Internet Sales Made Easy – IM Tutorials

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

If you already spend a fair amount of time blogging, money may come to you literally as soon as you ask for it. Once you have an established blog with a regular readership, it is easy to turn a profit through advertising. By hosting sponsored links or banners, you can see income from your hobby almost overnight. Even if you did not start your blog intending to turn a profit, making supplementary income from your blog may be easier than you think.

Of course, even for people who have spent months or years blogging, money from advertising revenue may not add up to a large sum. The amount of money that you can make as a blogger depends on a lot of different factors, but perhaps the most important element of the equation is the topic of your blog. If your blog is on a subject that appeals to a demographic that advertisers have a strong desire to reach, you will be more likely to be able to turn a large profit on your blog than if your blog is on a fairly obscure subject that does not draw the kind of audience that advertisers need to appeal to.

Of course, the only way to find out where you fall on this spectrum is to try hosting some ads. If you are already blogging, you have nothing to lose.

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

I have received some more emails requesting clarification on some common blogging myths, so let’s take some time today and try to straighten these out.

1. Duplicate Content.

The most common question I get ( almost daily ) is in regard to “duplicate content”. Google decides what is duplicate content and what is not, but Google does not immediately discard every piece of content it has already seen. This myth needs to be understood, so let us spend some time on it today.

Let me say, firstly, that if you simply grab any cheesy old piece of content, rewrite a few sentences and bang it up on your page, you deserve to incur the penalties that Google inflicts. PLR articles have a purpose, but unless you are among the first handful of people to access a particular piece, a quick rewrite will not suffice. You should be taking the core essence of older articles and rewriting them completely. Newer articles with PLR rights will require less work to make them acceptable to search engines, but you can never be sure of how old an article is so you should err on the side of caution and rewrite as much as possible.

The correct use for PLR articles is more along the lines of constructing reports, or content for your ebooks, than for web page content. Having said that, I still use PLR content on my blogs. There are ways to use them and not be penalized for duplicate content.

1. Completely rewrite the content using the core essence of the original article as a guide
2. Take a complete paragraph from the article, put it in quotation marks as the start of your blog post and change the text to bold italics. Present this as an “excerpt” of an original document and expand on the principle outlined in that paragraph to create your own article.
3. Start out writing an original post and, when you feel you are running short of ideas to finish the piece, flick through your PLR articles until you find something related. You can then either use the article as inspiration and ‘paraphrase’ some of it, or grab a complete paragraph and present it in the middle of your document as an excerpt the way we did earlier. If you do this, be sure to add some original content afterward to strengthen the content value of the finished piece.

These are just a few ways to use PLR content without being penalized for duplicate content. As much as Google’s policies can be a pain in the &%$, they are in place for a reason and, as such, can be navigated with a little care. After all, if Google did not want us to reference each others work, it would not give us credit for doing so. That is primarily the basis of the logic behind backlinks – high quality sites referring to content on other sites reaps a small benefit for both parties.

And don’t forget article sites – these sites thrive on the fact that you can re-use their articles on your website as long as you do not alter them in any way and include the original resource box. Now, if duplicate content was such an issue for Google, these sites simply would not be as prolific as they are.

2. Backlinks.

This brings us to the second most popular question I received over the last few weeks – How do I know if the backlinks I am building are actually helping me?

The answer is basically – you don’t! Well, not immediately anyway.

The first thing I recommend you do is add the SEOQuake plug-in to your Firefox browser. If you are not using Firefox, then feel free to crash through into the 21st century and catch up with the rest of us. Use it for a week and, if you are not absolutely thrilled with it, contact me through the link at the bottom of this page – I would love to hear from anyone who is not amazed at the difference between browsers such as Internet Explorer or Opera as compared to the features and benefits of Firefox. NOTE:- I do not gain anything by you changing to Firefox, I am not supplying a link to the download, I am not an affiliate, I don’t think they even have affiliates, the program is free – TRY IT.

