I get this email all the time… maybe 1-2 times a week. I am sure you all get it something similar too:
From: <mweeks@rogers.com>
Date: November 27, 2008 8:00:23 PM CST
To: <jeremy@shoemoneymedia.com>
Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to-make-money/
Hi,
We’ve seen your website at http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to-make-money/
and we love it!
We see that your traffic rank is 88919
and your link popularity is 3153.
Also, you have been online since 5/20/2004.
With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month
to advertise our links on your website.
If you’re interested, read our terms from this page:
1stsite.ca
Sincerely,
Marie Weeks
The ContactThem Network
So in every email it says I could earn up to $4800 per month.
This is one of those things that make me go “hmmmm”.
I wonder why the 4800 price point. I mean why not say 5000 ? Normally 4800 would be a good price point if someone was buying something but here you are trying to drive home how much I can earn right?
Anyway ….
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
Why $4800.00 A Month ?
I promised a few weeks ago that I would walk you guys through ‘the product flip’
What is the product flip? It’s basically where you create a product, drive traffic and make sales for it, and then flip the product at the end of this. You can make an easy $300+ at the very least for a relatively small amount of work.
This works awesomely well in the internet marketing niche, as of course things can be promoted a lot quicker in the IM niche than any other, however you can use this for almost any niche you want.
What should my product be about?
You want a product that talks about something people are interested in learning more about. In the IM niche, this is anything related to making money… driving traffic… blogging… social marketing - you get the idea. In other niches, this would be hot topics like how to lose weight, how to get your pet to behave, how to quit smoking etc.
Personally, I know a lot about the IM niche so I write my own products for it (when they’re sold under my name) but in other niches I like to outsource and get someone else to do the research. Although you want to make money, you should make sure your product is of high quality and will help people - this will lead to far more sales in the long run.
How do I create my product?
There’s one thing, and one thing only I use for all of my products - Open Office. It’s a free tool, and since I found out about it I stopped using Microsoft Word completely. What Open Office does is it has an option to easily convert your file to PDF, and there are also quite a few decent free templates available if you want to soup things up. EZ eBook Templates is just one site that has around 15~ free, all of which are high quality.
You want your product (at least your first one) to be short and sweet. A rough number to value a product I use is a dollar a page, so if your product is 10 pages you charge $10 and so on, although you’ll probably want to decrease this at the beginning (like I’ve done for Flip Noobs).An introduction, a step by step break down of whatever you’re talking about and a conclusion. Try to put as little fluff as possible (people hate fluff!) and space it out / use large fonts so that your eBook is easy to read.
Make sure to use images whenever possible - don’t just put some in for the sake of it but if you’re explaining certain concepts images can make people understand things a lot easier, especially if your product is aimed at newbies.
I’ve already done the promoting for this specific product (Flip Noobs, which is public) so I will cover this in a few days; however the above is basic information on how to create your product.
This product will also be listed (full rights) sometime over the next few days. I was planning to hold onto it, but I have exams coming up in a couple weeks and then will be out for most of January… to be honest, two months without working on promoting this and it’s likely it will be worthless. If you’re interested in purchasing full rights contact me; if you want to get in at the discounted price, you can purchase through the sales page.
There are also a few people in the joint venture project with me that I need to get kick started, so I’m going to clear a few of my other projects and spend more time working with them. I’ll be talking on here about some traffic / value adding strategies that I’m going to teach them to use, as well as hopefully reveal a couple sites from those that have already started seeing some traffic / revenue trickle in. Stay tuned
As I haven’t run a contest of sorts on here for some time, and this thread is about product creation, here’s an offer you can’t miss…
I’ll give away two FREE custom eCover designs to random commenters on this post. My only requirement is that you be subscribed to this blog.
Just subscribe, comment using the email you subscribed with and I’ll pick two random people for a custom, high quality eCover design from a top notch designer. This mini-contest will end on the 1st of December.
For this week’s edition of Dot Com Pho, we brought out the Flip Mino HD to film our first HD Look version. We’re calling it HD Look because the Flip Mino HD is about as HD as Julia Roberts is blonde. Sure, it films at 1280×720, but the compression is so high, the video quality is no better than the standard Mino.
We had a full house of 12 people showing up at Pho Trang Ad restaurant on kingsway, including two who have never attended a Dot Com Pho before. It’s always nice to meet new people. For the HD Look edition of Dot Com Pho, we bring you hot pepper eating dare, the iPhone app of the week, Pho menu #26, Dot Com Pho pens, IZEA T-shirts, the web site maximizer, UGM shout outs and a whole lot more.
Anyone is welcome to join us at Dot Com Pho. To find the location of next week’s Dot Com meet up, follow me on Twitter.
