able to make at least $15 a day from each blog. If skillfully done over multiple blogs, this method can allow you to easily make over $1.5 K a month.
Disadvantages: No passive income. You’ll need to spend time writing multiple sponsored blog posts, which can be boring and time consuming. Work will also be needed to maintain your multiple blogs, although that will be minimal after they have been optimized and running for some time.

3. The Automated Blogging or Splog Route

Automated blogging involves the setting up of blogs which automatically pull content from RSS feeds, search engines and news sources to serve as content on your website.

Some bloggers set this to pull full RSS feeds which does go against some copyrights and one can choose to only include excerpts with a link back to the site in question. Monetization for automated sites is usually done through contextual ads like Google Adsense or affiliate programs.

Benefits: Very little work needed to maintain these blogs as they do not need you to actively generate or write content. You might need to do a little SEO and regular maintenance now and then. Try if you are adventurous.
Disadvantage: A weak potential for profit unless you understand the entire process perfectly and if you have quite a large number of blogs.I estimate that a fully automated blog will make you around $5 a month although the actual value depends on the niche and your skills. Assuming that this is so, you’ll need 1,000 blogs to make around $5000 a month. Splogs dwell in ethically gray areas as well.

4. The Text Link Selling Blog Route

The main bulk of your income through this method comes from selling text links to various webmasters and businesses who want to improve their site ranking in Google. While text link selling works for the flagship or other blog models as well, sites can be primarily built for text link sales as well.

The overwhelming emphasis here is on Google PageRank and niche relevancy so you’ll need to focus on these two factors. You can either convert a domain into a text link and sponsored post selling blog or you can purchase a domain with existing PageRank to sell text links for a quick buck. I suggest looking for link buyers directly through webmaster forums.

Benefits: Selling text links or contextual text links is rather easy and doesn’t involve much work. Potential for profit will correspond to your Google Page Rank and niche. A site with a high PageRank and a profitable niche (mortgages, credit cards) will be very attractive to link buyers. Like paid review blogs, traffic is not a factor in these blogs as well.
Disadvantages: Over Reliance on the Google PageRank algorithm means that your income may rise or fall depending on your actual Page Rank. There may also be a limit to the number of links you can sell which leads to an income ceiling.

5. The Made-for-Adsense or Made-for-Affiliate-Program Route

This involves setting up a blog around a specific topic with moderately high priced keywords (e.g. teeth whitening, car loans). You’ll only need to create around 25 keyword rich articles on the topic, optimize it for search, set up Adsense or affiliate programs and then leave them alone.

The main emphasis is on building links to the specific webpages, according to the long tail keywords you want to target. Search engine visitors will then find your blog and either click on the ads or convert on a product.

Benefits: Not a lot of time involved as you can usually contract an experienced writer to develop the keyword rich articles. Not much time is needed to update the blogs as well and new material can be added on a bi-weekly or even monthly basis.
Disadvantages: There might be a lot of competition in a profitable niche and search traffic might not lead to sufficient income, unless you go for volume and set up dozens of similar websites in other niches as well.

6. The Blog Network or Contract Blogging Route

This involves joining a blog network and getting paid to maintain and create content for blogs. You’ll get paid according to the amount of pageviews, possibly receive a token base fee in the hundreds or a share of the blog’s ad revenue.

Benefits. Relatively stable monthly income because of the base fee. Contract work usually leads to more freelance blogging or writing assignments because of your proven ability or association with a specific organization.
Disadvantages: Why bother? If you’re that good at creating and promoting a blog, set up your own website and keep all the profits. However, it is useful to note that a lot depends on the type of network or contract agreement you receive.

7. The Blog-as-Marketing or Branding Route

This method will only apply if you own an online business or provide a freelance service like web design, copy writing or marketing consultation. A blog can be used to help promote your personal or business brand and attract more customers.

This is an indirect method of making money. Ideally, this sort of a blog shouldn’t be plastered with ads or paid reviews because it can tarnish the image of the brand.