But I digress. After installing SEOQuake, you can analyze all your critical data as often as you want. This data includes all the meta data that we added in an earlier tutorial, ( if you missed that go to:- http://www.internetsalesmadeeasy.info/BloggingGuidebook.html ), as well as all the efforts you have made since creating your first blog. Data such as

• Page Rank
• Indexed pages
• Inbound Links
• Outbound Links
• Traffic
• Google Rank
• Keyword density

is only a very small part of what this plug-in tells you. By monitoring all this data on a daily basis you will be able to see your backlink building efforts paying dividends. Having said that, don’t expect all your backlinks to show up immediately, they can sometimes take many weeks to get indexed. You can speed things up a little by pinging your backlinks, but generally it simply takes time. Your Google Rank, however, will change almost daily depending on the amount of content you add to your site. This is a good way to keep your motivation, as you watch that number drop from somewhere in the millions when you start, to a much more impressive number after only a few weeks of dedication. Keep that number dropping and you will be rewarded with organic traffic, and that is the aim of the game.

A quick note on Meta-tags before we go further into backlinks. For those of you who are using WordPress to its fullest and adding meta data through the “Appearance/Editor”, remember to review that data after you update your WordPress version, because WordPress will revert all those base templates back to original during the update, which removes any alterations made by the user. It takes a few minutes, and can be a pain in the freckle sometimes, but if Google reviews your site and notices metatags missing that were visible on their previous visit, you will notice a change in your ranking and it won’t be a good one.

When building you backlinks, don’t take shortcuts! The possible shortcuts I speak of include paying people to build backlinks for you or using “canned” comments on other peoples blogs. Many services are available for purchasing backlinks, some paid services are quite reputable – many are NOT.

While a service such as ‘Link Dominators’ will charge you about $80.00 to build a couple of hundred links per month for 3 or 4 sites, this is far better value than paying someone from Fiverr.com to build you thousands of links at a time. The quality of the links is all-important and these huge backlink packages from Fiverr members are generally nothing more than a wholesale ping festival done on your behalf. Google is not impressed by this behavior and will only tolerate so much before it loses interest in visiting or ranking your site.

I have had successful link campaigns created by Fiverr members ( Cathy-Rey will run a campaign for you and create between 125 and 140 backlinks in a day. I have done this once a week with one of my sites to measure the success and was quite impressed with the results after 6 weeks ), but generally these members will use the fastest possible method to create links that never see the light of day. While I would recommend Cathy-Rey, there are few others who are worth your time or  your $5.00.

I covered the difference between backlinks and pings a few weeks ago, make sure you understand the difference before engaging anyone to run backlink campaigns on your behalf.

This brings me back to SEOQuake. While performing the necessary blog commenting for backlinks, use the data provided by SEOQuake to decide if each site is worthy of your time.

• Is the site description relevant to yours?
• Is the Page Rank higher than 2?
• Is the site fresh?
• Is the Google ranking in an acceptable range?

Ask yourself these questions about every site before you take the time to read the content. If these questions are all answered to your satisfaction, then read the content on the page and find a post that you can make a quality comment on. Add the comments in your own words, avoid “canned comments” at all times.

Services such as Comment Kahuna have their benefits, but do yourself a favor and ignore the option to pre-write a comment for use in every site that they present to you. Read the content and then formulate a comment. I have 1 clown that visits all my sites and dumps the same comment on 2 or 3 posts per site – and he does this 3 or 4 times a week! I actually enjoy dumping all his comments in the trash, they will never see the light of day on my sites because he hasn’t even taken the time to read my posts.

If you show me that you have at least taken the time to read my content, you will have a better chance of having your comments approved, and almost all bloggers feel the same way. This poor misguided fool is spending hour after hour on Comment Kahuna pounding out comments to hundreds of sites every week and probably only getting a handful of them indexed. Why? Because he has been misled from the start. Some know-it-all Guru has thrown together a quick course and outlined a backlink method. He hasn’t given enough detail because he is planning to sell a dedicated course on this later. Meanwhile, this poor fool newbie actually believes every word he has been told, and has dedicated hours of his time to a method that is doomed to fail.