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The open voting session was closed yesterday at midnight, and we already have the 3 winners (each of them wins 1 point). They were:
- http://www.tofugu.com/ with 548 votes
- http://www.happyschoolsblog.com/ with 514 votes
- http://www.suzannefranco.com/ with 453
It was interesting to follow the evolution of the polls. HappySchoolsBlog.com and Tofugu.com were leading from the beginning, but the competition for the 3rd place was pretty tough. HeroesTelevision.com was taking that point until the very last day, when SuzanneFranco.com managed to pass its number of votes by mere 23.
Some people could argue that the bigger blogs would have an insurmountable advantage on the open voting session, but Suzanne Franco proved that this was not the case. She started the competition with 52 RSS subscribers, and her traffic is still much smaller than many of the other competitors. Still she managed to get a number of votes that was larger than many of the big guys.
Tomorrow at midnight we will know the blog that will have the largest subscriber gain, and on Monday (December 1st) the 3 judges will cast their votes.
Who will be the next Blogging Idol? Stay tuned for the post on Monday!
Copyright by Daily Blog Tips.
Blogging Idol 2: Update Five (Winners of the Voting Session)
Today Dr. Nicole from Kitchen Table Medicine shares her story of overcoming her Stats Addiction and gives some tips on what to do with your time to build your blog instead of checking stats.
Do you obsessively check your blog traffic stats throughout the day? Do you optimistically expect your Alexa ranking to drop every four hours? Do you frequently fret over your Google Page Rank? Do you watch your Adsense account like a hawk throughout the day? Well as much as these statistical markers may be helpful in understanding the success of your blog, they may also be interfering with the long term growth of your website.
Not only is checking stats a total time kill, but it can be a real buzz kill too when it doesn’t turn out the way we want.
In a month’s time, I stopped checking my stats only to return and find that my page views had doubled if not tripled, and my Alexa ranking had dropped from it’s consistent 252K to 151K! WOW!
So what happened? Had I actually changed anything I was doing…no not really I had just freed up a few extra hours to spend doing something more productive for my blog then obsessing over my stats.
First of all as a recovering stats addict I can’t stand before you all pure and pristine that I actually decided to give up stats all on my own, I never stopped obsessing over my stats intentionally. Actually, I was locked out of my stats program when my website crashed from hitting the front page of Digg! When I upgraded to a better host, their stats program was down for maintenance.
I WAS LOCKED OUT OF CHECKING MY STATS! OH THE TRAUMA!!!
Do you feel my pain?
For the entire month of October I was unable to check my stats! Only those of you obsessed with the constant joyful reassurance that checking stats brings can even begin to understand the frustration!!!
In an attempt to just “go with the flow” I decided to give up worrying about stats and start spending my time on marketing, writing, and building my readership….you know those things I should have been doing all day instead of wondering about my readers in Zimbabwe and if more people read my blog through IE7 or FF?
So you can only imagine my extreme paranoia when I finally could log back in to my site statistics and see if I was meeting my goals. You can only imagine my shock when I logged back in to see 10,000 page views a day!
Previously I would freak out if I hadn’t hit my goal of 3500 page views daily. Previously I liked considered 3500 pv’s my “fighting weight”.
So I was SHOCKED to find in just one month’s time that my baseline was bumped up to 7000-10,000 page views a day!
WOW! Maybe there really is something to this…
For most of us bloggers checking stats is the immediate reward we need for our day. However, checking stats can also be discouraging when we log in to find that a post was not as successful as we hoped.
So can you do it? Can you stop checking your stats? Are you fit for the challenge to completely give up obsessing over your stats for an entire month? Can you stop doing it every day and sit down for an hour once a week to go over it all? In hindsight the following ten traffic building tips are what I unintentionally ended up doing to build up traffic, and for just 20-30 freed up minutes a day, you can likely double your traffic flow in a month as well:
1. Stop checking your stats and stop writing for stats!
Write from your heart. I know we hear this over and over and OVER again, but readers really don’t “care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Keep it fresh, keep it live, and let it flow right through you. Say what is on your mind and be passionate about your beliefs. You may lose a few readers occasionally with some extreme viewpoints, but it ensures everyone else that you are at least always giving your honest opinion. When I couldn’t check in to my stats after a while I suddenly found myself not writing for stats but instead remembering all the things I always wanted to write about…and then writing about them.
2. Instead of checking stats, help out a fellow blogger!
Offering newbie bloggers in your field guidance and feedback for instance is a great POSITIVE way to spend a bit of free time. One day out of severe boredom while my site was down I started a forum thread offering help to people about their blog. It was a fun project for me and a valuable learning opportunity for those brand new to blogging. Pay it forward instead of obsessing on your latest stats. People quickly pick up on your kindness and will link to you like crazy. Please don’t go about this with the intention to gain backlinks. Don’t be fake, just sincerely make an effort to help out those folks you see with a great deal of potential, because it feels really good and truly is SO much more rewarding than checking stats. Honestly I think this is what helped my traffic out the most. The fact that I found myself a bit bored from not checking stats and so started just checking in on other bloggers.
