Site Smart

John Chow brings out a good point in his latest post. Now he talks about a bit of pondering that’s going about how high an income his blog could actually make. Through all this talk he tosses out a little gem for us to think about.

A blog can only have so many ad slots and when they are full the only other option to increase income is to raise prices. However, if you are at the highest price your blog can sustain then think about another possibility. Affiliate programs offer residual income meaning you will get a cut of the profits mad by other affiliates you refer, so in this avenue there are no limits to the amount of money you can make and it also continues as long as your referrers keep making money.

John Cow has a nice article explaining the benefits of guest blogging and how it can make you more money. Some bloggers are wary of or feel it is not worth the effort to guest blog. If you stop and think about it, yes, you are improving their site but you are getting traffic, exposure, and hopefully conversions like rss subscriptions, etc.

So there is plenty of benefits for you when you guest blog. Here are some good points from the article. Be sure to read the original for all the details.

1. Give More (Much More) Than You Take
2. Be BOLD
3. Tailor the Post to the Blog’s Audience
4. Look For Spaces to be Filled
5. Check Your Work for Spelling and Grammar

Collin of Mixed Market Arts has put together another great post on link building. He shows us how when can use Flickr to get linkbacks and drive traffic to our site.

What is Flickr?

Everyone knows about Flickr and that it is the largest photo sharing site and that it serves millions of users every month. However, as Collin points out, most are not aware that you can leave links, using HTML, in the photo comments. This allows the search engines to follow the links and pass PageRank as well as users to follow the link bringing you traffic.

Why should I build links with Flickr?

This is a good question with a really obvious answer.

Flickr is a massive site and is growing at a rapid rate. Flickr is already a Google Pagerank 9 site, which means it is looked highly upon by the search engines. There are over 73,000,000 pages cached by Google on the site already. In other words, there are over 50,000,000 opportunities to get your blog noticed!

How to build links with Flickr

I am just going to summarize Collin’s points as I could not say it any better.

Extremely Unethical Method

Browse around everywhere spamming comments with your link in them. The comments provide little value and are simply “copy/pasted” material with your HTML link embedded in it.

Unethical Method

You make a lot of comments on random pictures you take little interest in. The comments you make are masked to sound like you truly care about the person when you couldn’t seriously give a damn. An example would be “Nice picture, do you mind if I use it over at my blog that shows you how to make money blogging?”

Ethical Method

Nearly the same as above, but you would only comment on the pictures that you would actually use in a blog post. I know a lot of bloggers that have a picture at the top of every blog post, and the majority of them find those pictures off Flickr.

To wrap it up

Collin leaves a final tip to maimize the effectiveness of your link building. He recommends looking for popular photos on Digg. These photos will have higher PageRank and you may be able to get some of the traffic if the photo is still on the “recently popular in the last 30 days” section. This adds up to more value and traffic for your links.

Toby Somerville has published the second part of his three part series on getting contract work. I covered the first part in a previous post which laid the ground work for what Toby talks about next, the, ever so vital, initial email. Again I am going to summarize on the key points that Toby makes.

The Initial Written Contact
This first email is the “teaser” email. The “get your foot in the door” introduction. Nothing more. It is not your resume or an essay on your approach to the web. Its a “would you like to know more?” introduction.

Keep the Reader in Mind
When creating your email you need to think about the person reading the email. What they looking for and what they will be asking themselves:

• Who is emailing me and why?
• What skills do they have that we might find useful now or in the future?
• What relevant experience do they have?
• How good are they? Lets see some work examples.
• How much do they expect to be paid?
• How much do they expect to be paid?

The Email Format
I recommend a text-only email, rather than HTML. For the simple reason that it is more likely to arrive looking as you intended it to look.

The Email

• keep it short and sweet
• make sure there are no typos or errors and that the links work
• get someone else to proofread and give you an honest appraisal of what they thought of the content and its tone
• personalise the email if possible
• don’t be pushy or arrogant. Be polite and professional
• get to the point
• at the start explain: who you are and what you want
• link to examples of your work
• link to an on-line resume
• ask them if it is OK to call them in a few days time to discuss
• your contact details

Test it. Test it. Test it.
Prepare the email and save a copy. Send one to yourself and make sure it works and looks good. Double check it and get someone else to check it.

