How To Attract visitors To Your Affiliate Website
A common question among people with affiliate websites is how to attract more visitors to their websites. There is a simple answer to this question, which can be performed by even the most inexperienced Internet Marketers. This answer is pay-per-click marketing.
Pay-per-click is a service offered by some search engines, where you can post the link to your website, and you only pay when someone uses that link to visit your site. You only pay when it works.
Remember, a successful affiliate website has a 2% click through rate. That’s only 2 out of every 100 visitors. That means that you’re going to want a lot of visitors to check out your site, if you’re going to benefit from your affiliate links in any realistic sort of way.
Here are some tips that you can use to get the most out of your pay-per-click:
· Check out a place like howitworks.com and get to know how pay-per-click really works. With a good understanding of the way the programs function and record their clicks, you’ll have a better idea of how to use pay-per-click to your advantage.
· Use keywords that aren’t covered by too many other (if any) websites, and that will be common searches by people seeking the products and services sold through your affiliate links. Be sure to try many different variations of different keywords, to make sure that you have as much of a monopoly on them as possible.
· Bid on as many keywords as possible. Why? Because the more keywords you bid on, the more links will be built for your website. That is, bidding on 100 keywords is the same as building 100 links back to your website.
There are, however, many other different techniques that will make the difference between making a little bit of extra cash, and making an actual income. It’s the difference between signing up to an affiliate program, and actually mastering affiliate strategies.
One of the best ways that you can maximize the performance of your affiliate strategy is by way of direct promotion via email. While the use of this strategy has blossomed over the last few years, a great deal of it has been through SPAM – unsolicited advertisements – which this course neither suggests, nor approves of. Instead, there are much more effective and acceptable method of advertising by way of email that will be of much greater use to you and your affiliate strategy.
This is by way of opt-in emails, which usually consist of e-zines or newsletters. These are emails that recipients actually choose to receive, by signing up. This way, you’ll be able to create an information-based email, which you can send directly to the recipient’s email inbox, and which may also contain summaries, explanations, benefit lists, and uses for different products or services.
Within these newsletters, you can create a great deal of interest in the different products and services offered by your affiliate program – subtly, as hard-selling is unappealing, and will frequently turn readers away from your e-publication – creating the desire within those readers to learn more, and perhaps even buy.
Within each of your articles or summaries, include your affiliate link for the product that applies to that particular message.
The benefit here is twofold. Not only do you have a perfect opportunity to promote the products and services being sold through your affiliate strategy – providing click-throughs, and then sales with your commissions – but your visitors will be reminded of your site with each publication of the newsletter or e-zine, allowing them to discover new products and services that they may never have noticed on their own.
For those of you who have never been hit by a Hurricane, and especially a category 4 Hurricane, your blessed, because the moments still lives with me as if it was yesterday.
I had my whole life turned up side down back in 1995, when Hurricane Louis destroyed my lovely little Island of St. Maarten. The sight of wakening up to see all the trees bare without leaves and your home destroyed, and 95% of the homes on the Island destroyed, is heart breaking. Well, it took St. Maarten two years to recover and all I can say is that, only God knows why some get hit and others not.
Well, my heart felt sympathy goes out to those hit by Hurricane Katrina, all I can say is I have been there and you can make it also. Just have faith and believe and the Lord will take care of the rest.
You know one thing I must admit about Hurricanes, is that it creates unity among the people struck, you will finally get to know your neighbor and start lending a hand to someone who lived next to you for many years, but not once did you ever realized that your neighbor is an OK person.
The worse part of the disaster is the flooding, my daughter Imani was only two months old, and everyday she would get some kind of rash, I spent $900 on medical expenses in a couple of weeks. For those who have little kids, try to keep them away from others, their immune system is too weak to ward of the germs that you will be facing daily.
I don’t want to write a book, so to all those struck, keep your head on and try to be the best person that you can be and help those in need. You need each others support more than ever. May God Bless You all and Give You The strength To Continue, and may your country once again be as beautiful as it once was.
There Is No Better Industry Than Affiliate Marketing.
There are thousands upon thousands of different affiliate programs available to you across the world wide web, so getting started with an affiliate program can sometimes seem a bit daunting. However, when you know what you’re looking for, you’ll feel much more prepared to tackle this first major step.
Though many affiliate sites will give you the impression that all that is required to enjoy affiliate program success is plugging a link or a banner onto your website, and the money will begin rolling in on its own, this is not always the case. Usually, this is only the case if your website already experiences massive amounts of daily visitors.
For that reason, you’ll want to make certain to hook up with affiliate program that offers products, services, and bargains that hold real attraction to the type of website visitor you will be experiencing.
Once you have that set, it’s up to you to get the word out, and draw as many people to your site as possible, using a number of different marketing techniques. Variety is the key, both with the products you’ll offer, and the advertising you’ll perform.