3. Interview other bloggers.
In just FIVE MINUTES you can put together a fantastic set of FIVE interview questions that will not only promote another blogger, but will hopefully bring along some of their following. Find someone that specializes in a niche within your niche and you instantly have a free SEO friendly page perfectly made for your website….by an expert! Don’t forget to ask them for all their favorite links to add as resources, readers love it, and it easily connects you to other like minded bloggers.
4. Participate in discussion forums.
I always participate in the threads that catch my interest and the threads that are within my niche. Participating in your community is a million times more beneficial than obsessively obsessing over you your stats.
5. Check in on your readers instead of your stats!
Pay a visit to your latest commenter’s, thank them for stopping by your blog and read their latest article. Being a successful blogger means being part of a community. Are there any top bloggers that are an island within themselves on the internet? Not that I know of. Chances are if you have the time to fritter away checking stats, you are better off using that precious time to build your community.
6. Sign up for a new social network each day instead of obsessing over stats.
The more websites your blog is featured on, the more enmeshed in the internet you become. It only takes a few minutes to get signed up. I just copy and paste my info from Blog Catalog consistently in to each new site. If you are seriously obsessed with stats you may need to be prescribed two to three social networks a day to fill the void!
7. Write a scintillating guest post such as this one (well hopefully).
Translate those moments obsessing over stats into something productive like guest posting. Ask to be interviewed. A great guest post can be done in a matter of minutes. Many bloggers are just looking for a quick basic bit on your area of expertise. Write up a list of tips and tricks that reference longer posts on your site to generate new interest to old content. A great guest post can typically be done in a matter of twenty minutes. You know the basics about your field. Don’t waste your research time on a guest post. Talk about the stuff that constantly rattles out of you. You will sound more like an expert that way anyways. Save writing longer articles for your own site, and then write guest post “press releases” using them as a reference. Whatever you do, just keep writing, you got in to this business because you love to write—right?
8. Reach out to new friends at Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, and Mixx.
These social news sites are fantastic places for promoting your news and the more friends you have the better. I spend about 15 minutes on intentional time per day per social network and it is plenty. You don’t have to be on the front page, don’t digg your life away. Remember the best way to have a friend is to BE a friend. Spend a few minutes each day voting for your favorite articles and finding like minded authors and readers in your field. Now write some articles intended for the front pages of these sites. I know I know…Ignore my previous recommendation to write from your heart. Suck it up and write some REAL newsworthy piece of journalism for your niche. Spend some time on the front pages of Digg and Stumbleupon in your category to see what becomes popular. When you learn to consistently craft posts that are eye catching and intriguing they will inevitably hit the front pages. For Digg and Mixx I write brief journalistic newsworthy features on the latest in alternative medicine research, and for stumbleupon it is all about the simple numbered lists of tips and tricks, quizzes, and photos. I’m sure right at this moment you can easily go through your categories and find a theme for some numbered posts such as my article “21 Free Preventative Medicine Tips” .
I actually now create categories for certain tips and do a post a month on this topic until I have enough for a great viral link post.
9. Keep a stats journal.
Instead of obsessing about your stats on your computer make a stats journal. Write a log of the post title’s for each day, the time you posted them, what you did to promote them, if they became popular on any social media sites, etc. Then sit down with your stats journal for a couple hours at a time once a week and try to make REAL sense over your page traffic instead of just obsessing over numbers and feeling destroyed if today wasn’t as popular as yesterday. Looking at the big picture is the best way to address stats. Is it really worth all your time to spend your day on Digg when 90% of your socialnetworking traffic comes from Stumbleupon? Hmmm…Maybe not.
10. Read Problogger.net!
Ha…you all know that Darren did not edit this in because I made it the last tip and not the very first  But really we always save the best tip for last and the most important thing you can do to improve your page traffic is become a better blogger. You are far better off reading Problogger or your other favorite blog improvement blog 15 minutes four times a day then you are obsessing over stats. I remember a post a while back here on ProBlogger on how to be a “Meta” blogger. Some people hated the post, but I took it to heart and the advice has rung true on many frustrating occasions. The message behind “meta” is that you don’t have to be the very best each and every day. You just have to be a little bit better than we were yesterday. That is why Meta is bettah.
In all honesty, if you are on the internet to write, if you are passionate about blogging, I hope you will be inspired by my little stats success story to focus on your readers and your writing, and not use stats to determine the success of your blogging endeavor. Instead of obsessing over your traffic, obsess over ways to improve it.
