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Most web surfers are sheep - 62 websites to herd them

Posted by admin

Promotion is paramount to any blog’s success.

A simple statement, but one that will cause you nightmares. Do you buy links on other sites? Should you sell paid links on your site? What if I buy a plane to sky write my web address in the clouds? All of these questions will most likely run through your head as you are building your website or blog.

For the purposes of this post I’m going to concentrate mostly on blogs, but all the information and theory applies similarly to websites as well. If you have an online presence (and you want to make something of it) you will need to promote it. This whole theory of “Build it, and they will come” is an optimists wet dream. You can certainly build it, but more then likely “they” will not come.

Marketing has become laden with coined phrases like viral, social, 2.0 etc - all of which are just rehashings of past marketing ideas and practices. Viral is a term that has been around since marketing began, it just happened to get stuck with the name viral in the last couple of years.

The internet is so vast and filled with so much chaotic movement that finding any useful information has become an exercise in illusion management. A good marketing and promotion campaign will cut straight to the point for the end user and dangle a nice shiny object in front of them to reach out and click. Most web surfers are sheep.

Sheep you say?

Yes, sheep. Sheep tend to herd together and follow the easiest path laid out before them. Internet surfers on the whole want the easy path, if you’re promotional material is appealing and non threatening they will follow it. Consider the following list of web sites, all social bookmarking sites. Have a few profiles on different sites from this list that link to each other and to your website to create a network for free promotion for yourself. Multiple paths for sheep to follow directly to your blog or website.

31engine.com
backflip.com
bitacoras.net
blinkbits.com
blinklist.com
blogdigger.com
bloglines.com
blogmarks.net
blogmatcher.com
blgomemes.net
blogpeople.net
bloguniverse.com
bmaccess.net
cocolog-nifty.com
coreblog.com
del.icio.us
digg.com
dotnetkicks.com
favorites.live.com
feedburner.com
feedmelinks.com
foculook.com
folkd.com
freshpodcasts.com
furl.net
holycowdude.com
hoorahs.com
icerocket.com
indianpad.com
ipodder.org
jots.com
linkagogo.com
linkroll.com
looklater.com
markaboo.com
memigo.com
myjeeves.ask.com
myweb2.search.yahoo.com
newsgator.com
random-domains.com
rawsugar.com
reddit.com
scuttle.org
searchles.com
shadows.com
simpy.com
smarking.com
socialogs.com
spurl.net
stumbleupon.com
syndic8.com
technorati.com
topicexchange.com
twitter.com
veneblogs.com
wdclub.com
weblogalot.com
weblogs.com
webride.org
wink.com
wirefan.com

Tags: blog, market, Marketing, promotion, traffic, website

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A Newbie’s Guide to Adsense Money

Posted by admin

In the following paragraphs you will not find any great secret. You will not find the path to great wealth. Nor will you find a get rich quick idea or plot. You might find some left over pizza and burnt toast. Perhaps you might even find the true secret of an Adsense money maker - patience.

First things first, you need a website. Seems simple enough right? Well its not. Don’t bother using free over the counter websites as they won’t help you much later on in the SEO game, not to mention Adsense rules and regulations are pretty strict. You will only be helping yourself out in the long run to spend 5$ a month, and 8.99$ a year for a decent domain name and web hosting.

You don’t have to get the worlds best web hosting either. It can be a small account that can grow as your website grows. Start with the minimal package to save yourself some cash up front. Most web hosts allow package upgrading along the way.

Now the second important part - the domain name. Notice how I listed this second? I did that for a reason. I can already see the incoming emails saying “you’ve got it all wrong, the domain name is the most important thing ever” - need I point out websites with names like Squidoo, Flickr, or perhaps maybe you’ve never heard of those obscurely named websites? Anyway, you should (in my opinion) try and get something that relates to your websites content. IE: if you are going to be designing a website that is about Llamas get a domain name with the word Llama in it at least. But hey who am I to tell you what to do - if www.strokemyrock.com really really looks good to you then knock yourself out.

There is a two fold effect with having your content name in your URL. One being the SEO game will give you a few points of recognition right off the bat for having a keyword in the URL. The second effect of it is that people will remember it easier. Now I understand that odd names can be easy to remember (I hear someone screaming Google at me) but its called mental reinforcement, forcing someone to think a word that they are searching for in the domain name only makes more the brain remember it easier. I could go look up some scientific study on that one, but I’m reasonably sure its common sense.

Once you’ve got your hosting and URL all set and ready to go follow this important safety step. This is probably the most useful and overlooked first step in building a site, put up a different index page then what the web host provides you as a placeholder until you can get some content up and installed. Secondly, make it semi engaging and interesting to the random passerby who might stumble upon your virginal website. At least this way if someone surfs to your new site you won’t loose them completely as a potential lead.

