How You Can Earn Online

For many people getting the right traffic to our sites (that is targeted traffic - visitors that come to your site with a purpose) or being able to effectively promote our favourite affiliate, PTA etc programs is one of the hardest parts of earning online.

While there are many ways to go about this - I’ve already discussed some and will cover some more traffic building methods this particular post is about using autoresponders to promote your site or programs etc.

In a nutshell for those that don’t know an autoresponder is simply a program you can use where you set up a predetermined amount of emails that are sent out at your chosen intervals to whoever signs up for your email series.

These emails can be a way to pre-sell your chosen product, they can be used to hilight certain posts in your blog, promote certain programs or activities,  a general way to keep in touch with your readers or a variety of other things.

By the same token you could also set up a newsletter that goes out once a month covering what you’ve blogged about or what you plan to blog about or even ask for suggestions etc.

Most autoresponders are free to join though being a free member can mean you’re limited in the amount of pre-set emails you can set, or you’re limited to one series of emails etc. Having said that though, often you only need the one series to get your message across.

While there are a wide variety of autoresponders available on of the best free ones I’ve used (that gives you the option to upgrade) is Get Response. It gives you the ablility to set up 5 emails that can be sent over whatever period of time you want from every day to once a month etc. You simply sign up for free, set up a template of your emails you want to send (an introduction first then followed up by the next in the series that can cover whatever you want) then place a piece of code in your blog that allows people to subscribe to your series.

For more information take a look at Get Response or do a quick search online you’re bound to find plenty of different programs

September 20th, 2009 | Tags: autoresponders, blog visitors, emails series, newsletters, subscribe | Category: Earn Online, Getting Traffic To Your Site | Leave a comment

For many of us getting links back to our sites or blogs can seem way too hard. As I’ve mentioned before to make the most out of our incoming links they need to be one way and best if they’re from a related site or blog.

Well there’s a way you can easily get some one way inward links to your blog, that can be highly related and from sites that search engines like google think highly of (that is they have a higher authority) and you can earn from them at the same time

To do this it’s simply a matter of signing up for sites like Squidoo or Hubpages etc (all free to join) there are many others of this kind around but those are the two I’m giong to focus on for now.

The beauty of using sites like these is that not only can you build some all important inward links to your own pages you also get the chance to earn some extra money from those sites.

By creating a lens (squidoo) or a hub (hubpages) thats related to the topic of your blog you can add a link back to your blog or setup an rss module (a box that allows you to import the most recent posts from your blog to your lens or hub) and you can also add some income streams to them -either your own if you want to create a module for your chosen affiliate link, or both sites add things like adsense, amazon etc where you can get a share of any revenue earnt from these income streams.

Both are very easy to set up - simply sign up and then follow the prompts.

Here’s some of my squidoo lenses or  hubpages

Or for even more information on Squidoo here’s a free quide - Squidoo Guide

September 19th, 2009 | Tags: blog traffic, hubpages, inward links, link building, squidoo | Category: Earn Online, Getting Traffic To Your Site | Leave a comment

Okay so you’ve done your research, set up your blog and have several related posts - now comes the next step.

Adding income streams.

There’s a whole variety of ways you can monetise your blog(s) and one thing to remember when earning online is the old phrase of don’t put all your eggs in one basket. What that means is don’t rely solely on one source of income. Too many things might go wrong if you only have one source of income - lose that and you lose a lot of hard work.

Having said that though, you don’t want to go overboard on adding income streams to your site - one or two is fine - having too many ads though will most certainly put your reader/potential customer off.

The income sources you use will depend on different things: such as the content of your blog, where and how you plan to promote it and what programs are available to you.

While for me my best money makers are google adsense and one affiliate product (generally a clickbank product) that’s not always the case. This blog for example I have bidvertiser and one other affiliate product as my source of income.

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to monetising your blog or which program to use - I have a couple of pages listed here under income streams (to the top and left of the page) that offer some different alternatives. You will need to decide for yourself though which is going to work best for you and your chosen topic.