Toby has done an excellent job and I recommend reading the whole article and getting the full details.

First off I would like to thank John Chow for bringing Mixed Market Arts to my attention.

These days I am always on the look out for good, legit ways to bring in traffic and hopefully produce a little bit of passive income. I am not considering jumping into full-time blogging but have a little extra cash to pay for site expenses or even the occasional new gadget is always nice.

While browsing through Mix Market Arts I came across a post I really liked, and apparently John did to as it was one of his recommended articles, about using StumbleUpon to bring in traffic to your site. While the traffic will likely come in spikes if you blog on a regular basis you can build up a semi-consistant flow of traffic.

In his post Collin makes the following points to get you started on (ab)using StumbleUpon.

Benefits of StumbleUpon:

• You can select the exact niche that sends these visitors, so if your blog is about investing, you will get tons of people who enjoy “investing” sites, which turns into excellent clickthrough rates for your ads.
• If you do go on the “paying” route, it is far cheaper than most advertising solutions. (I still recommend the free way, as it is dead simple).
• It can help anyone who owns a website
• It is completely free
• You can learn the entire ups and downs in 15 minutes (by reading this post in its entirety)
• Tons more, take a look for yourself

Downfalls of StumbleUpon:

• 1. The traffic is inconsistent. You will get a burst of traffic one time, but then it idles down to very little, or if you write good content consistently, it will be a series of traffic spikes.
• 2. The links from the stumble pages are nofollow, so it does not help your search engine optimization
• 3. It takes up a pretty big portion on your browser

How to milk Stumbleupon for all it’s worth:

• 1. Sign up for Stumbleupon.
• 2. Register on forums.digitalpoint.com, and post a thread in the freebies section stating that you will stumble anyones website if they add you as a stumble friend. (http://*YOUR_USERNAME*.stumbleupon.com). For example, mine is raithe1337.stumbleupon.com. (Collin’s stumble url)
• 3. After you have accumulated a good number of friends, the sites you stumble now get an even larger burst of traffic to them. My stumble account has over 300 friends, but I started to notice my stumble visitors tripling when I reached 200 friends, so make that a monthly goal.
• 4. If you own a blog, exchange reviews of websites with other blogs, and then when their blog’s first post is about you, stumble their main page as well as the exact URL of the post. This will give them “2 stumbles” to their website, sending them a flood of visitors, but it will also help you in that those hundreds of visitors will be reading a review of your website.
• 5. StumbleUpon will not let you stumble your own site with hundreds of pages, until you stumble 9 other pages. With the technique shown in #4, for every 9 stumbles you make on blogs about your own, you will be allowed to stumble another one of your own pages.
• 6. Join stumble exchanges. You can make a thread on the digitalpoint freebies section, or join a stumble exchange website such as SUExchange.com, or StumbleXChange.com. People will stumble your pages in return for you stumbling theres. Both of you result in tons of free visitors, so it is mutually exclusive.
• 7. If you get a lot of stumbles in a small period of time, you get listed on the Stumble Buzz page, which will send you tons more free traffic. To raise your chances of getting on this page, only stumble your best websites or blog posts, so that with the thousands of visitors that Stumbleupon sends you, they have the highest chance of also giving you a thumbs up, sending thousands more and making your content go viral.
• 8. Stumbling sites does not cost you anything, so I recommend stumbling every website that links to your website, because the better that those sites do, the better they help you. This will also make the owners of those sites like you more if you are sending them tons of traffic. Like I said earlier, mutually exclusive.
• 9. If you own a blog or an interesting website, you can provide a stumble upon button on every post. Your readers generally shouldn’t mind, and it has the potential to send you lots more easy traffic. If your blog is big enough already, I don’t recommend this because I feel you should only stumble “your best content”. The call is yours to make though.
• 10. Like I said with stumbling sites that link to yours, another really “evil” trick is to get around that “you can only stumble another page on your website if you stumble at least 9 external sites” problem is to stumble your Digg posts, your own Stumbleupon profile, your forum profiles, your Myspace/Facebook pages, forum posts about your site, etc etc. Not only does this get around the stumbling limit, but it will also send you some more visitors.