When you’ve managed to throw up something semi decent looking as a splash page place holder, you need to figure out what type of system you’ll be running for your website. I’m going to list them in order of easiness below. See below (duh).

1. Blogging systems - ie. Wordpress etc. This type of system once installed is as basic as it gets really. I know alot of you are going to yell at me and tell me the wysiwyg page makers are the easiest, but come on, who really stays around to look at those crap sites? The best part is that most web hosts have nifty automated installers for you - piece of cake.

2. CMS’s - (content management systems) ie. Drupal, Joomla, Nuke etc. These have their own individual quirks to them, and are nicely robust. Fairly easy to install and offer the user more control over the programming and structure of how the system runs, Drupal especially I’ve noticed has a very nice core system to monkey around with. Accordingly, don’t monkey with it unless you’re fairly sure you know what you are doing.

3. Self design / destruction - go look in the mirror. This is all you bad boy, from start to finish. Now of course this offers the most flexibility and the most hardship. Something goes wrong, you need to fix it.

So since this is a newbie guide I’m going to suggest you select door number one and choose the easy to setup and use blogging software that will most likely come with your web hosting package. Now here comes the stunning part - RESEARCH - be sure you read that word again for good measure. If you’re planning on making a little money from Adsense you need to research the market you will be playing in. A well thought out approach is much more satisfying to the wallet later on then a thrown together idea that goes no where.

While you are researching the market area you’d like to develop your website for, be certain to write down and keep a list of all terms & associations that apply to your market. Having a handy list of keywords will help immensely later on when you start advertising the site in Adwords or any other traffic generation program.

Once you’ve done the homework and researched your market area, create some content. And by create content I mean some decent articles that have some length to them and actually have relevance to your chosen markets. So using our example of the Llama, write some background history article about Llamas, where they came from, how they are used ad nosium. Doing this well will generate much more specific targeted ads when you ad in Adsense later on.

In order to have Adsense produce any ads that you’re visitors may want to click on you need to saturate the content of you’re site with the keywords from your market research. Now if you were paying attention up above you would have written these down somewhere and could reference that list when creating the articles. If you still haven’t written them down, stop reading and go do that.

By this point in the game you should have some decent content in the blog, say 10 or 15 articles maybe of decent length. When you’ve got this you can start splicing in that nifty little script that Adsense will generate for you. If you can’t figure out how to get a banner to show up in your posts - its essentially copy and past it where you want it. Most blogging systems have a “Code” button that will flip you over to the html side of the article, just paste there and you’re good to go.

I would suggest starting with some of the easier size ads like the banner and skyscaper ads. Be sure to use both text and images option when creating the ads in Google’s setup lab. Typically you would want to choose the horizontal banner ad, and put it somewhere noticeable, like the bottom of a blog post. This will provide you with the most bang for the buck, and generate the most compatible ads shown from the entire database. You can limit the type and style later on down the line when you’ve got a better handle on what is converting and what is not as far as clicks.

Now go start advertising you’re website all about town. Try Adwords, using the handy keyword list that we wrote down earlier. Also try utilizing some of the web 2.0 applications that have come out in the social media such as Stumble and Digg. My advice is to set a nice dollar amount you want to spend on advertising, say $100. Be ok with loosing that money, and utilize your researched market keywords to buy some advertising to start with. Later on focus more on back links from other respected websites to generate long term traffic, but to start with its always nice to give your site a fresh injection of traffic.

Don’t expect to get rich with Adsense immediately, or really anytime for that matter. Adsense should be used as a supplemental system and not over done. A goal that I like to set for new sites is to make 50$ a month with Adsense. I know that seems really low, and it is. But once you start consistently making that much every month, bump the goal up to 100$ etc. Even at 50$ a month thats still $600 a year, which coincidentally is right under the level at which you have to claim it as taxable income.

Tags: ads, adsense, blog, market, Marketing, Money, traffic, web, website

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A marketer is only as good as his back end.

Posted by admin

So you’ve been marketing the heck out of that new blog or web store that you’ve put countless hours into and driven your family to the point of moving to a hotel, and you realize that in order to sell anything on that website or blog you need a system to process the orders from the masses. This is one thing that you definately do not want to pay a half naked monkey to take care of, you need to spend some quality time getting to know your order processor.

There are a ton of places out there in web 2.0, but one that i’ve found recently which seems to have everything in order is www.msmerchantaccount.com. One of the nice features that i’ve seen with Msmerchantaccount is their willingness to work with both low risk and high risk accounts. This means that if you have a business in the adult industry or even a business that is in a market the bank will consider as a high risk venture you can still get an order transaction system.

Its worth checking out at least. I always recommend to people just starting out with order transaction systems to research, research, research, and then research some more before deciding on the system for them.

Tags: blog, market, Marketing

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