Benefits. A blog can help your brand or business to develop much more search visibility because it allows you to easily create more fresh content that caters to specific demographics as well.
Disadvantages. Your blog will only be as useful as the quality of the service or product you are pushing. The amount of money you earn doesn’t entirely depend on the quality of the blog but the value of your service/product as well. Income is therefore indirect and can be inconsistent.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several strategies you can choose if you’re interesting in making money from blogs. To ensure maximum success, be sure to pick one that suits your personal schedule, skill level and interests.

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs (by www.problogger.net)

2007-08-26T19:33:00.000+03:00

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogs.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How they Make Money from Blogs

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. Another two popular ones with many is BlogAds. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and CrispAds, Text Link Ads.

Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, DoubleClick Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilot TextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, Bidvertiser, Fastclick Value Click and OneMonkey (to name just some of the options - I’m sure I’ve forgotten some) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (so I hear).

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fundraising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress (although I have to say they’ve lost one of my own orders and are being quite unresponsive to my requests to follow it up at present). While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Top 7 Tips To Get More From Your Adsense Program

2007-08-26T19:26:00.000+03:00

By now, surely you must have heard about Google's Adsense program. If not, buckle up and hang on for the ride. 2nd tier affiliate programs are on the chopping block. Google's Adsense program delivers immediate results that exceed most 2nd tier and many 1st tier affiliate programs in terms of revenue generation. If you've been looking for a way to monetize your content site and don't sell a lot of your own products on the website, the Goodle Adsense program may be worth a peak.

Google's terms and conditions prohibit me from sharing the performance and metrics that our sites generate with their program, but I have some tips and strategies to share that will help you navigate your Adsense Revenue.

Never click on your own Adsense links. This is theft. Best to set a policy upfront to not allow yourself or any of your staff members or contractors to click on any of your adsense links. You will know if your links are working within 1-2 days after you put them up as Google allows you to monitor your clicks and revenue performance.
Vertical skyscrapers on the right side of your website produce the best results as a generalization. If in doubt, do A/B testing until you discover which banner size creates the best result.
Borderless Adsense web banners produce more usually than those with borders. Blend them into your site. Google allows you to customize your Adsense ads, links, borders, and color themes.
Create Adsense channels so that you can track your results from different sub-sections of your websites.
Get to know high value keywords and don't be afraid to alter your content a bit to include them. I do not recommend hauling off and building websites for the pure purpose of additional Adsense revenue. Google is smart and they may optimize you right out of their program.
Time to retire 2nd tier affiliate program links that have not paid you more than $100 USD per quarter. Replace this premium space with Adsense.
If your site needs a re-design in order to incorporate the Adsense panel into your current ezine or email newsletter archives -- the more pages you have it on, the more revenue opportunity you will have.
By Christopher M. Knight (top7business.com)

Promote Your Blog (by Sharon Housley - www.rss-specifications.com)

2007-08-26T18:56:00.000+03:00

If you wish to automate your blog and RSS submissions consider using Dummy Software's Blog and RSS Submit Software http://www.dummysoftware.com .

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with the URL to the RSS feed and replace the brackets with "<" (less than) and ">" (greater than) symbols.

Making Money from Your Blog - Indirect Methods (by www.problogger.net)

2007-08-25T19:29:00.000+03:00

We now turn our attention to ways of making money from blogging that are more more ‘indirect’ in nature - or how to earn money because of your blog rather than from it.

Many of the following methods are the result of the profile and perceived expertise of the blogger themselves (whereas many of the direct methods mentioned previously are less reliant upon this).

Building a profile as a blogger doesn’t happen quickly and starting a blog with some of these hopes should be seen as a long term thing. My own experience in this area is that now after 18 months of blogging here at ProBlogger that it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve had opportunities open in most of these areas.