Many thanks to Collin for a wonderful guide to using StumbleUpon

Getting contracts can be a tough job in itself and if you are new to freelancing it can be frustrating even knowing where to start. Toby Somerville has started a 3 parts series over at SitePoint that I will be covering on how to do just that, get contracts.

This post covers part one of Toby’s series. I will just be summerizing some of his points and you can read his article for the full details.

How Does it Work?

• First, find and research the web and advertising firms in your area.
• Next, send the firms an introductory email.
• Then, follow up a few days later with a phone call.

The Ground Work
Preparation is really important, potentially any of these firms could be worth thousands of dollars to you. So, it is worth putting a bit of time and effort into researching each firm — basically the same as if you were preparing for a job interview (which effectively you are).

How to Find the firms
I would start by using search engines and your local business directories i.e. the Yellow Pages. When searching look for both web firms and advertising agencies. Note: Not all advertising agencies have a web department.

Research the Firms
Once you have a list of potential firms. Research them. Try and work out whether or not they are going to be a likely source of work. Do this by; reading through their website, looking for any forum post about them, and generally giving them a good Googling. Also, look at their client lists and analysis the website itself.

Keep Notes
Keep notes on your progress with each firm including:

• who you contacted
• what was said
• the date and time of contact
• any follow up that is required

In his next post Toby will be talking about the introductory email and how to form and structure this crucial point of firs contact. Stay tuned.

To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience know that it provides a steady stream of income. Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier systems, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier programs with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate programs are also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You are however, wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate programs to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate a stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offer real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime to monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate programs because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll eventually find out that someone has already closed those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. You gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier programs have been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliate, as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.

Author Info:

Steve is the CEO & Editor in Chief of http://www.articleland.co.uk and http://www.informationbooth.net. He is offering a free ebook on his site entitled Article Marketing Avalanche, a great read, a great book, go get it now.

Michael Gray hit the nail right on with his post concerning the debate surrounding Lane Hartwell and Richter Scales. He illustrates the need to manage your reputation because Google truely does keep a permanent [online] record that will last long after your situation has been resolved.

This is the perfect example of the phrase “sometimes when you win you really lose, and sometimes when you lose you really win” by Rosie Perez.

Lane Hartwell’s victory will be an empty one, but then she and her friends will probably say it was never about the money anyway, it was really the principal that was important, and this is a moral victory which brings important attention to the issue of image theft on the internet. She’ll be right and her friends will congratulate her on the victory, but at the end of the day she’ll be left holding the bag, and that bag is the permanent record that is your Google SERP

One of the consulting services I offer is reputation management and one of the first questions I have for potential clients is, Have you picked up the phone and tried to work this out with the people in question? The simple truth is if more people did this there would be less billable work for me. Not that I don’t want the work, but as a professional consultant if I don’t recommend the solution that’s best for the client, whether it’s the best option for me, I am doing this clients a disservice. I’d rather have a happy person who never turns into a reputation management client than an upset one who does.

In order to advertise your products to the largest possible audience you will need to know the most useful ways of promoting your web sites. This is a brief description of the most effective advertising methods for online marketers.

Advertising through pay per click is one of the more effective means of advertising. Listing your web site with a pay per click search engines will allow you to start reaching your targeted customers immediately rather than wait for months for search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to spider your web pages. Your advertising dollars are too important to waste time on ineffective means of advertising.

The three top reasons for advertising with pay per click are controlling your rank in pay per click search engines, reaching large numbers of online customers quickly and inexpensively, and the fact that pay per click advertising gets fast results and attracts traffic to your web site quickly.

Search engine optimization refers to the use of certain keywords on your web pages in order to receive high rankings in the major search engines. Each of your web pages will contain content on a particular subject.

There are certain keywords that are searched the most often by internet shoppers looking for information about a particular subject. Regardless of the subject matter of your web pages, finding the right keywords to include in your content will increase your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your web site.

There are several ways to find the most searched for keywords. There are services that provide keywords to internet marketers for a small fee, usually on a monthly basis. You can learn to research keywords on your own although if you are a beginner it may take some time to become familiar with keyword research and be able to do this effectively.

