Some of you may have noticed that I have written some sponsored posts lately. I just joined the social spark site and there have been some really good opportunities. There are a lot of $5 opportunities that are (more…)
What is your favorite url shortener? I used to use tinyurl and then switched to bit.ly because it offered better tracking capabilities. Over the last couple of months there have literally been hundreds of new url shorteners that have been launched. I wanted to share with you a url shortening service that you can actually use to make money with. The service is called ADf.ly and it works just like all the other services by shortening your url but you can actually make some cash each and every time someone clicks on your link. Each time your link is clicked and ad will pop up for a few seconds while your link is loading. You get paid based on the amount of page views.
I decided to take this for a test drive and created a new account today. The one downfall to this is that this could really annoy your followers and sooner or later when someone sees the adf.ly url they may choose to ignore it instead of clicking through. Luckily, I have 2 Twitter accounts. I have my @tycoonblogger account as well as an account called @followyou2. I created @followyou2 just for this very reason, to test new Twitter monetization strategies and Twitter follower strategies.
I will write a follow up post in 30 days and let you know if this is a real way to make money with your blog and Twitter or if it is a waste of time.
In the meantime, if you want to check it out for yourself, here is a direct link to the site:
Is anyone using this?
Good idea or bad idea? Let me know..
A lot of bloggers would tell you that you should compete in the search engine with keywords that do not get searched much. They tell you to avoid key phrases such as Make Money Online because they say that you will never make it to the first page of the search engine. Think of it this way – if you compete for keywords that have little to no search volume, you get little results. If you take the time and effort to compete for big key phrases like Make Money Online, you get big results when you rank high in the search engine. If you spend all your time trying to compete for little phrases that nobody really search for, you are working harder, not smarter.
Even if you are not a popular blogger, you can still make money online by ranking well in the search engine. Before you get into the competition, you need to keep this in mind: You need to have a long-term strategy that will most likely take you over a year or two to succeed. Notice I said a year or two because most people give up before that. Most people will say, “This doesn’t work,” so they give up.
It is impossible to rank well with competitive key phrases if you don’t have a link building strategy. Many people think that you simply comment on “dofollow” blogs, and you will magically rank high in the search engine. Most “dofollow” blogs are useless to get a good backlink to your blog. They need to be relevant.
Let me clear up what it means to be relevant. For example, I want to write a comment on a Make Money Online “dofollow” blog, but that blog has a title tag “How To Earn Cash On The Internet”, and the entire article does not mention the word “make”, “money”, and “online”, then that blog has zero relevance to my blog because the anchor text link that I want is Make Money Online. The search engine does not know that they have similar meanings. The title tag to this post that you are reading has the words “make money online” in it, and the phrase is written throughout the entire article. The anchor text link pointing to my blog also has the same phrase, which also matches the title of my blog. The relevance is 100% and it carries a lot of weight. The search engine determines how important the link is based on relevancy.
No matter how perfect your link building strategy is, this will take a lot of time and patience. Do not give up because most of your competitors have already surrendered!
Another great guest post from Kai Lo-
Author Bio: Kai Lo is a SEO enthusiast, and is passionate to help others succeed. He likes to talk about the simple truth to Make Money Online so be sure to check out http://makemoneyonline18.blogspot.com.
Most of the blogs that I follow are doing something to try to monetize their blogs. Most are using adsense or affiliate marketing programs. Some are selling direct advertising, and others are involved in advertising networks like Entrecard or CMF ads. A majority of the bloggers are missing out on what I see as the best opportunity to make money from your blog; Selling Services.
Most bloggers choose to specialize in a niche because that is where their expertise and interests lie. If you write unique and useful content then others will start perceiving you as an expert in your field. Why not offer consulting services in this area? As an example, I run a career advice blog and through that blog I offer resume writing services and interviewing preparation consulting. My earning from that blog are averaging between $1,400-$1,800 a month, with 90% of that money coming from resume writing. I am lucky if I make $10 a month through adsense on that blog.