Furthermore, once your audience has reached your site, you need to encourage them to click through your affiliate links. Remember, your visitors need a very good reason to click on a link or banner on your site. Otherwise, they won’t use it.
How do you do this? Use a wide variety of the different banners and links offered to you from the affiliate program so that you have the highest chance of attracting people’s attention – no matter what draws them. Moreover, if you use simple straightforward links and banners you will experience much more success than highly colorful and picture-filled banners.
Remember, a 2% is considered doing pretty well, so you will need to do everything you can to get at least 2 out of every 100 of your visitors to use your links.
How to Become a Master Affiliate
Affiliate programs are the latest in truly successful residual income strategies. They are the choice of online experts, and will be your choice too, when you find out how much money you’ll be earning.
What is an affiliate program, you ask? An Affiliate is what would typically be known in the retail industry as a "representative," or "rep." In this case, an "E-rep" is probably a more accurate description. Best part is that you don't have to drag a briefcase of samples with you! In fact, once you’ve set up your strategy for making money through affiliate programs, you won’t even have to think about it anymore – except when it comes to depositing the money you’ve made into your bank account, and then deciding how to spend it.
What do you need to become an affiliate? A computer with a connection to the internet. It doesn’t even need to be your own – though that does make it more comfortable. Beyond that, there are tons of techniques that you can build into your strategy for getting the very most out of your earnings. Typically, this starts with a website; A website, simple or complex, one simple page or a big deal. It’s all up to you, and you can build as you become comfortable with the concept, and understand what you’re doing.
Affiliate Tracking
This information was received by an article written by Todd Farmer & Jeff Doak
Affiliate Managers and many other web marketers have started to use a variety of tracking technologies and strategies, over the last few years, in their quest for accurately keeping track of their referred customers. Tracking customers "from click through to sale" can be accomplished with various tracking methods, such as:
• Simple Direct URL Links
• CGI/URL Tracking
• Cookie Tracking
• Self Replicated Pages
• Sub Domain Tracking
• Database Record Match Tracking
One of the good things about these methods is that each of them has strengths, and each has weaknesses. However, you'll see that Cookie Tracking (which I mentioned in an above section) is the clear winner as the preferred single tracking method when it comes to reliable, flexible, and convenient tracking.
When you are searching through the different tracking methods, an affiliate manager has to consider these things first:
• How flexible is the method? For example: Can you track everything that you want to track and will it work with my shopping cart or ordering system?
• How easy is it for the tracking to be started and completed? Ask yourself: ‘Do I have to exert much effort re-designing and maintaining my website to work with the tracking method?’
• How much can you count on the tracking method?
• How easily can an affiliate with a lot of experience defeat the tracking method?
• Does this tracking method affect the performance of your website or web server?
Making Money with Affiliation with Pay Per Click
It doesn’t really take a whole lot of knowledge to realize that the internet is the new wave in marketing right now. It is even better than traditional methods for marketing because this method can give you returns almost immediately upon your investment if you know what you are doing and how to best capitalize off of it.
As you can probably imagine, the entire purpose of using affiliation as a part of your marketing technique is so that you can make some money. Below, you will learn how you can make money with affiliation without spending more than you can afford to spend. There are more ways to generate traffic to your website and this is just one of them. However, I Thought that it deserved more attention on its own as its popularity gets higher. Look Below for more options.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is a bonus for affiliate marketers because it basically does exactly what it says. When your visitors click onto your web pages you will get paid just for the visit. It doesn’t apply to how much stuff the visitors purchase. Let’s take a look at some of the most common questions about it to help you get an exact idea of what this really is.
What Is Pay Per Click?
Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search query is performed. You get to decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose. Because of this, your site’s appearance listing can rapidly fluctuate. However, this method is great for the marketer that is just starting out.
Which Search Engines Offer Pay Per Click Advertising?
There is literally hundreds of pay per click search engines such as MSN, Yahoo, Google and Overture. Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine is, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on your keywords and how much traffic they draw in.
The largest companies in the pay per click industry are Overture and Google. Google is not a pay per click search engine, but it does provide pay per click advertising in text ad boxes to the right of search results it delivers. It also delivers pay per click ads to other content sites as well. One advantage the lesser known search engines have is that these search engines can provide lower costs per click to rank for a keyword than the larger search engines.
In addition to the general pay per click search engines, you may also be able to find thematic search engines that serve your industry or specifically cater to your target audience.
How to Find Good Affiliation Programs to promote
Because there are literally tens of thousands of affiliate programs on the Internet these days that are covering just about every product and service you could imagine. Finding the right affiliate programs can be a difficult task, but it does pay off; so it's well worth the effort. If you're new to affiliate programs, here's a good list of things that you can do to find the right programs for you:
First of all, you have to know that to the business owner, affiliate programs are seen as a virtually 'free' marketing tool that allows them to generate extra business without having to invest in any significant up-front costs. Because affiliate programs pay based solely on their performance, they typically have nothing to lose by recruiting as many affiliates as possible.