Leaving ill-informed comments on a site is poor form, but, because not everybody has the same opinion on every subject, these comments will most likely be approved because they have a human aspect to them. Comments such as:-

“I have often wondered about this and have looked to find out more.”

or

“I stumbled on your site by mistyping when looking for something else.”

or

“I like this site and will be back again for more of your information.”

are the type of comments I receive from the newbies using Comment Kahuna. This rubbish will never see the light of day on any respectable site.

Take a breath, step back and have a look at what you are doing – you are wasting your own time! The most precious commodity to an Internet marketer is time. There is always more money if you happen to waste a few bucks on something that doesn’t work, but if you burn hour after hour on a method that doesn’t pay off – you are screwed. You can’t get that time back – it’s gone forever!

Spend your time wisely.

1. How Often Do I Post?

Another common question is “how often should I post to my blog?

I recently had an email from a newbie who claimed he was told to post every day. I thought “that seems fair enough” as I continued to read the rest of the email. It turns out he has a multi-niche blog. He covers about 15 different niches on 1 blog, separated by category, and was tearing his hair out trying to find content for each category on a daily basis.

Okay, let’s wade through the problems here.

Firstly, try to avoid cross-promotion wherever possible because it detracts from your ability to project yourself as an expert. No-one can be an expert in 15 different subjects. Your task, as blog administrator, is to build confidence with content. By adding quality content daily you will eventually be seen as an expert in your chosen niche. Once you have established that you have some quality information, and the visitor numbers increase, you can begin to build the promotions – but only to related products.

If your niche was dog training, slowly begin to make reference to such products as collars, leashes, food, food bowls, bedding, etc. Don’t start offering bridles and saddles, you will confuse and alienate your readers.

Secondly, even if you were to persevere with the multi-niche blog, there is no need to add content to all of the categories every day. If you were to post good content to 2 or 3 categories per day, you would probably receive better returns and recognition than posting a low quality article to all 15 categories. Quality beats quantity, even in Googles eyes!

Thirdly, if you make an informed decision on your website name, you will be less likely to cross-promote. Do your homework and choose the best available domain name for your chosen niche and focus on it. You will find that you can easily come up with enough content if you are focused.

The same newbie’s email went on to ask – “How do I know it’s the right time to delete some content to add new stuff?”

Hmmm. I wondered what the hell he was talking about so I emailed back to him for some more details. This is what I got…

“In the WordPress setup it said I can change how many posts are on each page, so I bumped it up to 25 to give myself some more time before I have to delete some of them. I have been adding a post to each category every day like I was told to but nobody told me what to do when my site gets full. All this sitting and typing is starting to take the color out of my favorite underpants.”

Again, Hmmm.

1. You do not need to delete content…ever.
2. Change your post count back to 10 posts per page. As you get to 10 posts per category, the older posts are automatically moved onto another page, but are still accessible to your visitors via the category menu.
3. You do not need to add posts to every category, every day. 2 or 3 posts per day across the board will see Google take notice of your site.
4. Sorry, I can’t help with the underpants thing.

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

Chances are you have seen at least one blog. Blogging is an ideal way to get your thoughts broadcast into cyber-space. A blog can be about anything you choose. In fact, your blog could even be all about your business.

Structuring your blog is a matter of personal preference. It is possible to organize your own private soapbox in any manner that you like. This means you can make your blog into a site where you write articles that have to do with subjects connected to your business.

You may toss in something that is involved with more general topics as well, such as business ethics, customer service techniques, and anything else that you think may drive the right people to your web site.

You can even use the main section of the blog to publish articles that spotlight features and benefits of various products and services that are sold on your web site. The possibilities for your article section are only limited by your imagination.