Most of my readers are blog owners or people that are interested in starting a blog. One of the best services to offer as a blogger, is writing services. There are many webmasters and other blog masters that will pay good money for high quality content. Last month, I created a page on this blog called, “Hire Me,” and on that page I have a brief paragraph that informs the reader that I am available to hire for content creation through my writing company, Juicy Content . In the past week I have had three new clients and over $250 dollars as a direct result of advertising my own services on my blog. The best part is that I did not have to pay anyone a percentage, the entire amount was pure profit. I love getting these kinds of emails:
Other services that you can offer as a blogger, in addition to writing are:
Give it a try, go ahead and add a “hire me” button on your navigation bar, what do you have to lose?
Do you sell services on your blog? What types of services do you offer through your blog?
Last month, I mentioned that I was going to try Adgitize out, what a waste! Bottom line, do not even bother.
As you all know, I am active in the EntreCard community but that may be coming to a close. I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about the paid ads system and how much of a mess it was. The latest blunder of the juvenille management team is that they are now censoring the forum.
They are only allowing a “select few” to join and post on their “community forum.” All the while they continue to treat the backbone of their company (the bloggers) like second class citizens. Those kids over there need a lesson in business 101. You will notice that I still have a EC widget on this blog and that is due to the fact that I have a bunch of credits that I still need to spend in the marketplace. I did not want this post to be about bashing EntreCard, rather I wanted to let everyone know that I joined the CMF Ads community today and I am very pleased with what I am seeing so far.
For those that are not familiar with CMF, the are a blogging/ad network that helps bloggers promote and monetize their blog. They are similar to EC in the sense that you earn credits and use credits to advertise on other members’ blogs. That is where the similarities end. Unlike EC, CMF is a stable economy and there is none of the dropping that EC is built around. That is good for me because I do not waste my time dropping. My time is much more valuable than 30 cents for a half hours worth of work.
I would love to see CMF start a marketplace because I think that is the most valuable part of the EC experience. I currently spend all my credits on getting my posts digged, stumbled and retweeted.
The sign up process was easy and much more strait forward than EntreCard. I remember when I first joined EC it took me a week until I knew what I was doing. The biggest difference that I noticed is the company is actually run by people that really care about their company. The administrators are active on the forums and approved my blog in less than an hour. I also had a question about the size of my ad and I sent an alert to the admin. My question was answered in less than 5 minutes. I have questions that have never been answered over at EC. From what I can see, CMF has their act together and is run by adults who get it rather than a bunch of kids pretending that they know what they are doing. I guess the real test will be to see if I can actually make a few bucks from the ads and more importantly increase traffic from my ads and exposure in the community. I will keep you posted….
Is anyone else made the switch to CMF? Anyone else fed up with EC?
I added adsense to this blog around 3 weeks ago and I just checked out the stats. The one area I need to improve dramatically is my click through rate (CTR) percentage. I am running at .45% right now. That means that I get a click on an ad every 200 pages or so. I would like to get this up to 2 or 3 percent eventually. For now, my goal is to get this up to one percent in a month. When it comes to placement of adsense, the hottest spot is right above your first post. Other good spots are right below the navigation bar, in the middle of your content page and at the end of your content. When I first started this blog, I was showing no adsense and then to ease my readers into it, I decided to place it on the upper right hand side. This is not known as the best stop, but I thought it blended in nicely, so that is where I put it. Today, I decided to take the next step in the monetization of this blog and incorporate adsense into my posts. You will notice that there will be adsense at the top and bottom of the posts. Please let me know if this is over kill, I do not want to drive away my readers for a few extra clicks.
In case you are wondering, this is very easy to integrate. I am using the plugin called “Adman” and what you do is paste your ad code into the admin section where ever you want your ads to appear. For the content in the middle, you can let the plugin decide where it should go or you can decide by simply putting in a simple code to specify exactly where you want the ad to be displayed. This is a great plugin and I recommend it highly. I will update you in about a month and let you know how my CTR is going.