This is an important thing to keep in mind because most affiliate programs will do their best to present themselves as a great affiliate match for any site because business owners see that they have nothing to lose if you can't generate sales. However if you are the marketing affiliate, you do because that means that it is lost income potential.
You have to learn to define who your audience for example: Do you have general traffic or specific types of visitors? Is your audience mainly comprised of a particular age demographic? Male/Female? If it's possible, first narrow down what kind of potential shoppers you might have visiting your site. This is again called ‘finding your target audience’. Remember to write everything down.
Conclusion
There you have it. You now understand blogging and pinging and have all the secrets and tips that will make this work for you. Instead of waiting weeks, months, or even up to a year, you can get your website or your business blog indexed almost immediately.
Blogging and pinging is certainly an incredible marketing tool.
Changes to Your Business Blog Settings
All the settings for a business blog are identical to the settings for a blog and ping blog. However, you can add a description to your Business Blog that will help it be search engine optimized.
Go to the Settings Tab and then click on the sub-tab called Basic. Put in a description that uses your keywords. Then click on Save Settings and then on republish.
Change About Me
Looking at the sample above, you will see an “About Me” section in the right hand sidebar. You will want to change the “Editor” in the sidebar to reflect the same name that you use when posting. Go to the “Template” tab and scroll down until you find the following code:
<!-- Begin #profile-container -->
<$BlogMemberProfile$>
<!-- End #profile -->
Change the highlighted code to your posting name. In the case of this blog, it is Computer Security Guru.
<!-- Begin #profile-container -->
Computer Security Guru
<!-- End #profile -->
Save the template changes and republish.
Adding Links
The more links you have on your blog, the better. You can add pertinent links in the sidebar. Once again, go to the “Template” tab and scroll down until you see the following code:
This is the HTML code for the sidebar links. The yellow shaded code is the URL for the link. The green shaded code is what the person sees when visiting your blog. You will want the green code to be full of keywords.
For instance, if you are working with your Computer Security blog, you may want to link to http://www.cert.org/homeusers/HomeComputerSecurity/.
To do this, you would change one of the yellow highlighted fields to http://www.cert.org/homeusers/HomeComputerSecurity/ and then you would change the corresponding green field to something like Home Computer Security or any other combination of keywords.
The final code would be:
Changes to Your Business Blog Template
Change Editor
In the beginning, we set up your blog to say “editor” for each of your posts. In order to keyword optimize your blog, you will want to change “editor” to one of your keywords. To make these changes you have to go into the “Template” tab.
Scroll down until you find the following HTML code:
<p class="post-footer">
<em>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> at <a ref="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemDateTime$></a></em>
Change the highlighted code to a name with one of your keywords, for instance, Computer Security Guru. The new code would look like this:
<p class="post-footer">
<em>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> at <a ref="Computer Security Guru" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemDateTime$></a></em>
Save the Template changes and then republish. You will need to do this for each blog that you create.
Chapter 9: Tips and Tricks
Tips For Blog and Ping Blogs
• If you want to cut and paste into your blog content field, but the “paste” is not available, simple press Control V.
• Make a commitment to blog everyday.
• Don’t forget that the location code starts with htp://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u= Mark this down. You can also store it on your clipboard for easy pasting.
• Remember that your RSS feed will end with atom.xml
• Use favorites or bookmarks. Instead of having to constantly remember the different URLs of your blogs, having to type in the ping codes, or remember the Ping-o-Matic URLs, create a folder in your favorites or bookmarks. I call my folder “Blog and Ping.” The Blog and Ping main folder has the following sub-folders:
• Needs to be Spidered: Websites that you want to get spidered
• Blogs: Blogs that you have created
• Yahoo Ping: The blogs with the altered location codes so that you can ping Yahoo every time you make a change
• Ping-O-Matic: Pingomatic sites for each blog
• Tools: Here I would have MyYahoo to be able to view the Yahoo pings, Blogger.com to be able to make easy changes to your blogs, and the Ping-o-matic home page in case you want to add more blogs to the site.
• Do a search on your site URL at Alexa.com and see if you are found. If not, your search will have triggered what it takes to be inside their database in the near future. Alexa
Pinging Your Business Blog
Just like with blog and ping blogs, you will want to ping your business blog. Luckily, there is no difference at all!
• You will still want to create a MyYahoo! account, register your blog, and ping Yahoo whenever you add content.
• You will still want to ping Ping-o-Matic whenever you add content.
Additionally, you may want to add your blog to several other sites for submission. The Appendix has several of these listed for your convenience.
Your Business Blog’s Content
The content for a blog and ping type blog is relatively unimportant. All you need are the links to the site you want to have indexed. Why? Only spiders will ever see the blog.