Could you give up checking your stats for an entire month? A week? One day? Two hours?
What else would you recommend to increase traffic instead of checking stats?
Tags: Blog Promotion
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It’s been a good couple of days.
A lot of you know that I make money mainly through website flips, with a few other various things. However, when most of you have asked for examples of websites I’ve sold, I haven’t disclosed them.
Why? Simply because it’s not good disclosing to 1,000+ people exactly how you make your money. To be honest, for most of my websites I use the same formula… one that’s worked well.
This time however, I created a website with the sole idea of showing you guys what can be achieved if you’re willing to work for it… and now I disclose EVERYTHING.
I’m sure you’re tired of paying for products, so in this case it’ll be free.
Introducing Make Money Dynamo…
This (TUK) blog isn’t technically a make money online blog, but a lot of the information I’ve covered here, especially in the past couple of months is related to making money online, as that’s what people have wanted.
To be honest I’m tired of doing that here… I started this as an entrepreneur blog and would prefer to keep it that way. I’ll still share tips and techniques, but will look more broader than the standard “Make Money With X”.
However, people still need their fix… of FREE information that will help them earn a few dollars online. Which is why I’m JVing on a partner on this project, which will be a blog called Make Money Dynamo
The cost of this information? Well, it normally retails for about fifteen billion dollars, but ONLY for the next forever we’re releasing the information to you guys free. It’s all I can do to help people that have stuck with me for so long.
The posts on the blog will come maybe once a week, maybe a little more or little less than that, but I’m guaranteeing that almost each and every one of them will have something that you can use to increase your income. The blog was created between me and a friend, who contacted me during the JV With Me period… with a slightly different idea.
Anyways, I like launching in style, and not waiting… so I worked a bit today morning, detailing the exact steps I took in The Product Flip to amass $5,300 in revenue ($5,030 in net profit). And I almost didn’t create the site!
You’ll get the report immediately after you subscribe and you can sink your teeth into it. It’s a high quality report that could have been sold, and I hope you like it. If you don’t, I’ll refund the $0.00 you paid for it.
Screenshots of revenue are shown on the page.
Discover How I Made $5,030 Profit On The Product Flip
There’s also a post already up on the website talking about the email / zip submit method. It’s solid content.
Lastly, I want to know what specific ways to make money online you guys want to see detailed, step by step guides written FREE for. So leave me a comment and we’ll look into putting some out.
The Text Link Ad Network Pay $25.00 Per Free Referral. Confused about how to join? Read the eBook
An image is an act of communication. Images play an important role in the presentation of ideas. Worth more than a thousand words, they encapsulate meaning by both simplifying and embodying conceptual theories.They make information more appealing, more persuasive. In the realm of art or activism, images reflect the underlying current of collective feeling by vocalizing both public consensus and private desires.
On the internet, you can see the same popular pictures in websites of every language. Russian, Chinese, French or English. Images transcend linguistic and cultural barriers faced by text. There is no need for machine or human translation. No need for mediation.
Like videos, images can spread very quickly online with little artificial push. Are they inherently more ‘viral‘ than textual content? It is difficult to say with certainty if it indeed has a higher potential for popularity. But images have undeniable value in spreading ideas. Especially when they are elegantly integrated with the use of text to present information.
Unique, original images can attract an audience. They are not only high quality content for an interested readership but they can be useful promotional tools for anyone interested in gaining more attention. A particular form of image is relevant to this purpose: the infographic.
Visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information.
You’ve seen infographics everywhere. In books, magazines, newspapers, instruction manuals, maps, public signs and business reports. Visually, they come in many forms as well: charts, graphs, emblems, cartoons, diagrams and illustrations. Any image is suitable as long as it effectively works to convey data in a way that fulfills a specific or general purpose.
These graphics seek to inform. They can be a supplement to existing textual content or a hermeutically sealed construct, a stand-alone presentation which covers a subject in full. A complete statement and explanation that everyone can cite as a reference.
Infographics are a form of concentrated nutrition for data consumers. They are multi-vitamins, fulfilling basic info requirements in a simple hassle-free way. Like a pill, knowledge is condensed into essential components, enough to satiate your basic informational needs. They give you a general overview, one you can convert into talking points and social currency.
The amount of information they convey and the style used will vary depending on its purpose. Who is the intended audience of this piece? What specific frame or idea angle do you want to emphasize? How much abstraction and simplification is necessary for data to make sense?
Here are some examples from Princeton University’s International Network Archives. These infographics each give you a brief overview on a topic. See this page for full images and more.
The finished infographic is often beautiful to behold. Swirling gradients of color form into tangible shapes, contextually arranged to demonstrate quantifiable meaning. It’s easy to take it all in at one glance. Your eye darts around the numbers and skirts between the illustrations. You interact with it. You are thoroughly absorbed in its display of coherence.