Along with the main article section, you can also use the blog to allow customers to ask questions or make comments on either the articles or your product line. These types of features can help to bring people back to visit your blog regularly, since a question and answer or comments section is fairly likely to include something new to read every few days, if not every day.

In fact, you may get some great ideas for new articles from these sorts of activities, which will also go a long way in keeping your blog fresh. Plus, if you base articles on reader response, that is one more reason for people to come back and see what you have done lately.

Of course, you want to be sure to include links over to your web site that are easy to find. They may be embedded into your articles or featured in a sidebar on the main page of your blog. Making sure that your readers always have easy access to your business site is an ideal way to tempt folks to click over and make a purchase.

Don’t underestimate the impact of colors and images when it comes to your blog. Making your own little corner of the Internet visually appealing will surely make visitors want to return from time to time.

However, be careful of using too much animation or large images that slow down the loading of the pages. This is especially important if your target audience is likely to be among the millions of people who still rely on dial up connections for Internet access.

The longer it takes your pages to load, the less chance that visitors will wait around to see what is going on at your blog. Quick loading means people will start reading sooner, and will be more likely to find something that catches their interest.

There are a number of resources online for setting up your own blog. In some cases, you may be able to become an expert on a how to site. This is an excellent opportunity, since some of these sites will pay a monthly stipend based on the amount of traffic you generate.

In exchange, you agree to keep the content of the site fresh and informative. This usually will require no more than a few hours per week, and the opportunity for generated revenue will be worth the time and effort.

If you are not in a position to piggyback on an information site, check with the service provider who provides you with bandwidth for your web site. Chances are they can also provide you with space and resources to create your own stand along blog.

While this approach does not allow you to generate revenue from the space provider, it does allow you the opportunity to promote your own business, and also sign up with an adword service to allow advertisers that have some relevance to your blog to place ads there.

You will at least make a little money off the ads, and still have the ability to redirect people to your own site.

Before you jump into setting up your blog, take some time and check out several blogs that are already online. Make note of the page layouts, the arrangement of the content, the types of graphics and images, and the space that is set aside for ads.

This will give you some ideas on what you can do with your space that will result in driving traffic to your business, as well as making a few pennies by hosting ads for related web sites.

You will find a link in the left sidebar of this blog that links to my comprehensive book on blogging.

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

These days, you will notice that a lot of people write blogs for their own website. Some write blogs that focus on their personal life and experiences, others write blogs to market a particular product or service, while there are also people who post their original fictional short stories. Whatever it is, you will see that blogging brings a level of recognition. That is, if you do it right.

So, how can you write really good blogs that will make you an internet sensation?

Whatever you write about, it will have some potential of becoming noticed. All you need to do is write it well. So, here are some tips that may help you write better blogs, blogs that people will want to read and recommend to other people.

First, you have to remember that catching the attention of your readers is very important. What this means is that the title and the first two or three sentences of your blog should be enough to catch your readers attention and encourage them to read the rest of the post.

Many blogs have great potential and great content, but fail because they don’t inspire the reader to absorb the entire post. If the author didn’t give it a good title and a good introduction, the reader will close the page and look for other blogs that are more entertaining to read.

Although you won’t be able to please all the people reading your blogs, a good article will at least inspire some of them to read on. Regardless of your target niche, you have to consider the fact that if you do not catch the attention of the reader, they will leave. While this is more critical in some niches, it is still a general rule of thumb for all.

So, writing good introductions and giving your blog a good title is crucial in order for your blogs to become a success and be considered a good read because that is when most readers will decide whether to stay or go, in those first few lines.

Aside from the title and the introduction, the body is also very important. What you write in your title should correspond directly to the introduction you give your blog. Stay on the subject throughout the body of the post. Also, it is very important that everything should be easy to read and understand. Short and punchy paragraphs work best.