Consulting - when you are perceived as an expert on a topic you will find that people naturally come to you for advice - some of them willing to pay for it. Some niches are probably better positioned than others for their bloggers to get into paid consultancy work of course. I spoke with one blogger recently (blogging in a business/technology field) who was able to charge himself out at $600 per hour to give advice to a large company. Interestingly I’ve heard of a number of companies in the last 6 months who are developing VOIP services that bloggers will be able to add to their sidebars to enable them to be called by readers for consulting. The systems would have per minute rate on them to automate this consulting process.

Employment Opportunities - Just this last week PR blogger Steve Rubel announced that he’d been hired by a bigger PR firm. While he didn’t say it explicitly in his post I suspect that one of the reasons for him landing the job was the profile he’d built over the last year and a half from blogging. Steve’s case is not the only one - bloggers are increasingly being targeted by companies because of their demonstrated abilities in their field of expertise.
Business Blogging - Similarly there are some businesses who employ people to blog for them either as their main role or part of their role. One example of a company who employed a couple of bloggers was Vespa who now have two blogs. BloggerJobs is one site worth following if you’re looking for these types of jobs. Most of the jobs there are from blog networks but occasionally they include businesses looking for bloggers also.
Book Deals - Some days as I read through the RSS feeds that I follow it seems that every blogger I read has a book either in progress or coming out. Once again it’s about being seen as an expert in your field - if you can achieve this you will find publishers are more receptive to having an idea pitched to them and at times will even seek you out. This is becoming more and more common with publishers as they are seeing not only some great writers but that many of them already have large amounts of content on their blogs ready to be pulled together into a book!
Offline Writing Gigs - Manolo from Shooeblogs recently landed a writing gig in the Washington Post Express after he was discovered via his blog. These types of opportunities can be in the form of newspapers, magazines, trade publications etc.
Online Writing Gigs - Similarly some bloggers also land jobs writing for other forms of websites as a result of being discovered from their blogs.
Selling e-resources - I wasn’t sure whether to classify this as direct or indirect (and depending upon how you do it you could probably go either way) but some bloggers are leveraging the expertise they have in an area by putting together their own ‘e-products’ such as e-books, tele-seminars, courses etc and selling them to their readers.
Business Partnerships - One of the benefits of blogging about a niche topic that interests you is that you will begin to connect with others who have similar interests and expertise. As you interact with them it’s amazing to see the opportunities for working together that arise.
Speaking Opportunities - Once again this is dependent upon the topic you’re writing about but some lucky bloggers end up with all kinds of opportunities to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars on their topic of choice. Sometimes they are freebies, other times the conference will cover costs and on other occasions there are speakers fees.

If you’re planning to use some of these indirect ways of making money because of your blog it’s important that you think seriously about building your own profile and credibility as a blogger. Think about the types of people that you respect and look to as experts an consider what they offer in their fields.

These people are generally original thinkers that not only report what others are doing, but who provide answers and vision for their industry. They are also often well networked and have the ability to draw others along with them.

What does this mean for your blog? Here’s where I’d start:

provide useful content that shows an understanding of your niche.
network within your niche. Work on being connected with other key players (big and small).
use your blog not only to report and rehash news but to also show initiative in proposing solutions. Be proactive in your blogging and lead the conversation rather than just react to it.

Making Money from Your Blog - Direct Methods (by www.problogger.net)

2007-08-25T16:16:00.000+03:00

Having thought through whether you should blog for money it is now worth taking a look at some of the different models for doing so.

I tend to break the different models that bloggers are using to make money from blogging into two areas - Direct and Indirect methods.

Direct Income Earning Methods - these methods are where a blogger earns an income directly FROM their blog.

Indirect Income Earning Methods - these methods are where a blogger earns an income BECAUSE of their blog.

Most blogs tend to fall into one or the other of these methods - although there is nothing to stop bloggers experimenting with elements of both ( I’ve seen a few bloggers get into trouble with this (example: Scenario 1 in the previous post).