And after looking, you’ll often think of sharing it. Maybe save the image, attach it to an email and fire it to a friend. Maybe you’ll include it in your latest blog post or tweet it. Or you’ll log into your favorite forum, drop the link and see what everyone else thinks.
There are many ways to propagate these images once they are produced. Apart from the usual social media channels, you can provide link codes by hosting the images and providing the html which points back to your site. Or you can package it into PDF formats along with other similar infographics to make a mini-report.
Unlike textual content, these images often do not include much text: you can consider pre-emptively translating them into other major languages so they can be shared more widely among different audiences.
They can also be produced on a regular basis as feature content. As a pictorial representation of information, infographics are often considered to be unique even if the data shared as already been elaborated elsewhere in text articles. Therein lies its appeal to a readership that might be jaded by the repetition of ideas in the content of other media sources/websites.
Good Magazine is an excellent example of a site that recently started creating infographics (known as ‘Good Sheets’) as regular online content. The print editions of these images were also given out free of charge at Starbucks. The combination of online and offline distribution is something that is suited to the nature of one-page documents like infographics.
Next time when you’re planning on sharing specific ideas or data, consider using infographics. They are a terrific way of making information accessible and a useful primer that will pique the interest of your intended audience. When created and marketed effectively, they can be part of a powerful viral strategy to magnetize attention to your website or business.
P.S I intend to write more on the topic of information design specifically as it relates to marketing. This is something I’m recently interested in and hopefully you’ll find it entertaining and useful. And by the way… Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and friends!
To receive updates on new articles, subscribe to Dosh Dosh today.
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Infographics Can Help You Spread Ideas and Attract Attention
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Springwise:
It’s a well-known fact that dogs can be conversation starters that help break the ice with people their owners meet. Taking the notion a step further, a new collar tag from Boston-based SNIF Labs lets pet owners forge new connections with fellow dog-walkers, both online and off.
Available in a range of colours and patterns, the SNIF Tag is a small RFID device that attaches to a dog’s collar and records his or her daily movements and social encounters. On the social side, each SNIF Tag emits a unique signal that is sensed by the SNIF Tags worn by other dogs.
When Fido meets such tag-bearing playmates during a jaunt to the park, his collar stores that information and later uploads it automatically into the accompanying base station, which stays plugged into the owner’s PC at home. The dog’s owner can then log in to view the profiles of the owners of those other dogs and decide if they want to connect online as well.
In addition to monitoring social interactions, the SNIF Tag also uses an accelerometer and motion-analysis software to record a pet’s activity. Owners can monitor the dog’s movements in real time while he’s home but they’re at work, for example; alternatively, when Fido is out with the walker, information on his activities will be automatically uploaded when he returns.
Activity levels can be reviewed by the hour, day or month, and owners can compare them with those of the other SNIF Tag-wearing dogs in the neighbourhood.
Photo by SNIF Labs, Inc..
Dot Com Pho - Pho Trang An Edition
Tomorrow’s Dot Com Pho will be held at Pho Trang An - 1284 Kingsway, Vancouver. Anyone wishing to attend the weekly Pho meet up should email me or send me a tweet on Twitter so I can save you a seat and get a head count. We have prizes this week! Free pens from Bic Promo Pens, I’m Blogging This T-shirts from Market Leverage and one new Dot Com Pho attendee will walk away a The Web Site Revenue Maximizer kit from SitePoint.
The Art & Science of CSS
Speaking of SitePoint, if you follow them on Twitter, they will send you The Art & Science of CSS eBook for free. This 208 page book will teach you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about CSS, and more. It normally sells for $29.95 but it’s yours free for the Twitter follow.
If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll send you a nice thank you tweet.
Vote for Suzanne Franco - The Next Blogging Idol
The voting stage of The Next Blogging Idol has started and Suzanne Franco needs your help. Head over to Daily Blog Tip and cast your vote for her.
Power of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Michael Kwan, who blogs for Pho, has a cute post titled Power of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Basically, if you truly believe that something is going to happen, there’s a good chance that it is going to manifest itself. In other words, whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. I wonder if Kwan has been reading Think and Grow Rich?
Six Sure-Fire Steps to Sell Anything to Anyone
Do you suck at sales? Then let Derek Halpern help you out. Derek is the blogger at Prevential.com and he’s got six sure-fire steps to sell anything to anyone. I heard that Derek once sold ice cubes to Eskimos and ran a successful clothing shop at a nudist camp.
Star Trek vs Star Wars: The Final Battle
Who would win in battle, a 642.5 meter long Galaxy-class Federation starship or a 1,600 meter long Imperial Star Destroyer? This video gives a definitive answer once and for all. Or does it? Watch the video and let another never ending battle between Star Trek and Star Wars fans begin.