After you finished writing a blog, reread it and imagine that you are a first-time visitor to the site. View it with an open mind, as you would if you were genuinely interested in the subject. Also, check for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.

It is sometimes a good idea, if you are new to blogging and still unsure about your writing skills, to get a friend to read it through before you post it to your website. This is not critical, because you can always go in and edit the post, but it may help with your own personal peace-of-mind to have an unbiased opinion on what your blog is like to a new visitor. If you do have someone read it for you, ensure that they are going to give you an honest critique. You don’t need a “yes-man” at this stage, you need a genuine response.

This is basically all there is to the so-called art of writing blogs. It may sound simple, but it really isn’t. You need to work hard on your writing skills and strive to increase those skills. While it is never a matter of life-and-death, you will at times have to accept some level of criticism about how you write. As I stated earlier, you can not please everyone, no matter how well you write. The best you can do is strive for a level that you are comfortable with and always try to exceed that level at every opportunity. This will stop you from getting complacent and allowing your quality to drop.

Remember these tips and you can be sure that you will be able to write a better blog each time you reach for that keyboard. If the first blog you wrote didn’t actually become an internet sensation, then just leave it be and write another blog about a contextual subject. Before you know it you will be quite knowledgable on the subject and be able to pump out good articles with your keyboard tied behind your back. As long as you strive to improve on your writing skills, a natural progression will take place.

Remember these tips and you will one day become famous as a blog writer. Always remember that blogging can bring
recognition. All you need to do is make every effort to improve yourself, and before you know it you will be writing good blogs that people will want to read and one that people will want to suggest their friends read.

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

Affiliate websites are notorious for having crappy branding, while a solid branding strategy can add thousands to the average affiliate’s bottom line. Because of this, I’m leading the charge on bringing branding back to affiliate marketing. Branding an affiliate site is not hard to do and the reward is HUGE.

A brand, in short, delivers your users/readers a cohesive set of experiences that they can expect from your business. Basically, your brand image acts as a symbol of the positive, unique and trustworthy experience they have with you.

A cohesive branding campaign can build immense value into your business and gives your customers the confidence that when they deal with you, they’ll get something special.

There are numerous underlying psychological aspects of the importance of branding.  But, for our methods here, we’ll stick to the one that is important to affiliate marketing:- TRUST

Your main job with your branding is to earn the trust of your readers.  When they trust you, they buy from you.

So, your affiliate sites, freebies, emails and anything else they come into contact with must have continuity in their message. Your name, logos, brand image, attitude and ethos must be ubiquitous in everything you do.  When it is, your readers will know exactly what to expect when they see your site, emails and any promotions from you.  This means better open rates, more trust and more sales both through your site and to products you upsell in emails.

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest businesses to get into, largely, because of the low upfront cost. But, this doesn’t mean you should spend NO money on it.

Expect that at some point, you’ll be spending money on domains, hosting, freelancers, bonuses, advertising and more. Of course, to every rule there is an exception, but most affiliate marketers end up spending money on at least some of the above.

In addition to initial expenses are the tools that will help you make money.  Research and site building tools are the ones I’ve found give the most return for their outlay.  There are a number of tools out there that aggregate data in a way you could NEVER do manually, and these help you make better, more informed, more-likely-to-make-you-money decisions.

Likewise, site builders (software that helps you build your blogs/sites faster), can help you address markets faster and often, more professionally and with better sales results.

The affiliate strategy can be broken down into the following components…

• Research and find market
• Build effective sites and create content
• Traffic acquisition

We have already covered researching and finding a product and we also covered some aspects of building a website. Let’s have a closer look at that now.

You have three options when it comes to starting an affiliate site ‐ build a regular website, build a blog or buy an existing site or blog that’s already marketed to your niche.

I’ve used my fair share of both websites and blogs. But, in my experience and conversations with other successful affiliates, blogs seem to have a more successful track record, both for traffic and revenue.