In this post I’ll look at 8 direct income earning methods and in the next post of this series I’ll explore indirect methods. Please note that on occasion in the following post there will be few affiliate links to services that I use and have had some success with. These will be marked with (aff) after them.

Direct Income Earning Methods for Bloggers

1. Advertising

There are many ways of selling advertising space on a blog (this could almost be a series of it’s own) but some of the different advertising options that I see bloggers experimenting with include:

Contextual Advertising - Programs like AdSense and YPN (beta) are very popular with bloggers and are probably the most common income stream being used by them today (MSN are developing one too). In short - these programs scan the content of your blog to assertion what it’s topic is and attempt to put contextually relevant ads (text and image) onto your blog. They are generally simple to use and involve pasting some code into your blog’s templates. Payment is on a ‘per click’ basis (referred to as CPC or ‘cost per click’ ads). Contextual ads suit blogs that have a particular niche topic, especially if it has some sort of commercial angle (ie it has products and services associated with it). They are not so good with ‘general’ type blogs (ie many topics) and/or political/spiritual blogs which argue just one side of a case (this confuses AdSense). I write much more extensively on how to use AdSense on your blog here.
Other CPC Advertising - There are a variety of other ad systems that pay on a per click basis which are not contextual in nature (which is important as systems like AdSense do not allow you to run contextual ads on the same page view as them). These systems include Chitika’s eMiniMalls (aff) which I reviewed here.
Impression Based Ads - Impression based ads pay a small amount for every person who views the advertisement. The amount that they pays varies from program to program (and ad to ad) and is generally a fraction of a cent. There are a variety of ad systems around like this including Fastclick (aff) which I reviewed here and Tribal Fusion. Impression based ads won’t earn you much if you don’t have a lot of traffic but can be great if you do.
Blog Ads - BlogAds have become something of an institution when it comes to advertising on blogs. They traditionally have had a focus upon monetizing political blogs but are expanding their focus lately. The beauty of them is that bloggers set their own rates and can accept or reject advertisers that apply to them to be featured on their blogs. These ads put the control of what ads show and how much they earn into the hands of the blogger. The downside is that if you price them too high you could never have any ads showing at all. They can also be difficult to be accepted into as a publisher as these days they only accept people into the system if they have a someone who is already in ’sponsor’ or recommend the new publisher.
Text Ads - Another increasingly popular way to sell ads on your blog is to look into text links. The beauty of these are that they don’t take up much room and that depending upon the system you choose to run them you can have control over which advertisers you accept and reject. AdBrite (aff) is one such system that gives you control in a similar way to BlogAds in that you set your own prices and approve all ads. They also other other formats of ads. Text Link Ads (aff) is another text link seller that more and more bloggers are using. The beauty of both of these systems is that they have a pool of advertisers already so you don’t have to go looking for your own advertisers. Their systems are also both very automated and are just a matter of pasting some code onto your blog. I use them both and while they don’t earn anywhere near as much as AdSense or Chitika for me they add up over the year and have done well for me. Bidvertiser and Adzaar are other system that I know are popular with some (we’ve used them quite successfully on b5media although I have little personal experience with them).
RSS Ads - An increasingly popular way for people to read blogs is via RSS. As a result publishers and ad providers have been keen to find ways to place ads in feeds. These attempts have been met with a variety of success levels. I’m yet to hear of too many people making big dollars with RSS ads yet but the ad systems seem to be improving. AdSense offers RSS ads to some of it’s publishers (you have to have a certain number of impressions first) as does YPN. Feedburner is a tool I’ve used to help monetise my own feeds - they give publishers three options (1. AdSense if you’ve been approved by them, 2. Amazon affiliate program and 3. if you have a lot of subscribers (over 500) they have an Ad Network). Pheedo is another system that you might like to try (although I’ve not had much experience with it).
Other Ads Systems - In addition to the above systems (most of which I’ve used myself) are many other advertising options which I’ve not had experience with and so won’t personally recommend. I’m sure they are worth experimenting with however as I see many of them being used by bloggers every day. Here they are in no particular order:
AdGenta, CrispAds, Clicksor, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, Double Click, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, OneMonkey, and TextAds. Feel free to add your own and tell us how you’ve gone with them in comments below.