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Detroit Free Press:
Chris Hart of Eastpointe enjoyed a romantic Sweetest Day dinner with her boyfriend at an Auburn Hills restaurant without worries about driving home after drinking.
When it was time to call it a night, a chauffeur for the Designate, a Birmingham-based designated driver service, safely drove the pair back to Macomb County inside Hart’s 2008 Chrysler Pacifica. Another chauffeur followed the car and returned the driver to work.
Hart, 42, was pleased she took no chances by arranging a responsible way to get home that night and has since told her friends about the service she learned of from a radio advertisement.
“It’s just peace of mind,” she said of not fearing repercussions for driving under the influence like harming someone or a costly arrest.
Founded in March 2007, the Designate in Oakland County recently announced it is heightening its presence in Macomb County with an increased staff and a staging pod in Fraser. Those changes aim to reduce the wait time for customers without prior reservations just in time for Thanksgiving Eve, one of the biggest bar nights of the year.
Photo by The Designate.
Happy Thanksgiving for you guys that celebrate it (I know it was yesterday…). Another set of questions and answers is live.
If you want to ask a question you just need to leave a comment below with it.
1. James asks:
I run a podcast via a blog. I just started moving into video and I am now concerned that I have to many images, too many icons, and too many videos on the blog. Is there a chance I’ve overcrowded my blog?
I took a brief look on your blog and it does not look overcrowded to me. I think expanding beyond articles is interesting, especially if you have the time and skills to make cool podcasts and video posts. Very few bloggers do that, so it can become a unique selling proposition too.
The only thing that I would make sure is that your navigation clearly separates the three things. For example, you could have 3 main navigation tabs, one for “Blog”, one for “Podcats” and one for “Videos.” That one a visitor could reach the part of your site that he likes quickly and effortlessly.
2. Satish asks:
Is there a way to build automated link exchange system?
Ex:- If A and B exchange link.
A’s link on B’s website will be there until B’s link remains on A’s website.
I would like to do link exchange with some people, but I can’t keep monitoring whether they remove my link at any time, it should be handled automatically. Th
First of all I recommend exchanging links only with relevant websites, and for the purpose of adding value to the user experience and not to manipulate Google’s rankings.
If you follow that route, therefore, you would find yourself partnering with a handful of websites at most. On that case it becomes easy to monitor them once a month (even if you have 10 sites to check it will take 5 minutes).
The only scenario where you would need an automatic system is where you trade links with dozens or hundreds of sites, but this is something that might get you in trouble in the end so I would avoid.
Finally, I am not aware of any automatic system, but it should be possible to build one with PHP.
3. Transcriptionist asks:
What should be the optimal bounce rate? What is the minimum bounce rate that you think can be achieved? What were the bounce rates at the beginning of your blogs and what are the numbers now? How much did you target for your blogs at their inception, and have you been able to achieve it and if yes, how?
Apart from your own experiments and results in this regard and compelling content, what are other tips and techniques that you would suggest to bring the bounce rate down? Elaborate every little aspect in detail by dedicating a separate post for this topic please, as we all know the significance of controlling bounce rates arises from user behavioral tracking by major search engines and its subsequent effects on SERPs.
An optimal bounce rate is below 15%, but keep it in mind it is very hard to achieve that. The minimum that you could have without needing to spend a huge amount of time and energy on the tweaking process is probably around 25% is 30%.
I am not sure what my bounce rates were on the beginning of my blogs were because I didn’t use to check on them. Even today I don’t check bounce rates that often or for the blog as whole. Usually I just work with bounce rates on commercial projects, sales and landing pages.
As for optimizing sites for low bounce rates, I am working on a long and structured article on the topic. It will be part of my next project, so stay tuned for that.
4. Rick asks:
What’s your take on having a companion newsletter for your blog? (You don’t seem to offer one so perhaps that speaks volumes.) People swear by it, but I’m trying to understand why you wouldn’t just put all your content on the blog and skip the newsletter.
If you have the time available I think that having a newsletter to complement your blog is a great idea. Internet marketers swear by email lists because they are the most responsive channel you have, and it has been proven time and time again.
Additionally, I find that a newsletter allow you to build a closer relationship with some of your readers, because an email is more personal than a blog post.
Why not just put all the content on the blog? Well, because some of the content that will be suitable for your newsletter will not be suitable for the blog and vice versa. Suppose you want to give people a sneak peek into your latest project. A blog post would broadcast it beyond your control, while with the newsletter you could be sure about how many people would get to known your news, how they could share or act upon it and so on.
5. Ad Pr New York asks:
What are the best traffic stats to use?
Looking for one that is full featured and accurate.