Affiliate marketing programs are another method of increasing traffic to your web site. Webmasters can create affiliate marketing programs that will link their sites to the web sites of others. This enables an online customer to click on your ad from a web site belonging to an affiliate. You will pay the affiliate a small commission for each sale you make that results from the customer’s click. Affiliate marketing programs allow you to increase traffic to your site and advertise your products and services through the web sites of other internet marketers. The small commission you pay your affiliates is well worth the increase in traffic and sales you may receive.

Internet marketing is like any other business. If you want to succeed and profit from your efforts, you must effectively advertise your products and/or services. You cannot expect to simply choose the products you will sell, build a web page, and watch the money roll in.

Advertising and web site promotion are critical to the success of your business. Utilizing the most effective means of advertising will greatly improve your chances of succeeding in your home-based business ventures. The most profitable internet marketers take full advantage of the advertising tools available to them.

Author:
Eugene Rivera has been an internet marketer for over 17 years. Learn how you can get your Google Adwords Ads for virtually no money by visiting our links at http://www.truewebsuccess.com

There are all kinds of tricks and gimmicks out there that promise to increase traffic and even Page Rank if you throw enough money at them. People spend endless amounts of money buying links on high traffic sites, high page rank sites, and combinations of both.

Is this the only way to succeed? If you’ll take the time to finish reading this article I’ll show that the answer is no.

If there are less expensive and even free ways to launch your website then why do people spend so much money?
That’s a good question. Some would answer that buying your traffic and page rank is faster. I say, not true. There are plenty of ways to get traffic and establish your site’s authority that are instant and won’t cost you a nickel.

Buying your way to the top is easier.
With this I would have to agree (although that depends on how hard you worked to get the money in the first place). If you are looking for a magic solution that requires nothing from you then this article is probably not for you. But if you are willing to put in as little as 15 minutes a day into getting traffic and linkbacks for you site (not including the time you need to spend creating content for your site, that is a whole different ball game) then I’ll show you how to succeed. I won’t even ask you to buy my ebook either (not that I have one).

Alright, let’s begin. I am going to assume you have a brand new site or blog that has some content. First off, to really succeed you need quality content. You should strive to post at least 75% original content not just a summary or copy of something someone lese has already written about.

You have your content now how do you get people to read it?
You can have the greatest website or blog in the world but if nobody ever reads it it’s not really a success, is it? So how do you get traffic to your site? We will look at 3 ways to drive people to your site.

1. Article submission
Article submission sites are great ways to get traffic from other sites and build linkbacks at the same time. Articles that you submit are free for others to repost on their own sites as long as they leave your footer intact. You can place links in your footer to link back to your site(s).

This is probably the easiest method to get traffic and linkbacks because you write the article and submit it once and then others do the work of posting it on lots of sites for you. The amount of traffic you get and the quality of the linkbacks depend on the sites that post your article. Try writing articles for popular niches to increase your return.

2. Contribute to other blogs
Most blogs allow you to leave comments and they include your url. You should find blogs on topics you like and contribute quality comments to those blogs. Hint: look for high traffic blogs in your niche or blogs that have a lot of RSS subscribers. Your link will be posted with your comment and you will get some traffic from other readers, especially if you present interesting points and comments.

However, almost all blogs include rel=”external nofollow” on that link. What does this mean? It only means something to Google, all other search engines ignore this detail and record your linkback. Google does not record these types of links as linkbacks.

Despite this fact it is still worth it for the traffic you will get and the rankings on other search engines.

3. Help people in a forum
One fact that most people don’t realize is how useful your signature is on forums. You can place a link to your site in your signature and it will get attached to every post you make giving you linkbacks.

As far as traffic goes, the same principles as commenting on blogs apply. If you are helpful and provide quality feedback other users will follow your link to your site.

Also, forums won’t add rel=”external nofollow” to your link so it is picked up by all search engine however forum threads usually don’t reach as high of a rank as blogs and articles do but every little bit counts.

Summary
We have looked at some free ways to promote your blog that don’t take up too much time. You may already read blogs and comment on forums already so there is no extra work involved for you to take advantage of these techniques.