As an example if you blog about dogs you might want to join adsense and add one or two adsense ad blocks to your blog along with signing up with clickbank and finding a dog related affiliate product (dog training etc.) One key thing to remember though is to always read the terms of each program you decide to join. Too many people just sign up for adsense as an example and then wonder why they get banned from the program (only to later discover that they can’t put ads on sites that promote paid to click programs etc - if that’s the topic of your blog perhaps bidvertiser or adbrite etc would be better)

No matter what income stream(s) you chose though, again I urge you to understand the terms and to exercise some patience - you can’t expect to put an income stream on your blog one day and receive payment for it the next - it takes time to build up a good income - but once you have it - it’s a passive income that just continues to grow, often without you even having to do any more to it.

August 16th, 2009 | Tags: Earn Online, home business, make money blogging, online income, work from home | Category: Earn Online, Make Money With Blogs | Leave a comment

When it comes to building links to your blog and gaining more exposure one of the best long term ways to go about it is to use articles.

Article marketing consists of writing a related article (or articles) about your site and posting them to the many free article directories.

When you submit your article(s) to these free directories you’re given the opportunity to add further information in your authors resource box. This information can include anchor text link(s) back to your blog or website.

The bonus of article marketing and using these free article directories such as ezine articles and go articles etc is that not only do you have a link from a high authority site such as ezine articles, the article you submit may also be picked up by many other blogs and websites and placed all over the internet with your resource box (and links) kept intact. This means your link is spreading without you doing any extra work.

The other advantage of article marketing is that you can choose how much information you plan to share. The best way to approach this is to offer enough information to get the readers interest but limit it so they’ll need/want to click through to your site to find out more.

July 20th, 2009 | Tags: article marketing, business writing, marketing software, submitting articles, writing, writing articles | Category: Earn Online, Getting Traffic To Your Site | Leave a comment

Inward links, one way links, back links, reciprocal linking are just a few of the things you’ll hear or read about when people are suggesting ways to build traffic to your blog and/or increase your blogs page rank.

And while that’s all good to tell you you need those things, many don’t offer ways to actually get them. Of course as with all elements of SEO and earning online depending on what you’re reading or who your listening to you’re no doubt going to get contradictory advice, some will say this will work while others will say don’t do it because google doesn’t like it.

Like all things when it comes to earning online and building your site up so it ranks well in the search engines the more naturally you can do it - the better. But there are some things you can do to help speed the process up a little.

There’s a wide variety of ways you can get good inward, one way links to your blog (that is links that point to your blog - without you linking back to the original blog) and I’ll cover a few here and others in later posts.

For me one of the best ways is via article marketing (and this will get its own post soon) but in a nutshell you write an article, add your blogs link to the resource box and submit it to the free article directories: ezine articles, go articles etc. This article is then not only placed on that site, other blog/site owners may in turn pick up the article and add it to their own sites giving you another link back to your blog.

Another really good way to get links to your blog is via finding related blogs and leaving a comment on it with a link back to your blog. Of course when you’re doing this - DON’T SPAM - make sure your comment is relevant to the original post and you don’t comment on hundreds of posts on the same blog all at once (you’ll only end up having every comment removed anyway so it’s a total waste of time)

The same goes for finding related forums etc - find a forum related to your blog and sign up - you can add your blogs link to the signature - again DON’T SPAM. Doing this not only gives you an inward link to your blog it lets others know you’re willing to share what you know about your chosen field etc which will make them want to check your site out.

Commenting on blogs/forums and other social sites helps build links to your site, but it doesn’t end there. What you can also do if you comment, submit an article with your link etc is to then bookmark those sites on the many social bookmarking sites (stumbleupon, digg etc) this in turn brings the page with your link to the notice of many others which brings that page up in the ranks and in turn brings your own linked page with it.

Don’t rush to do everything at once - take your time and do it properly. As your blog grows so will the amount of inward links you receive.

July 5th, 2009 | Tags: blog traffic, inward links, link building, social bookmarking | Category: Getting Traffic To Your Site | Leave a comment

In a recent post I gave a brief outline on how to find the best keywords for your site. So assuming you’ve done that the next step is using them properly.