Detailed referrers and demographics are important
Google Analytics is definitely the most robust and feature rich web analytics program out there. It is also free, so you can’t go wrong by giving it a try.
Sometimes it will report underestimated traffic numbers, but the difference will be small, and much more realistic than the rest of the trackers out there that always over estimate numbers.
6. Simon asks:
1) How do I block an IP address that is spamming my blog frequently and consistently with useless comments and links to non-Google approved sites? It seems like there is some bot auto-posting spam comments.
2) Is there a way that in the page navigation of a blog we can make a link to an outside page? Would this be done through altering the header.php to include another link or through the manage pages section in admin?
1) You can block his name internally on WordPress. Just go to “Settings,” then “Discussion,” and you will find a blacklist box there. Alternatively you can also block his IP with a .htaccess file if your server runs on Apache. You just need to insert the following code on the .htaccess file (changing the IP address obviously):
order allow,deny
deny from 200.20.2.1
allow from all
2) Yes you can do this. Basically you would need to delete the code that calls the page links automatically from WordPress and add the links manually. Once you have that you can add a link to whatever site you wish.
7. Netpreneur asks:
I have a plan to make a blog with forum inside, what are characteristics of content for blog and forum?
The blog content will be generated by you (or by other authors that you will hire), while the forum content will be generated by the members. You might be present and active on the forum, but unless many other people are too, it will become a ghost forum.
What I recommend is to work first on the blog, make it popular and build a community around it. Once you have that accomplished, then you launch the forum to support the lateral discussions that might arise from the blog posts.
Copyright by Daily Blog Tips.
Blogging Questions & Answers 27
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Thanks for the shirt!
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NewHomesSection.com - Free Shirt Friday
Dear Amazon.
I have been using your Associates program for quite a few years now - from the early days when I earned just a few dollars a month to today when I send you tens of thousands of dollars of business each month. I’ve written about why I believe in your program and have no doubt sent you hundreds (if not thousands of affiliates in my time).
By my calculations I’ve sent you around $1,500,000 of sales over the last five years.
I’m very grateful for the $70,000+ you’ve sent me in affiliate payments and am by no means am I your biggest affiliate but I hope that having reached the million dollars in sales mark you’ll forgive me this note to express a concern that I have in the hope that it might help improve your program.
I am increasingly frustrated by your payment system.
While you offer direct debit payments to those situated in the USA - I live in Australia and so have two options for payment - gift certificates and check. Lets take a look at both methods:
1. Gift Certificates - as someone who earns $2000-$3000 in commissions each month from Amazon it is simply not feasible for me to take my payments in certificates. For starters I’d run out of things to buy pretty quickly - particularly because most of your high ticket items cannot be shipped outside of the USA.
This leaves me with the option of either just buying books, DVDs and CDs ($2-$3k worth a month….) or buying things, shipping them to US friends and having them repost them to Australia. It also means having to pay for international shipping on everything I buy - not cheap. Lets just say that all of this rules out the gift certificate option (although I take it once a year if I’m doing a trip to the US).
2. Check - this leaves me with only one option - receiving a check. Let me say that your checks do come quickly. I get them within a couple of weeks of the end of the month - a lot faster than others (nice work) - however a check of over $2000 in Australia needs to be processed and sent by my bank back to the USA before it can be cleared. This takes six weeks from the day I bank it.
This means that money I make from Amazon on the 1st of a month can take six weeks before I get the check and then another six weeks before I can see the money. That’s 3 months!
All in all this is one of the slowest and antiquated payment systems that I have to use. Every other affiliate program or ad network that I use (and I use a few) gives either the option for an international direct deposit or a PayPal transfer, particularly to affiliates who earn over a certain threshold.
The only other affiliate program that insists upon me receiving checks gives me the option to have them split into smaller amounts (so I get 2-3 of them each month) so that the check can be processed locally without the six week delay.
I love the Amazon affiliate program but the payment system is increasingly frustrating me. I’d love to see you do something about it for myself and my fellow non US affiliates and in doing so improve your already great program.
I know you must be kind of busy with your big Black Friday sale - but I’d appreciate your consideration to this.
Darren Rowse - ProBlogger.net
PS: having just added up how much business I’ve sent you ($1.5M made me have to sit down) it strikes me that you’re the largest affiliate program or ad network that I deal with that I’ve never had any personal contact with. Again - I’m sure I’m a small fish in comparison to some of your other affiliates - but other affiliate programs and ad networks give their medium to large affiliates quite a bit more personal attention.
Some assign account managers, others call every now and again to see how we’re going, quite a few offer special premium commissions for larger publishers, quite a few send a gift…. or even a card at Christmas time to say thanks for the business. Amazon…. well you send me checks that take 6 weeks to clear.