However, when you are creating a blog for business purposes, you need to purposefully creating blog content that has your keywords. As a Business Blogger, you can make your blog more powerful by using keywords in your content.
Using keywords in the content will ensure that search engines find your blog. And if search engines find your blog, there is a better chance that people will read what you wrote. And if you can get them reading what you wrote, then those interested in your topic are ready to be captured by your product or service.
This approach may sound like too much trouble. But consider this: if you are going to go to the effort of creating and maintaining a blog (and they are a lot of work), then why not make sure that the blog is found on the search engines via the keywords most searched by your intended audience.
You can still use BlogThis! but you will want to add some of your own content to the blog body. Let’s take a look at how to do this.
Assume that you have a business that is concerned with computer security and have a blog named Computer Security at computer-security. As you were browsing the web, you came across the a good computer security article here, that will help you motivate people to switch over to Foxfire instead of staying with Internet Explorer.
You would highlight a particular section and then use BlogThis! just like in you were taught in Chapter 5.
Now it is time to add your own words. In this case, I added words both before and after the quote.
Don’t forget to click on the list to get the correct blog before publishing. The blog will post will look like this:
Take a look at the second paragraph. That is the BlogThis! paragraph. If you don’t like the way the paragraph starts, you can make adjustments to the HTML. The HTML in the body of the post that shows the link to PCPRO is:
<a href="htp://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/65700/security-company-warning-of-vulnerabilities-in-windows-xp-sp2.html">PC Pro: News: Security company warning of vulnerabilities in Windows XP SP2</a>:
If you don’t want your sentence to start with” PC Pro: News: Security company warning of vulnerabilities in Windows XP SP2” you can change the highlighted words to something else. For instance, you might want to say “A professional in the report states”
The HTML link would look like this:
<a href="htp://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/65700/security-company-warning-of-vulnerabilities-in-windows-xp-sp2.html">A professional in the report states:</a>
In this way, the finished blog entry would look like this:
Creating a URL That Works
Now you want to create a URL. First, you want your URL to be keyword sensitive. Second, you want your URL to create Google Adsense Ads that match your content. Even if you are not planning to use Google AdSense, finding a URL that produces the right content will show you that your name is search engine friendly.
The way to check this is by going to ResultsGenerator Adsense.
Place a potential URL in the field. You will want to put the entire URL into the field. This means that if you are using Blogger.com, your URL will be htp://yourblog.blogspot.com
In the example, we are trying htp://kidney-stones.blogspot.com.
It does not matter which variation of AdSense you choose – these are just design differences and will not create different ads.
Click on “Show Me Sample Ads” and you will get a page like the following:
As you can see, the URL htp://kidney-stones.blogspot.com does bring up related Google AdSense ads. This means that your URL is SEO friendly AND that if you choose, you can place AdSense on your blog at a future date.
Let’s look at another example. Here I am trying the URL htp://commodityinvesting.blogspot.com.
And I get the following results:
As you can see, this did not get me relevant ads at all. So I know that htp://commodityinvesting.blogspot.com is not a good choice. One thing I could try would be to add a dash between commodity and investing.
With the dash added, I got the following AdSense Ads:
Choosing a Title
Now that you have a good list of keywords, you will need to choose a title for your page. Typically, this should be short and sweet and have the main keywords. For instance, with the kidney stone example, you might want the title:
• Kidney Stones
• Dissolve Kidney Stones
• Symptoms of Kidney Stones
• Etc
The key is to choose a title that will help you optimize your blog. Don’t choose something like “Stones” because you will want to get traffic that has to do with kidney stones and not bricks!!
Chapter 8: Using Business Blogs Instead of Websites
Blogs Vs. Websites For Small Business
Up to now, we’ve been assuming that you are using your blog to get one of your web sites spidered. Another way to use the blog and ping method is to try to get your blog spidered in its own right!
Why are blogs better than the traditional website? You have the ability to communicate one-on-one with customers in a casual way, and you can respond to timely events and maintain that community interaction on a weekly, or even daily basis. Plus:
1. Each blog entry is shown in chronological order on a blog’s homepage but, each entry is in reality its own web page, with its own unique URL and title. So, an active blogger can create hundreds of keyword rich web pages in a matter of months.
2. The typical small business web site is lucky to receive an update several times a year. Search engines like change. So, if you change your blog several times a week, you will constantly be updated in the search engines.
3. Links from other high quality blogs will send traffic and get your blog and web site noticed.
Regardless of the type of business or the goals of the site, it's clear that with little investment small business blogging brings big returns. It's a great tool for any business.
Your Business Blog’s Name and URL Matter
If you are blogging and pinging to get a website spidered, the name and address you choose for your blog is not terribly important. However, if you are using your blog as your main site, the name definitely matters – A LOT!