Domain Name/Url

One of the first places you should use one of your chosen/related kewyords is in your domain name or url. That is buy a domain with your chosen keyword or set up a blog with the keyword(s) as your sub-domain etc.

Categories

When setting up your blog one of the first things you’ll do is select some related categories so you can post your articles to them. These categories should also be keyword/phrase related

Post Titles

Again using your chosen keyphrases in your post titles

Content

Naturally your going to use them here as well. Don’t go overboard though. Make sure to have your main keyphrase in your opening paragraph but from there you’ll find it (or very related phrases) will flow naturally within your writing (and this is the best way to do it)

Remember that it doesn’t have to be an exact phrase suing the home business one for an example - while home business might be your main phrase using ” starting a business from home” is just as related. The words don’t have to be in a set order

June 21st, 2009 | Tags: Good Keywords, keyphrases, keyword titles, using keywords | Category: Getting Traffic To Your Site, Good Keywords | Leave a comment

Keywords, Keyphrases these are what often put people off when it comes to setting up their own sites. They’ve heard the horror stories about how you need to be SEO (search engine optimisation) experts before you can have any sort of chance at getting visitors to your site. Well let me tell you that you don’t need to be an expert, in fact it’s a lot easier than you might think - it just takes a bit of practice.

While this is only going to be a very basic guide - there is a lot of information you can learn and use and over time experiene will teach you most of it - what’s following will be enough to get you on the right track when it comes to finding and using the best and most suitable kewyords or phrases etc to get targeted, organic traffic to your site (that is people visiting your website or blog because they’ve found it in the search eninges etc)

When it comes to keywords or phrases firstly I’ve found that natural is the best when it comes to your content - by that I mean don’t go out of your way to add in kewyords or phrases etc. if you just write what you want to write the right words will come naturally and make a whole lot more sense in your article than if you try too hard to had particular words etc.

How do you go about finding the best keywords or phrases?

There’s plenty of ways you can do this and many great programs that will help, some free, some paid some are quick some take a bit longer but for a relatively easy free way to go about it you’ll first need to go to the Google Adwords Keywords tool

Once there you’ll want to put in your main keyphrase (that is main topic, niche idea etc) eg home business (as a side note - don’t go with things like work from home, home business etc as it’s way too competitive - ’specially if this is your first time) then add the captcha

Once you’ve done that you’ll see a list of words and phrases that google thinks you might be interested in related to your chosen topic

One of the colums listed shows the approximate search volume for the month - it’s here that you’ll get some idea of how many people are searching for that particular word or phrase each month - now while the higher the number the better - that doesn’t mean you’ll get that many visitors - what you also need to find out is how many other people have a page online targeting the same phrase - so - from the list to the left of the page find a phrase you think looks like one you could use and go to google.com - then put that phrase inside “” and do a search eg “home business” from there you’ll see how many competing pages there are (you need to put it inside the brackets otherwise google will return results that have those words anywhere on the page in no particular order rather than the actual phrase you’re looking for)

What all this means is that you’re going to be looking for words or phrases that have a good search volume but low competing pages - as a starting point try phrases that have say 100 odd searches a day and less than say 30,000 to 50,000 competing pages (as you grow more accustomed to doing this and setting things up your ranges can vary etc)

As I said that’s only a very basic guide but it’s enough to get you started - I’ll add some extra tools and programs to this page later - some free and some paid. Remember too that you’ll want to use your keywords, phrases sparingly withing your content but you will want to use them in titles and links etc (I’ll cover that in another post)

June 20th, 2009 | Tags: best keyphrases, finding keywords, Good Keywords, keyphrase, keywords, using keywords | Category: Getting Traffic To Your Site, Good Keywords, WordPress Blogs | Leave a comment

WordPress Plugins

Okay so in the previous post I discussed getting your blog ready so the search engines can find you easier via permalinks and ping lists. Now we’re going to take that one step further and discuss some great plugins that will not only come in very handy both for you and your potential readers but some will also help improve your SEO.