2. Sponsorship

Another form of advertising that a smaller number of bloggers are using is to find their own advertisers. All of the above systems have the advantage of finding you advertisers (or at least assisting in the automation of ads to your blog) but as your blog grows in profile and influence you might find other options for private deals come up.

The big blog networks have people dedicated to the task of finding advertisers (often working through ad agencies) but smaller bloggers might find this worthwhile also. I’ve been selling ads on my Digital Camera Blog for two years now and as it’s grown in traffic and profile and managed to attract larger companies (who are willing to pay more) to buys space. Currently the blog features ads from Adobe who have bought a combination of banner, newsletter and text ads.

The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.

3. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to (I reviewed it here). Other affiliate programs that represent many different companies and products include Linkshare, Commission Junction and Clickbank.

Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic. If you want to explore affiliate programs more you might like to read 10 tips for using affiliate programs on you blog.

4. Selling/Flipping Blogs

The idea of selling (or flipping) your blog is one that many bloggers have in the back of their minds for ‘one day’ but in reality it is not something that is overly common… yet (I think this is changing). Probably the largest sale is that of Weblogs Inc (a network of blogs) which sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Of course this is the stuff that most of us can only dream of - but there are examples of smaller blogs being sold, either privately or via auctions on sites like eBay and SitePoint. One such auction was that of the Blog Herald which took place here.

Starting a blog with the main goal of selling it down the track is one that I’ve heard of a number of bloggers doing but few have been successful. Rather than starting with this intention I think if you start with the intention of building a quality site that has a large readership and it’s own good income stream you are more likely to find buyers down the track.

5. Donations and Tip Jars

A very small number of blogs have a history of making good money with these (Jason Kottke being one of them). To be successful with asking for money from readers you’ll want to have a large and loyal readership (and a rich one might help too). Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make it work.

6. Merchandise

Another method that some blogs use with reasonable effect is to sell T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers etc with the blog’s name, logo and/or taglines on it. This is another idea that will probably only work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog. Some blog topics lend themselves to this more than others.

7. Selling Subscriptions

The idea of charging readers for content is one that surfaces from time to time. While there are numerous websites around the web that do this successfully (community membership sites) I’m yet to see many (any) blogs do it well. The problem that most bloggers who have tried it have run into is that most topics that you could think to start a blog about already have free sites available. To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic.

8. Blog Networks

Another emerging income source for bloggers are blog networks. There are two ways to make money here. Firstly you can start a network and contract bloggers to write for you or secondly you might like to join a blog network as a writer. There are many networks out there and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’ll attempt to write a post on what to think about when you’re looking at whether to join a network later in this series.

How to make money from your blog: 5 tips (from: www.microsoft.com)

2007-08-23T19:56:00.000+03:00

By Jeff Wuorio

Many of the people who write blogs today simply want to share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks, who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash too.

I recently wrote a column detailing how to get a blog up and running to boost your small business.

If you're interested in taking it further — blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your blog into a moneymaker.

1. Sell advertising. This is likely the most common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche, it's always possible to sell ad space on your own. For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs.

AdSense's — which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any ad placements that result. "The nice thing, too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen, co-author of "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online."

2. Help sell others' products. Here is another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve as a conduit between readers and online sites offering various goods and services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to Amazon to obtain further information about the book. If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you get paid as well.

3. Solicit contributions. Not every blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche DuBois did in "A Streetcar Named Desire," consider relying on the kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention tax reform, health care or some other topic — you can always ask for reader support.
Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make it easy to establish a simple on-site contribution collection button. "There are lots of worthy 'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett.