You will want to use keywords for both your title and your address. In fact, here is a little tip: you may eventually want to add Google AdSense to your site so it is better to pick a name that will place the right ads on your site.
Finding the Right Key Words
In order to use keywords for your title and URL, you have to know what they are. Effective keyword research for blogs requires knowing your audience.
Before starting to develop the blog, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
• Who do I expect to read my blog?
• What do I expect them to get from it?
• What are myr audience's "hot-button" keywords?
Answering these questions will help you create your keyword list. In fact, the answer to the last question will certainly provide a few keywords. Finding others is easier than you think. We will discuss two different tools in this section.
The first is Results Generator. Results Generator lets you know what words are being searched for on Overture.com. Start by going to ResultsGenerator. You will see the following screen:
Next, put your main topic in the GO field and click on GO. In the example, I am looking for key words that have to do with the kidney stone blog.
The left column will show you how much people are paying for different words on Overture.com. Although interesting, this is not as important as what you will find in the right hand column. Here you will see all the related searches done in the past month and the exact words used for that search.
This list is a great keyword list.
The second way to find keywords is using WordTracker found at Wordtracker (affiliate Link).
When you access this page, you will want to click on the “Trial” tab at the top of the page. The trial works just like the paid version but does not give you nearly the number of words. However, to get a small keyword list started, the trial is quite valuable.
To get the free trial, you need to put in your name and your email address and then click on “Start the Trial.”
This brings you to a welcome page and again, you have to click on the Start the Trial arrow.
That brings you to Step 1. Add your topic to the field and click on proceed.
You will see the following screen while you wait:
Now you come to “their” Step 2. However, before you do their next step, take a look at the related keywords and see if any of these should be added to your list. For instance, you will want both kidney stones and kidney stone, and you probably want uric acid and cystine.
Now you can click on one of the keywords. I suggest you start with the first one since it is usually more closely related.
When you click on the keyword, a list of words will appear in the right hand column. If you bought a membership to this site, you would get 300 words. With the trial, you only get 15.
Take a look at this list and see if any of the keywords or phrases would be a good match to your topic.
How Do You Know If It Is Working?
The purpose of the blogging and pinging, as we have been doing it, is not to get your blog spidered, but to get your website spidered. So, before you really get started, I want you to go to Google.
In the field, put the following information:
allinurl:+yourwebsite.com
If your site has not yet been spidered, you will get a message that there were no results.
Wait about 48 hours after creating your blog and starting the blog and ping process and put the same code into the Google field. Now you should see something like this:
Instead of nothing being found, Google has found one page.
Try this again in a few more days, and you are likely to see something like this:
That’s right, 4990 pages have been spidered! And in under a week!
Using Ping-O-Matic
Ping-O-Matic is a service that let’s you ping Technorati, and several other search engines!! These search engines include:
• Weblogs.com (not really necessary since you will be using Blogger.com and they automatically ping weblogs)
• Feed Burner
• Feedster
• Blogdigger
• Moreover
• Blo.gs
• Syndic8
• My Yahoo! (Not necessary because you will be pinging My Yahoo on your own. Although you can rely on Ping-o-Matic to do this for you, pinging Yahoo by yourself is a faster and better process.)
• Blogrolling
• Weblogalot
• Technorati
• NewsGator
• PubSub.com
• Blogstreet
You will need to fill out two fields – the Blog Name and the Blog Home Page. Once again, the URL needed is the actual URL and not the RSS or Location URL. Then click on “Submit Pings.”
Now your blog has been submitted to each one of these blog search engines. Simply bookmark the page and then each time you update your blog, you can have Ping-o-Matic let everyone know.
Chapter 7: Pinging Other Search Engines
Creating a Technorati Ping
There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out.
One such service is Technorati. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the world of blogs. Technorati automatically receives notification from blogs as soon as they are updated. This means that it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur. To get your blog listed on Technorati, go to Technorati.
At the top of the site, you will see a “Sign Up” link. Clicking on that link will bring you to the following page:
ill in the First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Username, Choose a Password, and Confirm a Password fields. Then you will need to select your country and agree to the Terms of Use. (A copy of Technorati’s Terms of Use are available in the Appendix of this ebook.)
Click on “Sign Up Now” and you will be brought to Your Account page.
Scan down the page until you get to the “Your Blogs” section. Now, add your blog’s URL. Please note that this is not the LOCATION code from the Yahoo ping, nor is it the RSS feed URL. This is your blog’s actual URL.
Once you have added the URL, click on the “Claim this weblog” button. The final step is actually “claiming” your blog. The easiest way to do this is to follow the “Profile Link” method shown at the bottom of the page.
Highlight the code found in the “Profile Link” box. Now, go to your blog and create a post. Put the code into the body of the post. You do not need to worry about adding a title or adding a link. Publish the new post.