In the past, blogs were used predominantly as their namesake suggests, daily web logs.  Users would write their daily thoughts, use them as personal journals and companies would use them to keep their customers up to date on news.

However, in the past couple years (and with the exploding popularity of WordPress), blogs have become much more than simple journals and have turned into money-making powerhouses.  Here are a few reasons blogs work so well for affiliate marketing…

1. They’re newbie friendly. Blogs are especially suited to those that are new to the web, with a very friendly user-interface, they’re easily updated and easily managed.
2. They’re also great for SEO. Easy and frequent updates, crawlable urls, blog directories for linking, pinging, RSS and well structured content all contribute to blog superiority in the search engines.
3. Blogs attract regular readers. Because of their frequent updates, blogs give readers a reason to come back day after day. Static websites, unless they’re updated with a script, don’t have the same ‘pull’.
4. Blogs generally link more freely to each other.  We’ll call it a more community feel, but blogs are MUCH easier to get links to, than regular websites. This is great for SEO (mentioned above) and for non‐search related traffic.  Which, depending on where the traffic is coming from, can be as good or better quality.

This, of course, is not to say there are no benefits to regular websites.  We’ll discuss more traditional sites a little later, along with a fast and easy way to monetize them.

There are a number of ways you can fill your affiliate blog with content. Some are easier than others. You have three major goals with your blogs’ content.

1. Inform
2. Sell
3. Get your readers to come back

In the next section, I’ll explain the ways you should be monetizing your traffic.   But, if nothing else, you should take away this idea ‐ you need to be using EVERY method you can, to monetize the traffic you have.  I’ve seen plenty of websites that, if they were to employ just 1 or 2 more monetization strategies, they’d double or triple their earnings. From the traffic they already have!

The following are NOT simply suggestions. Each technique MUST be used on your blog for the most traffic, repeat traffic and sales possible. I’ve broken them down by topic…

a) Update, update, update.
Repeat traffic, beyond anything else, will grow your traffic faster than anything else.  So, updating your site or blog with new products and new articles keeps your readers coming back, looking for what’s new.

b) Feature a single or a select number of products.
When running an affiliate site, it’s important to direct your site’s visitors to the products YOU want them to buy. It’s a fine line you need to walk. Offer them a massive selection, but guide them through the buying process. People love choices, but they also love to be told what the best choice is.

c) Give information.
This includes articles, videos and audio. The more information you give, the more your readers will think of your site (remember your brand) as a hub of information. They’ll trust your site more, trust its recommendations, spend more time on it, click more ads, be more likely to come back and subsequently, will be more likely to make purchases.

d) Professional appearance and logo.
This is somewhat an extension of our prior branding discussion, so not much discussion needed here – the more professional, the more trust, the more sales.  Brand yourself as such.

e) Collect opt-ins.
This will be talked about later in the section called “The Optin Option”. It’s crucial you give your readers
a reason to sign up to your site.  Give away free information, ebooks, video series’, etc, but just get them on your list. Your list will be worth its weight in gold.  (Which isn’t much, since everything’s virtual, but you know what I mean).

f) Give bonuses to purchasers.
Your mission as an affiliate is to give your traffic a compelling reason to purchase through your site.  One very powerful way to give your readers incentive to take the next step, is to give bonuses to purchasers. The idea is very simple. You tell your readers something to the effect of – “Make any purchase through this site and you’ll receive immediate access to our catalog of select bonuses. These bonuses  are not available anywhere else. To get access, simply purchase the product of your choice and email us with your receipt. We’ll give you instant access…”

Of course, you should use different (more thought out) vernacular, but you get the point.  It’s this extra incentive that will give surfers the impetus to come back to your site and make purchases through you, as opposed to someone else.

After all, the products you and your competitors are promoting are all the same price, they might as well order through you and get your bonuses.

Once you’ve done it the first time, the system is stupidly easy to manage.