4. Market your services in your blog. Many people associate blogs exclusively with a cyberspace-based soapbox — a place to shout your opinions and little more than that. Granted, blogs are an ideal venue to share your thoughts with others, but don't overlook their capacity to generate new business as well. When appropriate, work in references to what you do and, in turn, what you may be able to offer any would-be client or customer who may be reading your blog. That can spread your opinion and your business moxie at the same time.

"Instead of short commentaries that begin a dialogue with readers, as many blogs do, I write the equivalent of journal articles that demonstrate my abilities, strategies and perspectives on specific issues," Barnett says. "When it resonates, it means money. Since starting this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about $10,000 on revenue — directly attributable to specific blogs."

5. Use a blog to deepen your existing customer relationships. Nor does any marketing material inserted in blog content have to be limited to bringing in completely new business. By using a blog to regularly communicate with existing clients as well as other readers, you can take advantage of the opportunity to fully inform them about everything your business does. That may expand your readers' understanding of the full scope of your products or services.

"My blog has helped existing clients determine the range of my skills and services," says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. "One client who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented project."

Make Money off Your Blog (from www.washingtonpost.com)

2007-08-23T13:34:00.000+03:00

You pound on the keyboard each day, broadcasting your unalloyed truths to the world (or at least to friends and family) via your blog. Unfortunately, earning such singular authority demands serious time and energy, and what begins as a hobby can quickly start seeming like Job No. 2 -- sans paycheck. But haven't you heard? You can turn your Web log into a digital cash cow. Simply choose among these techniques (but keep in mind that it's not all free money -- come tax season, Uncle Sam gets his fair share).

LET GOOGLE WORK FOR YOU. Selling ad space might be the oldest way to make a buck, and with Google's free AdSense service (www.google.com/adsense), it's way too easy. AdSense allows bloggers to display up to three content-specific "ad units" (boxes that can hold up to four ads each) per page. "If you're writing about sports cars, they'll be ads about sports cars," says Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist at Google. Each time a visitor clicks these ads, you get paid. Google doesn't disclose its exact share of the revenue, but a personalized report page lets you track your own earnings. Earn at least $100 and Google sends you a check.

PLAY AD-SALES EXEC. If you want more control over the ads on your blog, hit www.blogads.com. BlogAds lets you join its database free and set your own ad prices. Companies (including media bigs such as Paramount Pictures and Random House) then search for suitable blogs and purchase ad space for a set period -- say, one month. In contrast to the way AdSense works, your earnings don't depend on whether a reader clicks the ad. All you have to do is give 20 percent of your net revenue to Mr. BlogAd, and you keep the rest. Perhaps best of all, you can indulge your megalomaniacal tendencies by approving or declining potential ads at will.

BE THE MIDDLEMAN. Many companies run "affiliate" programs: Post an ad provided by Amazon.com or Lands' End, for example, and receive a small commission every time your readers click that ad, go to the company's Web site and end up buying a book or splurging on a down parka. Referral fees -- the cash you get from these transactions -- vary (you can earn as much as 10 percent per sale from Amazon). LinkShare (www.linkshare.com) claims to run the Internet's biggest "affiliate marketing network," with more than 600 companies on its roster of advertisers. Another service, Commission Junction (www.cj.com), runs programs for eBay and Expedia.com, among others.

SELL SCHWAG. Don't dig ads? Uncomfortable asking for handouts? Then create your own blog-branded gear at CafePress.com, which offers more than 50 products begging for your unique logo. Choose from standard fare such as T-shirts and coffee cups, or, if Grandma doesn't read your blog, opt for sexy thong underwear (ooh la la). You get to sell each product at whatever price your entrepreneurial heart desires. CafePress gets back the original base price ($13.99 for T-shirts, $10.99 for mugs); you keep the markup. Just add your online store's link to your blog, and all that's left to do is wait for CafePress to send you a monthly check. See? It's practically like your real job. Mike Peed