Now click the “PING TECHNORATI” button in the “Profile Link” method. You will receive this message:
Although this is not difficult, it can be time consuming.
Imagine that you have several new blogs and you have to follow this routine for each one of them.
Additionally, Technorati is not the ONLY blog search engine out there so you would have to repeat a similar process several times for each blog. Keeping track of all those and hitting each one whenever you update would be a hassle. OR you can use a site like Ping-O-Matic.
Today, I have something to celebrate.
When I built my site, I signed up with Comission Junction and requested approval from Yahoo for business hosting.
My site is fully optimized fo search engines and I got approved, in a couple of days, well to my surprised I logged into CJ today and got a big surprise… I made my first commision of $60 dollars.
Wow, that is just great for a site that is just over a month old.
Today, I checked My Google adsense earnigns and It Was A Far Cry From Being A Total Shame.
I made a total of $0.33, yes 33 cents.
For the month of August so far I made a total of $16.52, well all I can say is that google pays for my web hosting cost.
Now, I am going to start testing how I can improve my adsense earnings, by adding two new articles per day to my site.
My site has 60+ pages, and I will add two articles per day, that will increase my total to over 120 pages my the end of September.
Statistical ha sproven that you earn $1,– per page online. So, with that in mind, I will try to improve my earnings to over $100 monthly, by the end of September.
Today I just added two pages to my website with my favorite program XSite Pro.
I also joined some advaertsing program that pays per click like google, but it’s a little different.
Will see how it works out.
This weekend I took a break and decided not to do any blogging, I was very busy reading up on stuff.
Will only send a blog notice if I find any really exciting news.
Step 2: Creating a Yahoo Ping
Now that you have the location correct, it is time to ping Yahoo. To do this, you just click on the bookmarked or favorites link.
If the ping worked correctly, you will see a page like the following:
It shows that a ping was sent out to
htt://www.commodity-investing.info. If you had pinged the kidney stones site, it would say Refresh requested:
htt://kidney-stones.blogspot.com. The ping message will not show the new location code but the ACTUAL URL for the blog you have pinged.
To prove that Yahoo pinged the blog, you can go back to your Yahoo home page. Go down to the bottom of the page where you registered your blog earlier. You should see the latest post under the blog.
Now both Weblogs.com and Yahoo have received info that your blog has new, updated information. Let’s look at ways to get other search engines aware of your fresh content.
Step 1: Changing the Code
The first thing you need to do is to go to the blog you want to ping and then add it to your bookmarks or favorites.
Once it is in your favorites or bookmarks, open the list and right click on the blog name. For instance, in the example here, I saved Commodities Investing in my bookmarks. Then I right click on Commodities Investing in the list.
This will bring up a list of different actions. At the bottom of the list is “properties.” Left click on properties and you will see the following screen:
Now, if you were to “ping” with the properties as they are, the blogging/pinging would not be effective. This is one of the “secret” steps that took a long time to figure out. For the blogging and pinging to work effectively, you are going to have to change the location field.
Currently, the location field has your URL. You need to add a string of text BEFORE this URL. Here is the string of text that you need to add:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=
So in the case of the example above, the old location was htt://www.commodity-investing.info/.
The new location is:
htt://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=htt://www.commodity-investing.info.
Let’s take another example because this is VERY important to get correct. If your location URL is currently:
name-of-blog.blogspot.com, the new location will be htt://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=htt://name-of-blog.blogspot.com.
Chapter 6: Pinging Yahoo
Pinging – The Next Step
Search engines love changing content and therefore WANT to visit a site when it is updated. Blogs are a great way of offering this changing content, especially since they have a “pinging” feature.
In Chapter 2, Step 2, you set up your blog to automatically notify Weblogs.com of any changes. This means that each time you change your blog, a message is sent out for search engines to come and visit.
In addition to letting Weblogs do the work, there are a few other things you can do to create more “interest” in your blog. One of them is to Ping Yahoo.
My Head is in over-drive, I am constantly thinking on ways to maximise and make the benefits easy so that others can see exactly what I do or try what works or doesn’t work.
While, you only need one working strategy to honestly make a killing online, you have to be prepared to fail more times than you will succeed. But, I m not scared about failing, I am only trying to create a blog that will show you exactly how I built my sites and the exact ways I created my traffic machine.
No web site online will survive without daily visitors, and those visitors have to be in the thousands daily before you can start to dream. You will have to see this process as my day to day activity keeper, where I post my thoughts but not my ideas… he-he… don’t want those golden ideas falling in the wrong hands now…
Or do we?
Anyway, if my plan works out to detail what I have in my head, you will be able to follow my blog daily and do exactly what I did and you will be guaranteed a successful online business.
Today I cancelled some memberships, I only have one running now. I decided that I will put away my credit card, and stop using that thing until I see the money rolling in. My card will only be used to purchase a new domain when I am going to launch a new site, and that will only cost me $5.99 per year.