First is Aksimet - This actually comes standard with WordPress blogs but it’s well worth activating. You will need to sign up at WordPress.com to get an activation key but that’s free and only takes a couple of minutes. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All In One SEO Pack - This handy plugin allows you to easily add keywords, titles and descriptions etc to all your posts and pages

Sitemaps

I actually use two sitemaps on my blogs the first is:

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

The Second Is:

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Generates a fully customizable sitemap like a table of contents for an example you can see the one for this site here Table Of Contents

Contextual Related Posts - This gives a list of posts related to the current post at the bottom of each post. Not only good for visitors to find things, it also gives inward links to other posts within your blog

Smart Update Pinger - This one can come in very handy, particlarly if continually update posts. When you publish a post it pings all the sites you set up to be pinged - the problem is that it also pings those same sites if you edit a page. While it might not be a problem if you do it a lot some of those sites may think you’re spamming which is where this plugin comes it. It will only ping when a new post is added and not when a post is edited etc.

RSS Footer - This one allows you to add a line of content to the end of your blogs rss feed. Comes in handy when people decide to use your content on their blogs etc or read in feedreaders - it tells people where the orignal post came from

There are of course literally thousands of other plugins available to you - some are fun, some are great for SEO etc and some can make your blogging life easier - Over time I’ll probably mention a few more, but those listed above are the standards that I use on every blog I create.

June 11th, 2009 | Tags: blogs, earn from blogs, plugins, setting up a wordpress blog, Wordpress | Category: Getting Traffic To Your Site, Starting A WordPress Blog 1, WordPress Blogs | Leave a comment

Now you’ve got your blog online and I’m sure you’re raring to get your first post online. Good for you, but before you do that there’s a few little adjustments you might want to make to your blog first.

One of the best things about using a WordPress blog is that is already very search engine friendly, however there are a few things you can do to make it even more so, after all you have the blog you want to do all you can to make sure your readers/potential customers etc and the search engines can find you.

As mentioned in previous posts I will go into more detail about keywords in later posts, but for now we’re just going to go into a little backend stuff to get your blog off on the right foot.

For those of you who know anything about WordPress blogs you’ll know there’s a million and one themes and plugins etc you can use and in fact there’s some plugings I’m going to recommend to you shortly but before we get to that there’s a couple of little settings in your dashboard you’ll want to change first.

So here we go…

Once you’ve logged into your dashboard you’ll see tl the left of screen a settings tab - this is where you can make some very useful changes to your blog.

Writing Tab

If you click on the writing tab and scroll down you’ll see an update services area - this is for your Ping List.

Pinging services are what allow you to automatically tell others (blog directories and search engines) that your blog has been updated.  I have a ping list saved on my computer that I copy and paste in but you can find plenty of others online.

A few sites that have extensive ping lists listed are

DailyBlogTips list of ping services

Vladimir Prelovac - WordPress Ping List

Webmaster Resources

Once you’ve added your chosen list (or are happy with the one listed) just click save changes

One other thing you might want to change before you add your first post is the permalink structure.

Permalinks are the permanent urls to your blog posts and pages and define what the web address looks like.

Now the default permanlink isn’t all that flash - it really just gives you the domain name and page number. While that at least has your blogs domain name in the title eg xyz.com the second part is just the post number so xyz.com/?p=123 now that isn’t very search engine friendly. So we’ll want to change that

Changing Permalinks

While your in settings click the permalink tab

You’ll see you have a few different options there from changing the ending of the url to day and name (post title), to month etc - while better they’re still not great so we’re going to make it even better

Click on the custom button and type this in /%postname%/

That then makes your permanent url xyz.com/title of post - so if you’re blogs address and post title are nice and keyword related that makes your url a whole lot more appealing for search engines etc. You can refine it more by adding your category etc in there (again your category would be keyword related) but you don’t have to.

That’s a couple of things you should do before you even begin to add posts to your blog. There are others you might want to do first, such as adding certain plugins etc. but if you’re in a hurry to get started getting those down will get you on the right path.

May 31st, 2009 | Tags: blogs, permalinks, ping lists, setting up a wordpress blog, Wordpress | Category: Starting A WordPress Blog 1, WordPress Blogs | Leave a comment