• Find or create a couple simple bonuses.
• Offer them on your site.
• Set up an autoresponder with Aweber that, when they email you, sends them back an email that has them subscribe to your list for the bonuses.
• Put their bonuses in your first followup message.

In the end, you’ve done two things:-
a) Given your traffic a compelling reason to order through you and
b) Built up your opt-in list with buyers (who’ll be likely to buy later also).

You will undoubtedly get freebie seekers that haven’t made purchases through your site.  Who cares! They’re just more people on your list that may buy from you in the future.  After all, at least they are interested in the niche.

In addition to marketing affiliate products on your blog or site, there are a number of potential (and lucrative) income streams you should consider.  Ideally, you want to employ as many monetization strategies as possible, to get the very most from your traffic.

If you’re making $1000/month from your blog with direct affiliate sales and could add another $1000/month from marketing to your list and another $1000/month from text and ad sales, why wouldn’t you?

Some monetization strategies pay more than others.  Collecting optins and email marketing should be done no matter what – as this almost always pays well.  Adsense may be one of your smallest earners.

I’ve given you the strategy along with a description of each below. Your task is to choose the strategies that you want to use on your blog.  The amount each earns will be determined in large part by the amount of traffic your blog receives. The only strategy I’ve found to be an absolute requirement is collecting opt-ins for your list. No matter what market you’re in, your list will be worth its weight in gold.

If you’ve spent any time in the affiliate world, you’ve run across the idea of building a list.  This, with no exceptions, is a must. There are various ways to build a list, but the easiest is to offer something of value to those that sign up. Long story short, it looks like this:-

• Give something of value.
• Collect sign-ups.
• Email list with freebies and affiliate offers you’ll make commissions on.

As with article marketing, the more you give the more you get. The same idea applies with freebies on your site. Plus, it’s logical. The more valuable the freebie, likely the more valuable the actual product is to be.

It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not the initial email collection that’s the most significant part of building a list.  It’s the follow-ups.  Like your freebie, your follow‐ups should be valuable.  Get your list used to value in your emails, and when you up‐sell products, they’ll expect the products are also valuable and be more likely to make the purchases you suggest.

A FEW MORE THOUGHTS ON EMAILS TO YOUR LIST:-

• Carry your brand experience through in your emails, remember the importance of trust.
• Be personable and friendly.
• I know I just mentioned it but it’s easy to forget ‐ Offer value and email them with something they will find of interest.  If you can’t do this, don’t send an email.

Both text links ad sales and banner ads are a fantastically easy way to earn money from your blog.  Most banner/text links ad sales go like this:

* Advertiser finds you (either directly through the site or through a service), requests an ad placement.
* You put their text link or banner on your site.
* They pay on a monthly basis.

What you charge is determined by your market (some markets pay better than others) and the amount of traffic your blog gets.  The more traffic, the more you can charge.

The first thing you should do is create a page called ‘Advertise’ on your blog.  You can then use this page to tell potential advertisers what their options and pricing are.  (I’ve personally purchased many an ad from blogs that did exactly this.)  This is a solid example of what a good advertise page looks like:- http://www.tylercruz.com/advertise/

Standard options include text links, reviews, 125×125 and 468×60 banner ads.  But, what you offer is completely up to you.

There are a number of services that enable you to advertise through your blog post content.  One such is Kontera.

This service selects relevant keywords from your blog’s posts and links them to advertisers through their system.  Like Adsense, the advertiser pays you when your readers click
the links.  Please note:- I have no experience using Kontera or other in‐text advertising.

So, do your research before committing.

Adsense offers an incredibly easy way (albeit, one of the lowest paying) to make additional money from simple clicks. In short, you put an Adsense block on your site, a percentage your traffic clicks on the ads and you get paid per click.
A far better alternative is CBProAds. They offer a variety of ads including picture ads – see to the right of this post – targeted to your needs with higher commissions than Adsense, paid into your Clickbank account.

You also should be using Articles, Forums, Classifieds, etc to promote your website. More on this in future posts.