I give you my word, that no new gimmick or program will be bought by me. I am focused and will do what I have to do to make $500 monthly in 3 months from today (Todays date is: 25 August 2005). You will know exactly what I do and how I do it.
Everyday I will post what I am working on, and if your smart you will follow suite. tomorrow I will spend time creating the header graphics and template for my new site.
Are you in or out?
Let me know, because this train will be moving forward and once momentum starts there will be no stopping until I reach my goal.
Well, I will finish that tutorial on how to blog, because it is needed to educate our newcomers to the arena. that will stay as planned, but I will be working on my second project, and that is showing you exactly How To Build A Website.
So let’s get this ball rolling…
Task for today:
Do some research using this free good keyword tool for your new domain name. Your domain name must contain your main keyword.
If your planning a site or blog about espresso coffee, then use domain name like:
espresso-coffee.com or best-espresso-coffee.com
Then you will need to register that domain name, you can register your new name for $5.99 here: 1and1
OK, we have just created a momentum leap, there is no return now. Stay tuned for tomorrow.
All the rant online is about the new keywordbible, well I must admit it sounds like a real Gem.
But it packs a serious blow to your wallet also, these prices are simply rediculous for the small online marketers. that is where we get only refurbished programs that sucks. so why isn’t there a payment plan?
With a payment plan at leats everyone can take a chance and make three installments and get the benefits of top keywords for you site.
Question:
Do you think keyword research is important?
Would you pay $247 for the KeywordBible?
I just found a great little resource that has a video showing how to use sitemaps to get indexed into google.
sing BlogThis!
Using BlogThis! is as easy as installing it!
The first thing you need to do is go to the website you wish to get indexed. In this example, I am wanting to index my website about commodities investing and will be using my commodities investing blog as a way to do this quickly.
Ideally, your website will have many different pages. For many of you, you have been creating pages using Traffic Equalizer or Traffic Generator. The key here is to blog from different pages each time.
Go to one of your pages and highlight an area of text. You do this by running the mouse over the text with the left mouse button held down.
For the typical blog and ping method, your blog will only be visited by spiders and not by real people, so the text you highlight is not important. (For those that want to use their blog as a website or other business tool as well, you will want to read Chapter 8 to learn how to make your blog acceptable for people and not just bots.)
Next, just click on the BlogThis! link that is either in your Google toolbar or that you added earlier.
You will see that a title has been placed in the title field and a URL has been placed in the URL field. Additionally, you will see the text that had been highlighted in the website is now in the body of the blog. You will also see a URL link in the body text.
Having links in both the URL field and the body will help you get indexed more quickly.
Now you have to determine which blog you are adding content to. In this case, the material is for the Commodity Investing blog, so you would click on the expand arrow and then click on Commodity Investing. BlogThis! will refresh quickly and then you post by clicking on the Publish button in the upper right hand corner.
You will then see a “Done” page that shows which blog you have posted to. Now that you have fresh content, it is time to ping!
Installing BlogThis!
There are two ways to use BlogThis!: if you use Windows and Internet Explorer, you can use BlogThis! straight from the Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar by going to Google Toolbar.
If you're on another browser, just drag the link below to your browser's Link bar.
Help.Blogger.Com
Once you have BlogThis! installed, try clicking on the icon. You will get a small screen that looks like this:
The upper right hand corner has a listing of each one of your blogs. When you use BlogThis! correctly, all of the fields will be filled in automatically.
Chapter 5 – Blog This!
What is BlogThis!?
Earlier, you learned how to create a very simple post. Let’s look again at that page as a refresher:
First you put in the title and then you added the body. In order for blog and ping to work, you will also need to add a link. If you had to do this all by hand, it would take some time, but Blogger.com has made this fast and easy with the “BlogThis!” tool.
With BlogThis! you can easily make a blog post without ever having to visit Blogger.com.
BlogThis! creates your title, adds your link, and adds any highlighted content. If you wish to add more content, you can do so. Then, with a couple of simple clicks, you have a new post on your blog. It is as easy as that!
This is something that has been running through my mind the whole day.
I have been asking myself the question:
Why is it that one person can make so much online, while others only dream about it?
From what I observed online, there are patterns towards those who do and those who don’t.
The first pattern lies in the fact that those who do, are not really looking for a quick way to get rich online, they are building a business online the slow way, just moving along one day at a time and learning all they can.
So what about those who has someone to guide them?
Now, you hit the nail on the head, that is the true factor to much of their success online, those that has stepped out of their comfort zone and made contact with someone who is making it online.
Maybe it’s time you stick your palstic (Credit Card) in your pocket and make a promise to yourself that I won’t use it until I make my first $100 dollars online.
Food for thought: Something to think about.