Don’t get me wrong - checks are nice and you’ve more than helped me make a dent in my mortgage…. but when web publishers are making the choice of which affiliate program to use on their websites, sometimes the little things count.
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I confess that this is a mistake that I used to do myself. When starting to write a new post, I would start with the title, move to the body of the post, proofread it and publish.
Why is this method not effective? For two reasons.
First of all because it makes you neglect the title, which is one of the most important elements on any post or article. If you write it down quickly and move on, your attention and energies will be directed mainly to the body of the post.
So the first thing you need to change is to dedicate more time and attention to developing the title of your posts, especially to the structured ones where you expect some social media exposure. Some copywriters argue that the time spent developing the title should be as long as the time you will spend writing the post itself. This might be a stretch, but you get the idea.
The second mistake that people make is to work on the title before they write the post. How can you come up with an appealing yet descriptive title if you are not sure about the content of the post yet?
The solution for this is simple: whenever you start writing a new post, use a draft title. You can literally write “Draft:” in front of your title, to make sure you will remember to work on it after you are done writing the post.
Keep those two principles in mind and I am sure that the quality of your headlines will improve.
Copyright by Daily Blog Tips.
Write Your Titles CAREFULLY and AFTER the Post
Christmas is coming up, so here’s a way you can make yourself some holiday cash.
Most of you will know about the website flipping guide that I launched a couple of weeks ago… it’s going strong, and it should surpass the 100 sales mark today or tomorrow. People have been pretty astounded with it as it’s (in my personal, honest opinion of course) crazy value for money and with the bonus is a must buy for anyone that’s getting into site flipping.
Anyways, I’m not going to sell you on this any more, don’t worry :razz:; I am however going to help you make money promote it. I have not put up an official affiliates page on the site, so at the moment this is the ONLY place where you can sign up for the affiliate program.
The report currently sells for around $15, so you will net $7.5 on every sale. Not the biggest amount, but this is one the easiest sells you’ll ever have. Making 5+ sales a day is not difficult, and that’s an extra $1,125 per month if you manage to keep it up. It’s a 40+ page report with a custom bonus that is worth the price alone.
You can sign up for the affiliate program through this link. You’ll need a free account at E-Junkie, but once signed up you’ll be able to see your statistics etc.
I want this post to be useful for even those that are not interested in promoting this specific product, so you can use the information below for almost any product out there.
I recommend setting up a cloaked affiliate link to promote this. You can do this through your own website by setting up a php file (for example, flipnoobs.php) and entering the below code into it:
<html>
<head>
<title>Make Money Flipping Websites</title>
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow”>
<script>window.location=”http://www.youraffiliatelink.com”;</script>
<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“1; url=http://www.youraffiliatelink.com“>
</head>
<body>
<p align=“center”>You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page doesn’t load after 5 seconds,
<a href=“http://www.youraffiliatelink.com“>click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
Once that’s done, you can start promoting. Here’s a few ideas…
1. Leave blog comments on every single decent traffic blog you visit over the next few days. Use your cloaked affiliate link as your URL, and aim to be the first comment (more eyeballs!) by using a tool like Comment Sniper. If your comments are of high quality (or controversial ) people will click through. Remember that you can outsource this.
2. Write a post on your own blog, no matter how big or small it is. Review the product, talk about why people should buy it, the benefits of it et cetera. If you have 200+ subscribers you qualify for a free copy, so send me an email. If you review it on your own blog and write the review well enough, you’ll see sales.
3. Write articles. At the moment this product isn’t so widely promoted that people are searching for the product name itself (if they were though, you could write articles based on that), however you can target terms like website flipping, make money flipping websites, how to sell websites etc. You could also setup a Squidoo Lens, Hubpages, a Facebook account to promote… entirely up to you.
4. Put your cloaked affiliate link in your forum signature and post high quality stuff for a couple days. Clicks ==> sales. The sales page is converting pretty well (probably because I didn’t write it ).
5. Create a short, free report to give away… 4-5 pages long, maybe talk about something about website flipping or even presell your report readers (”Why you should start website flipping” etc). At the end, recommend this product through your cloaked affiliate link. You could also use your free report to build a list.
6. Pay per click. Again, website flipping terms or even make money online terms, although your profit margin would decrease as MMO terms cost a bit. This is not recommended for newbies - only do this if you are experienced.
7. Advertise in ezines with your cloaked affiliate link. Or buy advertising banners on blogs.
8. Order a paid blog review but ask the blog writer to use your affiliate link instead of direct linking.
Eight ways that you can promote this… if you’re creative, there are plenty more. You can use any of the content from the sales page, including the header / eCover / order button.
Feel free to let me know if you need any help via instant messenger or ask in the comments. If you’re good at affiliate marketing, you may want to help people out below
Payments will be made every couple of weeks, quicker if you do 10+ sales. Good luck!
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