Subscribing to Your Blog
After you have registered for your free MyYahoo! account, you will come to the following page:
You may want to print/screen capture this page for your records. Once you have this information saved, press on the “Continue to My Yahoo!” button.
This will take you to your own personal Yahoo landing page. You can personalize this page in any way you choose. For the purposes of blogging and pinging, you do not need to worry about anything except signing up for your blogs.
To register for your blog, the first thing you have to do is click the “Add Content” button at the bottom of the landing page.
Doing so brings you to a page that allows you to add content in various ways. You will see a large, blue “Find Content” field. Next to the “Find” button, you will see a link called “Add RSS by URL. Click on this link so that you will be able to add your blog’s Site Feed URL.
WARNING: This is not your blog’s URL but the SITE FEED URL. Your site feed URL will have atom.xml at the end. If you place the wrong URL in this field, the system will not work. In Chapter 2, Step 6, you were told how to find your site feed URL.
In the following example, the BLOG URL is
kidney-stones.blogspot.com and the SITE FEED URL is
kidney-stones.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
Once you have added your site feed URL, click on the “add” button.
Yahoo then does a quick search to see if there really is a blog with this RSS URL. Remember earlier when you had to create a test post (Chapter 1, Step 5)? That test post allows your blog to be “active” so that when Yahoo does this search they will find your blog. You will get a screen that looks like the following:
Now you will need to click on the “Add To My Yahoo!” button. You should then see a page like the following:
If you put in the wrong URL or have not created a test post, you will see the following screen:
(Look closely and you will see that the site feed URL is not correct because the spelling of the word kidney is incorrect.)
Once you have your site feed URL accepted, click on the “MyYahoo! Home” link. When you scroll to the bottom of your Yahoo page, you will now see that Kidney Stones is listed.
Let’s review quickly. You now have:
1. A Blogger account and at least one blog.
2. A MyYahoo account
3. MyYahoo RSS feed link to your blog
Now comes the fun part. It is time to start adding content to your blog! Chapter 5 will show you how!
Why Use the Yahoo RSS Feed?
You will want to create a MyYahoo account because Yahoo allows you to subscribe to your OWN blog RSS feed. This means that you can get Yahoo’s spiders looking at your blog immediately. All you have to do is subscribe to your own blog and Yahoo will visit and index your blog for free!
Chapter 4 – Yahoo and Your Blog RSS Feed
What Is An RSS Feed?
How and why RSS works is rather technical, but that shouldn’t worry you at all because you don’t need to know the technical side to get it to work for you. Short for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary, RSS is an XML format for sharing of content among different Web sites.
A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. Luckily for you, blogs have this built right into their system. That means that your content can be seen by people who subscribe to RSS readers like Bloglines, Yahoo, or MSN. And this is what gets your website noticed and indexed by major search engines.
Step 2: Security, Customization, Verification, and Terms of Service
You will need to select a security question, give your birth date and your ZIP code. This way, if you were to forget your password, Yahoo! would ask you to answer the questions so that they could let you back into your account. Be sure to tell the truth or you will forget the answers to the security question!
There is no need to customize your account. You can simply leave this section as it is.
Then you will need to verify your registration. Once again, you will type in the numbers and letters you see. In this way, Yahoo! keeps automated registrations from occurring.
Finally, you will be asked to read and agree to the Terms of Service. We have placed Yahoo’s Terms of Service in the Appendix for your convenience.
Once you click on “I Agree.”. Now it is time to link your Blog to your Yahoo account!
Step 1: Create Your Yahoo ID and Password
When you click on “Sign Up”, you will be taken to a page that requires quite a bit of information. The first section is “Create Your Yahoo ID.”
Here you will need to enter your first name and your last name. Then you will have to choose your preferred continent and your gender.
Now it is time to choose your Yahoo ID, which will also be your Yahoo email.
Please note that your Yahoo ID may contain only letters, numbers, and the underscore. No dashes or other punctuation may be used.
Once you have chosen your Yahoo ID, you can press the “Check the Availability of This ID” button. As with Blogger, the name you want may not be available. If not, then simply choose another. If it is, go on to the next field.
Next you will need to create a password. The password needs to be at least 6 characters and IS case sensitive. Once you have chosen a password, you will need to retype it.
Be sure to check the box “Create my free Yahoo! email address.
I believe this is straight forward, no need for pictures.
Chapter 3: Creating a Yahoo Account
Why A Yahoo Account Is Needed
In the introduction, we told you that Google owns Blogger.com and sends its spiders through Blogger looking for fresh content. We also told you that there was a way to get Yahoo looking at your blog, too. In order to get Yahoo spidering your blog, you will need a yahoo account.
Go to http://www.yahoo.com. You will see the following screen. Click on “My Yahoo!” found to the right of the title:
Next, click on “Sign Up” found near the top of the screen: