We have just launched the Wordpress Shopping ECommerce Themes Pack from Creative Theme Design for under $30 for 5 Top Shopping Webstores Themes. Along with 5 Top Shopping Themes, we also give away 3 popular ebooks that would help anyone expand their online marketing business!

If you are a prolific blogger or an online affiliate marketer, this could be a very profitable offer for you. You can Buy the Shopping Themes Pack & get each theme for less than $5 (thats a 50% discount right away).

You can also sign up as one of ur affiliates & make handsome money by selling our Creative Wordpress Products for Personal Business, Home Businesses & Small Businesses.

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Our Themes for Individual, Home Business & Small Businesses are very unique:

• These Creative WP Themes are simple but very effective
• They are highly optimized for search engines giving better organic search results
• The Popular Multi-Ads Wordpress Themes could increase ad click through rates by over 40% (that’s 40% increase in ad revenues right away)
• The Themes are designed & tested by professional small business owners, affiliate marketers & successful money making bloggers, making them perfectly suitable for all small businesses, home businesses & individuals making money from blogs
• Lowest Price each costing under $10 a theme, or under $5 when you buy the Themes Pack

Join Our Team of Affiliates & Help Other Bloggers achieve their dreams of making money from their blogs & websites. You could also be helping online retailers & small business owners get the right Wordpress Themes for their online retail businesses.

Our Affiliate Program is supported by full fledged marketing & promotional materials, including emails, blog articles & a large set of banners & buttons to help you promote & market them efficiently. We constantly add new promotional content to keep you equipped with all the competitive edges our products provide to the customers.

These individual multi-ads creative themes are sold from here as well as from Business Themes site. We will continue to sell these money making themes & add new ones to the stores.

After several requests from our readers & customers who run a variety of blogs on Wordpress, we have rolled out the Complete Multi Ads Wordpress Themes Pack, with 10 incredible high performing creative themes, for under $40 now!

Along with these 10 Super Multi Ads Themes, we have also provided 3 incredible ebooks absolutely Free.

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You can also sign up as an affiliate & make money selling the themes pack. These themes sell pretty much by themselves & is priced so attractively that its hard for anyone to pass on the bargain!

Click Here to Start Selling Multi-Ads Themes Pack to Money Making Bloggers Now!

We will support your marketing efforts with a handsome commission & all marketing materials. We would love you to join our team & grow with us.

Overall, you could save about USD 350 per month on your home office & small business supplies when you start using the computers & the internet more effectively.

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Very often we have used these discounts for new corporate promotional materials for our customers. The quality of these products are excellent & you could use them for your own small business, as well as gifts to your customers.

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Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools today. Challenged by spams & anti-spam measures by ISPs, you have to partner with the best email marketing partner to make your email marketing effective.

Even though we have used 3 Top email marketing services, for the most part, we have used only one. Especially when it comes to new bloggers & new affiliate marketers, our recommendation is still one of the three!

We only recommend Aweber to anyone who is starting new with building email lists for affiliate marketing & affiliate blogging.

Click Here to Sign Up with Aweber for Just $1 Now.

So why do we recommend thier services when there are so many choices out there? We have 25 Solid Reasons to Recommend Them to All New Bloggers, Affiliate Bloggers & Small Businesses.

1. Easy Sign Up – from the very beginning, it is about making it easy for you, beginning with the easy sign up process for their email marketing services
2. Meant for Business, New Bloggers & Affiliate Bloggers – they have all the features any small businesses would need & they do not clutter with unwanted & unnecessary features that you have to pay for, but never use
3. Meant for Non Technical People – you do not have to be technically expert to know how to use it. We compared all the 3 services we used and found Aweber to be the easiest to use
4. Hundreds of Free Email Templates – you can use hundreds of free email templates to send emails to your subscribers. You can also design your own but you will never have the need, given their wide variety of choices
5. Over 100 Free Subscription Form Templates – they have preloaded professionally created subscription form templates that you can use & customize. No matter what your niche marketing area is, you will find a suitable sign up form to use
6. Completely Customizable Forms & Emails – you can completely customize all the free templates, be it for emails or subscription forms, to suit your blog or website’s style
7. Creative Display of Sign Up Forms – Aweber allows you to creatively display your sign up form on your website or blog. All you need to do is to create one from all the available options of In-Line Sign Up Form, Hover Sign Up Form, Pop-up Sign Up Form etc
8. Custom Email Alerts – you can get an email every time you have a new subscriber. You can set up custom email alerts for new sign ups & unsubscriptions
9. Easy Step By Step Guide – every time you create a new list or sign-up form, a easy visual guide helps you step by step. You may decide to ignore that, but to this date, we still use these guides blindly & never make any mistake
10. Very High Penetration Rates – Aweber has one of the highest penetration rates (meaning, your email will not be blocked by ISPs as spam) & is white-listed with a large number of global ISPs
11. Completely Customizable Email Messages – apart from the follow-up messages & broadcasts, the Confirmation Email is completely customizable. You can use any of the pre-formatted ones or customize them to your liking
12. Each Email is Checked for Spam Index – Spam Index is a number that indicates the possibility of that email being seen as spam by ISPs. Every time you customize an email, Aweber will indicate the spam index on it so that you may want to change the messages for a cleaner one
13. Easy to Measure All Clicks on your Emails – you can track each & every links on your emails & know how many are delivered, how many are opened & how many links are clicked
14. RSS to Emails – you can send your blog updates in an email simply by adding the RSS feed URL to your emails
15. Unlimited Follow Up Messages – follow up messages help in specific marketing activities, especially when you are running a campaign. You can set up limitless follow up emails in this case
16. Unlimited Broadcast Messages – similar to follow up emails, you can set up an infinite number of broad casts to your subscribers as well
17. Set Custom Days, Dates & Time for Message Delivery – very easy options to set a specific date, date or time on all your messages. This allows you to control the exact time you expect subscribers to receive your emails
18. Very Attractive Affiliate Offer – Aweber has one of the best affiliate offers too, so while you pay them to manage your lists, you can also earn from them by referring others. If you click on our links & sign up with them, we will get a small commission too (that helps us keep most of the site & content free)
19. Easy to Import Old Lists – it is always a risk to change Email Marketing Service providers. But Aweber makes it very easy to move to them & you may be able to skip the double opt-in in may cases legitimately
20. Detailed Subscription Tracking – each subscription is tracked & you can run reports to see 25+ metrics, including countries, states, time zones, forms used etc
21. Detailed Report on All Emails Sent – you will be provided real time report on all emails that you are sending out, including, countries, time delivered, emails opened, links in emails clicked, conversions etc
22. Perform A/B Tests for Effective Placement – much like A/B tests for ads to help you with the effective placement of ads, Aweber allows you to test Sign Up form’s effectiveness with simple A/B tests
23. Free Email Marketing Tips for Your websites & blogs – you can display their Email Marketing Tips & Tutorials through RSS feeds. Like any other RSS feed, they too help in providing new content for your website & improve the SEO
24. Numerous Free Webcasts on Email Marketing – they have some of the best webcasts arranged that teaches you how to effectively do email marketing & how to use Aweber features in the best possible way. They will also answer ALL your questions when you attend their webcasts & trainings
25. The Unbeatable $1 Trial – if you Click Here & Sign Up with Aweber Now you will get the first month for only a dollar

This is more than just reasons to help you understand that Aweber meets all the needs of any new or experienced bloggers & affiliate marketers. We have been using their services diligently for years now & we continue to recommend them to anyone who is looking for all the right features at the most affordable price.

In this post on the Blogging for Money Series I will answer those frequently asked questions on using the right Wordpress Theme for your money making websites.

Let me rephrase a few of these questions here:

1. What is the best theme for people blogging for money ?

2. Where do you get the best themes for money making Wordpress websites ?

3. Why do you recommend Multi Ads Business Themes ?

4. Is a paid theme better than a free theme ?

Multi Ads Business Themes for Wordpress

1. What is the best theme for people blogging for money ?

There are a lot of themes, ideas & statistics on Creative Themes Design. That is a part of our group who are experts in creating Effective Wordpress Themes for money making websites. The best theme for people blogging for money should serve a couple of important functions:

• focus on conversions – it could be as simple as higher registrations or as complex as higher click through rates for ads & banners
• designed for people – the key aspect of the best themes is their focus on the reader, the visitor. The best themes make it easy for the visitor to read, understand & quickly take actions
• highly optimized for Search Engines – you might well be spending a few thousand dollars on search advertising, but your theme should equally be helping you with all the organic searches. SEO is achieved by various means like proper styling, effective use of images & website loading time

2. Where do you get the best themes for money making Wordpress websites ?

There are some great theme designers. We sell Business Themes & Multi Ads themes too. Since we have been blogging for money for quite some time (including affiliate marketing), we build these themes to be crisp & effective for any blogger.

• Click here to view Business Themes site
• Click here to view Creative Themes Design

Since making themes is not our primary line of business, we sell all these Multi Ads Business Themes for Under $10. You cannot find any better place or better themes for that price anywhere!

There are also a lot of great theme designers that you could evaluate. Brian Gardner, Michael Oeser, Arun Kale, Michael Hutagalung are among the best. We have learned a lot from them during our initial years of theme designing.

3. Why do you recommend Multi Ads Business Themes ?

If your intention is to run a blog like a business & make money from blogging, you have to have an eff3ective website in every possibly way. Multiple Ads Business Themes are just one of the most important parts of making your Wordpress blog effective.

Multi Ads Themes help you show all the high performing ads on your websites & they are designed to increase the ad’s effectiveness, resulting in higher conversions.

4. Is a paid theme better than a free theme ?

Is has been a very debatable point within marketers. My point of view convinces me to say that a paid theme is better than a free theme for more than one reason:

• it helps you be unique – unlike free theme that are downloaded in thousands, paid themes limit the number of themes that are in the market. You could give your website a unique look & feel over others
• paid themes are effective – the most important word in business is Effective. I cannot speak for the other theme whole sellers (there are quite a few who are just theme shops producing hundreds of themes a month!) but each of our themes are created for a specific sort of business. There is immense amount of investment (in terms of time, creativity, testing etc) in designing any of these specialized themes. And since they are designed by experts in that business line, these themes simply work!
• paid themes can be branded – typically free themes legally require you to keep the publisher’s links at the footer. When you get a paid theme, your license allows you to remove those links from the footer (there are several other licensing conditions that do not affect the usage in any way)

If you are looking for a new multi ads theme for your business blog, I would suggest that you don’t rush & buy the first theme you see. The sellers are not running away & the themes are staying too!

Understand why you need a business theme, what sort of theme would help you meet your goals, how much should you pay for it (our buyers found $10 very attractive) and what features of the theme solves your needs. No one theme will be able to meet a long list of expectation. So finally, your choice will be driven by the comparison of what you are getting from the theme vis-a-vis what opportunities you are leaving out.

Although, like any business, the initial months are always difficult, it is much easier (or so it feels) to make a successful business out of your hobby than anything else. That could be because you really do not feel the pain, or the expense, or even the frustration when you do something like your hobby, that you love doing so much.

On the other hand, since your hobby is something you have been doing for a long time, you tend to get to do it better than many other things – you easily become an Authority in that area & hence become valuable to others who are just beginning.

Here is a list of 10 hobbies that you can easily turn into a money making business. You can create a significant extra income when you pursue it long enough & market it well.

1. Photography – this is the most popular hobby that many have turned into successful part time & home business, generating serious income month on month. For more on setting up a profitable home based photo business, read Photo Business website
2. Videography – from wedding videos to syndicating videos & shooting family & social events, videography is the next in line of having the potential to turn into a profitable home business
3. Art, Painting – with numerous options of creating large prints commercially, & the ease of distribution, selling of Art, Paintings & Designs for display in offices or homes is also a great option for a part time business. RitxPix and Kodak Gallery have various options for print makers
4. Photo Books – coffee table books are extremely popular & sell very well. If you can take pictures, you can publish Photo Books very easily. Read Publishing Your Book article
5. Personalized Gift Items – you can create personalized gift items that corporates & various businesses buy to distribute to their customers. You could use a small art work, a picture or even use a quote to create attractive mementos. Mostly people use Smug Mug to handle all the inventory & distribution for this home business is very reputed for this
6. Pet Care & Pet Training- if you are a pet owner & love pets, this could be a great option to create a profitable part time income & be close to pets. This could involve pet training & even pet grooming. There is a lot of help available. You can Join YouPet for FREE! & get a lot of information & get discounted pet supplies from PetCareRx
7. T Shirt Designing – if you are good at designing slogans & art work that could go on T-Shirts, you can turn that hobby into a profitable small home business too. You can Create & Sell What’s On Your Mind at CafePress
8. Beauty Salons & Professional Beauty Parlors – there are numerous options to turn your creative mind & passion for creating good looks on people into a money making hobby. You will get lots of help & discounts & free gifts to begin with on SkinStore
9. Reviewing Products – you would need a website or a blog for this, but if your hobby is to try out new products, test new products etc, you can start your own website to review them. You would have to approach a manufacturers for samples to review & you could make money from both paid reviews as well as advertisements
10. Various Freelancing Work – there is a lot of money to be made from freelancing on many different jobs. There is variety and there is sufficient income from regular freelancing. Go Freelance could provide you with a lot of information & opportunities to freelance at your own time & build your income

There are numerous possibilities of making money. But making a living out of one’s hobby is everyone’s dream. You would be competing here with a lot of others too, people who have started earlier & people who probably do it better than you. The key again, is to choose the right hobby to start your personal business & pursue it for over a year or more before you can make significant income month after month.

You will get a lot of information & tips here on marketing & growing your business too, so you should subscribe to our news updates now.

Click Here to Read More on Google red Internet Profit Success System.

This auto-start system allows you to activate customizable websites stocked with products in just minutes.

This is a Free 3-day trial offer of the Internet Cash Machine program. You are given immediate access to the program for 3-days from the date of your submission. If you find that the system is not right for you, simply cancel the offer before the end of your 3 day trial period and you will not be charged anything.

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There are quite a few Benefits of using the Free Trial Offer.

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Click Here to Read More on Google red Internet Profit Success System.

This system is a simple to operate commerce website that allows you to sell goods and services online. The free offer comes with pre-designed templates, a product catalog, shopping cart and payment gateway already integrated & it saves you the hassle of setting it all up on your own.

The discussion first started during the Q & A with New Affiliate Bloggers & then in the article on the Key Facts about Email Lists & lastly on the Challenges in Changing Email Marketing Services. There is no doubt, one of the most critical decisions every effective blogger & affiliate marketer has to make is which email marketing partner to choose.

The reasons here are from my personal experience, as well as that of others with whom I have been associated, and who have all referred me to AWeber as the best choice. And right now, you can try out their services for just $1.

This is a great offer for any New Blogger or New Affiliate Marketer to evaluate the right email marketing service provider. This is a completely risk free offer & you have nothing to lose, especially, when they will give you a thousand reasons to partner with them!

Click Here to Start AWeber for Just $1 Now.

In fact, you can use this form right here to test drive the system.

Why is Aweber the Right Choice for Your Email Marketing?

1. It’s the simplest to use & operate. Once you sign up, you would be ready with your subscription form & email system in less than 10 minutes
2. You don’t need to know any programming to be able to use it
3. You can customize your email subscription form & mails in hundreds of ways
4. You will get a constant supply of templates across all the niches for your subscription form as well as emails
5. it has one of the highest penetration rates & very rarely ends up in spam
6. It’s still the cheapest option, now having trial run for less than a dollar!

There are more reasons to choose Aweber but my personal reasons are choosing them.

The basis of this post is the fact that potential buyers are just looking for that additional information, that tiny bit of data that is making them unsure of buying a specific product.

Most of the shopping websites now a days provide User Reviews, that work as a charm to convince the buyers on the value of the product. Internet sellers have boosted their sales over 60% in certain cases by showing the reviews from others who have purchased the products.

This post will focus on 5 ways to educate & teach your visitors, thus providing them with all the effective information to close the sale.

5 Teaching Tips for More Sales

1. Don’t repeat information that is already available on the product sites

If you have enough reasons to believe that the visitor has not been to the product’s site, you may as well mention what the product is all about. But in most cases, the visitors know that such a product exists, they are just not sure if they would serve their purpose. Repeating the same information that’s already on another site, does no one any good. There could also be duplicate issues with SEO.

2. More than the Product Features, Explain the Benefits

The readers are looking for products that could solve their problem. They don’t care if it does 10 other things too as long it helps them to solve their specific issue. Explain what are the benefits of the features. It is also a good idea to explain what problems the product has solved for you. This helps the reader to easily relate to their own problem solving efforts.

3. Use Audio, Pictures & Videos if possible

When explaining how or what the product can do (or cannot do), videos & pictures help more than just text. You have have noticed this, many of the top line product retailers (especially those of electronic goods like cameras & camcorders) have started to provide videos to know how easy it is to use the product & how stunning the results are. Text, and then pictures, were simply not enough to impress the readers.

4. Provide quotes or reviews from other buyers or write your personal experience with the product

Nothing works best like hearing from someone who has used the product already. One of the best ways to sell is to consult your reader with your own reviews (if you have used the product yourself). But it is not physically possible to have used all the products you are selling! In that case, you may quote reviews from other buyers, search the internet for reviews & you may summarize them for your readers.

5. Always provide an unbiased review

You are here to sell, but not at the cost of your readers’ trust. If there is anything you were not happy with the product, you should express your unbiased opinion. It is usually good to keep the discussion of price out of any reviews, since price is always weighed against the perceived benefits to the reader.

One of the very reason that a visitor will buy from your website (when the same product could be available on many others) is that they believe in what you are saying & found it helpful. There are numerous other factors too, like ease of purchase, warranty etc that may not be entirely in your control.

But you have the ability to educate your readers well & point out all ways the product can help them solve a problem or make a business process more efficient.

In this article, we will share our experience & learning that could help you minimize your losses when you change your email providers. But before we start, I would like to mention again that migrating your list could be very risky. Spend time before you select your provider and you should try to stick to them, forever!

We mainly work with 3 email service providers for all our sites & we have been very happy with their services. There are obvious limitations as I mentioned in the previous article, but we have learned to live with them.

In many cases, your new email service provider may not require you to send a new opt-in email to your subscribers. Talk to your new provider & all they might need are a complete list of subscribers you want to migrate & a proof that they have gone through the double opt-in process with your previous service provider.

In case you are migrating from FeedBurner, you should give your new email service provider a complete detail of when people signed up & you could avoid this risk altogether.

In case you still have to send a new opt-in link to your subscribers, here are a few tips that will help you.

5 Tips to Move or Migrate your Email Lists

Tip 1 : Communicate, Communicate & Communicate

Well in advance let your subscribers know that you are planning to change your email service provider. Send them a broadcast, update your blog, put in a splash message – anything that will draw their attention to this activity.

You may want to send them a notice 4 weeks in advance, another 2 weeks before the move, another a day before & finally one after you have moved, just to make sure that they know what is happening.

Tip 2: Educate Subscribers on what They Need to Do

In communications list our bullet points on what you need your subscribers to do. That would be mainly 2 steps:

1. subscribe or confirm their subscription from the new provider
2. add the new email address to their safe list

Keep this short & simple so that your message does not confuse anyone.

Tip 3: Offer Additional Incentive when your Switch Email Providers

Offering an additional incentive to your subscribers is another great way to attract attention of your subscribers & provides them with a reason to re-subscribe with your new email service provider.

Tip 4: Do Not Discontinue your Previous Email Service Provider Immediately – Keep at least a Month’s Overlap

Do not discontinue your previous email provider’s service immediately when you migrate onto the new one. Run them in parallel for at least a month & so that you can still send emails to your subscribers from the prior lists.

In case you know who hasn’t signed up again, you can still send them an email requesting them to subscribe & confirm with the new provider.

Tip 5: Send a Thank You Note

It is always a good idea to thank your subscribers who have stayed on with you. Very frequently we do not say Thank You enough, and this is definitely a situation where you need to thank each & every one who has re-subscribed again.

In this post on the continuing Affiliate Marketing Tips series,I will share 10 Facts about email subscribers & how to grow & manage lists. These facts are from our practical experience in running multiple affiliate niche websites over a period of 2 years, so in all probability you will be able to relate them quite easily.

We manage our email lists here with AWeber (Click Here to Sign Up with AWeber) and a few others for our other websites (Click Here to See What Email Services we Use).

10 Facts You Cannot Ignore About Email Lists

1. Offer New Visitors Something They Cannot Pass Off – almost all websites now a days offer something or the other to entice visitors to sign up. ebooks, free gifts, free downloads, free coupons etc are now very common. Visitors need a very strong reason to sign up. Offer your visitors something they just cannot pass off.

2. Offer Something Original & unique as an Incentive to Sign Up & Continue to Offer Incentives – Visitors are not happy with one time offers. As eager as they are to sign up, many will immediately unsubscribe after receiving the “free offers”! So you have to continue to provide value to keep them subscribed.

Here we continue to publish very relevant eBooks that are critical to your success as an Affiliate Blogger. When you subscribe, you will receive all our eBooks for free. Hardly 2 – 3% of the 100+ websites we studied had something to offer continuously.

3. Double Opt-In vs Single Opt-In – law requires in the US that all email subscriptions are double opt in. And all the commercial email management services will enforce double opt-in to protect their penetration rates & avoid being labeled as spammers by the ISPs.

Many subscribers will forget to go back to their email inbox & click that confirmation link. There are several ways to minimize this fall out, but you simply can’t avoid it. Subscribers from countries that do not require double opt-in are most likely to falter.

First time subscribers from Asian countries & Latin American countries form the bulk of these errors. You will not be able to send a “reminder” email to any of these people & so they are lost forever. About 50 – 70% of subscribers from these regions will never confirm their subscriptions.

4. Followers vs People Hungry for Free Offers – not every subscriber is a follower. A follower is one who understands that you are offering something free & in return you may send them promotional emails on various products & services. Followers create a mutually beneficial symbiotic relation with you & continue to be subscribers life long.

People Hungry for Free Offers will subscribe just for the moment. They will unsubscribe as soon as they get the Free Offer. There is no possibility of developing a long term relationship with these visitors. They are simply hungry for what’s free.

You have to recognize these 2 types of subscribers. There is nothing wrong with either of them. But whatever you do, you have to do it for the benefit of the long term subscribers. The momentary subscribers were never really in your radar! About 5 – 7% of subscribers would be in this category.

5. Email Subscribers & Participants – you may have lined up a series of follow up messages & broadcasts for your subscribers, but simply sending them emails do not mean that they are reading it.

Of all the email subscribers, our 2 year study on all our websites continuously showed that over 20 – 30% of the subscribers never opened their emails.

We shared our statistics with other marketers & found that the numbers varied widely in niches. Healthcare niche for example, had the highest percentage of subscribers who opened their emails, while technology & games niches had the least number.

It may not be a problem with your emails, it may just as well the behavior of email recipients & subscribers in these niches. Since there are too many technology related sites, people may have registered with more websites & content providers than they could handle, thus leading to low rates of emails being read.

6. Emails Are Still Primarily One Way Communication with Subscribers – no matter what other marketers tell you, emails are still a 1-way communication channel with your subscribers. You say something, they listen. That’s it.

If you are sending your blog updates & you are trying to establish a 2-way communication, you should encourage them to come over to your websites. Though many marketers email the full article, and that is quite nice, they do not need anyone to come back to their websites for more.

In data discussed with a few other marketers, a very small percentage of email subscribers come back to the blog for more, even if you are providing summary updates in emails. The percentage varied from 30 – 50% of subscribers.

7. Daily Digest vs Weekly & Monthly Updates – decide how frequently you want to email subscribers with updates. There are many who send daily updates, while many send weekly or monthly. There are still a lot of marketers who would only send promotional emails only (and not the blog updates).

People are fighting desperately with excess amount of information. Look at how many emails come to your Hotmail or Yahoo! mail boxes. You simply cannot expect your subscribers to read your updates daily!

From our study we found that weekly update emails were read over 50% more than daily emails, whereas monthly updates were opened only 20% more than daily emails.

Most of our updates are now sent weekly & we send only the summary in most cases, while for a few of our niches, we do not send any updates at all!

8. HTML emails vs Text emails – increasingly more and more people are reading emails on their mobile phones. Many of them do not display HTML emails properly & it could be a big challenge to get the message across.

All our emails from AWeber have a HTML version as well as a text version.

Across all our niches, we experimented with both these formats and we found that text versions were 50 – 70% more effective (they were opened), which possibly means that our subscribers were using mobile devices mainly (like Blackberry smart phones) to read emails.

9. Migrating your Email Service Provider is a Big No-No – this is a disastrous step and you should have a really strong reason to do that. We had to do this ones for a photography website & e lost over 80% subscribers – simply because they never knew that we had a new provider that required them to subscribe again!

Anytime you change email service provider, the new one will require subscribers to double opt-in again in their system. Many subscribers will never know that they have to & will consequently ignore the messages, causing them to fall-off the subscribers’ list.

Prepare your readers & subscribers well in case you have to change your provider to keep this loss to a minimum.

10. Branding Email Subject Line vs Generic Subject Lines – you can create custom subject lines to all your messages or keep them generic. For example, you could send an update with a subject line reading “Updates from 11/11/1111 to 12/12/1212″ or you could brand it with your company or website’s name like “ProMediaBlog Updates – Making Money Online by Blogging Effectively”.

In our tests over a year, we found that branded emails (as in the second example) had over 80% success rates compared to those with generic emails. Subscribers immediately recognize the name (and the description) & know who it is from & what sort of messages they are, leading to higher success rates.

Conclusion

Building email lists is a continuous activity and you have to continue to grow them. There will be numerous unsubscriptions and for the most part that is acceptable. However, if you find that long term subscribers are discontinuing, then that is the sign of a serious trouble!

For the most part, people who subscribe intend to build long term relations, so with every email you should ensure that if not anything else, you are not giving them any reasons to unsubscribe.

While a new blogger or internet marketer might find these niches difficult to get in, most of these are extremely high profiting niches to those who have been marketing them for sometime. Here is a list of 4 Profiting & Growing Affiliate Marketing Niches.

A couple of advertisers could help you with free advertising dollars to begin promoting your new niches. Promote your Website with BidVertiser & Get $20 in FREE clicks.

1. Weight Loss Products & Programs Niche Market

Weight loss has 2 unique variations – food & diet on one hand & fitness equipments, exercise products & pilate programs on the other. Both these have been doing tremendously well & continues to show strong growth.

The new weight loss programs that are showing signs of growth now are the various training videos, club memberships (localized campaigns) & sales of exercise products that can be quickly assembled at home.

2. Diet & Healthy Living Products Niche Market

After the Aloe Vera & other oriental products, it was time for the high selling Aci Berry products. From the affiliate reports of 2009, Acai Berry is still selling well. So are the oriental herbal products. All these have very successful sales record from 2006 & still continue to sell in high numbers.

Now the competition has strengthened, with affiliates from Philippines, China, Malaysia & other south east Pacific countries.

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Health care & Weightloss products:

1. Click Bank Healthcare Products

2. Never Blue Healthcare Products

3. Revenue Ads Healthcare Products

4. Click To Sell Healthcare Products

Health care Affiliate Marketing Tips:

1. Buy the products yourself before you start selling – too many people just jump into writing pages of the product without actually using one, thereby missing out on vital pros & cons of marketing the right products in the right way
2. Evaluate & compare products for your buyers. Help them choose one line of products instead of buying all the varieties & trying them out. You would need to know your products well to be able to recommend them to your buyers
3. Don’t pitch a variety of products to the same audience. This is one common mistake that new marketers do, hoping that it would increase their sales conversion. On the contrary, it causes people to unsubscribe faster
4. Create a marketing roadmap to pitch health care products to your customers. Introduce products in well designed periodicity so that users can mature into multiple product lines.

3. Foreign Currency Exchange Products & Services Niche Market

This is a very strong niche with lots of competition but very high returns. The biggest advantage of this financial niche is that you can sell both one-time products as well as make money from recurring billing sales.

If you are running your own Foreign Currency Exchange Products websites, you can also make money from financial institutes who will sponsor your websites at high monthly rates (usually exceeds US $1000 / month).

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Financial products & Foreign Exchange products:

1. Click Bank Financial & Currency Products

2. Never Blue Financial & Currency Products

3. Click To Sell Financial & Currency Products

4. Energy Savings, Utility Products & Green Energy Products Niche Market

This is a very small niche & has grown by over 700% in sales in 2009 & is likely to grow even more in the next 4 – 5 years. It started off as a consulting business by professional energy & manufacturing experts advising corporates to become environment conscious.

Very soon, small businesses also realized that they could implement many of what the large businesses are doing that will not only save the environment, but will also save them a lot of expenses & get them added rebates from the governments.

In 2006, online affiliate marketers sold thousands of eBooks & training videos for small businesses & metal shop owners on Energy Savings & Green Technologies.

Here are a few affiliate programs that have high converting Energy Savings, Green Technology & Utility products:

1. Click Bank Financial & Currency Products

2. Click To Sell Financial & Currency Products

Energy Savings, Green Technology & Utility products Affiliate Marketing Tips:

1. This is still a very infant business domain & not many people know in-depth about how to market these products. You have to spend a lot of time & effort in educating your customers before & after the sales
2. Your customers are small business owners, shop owners, manufacturers & educators rather than retail shoppers. Your marketing should be designed to connect with efficiency experts & the potential customers
3. Testimonials are very essential in marketing Energy Savings, Green Energy & Utility Products. You will surely sell more if you could get a few of your customers to speak of you on videos
4. Service is a vital component of this niche that will bring you long term revenues along with simple product sales

There are a lot more high profiting niches but what makes these 4 high on the list are the facts that they continue to show growth, some of them for over 5 years & will continue to grow in the future too.

Here are a few relevant articles on ProMediaBlog:

1. Emerging Affiliate Marketing Niches

2. 10 Popular Niche Blogging Topics

3. 5 Success Tips for New Affiliate Marketers

All together, these new systems could be overwhelming. This eBook simplifies the technical complexities & shows opportunities for small businesses to grow. The focus of this ebook is using these tools effectively – so that each could contribute towards growing your small business.

The free eBook is divided into 4 chapters:

1. New Channels of Growth – discussing how to find newer ways to grow your business
2. Using Technology to Grow – how to use Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 technologies to help cut costs & grow quickly
3. Understanding Trends & New Media – using the new media to promote your business & small business trends on using Social Media, Collaboration & Productivity Tools
4. References – small selection of helpful articles on Pro Media Blog

The Growing Your Business Using Tools, Technology & Social Media Effectively ebook is available free of cost to our subscribers. Subscribe by Email now to download this ebook.

Click Here to Read 10 Steps for Effective Blogging in 2010.

2010 is going to be a spectacular year for affiliate marketers & for bloggers who are making money online. The economy is getting better & more & more consumers have started to spend money shopping for products (Click Here to Read Blogging Tips – McKinsey Report on Post Recession Consumer Behavior). And Compete has recently published the data on internet shopping for 2009 that showed more & more people are shopping online.

There could not be a better time for you to start off with your online affiliate marketing business. Here are 10 Reasons You Should Start Your Own Affiliate Marketing Business now.

Click Here to Read the entire Affiliate Marketing Tips Series.

1. More & more people are shopping online. Consumers review deals, compare products, judge prices & buy online. More consumers from US, Canada, Europe, Latin America & Asian countries are shopping online now
2. Consumers are not looking for well known Brands anymore. Though some will always have a brand fascination, more & more people in the US are now buying products that offer value for money
3. Affiliate Networks have expanded their network & distribution t serve the growing international consumers. Click Here to see the The Top Affiliate Network we Recommend, & they all have major focus on the international consumers & the growing economic countries – Latin America, Asia & Asia Pacific countries for example
4. Technology is at its best. You can Set Up a Business blog quickly & most of the technology is either available free or at a nominal price. If you are using Wordpress, you have some of the Best Business Plugins available to grow your Affiliate Business quickly on the internet
5. Social Media has opened up a whole new dimension for Affiliate Marketers. Not only can you promote your business, you can even make money from various social networking websites (Click Here to Read How to Monetize Twitter Accounts)
6. Affiliate Software Systems are available to run your own network. This is a very easy to setup & use software & integrates very well with your existing website. You do not have to be a programmer or a technical expert to host & run your own Affiliate Networking Software. Click Here to Read about the Affiliate Network Software
7. There are numerous new advertisers & website (or blog) sponsors available. Unlike in the past when you had only Google, Yahoo & MSN to depend on, now you have over 50 profitable advertising networks available to serve ads on your websites & blogs. Click Here to Sign Up with All the Google Alternative Networks for Ads
8. Technology has also made it easier to run email campaigns based on geographic regions. You can target specific countries for specific products that otherwise you have to pitch only the US, Canada or European residents. The Email Services options have also grown, from free mass emailing software like phpMails to the more successful ones. Click Here to Read our Recommended Email Newsletter Services
9. While Affiliate Marketing is becoming more competitive, you also get some of the best affiliate marketing training programs now – available online or mailed to you by post. One of the most reputed is the Blog Mastermind Affiliate Marketing Program by Yaro. This training program is updated very frequently so that you get to know & use the latest technology, tactics & promotions in your marketing
10. Getting on early is the main key to success. Statistics shows that about 15000 new websites are being created daily (and most of them show ads to make money) & more & more people are trying to be successful in various means to make money online. Adopting the business early & sticking to it makes the difference between one who thought he could & one who did!

I hope that these are 10 solid reasons to get you started with your new affiliate marketing business in 2010. The investments are quite low, sometimes less that a few hundred dollars (to get you the essential tools & training as I mentioned above).

And if you have been blogging for sometime, you are already steps ahead of the others. All you need to do now is to make your blogs effective to make serious money. There are hundreds of tips, tactics, examples, lessons & statistics here on ProMediaBlog to help you along the way. You could subscribe to the updates & also to get the latest & the most effective information mailed to you on time.

Business has used Twitter just like any other individual Twitter account holder so far. They sign up with a name & a Twitter ID & posted their 140 letters’ updates lust like you or I.

Now with this new update, members of an organization, each having their own Twitter account, can post on behalf of their business.

This is an example shown by Twitter.

Here, Biz is a user from the Twitter company & has the ability to post updates to the Twitter company account. The message finally takes on a format like:

CompanyName 140 letter update IndividualTwitterID

This feature is being beta tested right now. Businesses invite “Contributors” who have their own ID, to tweet on their behalf. These businesses will now be able to manage multiple contributor Twitter accounts.

If you have been making money on Twitter with sponsored ads & getting paid to tweets, there is a big opportunity with this Twitter update. For more on this read:

• Make Money on Twitter
• Blogging for Money – 10 Ways to Use Twitter Effectively for Advertising & Making Money
• Twitter & Social Media Advertising – Twitter Gives Over 600 Percent ROI
• Blogging For Money – Sponsored Tweets on Twitter for Quick Cash

So how can individual bloggers & small businesses benefit from this new update? I have a couple of thoughts:

1. large businesses will now pay individual Twitter users who are influential in their communities to tweet on their behalf. The impact will favor the large businesses more than just a sponsored tweet
2. like it happened in the blogging world, influential Twitter users will form “rings” or small groups, who can then pitch themselves to large organizations to tweet on their behalf. Such groups will use tools like ReTweeting etc to bring better returns for the organizations paying them to tweet
3. individual bloggers & marketers can form Twitter teams & tweet for each other. They have been doing this now too, but now they can do it as a pronounced group

What is still not clear is how the timeline would appear for these organizations – if, say, Ken is following you, your update appears in Ken’s timeline. So if ken is following you, and Ken is a Contributor to a company called XYZ Inc, would your update show up in XYZ’s timeline as well?

That would be an immense opportunity for small businesses, where as companies like XYZ will not want that to happen! We are waiting on Twitter to post detailed updates soon.

The 2 broad classes are the “hunter” & the “farmer” types of affiliate marketers. During the course of your affiliate business growth, you will need people of these 2 types to grow your business successfully.

Let us look at the main characteristics of the Hunters & the Farmers in Affiliate Marketing.

A “hunter” typically goes out to get new business, find new customers, new opportunities for growth & contributes to radical growth or inorganic growth of the business. Typically, all businesses require a strong hunter to start the business & ensure a successful lift off.

As business stabilizes & there is a good base of customers, the “farmer” becomes more important to the business. A “farmer” typically uses all the resources within the current business, focuses on customer service & customer retention through excellent service. The “farmer” also contributes to the steady growth from within the current customers. Successful “farmers” grow business organically.

What sort of an Affiliate Marketer are you? Are you a great Hunter? Or are you a great Farmer?

If you are the only person handling your business, then you have to play a dual role – you have to be a hunter type of affiliate marketer to begin with & then, as your business grows with a good base of customers, you have to bring in the same focus as that of a “farmer” to ensure exceptional customer service. You would then cause your business to grow just with the customers you already have, organically.

Few people have the ability to be great in being both a hunter & a farmer. So many successful affiliates create a small team (of a couple of people) to focus on new business as well as growing organically.

As the owner of an affiliate business, which role do you play most?

The reason probably is quite simple – Craigslist is overshadowed by Facebook, Twitter etc. And the second reason is probably the fact that there is absolutely no advertising about Craigslist – it hardly shows up in any of the Social Media news. It’s rarely that we get to hear from Craig Newmark about the immensity of his website.

Click Here to Read the Interview of Craig Newmark of Craigslist & Dan Zarrella.

Craigslist, under its CEO Jim Buckmaster, now spreads over 700 cities internationally. And as Craig mentions in the interview, the real strength of the site comes from people’s willingness to come back to it for their daily need & the fact that the site has expanded more by word-of-mouth than by any advertising.

Is Craigslist in your Viral Marketing plan?

Have you tried using this plain & simple looking website in anyway to promote your business? Though apparently, this site is more transactional in nature & not many tools (automated or manual) exist that can directly help your business.

Can Craigslist be Your Viral Marketing Channel?

If you have not thought about using Craigslist as a successful viral marketing tool for your affiliate business, here are a few tips that can excite your about Craigslist:

1. Using the Page Rank – The CL Blog has a Google Page Rank of 6 & allows comments & ping backs

2. Craigslist Search – More people are searching Craigslist than Facebook – click here to read the published report that there is 12% increase in Craigslist Search

3. Craigslist Spread & Readership – Readers in over 700 cities in 70 countries read Craigslist – click here to read how Craigslist has expanded

4. Craigslist Popularity – Craigslist gets more than 50 million unique visitors every month from US alone & total monthly page views exceed 20 billion – click here to read the Compete report on Craigslist

5. Craigslist Free Features – Most of the features of Craigslist necessary for affiliate marketing can be used free of cost although you can still opt for paid ads & job ads

6. Craigslist Forums – More than 100 topical forums are available to market your business on Craigslist – most of these forums are localized so you can actually target specific cities in your campaigns

7. Craigslist Connect – Craigslist forums lets people connect with each other – you can create new customers & generate leads easily with Craigslist

8. Craigslist Word of Mouth Promotions – as Craign Newmark said in his interview, the main reason behind the growth of the site is by to word of mouth promotions by its users. This is still the most trusted method of promotion & creates a strong engagement with the reader (customer) from the very beginning

There are more factors that should interest you to take a deeper look in using Craigslist to market your Affiliate Business virally. The design of Craigslist is very simple & you need to create a free user account to be able to start viral marketing & promoting your business at either low or absolutely no cost.

Referrals could get you good money in the long run, but it takes at least 12 – 18 months for any of the new referrals to start earning from their affiliate marketing business. And most of the Top Affiliate Marketing Networks seem to give up the idea of Referral Income for Life!

The latest to announce that was NeverBlue. In an email to all their affiliates on the 24th of December 2009, they announced that affiliates will earn 2% of referral income for the first 6 months (compare that to a 2% income for life offer). While it is still one of the best programs that we have worked with, this announcement caught us by surprise! This is going to have a serious impact on many affiliate’s revenues.

AffiliateBot still continues to provide 5% of referral income for life, & is still one of our most preferred affiliate network till date.

In the past, we have seen similar actions from AZN network & Google, where they drastically cut down on their referrals or completely stopped it. It appears that once any of these new affiliate networks gain momentum & reach a certain base of affiliates, the first thing they do is to stop referral incomes.

Coming back to the question of this post – How Much Time & Money Should You Spend on New Referrals?

I have suggested this before, affiliate marketers should always focus on building their niche market, building their customer base & their own direct income. Statistically, a successful affiliate marketers does not spend more than 5 – 10% of their time & money on building new referral affiliates.

With affiliate referral income restricted to 6 months, you can be very sure to have zero income from any new referrals. People who sign up are usually new to affiliate marketing & it takes them anywhere from a year to two to find their own sweet selling spots!

The extended content of this post is in the 12 page ebook. The ebook is mailed to all our subscribers. This post will have the excerpts from this ebook.

Twitter could be very involving, very addictive in many cases. However, learning to use Twitter effectively in 10 simple steps could mean building an effective blog & even make money from Twitter.

Here are some more articles of similar interest on using Twitter published earlier:

• Effective Blogging – 5 Easy Ways You can Use FaceBook Twitter to Promote Your Blog
• Twitter & Social Media Advertising – Twitter Gives Over 600 Percent ROI
• 10 Essential Twitter Features Tools to Use – Blogging Tips to Maximize Twitter Benefits
• Innovative Uses of Twitter for Business – FirstGroup International Transportation Services
• Making Money from Sponsored Tweets and Twitter Advertisements

We hope you would enjoy the ebook & find it helpful to make your business blogging more effective.

The best part of this popular Affiliate Networking Software Systems is that it completely integrates with your existing websites & blogs & you do not have to be a technical expert to host, run, expand or maintain it!

Many of the growing affiliate marketers often opt out of the run-of-the-mill 3rd party affiliate networks & run their own chain of affiliates & affiliate network globally online. They have a need for more customization & ability to provide customized services to their affiliates.

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

What problems do this Affiliate Networking Software System solve for growing & expanding affiliate marketers?

• helps you recruit your own affiliates to build your network – you build your own team & you know who is part of your success
• helps you offer custom commissions to your affiliates depending on products, niche markets, experience & sales volume
• track & reward the affiliates who are performing better
• track the niches that are doing better so that you can replicate the tactics in other niches
• customize marketing campaigns in various niches individually
• create custom reports on campaign performance, affiliate performance, sales, commissions, margins etc
• since you know who your affiliates are, you can provide additional training, tips & supplemental information to all or select few to boost your sales
• since you host the software system, it is completely under your control & you do not have to depend on 3rd parties to be effective
• since you own the software you do not have to pay any monthly fees to anyone else

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

When is the right time to Host your own Affiliate Networking System? How do you know you are ready to Setup Your Own Affiliate Networking Software?

The affiliate software system does not require you to be technical or know any sort of programming. Since the system can be set up with the wizard & can be configured easily, you do not have to know any software programming to be able to use it. So technology should not be the deciding factor in deciding the right time to use it.

You know when you should start hosting your own Affiliate Networking Software System when:

• you have approximately 0ver 20 affiliates in your network
• a large part of your monthly income is coming from the sales your affiliates are making (approximately when 70% of your income is generated by affiliate commissions)
• you are selling less yourself than your affiliate network
• you are operating in multiple niche markets that require different marketing tactics
• you want to monitor & train your own affiliates in specific marketing niches
• you already have a handful of successful affiliates & want to focus on training more of them for the future
• you want to build new niche markets  & measure success of your campaigns etc
• you want to measure success in specific niche markets so that you can focus on the high-profit ones

Click Here to Read the Details of the Affiliate Networking Software Systems.

We highly recommend this Affiliate Networking Software to all the growing affiliate marketers & those trying to break into new niche markets. There are 3 important success criteria for the growing affiliate marketers:

1) breaking in early into newer niche markets – both for products as well as for new geography

2) using technology to operate globally, reduce operating cost, measure campaign success to operate more efficiently

3) a solid team of affiliate marketers, trained to sell & helped with customized reports on their sales

This easy to use Affiliate Networking Software System addresses all these key elements of success. You pay once – when you buy it & you never have to pay any more. And for the first year, all your upgrades are free of charge. The documentation is helpful to allow technical laymen to set up & host this system on their own.

Many of you who have signed up from my websites have come back with one big question – why isn’t the sales growing? Though I have answered most of you in emails with tips, I thought it might be a good idea to publish a few of the tips that can help new affiliates in this post on Affiliate Marketing Tips Series.

We will shortly publish an ebook with more than 25 tips that can help you have a great start with your affiliate marketing.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 1 – Choose the Easy Path First

For beginners to affiliate marketing, it could be very overwhelming to compete with the large retailers who offer tremendous discounts & spend millions of dollars marketing their products.

My first advice to new affiliate marketers & affiliate bloggers is to choose the path of least resistance. Choose products or services niches that have sold eternally – books, music, games, electronic accessories etc are possible choices.

Take advantage of being first in the new emerging markets (Click Here to Read Emerging Affiliate Marketing Niche – Get Started Early to Profit in New Niche Markets) where its easy to sell & the profits are higher.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 2 – Plan Advertising Ahead of Time

Most of the new affiliate marketers jump into setting up a website, load it with products, wait for 2 months for things to happen & when nothing sells, start to advertise!

Wrong approach!

Even before you begin, you must keep the proven sequence of activities:

• choose your niche – research to identify products, geographies & demographics
• choose the right domain name for your website
• choose the right technology & layout to build your affiliate business site
• choose the right email marketing partners
• choose the incentives to offer – discounts, free gifts etc
• choose the right advertising networks – direct ads, social media ads etc
• initiate a campaign to measure the response
• launch your products

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 3 – Focus on Landing Pages

Once you have a visitor, either from a campaign or from organic searches, close the sale as quickly as possible. The biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is to try & sell too many things to one visitor even before they buy a single product from your site!

Wrong practice!

Choose the right website design so that the visitors can focus on one product at a time. Once a sale is closed, show other products & offer the customer a tour to other parts of your website.

Focus on the landing page that can help close a sale. Click Here to Read Affiliate Marketing Tips – Whats Wrong with Your Landing Page.

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 4 – Optimize for Search Engines

I would never advise you to spend hundreds of dollars on optimizing for search engines. Click Here to Read Blogging Tips – How Far Should You Go with SEO. But I do recommend following a few simple points that will go a long way in optimizing your website landing pages for organic searches:

• use META tags correctly – TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION
• use keywords in your landing pages – 1:4 is a good keyword density
• use images on your landing page & tag images with an optimized name, TITLE & ALT tags
• do not hide keywords or stuff your landing page with keywords – this only harms your landing page
• use breadcrumb navigation so that any page is just one or 2 clicks away from the main index page of your site

Growing Affiliate Business Tip 5 – Target Sales the Right Audience

Pitch your sales to the right audience. This could help you save advertising money & get more conversions. As an example, if you are selling Acai Berry health supplement, run advertising campaigns where people are health conscious & spend money on nutritional products. Narrow your campaigns within a certain age group that are more likely to use Akai Berry frequently.

Many times, affiliate marketers run general ad campaigns, using up all their advertising budget with few hits & almost no conversions.

Conclusion

Planning is important. As a new affiliate marketer you may be thrilled to go out there & sell, but you will only come back empty handed if you have not planned each & every campaign properly.

There is no magic wand, no generic mantras that will get you thousands of dollars when you set up an affiliate website. Follow these tips & you will see results. I will also encourage you to experiment – run split tests to understand how your visitors are navigating your sites. With the results, optimize one step at a time.

The last point, as I have repeated very frequently, is patience! To give you some idea, the first sale we made on one of our affiliate site was 4 months after we launched our site. Those were the longest 4 months we ever had – but we kept our patience & experimented with designs, layouts, campaigns, SEO & finally they all came together!

These are great indicators for an exciting year ahead. In this article on Effective Blogging, I decided to list down 10 Things we should do to make our blogs more effective in 2010. Also Read Blogging Tips – McKinsey Report on Post Recession Consumer Behavior for more insights.

1. Sell a Product or a Service – can you think of a product that you can sell from your website or blog? With more & more shoppers spending their money online, getting to sell a product would be a definite advantage in 2010.

If you do not have anything that you make, you could sign up with the top affiliate marketers & sell some of their products from your blog. Click here to see our recommendation of some of the best affiliate programs. This could start adding to your revenues & also help generate long term residual income.

2. Revamp Your Website & Blog – inspect your website (or blog) and see if it has all the features of the modern day websites. Is it easy to run, maintain & update? Is it Web 2 enabled? Is it helping in your SEO? Is it geared for connecting with users through Social Media sites? are some of the questions you should ask.

• Click Here to Read Affiliate Marketing Tips – Whats Wrong with Your Landing Page
• Focus on Website Templates – Why Themes & Templates are Important for Shopping Blogs

If you are running a traditional static website & you are afraid of changing everything, then you may want to add a companion blog to your site. This simple action solves most of your challenges as far as Web 2 features go.

If you are already running a profitable site, evaluate if there are any more enhancements you want to add that could improve your visitors’ experience.

3. Finalize that Social Media Strategy – no more experiments of what works & what doesnt. Twitter & Facebook works. Period. You should freeze the plan on how to best use Twitter & Facebook for your business. Here are some more articles:

• Social Bookmark Popularity – What Share Buttons Work for You
• Blogging for Money – 10 Ways to Use Twitter Effectively for Advertising & Making Money
• Effective Blogging – 5 Easy Ways You can Use FaceBook Twitter to Promote Your Blog

4. Plan Ahead of Time to Make the Best Use of All the Festive Seasons – holidays are the best time to generate huge revenues from your websites. This is also a time for great promotions, enrolling new customers & increasing customer loyalty. Read our Holiday marketing tips:

• Affiliate Blogging Tip – 12 Months to Grow Sales
• Top 10 Ways to Promote Small Business During Holiday Seasons

This does not happen overnight. This requires planning & larning from your past experience as to what sells well, in what holidays, for what group of customers. Numerous affiliates offer incentives in the form of discounts & free gifts during the holidays. When you plan ahead, you would be able to pass on these incentives to your customers, resulting in more sales.

5. Make Your Email Lists Effective – you must have grown your customer list. You may in fact have several of them, each with thousands of names & email address. It is time to weed out the inactive ones, or maybe start a fresh one too.

Email lists are not stagnant – people change email addresses, people mark emails as spam by mistake & many people just develop the habit of ignoring emails from certain places. You need to make sure that your subscriber list is crisp & not full of old inactive users.

Click Here to Read Autoresponders Mass Mailers Email Campaign Software for Effective Affiliate Marketing & use them effectively to refresh your lists.

6. Write Personal Messages once in a while to Customers – you must be sending daily, weekly or monthly newsletters to your customers. That is wonderful. But once in a while, represent yourself & write personal notes to your customers too.

Personal notes reassure the customers that they have “YOU” to depend on if they need any assistance. Personal notes make your business more human friendly & adds a human touch to the relationships.

7. Revise your Pricing Strategy – Prices are the one thing why buyers hesitate to procure while on the other side, its the one thing your business needs. Do you have a solid pricing strategy that you can carry forward? Especially in light with the post recession buying & spending trends?

There are 2 misconceptions or wrong assumptions among marketers:

• One of the wrong assumptions that marketers have is that they can command attention if they give things free
• Because you are giving things for a lower price, you do not need to think about support

More and more online shoppers are now leaning towards cheaper & better alternatives to branded products. Cheap is no longer associated with poor quality, less durability or even lack of support. The McKinsey Report I spoke about earlier shows the statistics clearly.

8. Transform Technology from a Cost Saver to a Business Driver – many small businesses look at technology as a way to save cost. You set up an auto email system so that you don’t have to send out postal mails any more. True, but not always right!

Web 2 & Web 3 technology opens up a huge opportunity to use technology to drive & grow more business than simply to save cost. Read these relevant articles:

• Online Presentations – How Online Presentations Save Time & Money & still Builds Customer Relations
• Increasing Reader Engagement – 15 Easy Ways to Bring & Keep Blog Visitors

9. Collaborate, Collaborate & Collaborate – success in 2010 will come to people who collaborate. Find all ways to collaborate with vendors, other partners, customers and look for opportunities to either save costs or drive more business through collaboration.

Collaboration could also be in the form of partnerships. Are there opportunities where you can offer your product or service to another & you can jointly present a better product or service to the business community?

10. Catch on Early to New Initiatives – businesses that can catch on early to new systems, products or services, will get to benefit more. Look out for new opportunities that can help your business.

Think about Twitter. Had you started with a twitter account a year & a half back, you could be making a lot of money with Twitter. If you had a blog up & running in 2001, by now, you would be making a hundred thousand dollars a year from sponsorships!

So what are the few things to look out for in 2010 to grow your earning & business?

Collaboration Tools, Mobile Tools & Apps, Mobile Advertising, Affiliate Tools, Advertising (Video Ads, Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads). Also keep an eye for new training tools (like Blog Mastermind) & those coming in from SMO experts like Dan Zarrella & Guy Kawasaki.

In conclusion, 2010 will be exciting for all bloggers & affiliate marketers & be sure to have all the tools & knowledge to be effective in the coming year.

Although the report is more on how the YouTube homepage can serve as a platform to drive brand engagements through advertisements, there are a few points that we can pick up for our small businesses & individual business blogs.

How can Small Business & Bloggers use Videos & YouTube to Drive Brand Identity & Customer Engagement

The main idea behind the case study is to show:

• how homepage videos & media on Social Media sites can drive brand identity
• what ad formats work best to drive branding initiatives
• whether ad performances vary from one type of industry to another

There are several performance metrics in the study, however here are some of the key points that I think can help individual bloggers & small businesses.

• plan branding activities so that you increase your blog earnings
• use social media effectively to maintain an online identity & communicate your brand messages
• videos help to increase customer engagement
• choose the right ad formats when you advertise your brand
• choose the cost effective advertisers (Click Here to Read about some of the Best Advertisers for Small Business)

Share with us how you engage your customers & readers.

So this article will be important while you are planning to upgrade your template or running a campaign on the same design. Before we go on, let us look at 2 significant industry case studies.

1. Lee redesigns it’s website & doubles it’s website revenue (click here to read the details)

2. La Quinta redesigns website & increases conversion over 80% (click here to read the details)

Here is a snapshot of the redesigned website of Lee

Now let’s look at the landing page or the conversion page design

Following Lee’s example, here are some of the basics of a good landing page & conversion page design:

• distraction free – completely focuses the attention on sales
• provides all the options – multiple sizes, color options etc
• prices & discounts clearly seen
• an option to view details – more pictures, additional details, if the customer wants to
• a clear “Add to Cart” button on the point of attention of the customer

You would also notice that to increase the customer’s focus on the product they have chosen & to allow him to buy quickly, the background is darkened & the specific product pops up in front.

The Overall Design that Helps Convert Quickly

Following the same website of Lee, you must have noted these points that has helped the customer quickly come to the purchase page.

• minimum number of clicks to come to the conversion page (in this case its 2 clicks)
• the site makes excellent use of pictures (although garments are the most difficult to demonstrate through images, that’s why shops have a full fitting rooms)
• minimal text – but effective use of descriptions
• smooth navigation right to conversion page right from the home page

Why People Lose Sales from Conversion Pages

Let us examine the main reasons why customers come to the conversion page but then don’t go ahead to buy the product. In many cases, customers also add the product to their shopping cart but then do not end up buying them (this is called Shopping Cart Abandonment). What could be the reasons?

• slow website – a sluggish page is the main reason why many people give up buying the product eventually
• incorrect pricing information – people are weary of being cheated & anytime they see any discrepancy in the amount they are paying, they withdraw
• unable to locate the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button
• “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button redirects to other site without much information to the buyer why it is happening
• distractions on the conversion page – could be a listing of “Similar Products” or “Recommended Products” on or close to the purchase point that distracts the buyer to another possibly better offer
• lengthy or cumbersome registration or sign up process to set up an account prior to purchase
• unable to process the credit card

When combined, either of these 7 reasons total to over 90% of the times why customers do not complete the sales process.

When you are designing your website, or choosing your theme (template) you should keep in mind that a great design would avoid all these “bad” experience of the buyer for a quick closure of the sale.

We publish Wordpress Themes for small business, retail business mainly, for online affiliate marketers, MLM business owners & individuals who make money blogging. Click Here & Take a look at our Business CMS Themes & see how we build our themes to help convert quickly & easily.

Many new affiliate marketers write to me asking for tips & recommending what works and what does not. What will work for you will depend on what you are marketing, who you are targeting & what promotional methods you are using.

But there are 5 basic tips that you must follow. Very often, these 5 simple tips could help you start off well with your online affiliate business. In this post on Affiliate Marketing Tips, I will write about these 5 golden rules for affiliate marketing beginners.

New Affiliate Success Tip 1 – Choose & Partner with Few & the Best Affiliate Networks

New affiliate marketers are often too enthusiastic & sign up with too many affiliate network programs & thus fail to focus on any of them. You must choose to partner with only a few, 3 – 5 of the best affiliate networks.

Click here & read the best affiliate network programs we recommend

New Affiliate Success Tip 2 – Start Building an Email List from Day 1

If you ask any of the successful online affiliate marketers ALL of them will either say that the number 1 reason for their success is the fact that they started building email lists from day one. It takes time to build the email list & it takes effort (& money sometimes) to grow your email subscribers list.

Use the services of the best know in the industry. They are all affordable, mostly starting from about $20 a month to about $150 a month when your subscribers’ list grow over 100,000.

In our business, we use the email campaign services from these professional companies:

A. A Weber Email Services including Email Campaigns & RSS to Email services

B. Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers

C. Email Communication Experts – Email Marketing, RSS, Surveys, and Autoresponders. iContact Email & Campaign Management

There are many more services, so choose which works for you but its best to have the professionals handle email & subscription lists.

New Affiliate Success Tip 3 – Use Country Specific Campaigns Effectively

Most of the Top Affiliate Network Programs will run multiple country specific campaigns. It means that you get to make money when anyone from that country will buy the products or services. You should use these country specific campaigns effectively to drive growth & more international business.

Many new affiliates try to pitch multiple campaigns over & over again to the same subscribers. This not only results in poor conversions (due to improper targeting) & an upset group of subscribers. You could soon see that more people are unsubscribing from your lists – faster than you can grow them!

New Affiliate Success Tip 4 – Choose Your Niche Carefully

Your niche product area will determine how successful you would be in your campaigns & advertising. If you are in a competitive niche (video games, dating, mobile phones, branded electronic gadgets & accessories are extremely competitive) you will need to spend more money in advertising your business & usually the margins on these products are less.

Other niches (like hobbies, sports, angling, crafts etc) are very narrow but you would get more dedicated customers & definitely a higher margin on sales. Customers in these niches also tend to come back again & again giving you repeat sales over an extended period of time.

New Affiliate Success Tip 5 – Choose Your Website Template to Sell

People often stay away from the typical web pages (like what Clickbank affiliates do) & look for sites that provide adequate information, product reviews & which gives them the confidence that they would get the support they would need after purchase.

When building your website, look for the best options when it comes to the technology & design. You would rather set up an easy to run web site with a great design than be stuck with a complicated website with lots of features.

Look at some of the Business CMS Themes that are popular with affiliate marketers & online retail sellers. These designs work on websites running on Wordpress, a very flexible system that can easily be customized to your affiliate needs.

Make it easy for people to browse products, read reviews, ask questions, contact you & make the buying process easy & secured. All your customers are asking for is a good buying experience & you can provide that will little planning & effort.

These 5 basic affiliate marketing tips could help new affiliates get started on building their online affiliate business. Depending on how popular your website is, it could take anything from 6 months to 18 before you could start seeing an increase in revenue.

The last point, therefore, is patience. If you have done it right, be patient & keep promoting your website & products & you will soon get to see increasing sales.

You can use both your personal profile to promote your business & campaign your promotions and / or create separate Business Facebook Pages for your products. Since each Facebook Page comes with a unique URL, you can promote each of them separately.

1. Connect Facebook & Twitter posts

Use Free online services like FriendFeed, TwitterFeed & Tweet3 to connect multiple Twitter accounts to Facebook accounts. Then link up your blog feeds to these FriendFeed or TwitterFeed accounts. So anytime you update your blog with a new post, the post gets published on Twitter & Facebook at the same time.

2. Use Facebook Applications to Post Blogs on Your Wall

Facebook has RSS Feed applications you can use to post your blog updates on your profile Wall. The popular ones are Simply RSS , Blog RSS Feed Reader & Social RSS.

Social RSS can be used to post RSS Feeds on Business Pages as well as on New Tabs or on Profile Wall.

3. Post all Twitter Updates Directly on Facebook

There are numerous ways to post your Twitter updates to Facebook. You can use applications like Twitter App or update Via Facebook Connect tools.

Once you connect Tweetpo.st with Facebook, you can post your tweets as status updates, post selective update, include rich-media links on your wall, convert Twitter names in @replies to real names & track link performances.

4. Use a Speech Converter to Update Facebook & Twitter status from Mobile Phones

Use speech converting tools like VLingo for iPhones, Windows Mobile Phones, Nokia & Blackberry smart phones to post updates on the fly right from the phone. VLingo recognizes your speech, converts it into text & lets you post the text to your Twitter account & Facebook Wall.

5. Use Web Tools to Update Twitter & Facebook with latest Status from any social network

You can use web tools that integrate all your social media profiles together & keep them in sync. The most popular is Hello TXT. With a Hello TXT account you can post your status updates from web, mobile, sms, email or 3rd party applications through our API to more than 45 social networks, including Twitter & Facebook.

These Free Social Media Apps & Tools all work as integrators & can be used extensively to keep all your social profiles updates from one place as well as control to some extent, what updates should appear in which profile.

This article will focus on using technology & tools to help you build your online communities. Remember though, if your business model & marketing plan does not include building online communities, it is perfectly all right. You can still read this & pick up the tips in case you still want to build micro communities around your products.

The Popular Social Networks & Tools to Build Online Community

Facebook

• Facebook – you can use your personal FaceBook profile to gather followers (Friends) & also use FaceBook Pages to build community & interactivity
• Facebook advertising is new & is catching up very fast as a way to target specific profiles, demography & other community to broadcast your marketing messages
• Using Facebook applications on your profile – there are numerous 3rd party applications that are available to build connections with your website, blogs, RSS feeds, slide shows etc
• Using Facebook Connect on your websites & blogs – you can also use Facebook widgets on your sites & blogs to connect outside of Facebook website too

Twitter

• Advertise with Twitter Sponsored Tweets to give momentum to your marketing campaigns
• Twitter lets you follow other people, let others follow you & create membership forums
• Connect & build buzz with numerous 3rd party Twitter applications – these applications run on the Twitter platform & are mostly approved by Twitter to use their data
• Using other internet based services to connect with other Twitter users – these web based Twitter apps could help you gather followers & follow specific category of Twitter users
• Using Twitter Search tool to find people you want to connect with relevant people who are also using Twitter
• Use complementary services like that of TwitterCounter to build your network on Twitter by promoting your Twitter accounts & measuring statistics like rate of growth of community, number of followers, comparison of multiple Twitter accounts etc
• Measure your Tweet effectiveness, Tweet views & clicks using services like TweetBurner

Wordpress Plugins for Social Media marketing

• Alex King has one of the best Twitter Tools that publishes your Wordpress blog posts on Twitter (& vice-versa) automatically
• Using FriendFeed to connect Twitter, Facebook & other blogs – Friendfeed can read in a RSS feed & then publish the feed on other Web 2 tools like Twitter & other Web 2 Blogs like Wordpress

This concludes the mini-series on Effective Blogging & Creating Online Communities to help grow your business & personal blogs.

I will highlight a few interesting points from this McKinsey report on Post Recession US Consumer Behavior.

• 18 percent of consumer-packaged-goods consumers bought lower-priced brands in the past two years when the country was in recession
• 46 percent of the consumers who used “cheaper” alternatives, said these products performed better than expected
• 34 percent of the consumers to switched to “cheaper” alternatives, said they no longer preferred higher-priced products
• additional 41 percent said that while they preferred the premium brand, it “was not worth the money”

A great example at our hand is our custom themes for small business (sold from Business CMS Themes & soon will be available on Creative Themes Design websites):

• all these business CMS themes (designed for multi ads sites, affiliate marketers, MLM business owners & individuals who make money blogging) are priced under $10 – compare this to an average price range of $100 – $150 of similar themes from other vendors
• we are able to offer these quality business CMS themes at $10 by saving expenses on advertising & relying more on “word of mouth” of satisfied customers
• we sold an average of 35% more of these business CMS themes for Wordpress in the last 12 months
• since the themes had to be created once & can be sold over & over again, our margins per business theme sold is now 50% higher than expected
• we have not offered any additional discounts & no incentives were offered during this period
• because customers could save over $100 in buying business themes from us, we had over 50% additional requests to provide additional set-up services to help them advance faster with their business website set up

The McKinsey report could be a clear trend during the post recession stabilization period. Clearly a large segment of the internet customers have started to realize that there are “cheaper” alternatives available & that such products or services are of good quality but without the added price for the “brand names”.

Plugins are Web 2 tools that can be added to your Wordpress blog with a mouse click. Affiliate Marketing plugins help to add more functionality to the affiliate blogs. Primarily they help build an effective blog, build page ranks, eliminate duplicate content keeping search engines happy, help enroll sponsors & advertisers but most importantly many of them directly help to sell.

Here is a small list of some of the best plugins that are widely used by business bloggers, affiliate marketing bloggers, online webmasters running shopping blogs & blog marketers.

• DupeMagic WordPress Plugin – Dupe Magic is a premium Duplicate Content Management Plugin for WordPress. It has 2 different functions (a) alter post & (b) alter page content without altering the readability of the content to human readers
• 2 Powerful & Profitable WordPress Plugins – Adps2 & ZipPoster – These 2 power plugins automatically drip Feed Content for months. You can add Affiliate Datafeed Products, or Load Up 100s of articles instantly saving you hours & days of product building work
• Wp Spinner WordPress Plugin – this is a multi-purpose plugin essential for money making blogs. It can completely eradicate concerns over duplicate content on your WordPress Business Blog. You can build your own Free Unique Article Spinner.You can also defeat the risks of Proxy Hijacking. Along with that, you can dynamically rotate ads, thus increasing your chances of making more money from ads. With this Pro Plugin you can test your ad layouts & do A/b Split Testing. It also has built in Affiliate Tools and much more.
• Wp Affiliate Pro – The #1 Plugin For WordPres Blogs – With this Pro Plugin, you can instantly identify, manage & track your highest performing Affiliate Links over your entire Wordpress Blog in less time than it takes to pour a glass ff Kool Aid & make more money doing so
• Wordpress Link Cloak – An Amazing Wordpress Plugin To Increase Revenue – Wordpress Link Cloak Plugin allows business bloggers to automatically & easily hide as many links as you want on your Wordpress Blog through the Admin Panel. Affiliate & text links are often penalized by Google & hence it is safe to protect your blog by cloaking the affiliate links
• The Famous 3 x Wordpress Plugins to Automate Your Blog – with this Pro Plugin you can stop worrying about updating your Business Blog & notifying the Social Bookmarking Sites. Just ‘Set-And-Forget’ your Business Blog, while all posting & promotion is done automatically. You can also keep content fresh in the eyes of the Search Engines by publishing content from different RSS sources with the built in RSS aggregator
• Wordpress Viva Social & Mashup Web 2.0 Plugin – this novel Wordpress Plugin And Theme makes maintaining a cutting edge, Magazine Style Wordpress Blog easy.You can automate your Wordpress Theme Thumbnails on the fly, scrollable carousels for product display, smart google maps & more. This is one of the best Magazine Style Theme & Plugin around.

An effective website or a blog is the key to online affiliate marketing. Plugins complement your content with advanced features that could differentiate your blog from the rest.

This is a 2 part post in the Effective Blogging Series covering the why it’s necessary to build micro communities, where to build communities for best exposure & how to build communities with available technology.

In this first part I will highlight the reasons why building communities should be a key focus area for all business bloggers & where to build their communities.

How Social Media can help Build an Effective Blog

• build your business’s reputation & brand easily (read more on building online identity)
• connect with your readers, customers & partners in a more personal manner (read why CEOs are focusing on building relations with social media)
• build buzz & popularity about your business or opinions in a more social manner (read more on how to make your blog popular with social media)
• influence micro communities with your ideas & opinions (read more on connecting with your readers)

Popular Social Media sites to Build Online Communities

Choosing the right media could be a daunting task & choosing to be on all of them is simply impossible. One way to start is to have a marketing plan around social media – which networks you will target, what sort of people do you want to build your community with, how & what will you communicate & how will you respond to feedback.

The extent to wish you decide to use social media for your business will determine the amount to time & money you have to spend to build these online networks. So starting with a couple of the top ones is the best way. Here are a few tips to help you choose your networks.

• geo targeting – not all social media networks are popular everywhere. Choose the networks that has the best reach within your customers communities. Read the Compete report on the geographic spread of social media networks
• universal appeals – over & above geographic targeting, there are certain networks that may not lie in your geography but has an universal appeal. Sites like Facebook, Flickr & Twitter, though mostly used in US has an universal appeal
• demography – if your product or service caters to certain age groups, religious communities or social influence, you must have a plan to use these networks. A few good examples are the Hi5 network that is popular with teens & young adults, MySpace for the artistic & music communities & LinkedIn for the salaried & business professionals

A few Tips on Being Effective with Social Media

This is both from my personal experience as well as from my experience in consulting Fortune 100 companies on internet marketing. You may be able to ratify these from your own experience.

• pick only the minimum number of social media sites when you begin. Experiment in trials & errors to find a sweet spot for your business. What worked for others (even in the same line of business) may or may not work for you
• measure effectiveness of your marketing efforts on social media. This is much like A/B split testing you do for your advertisements & helps you find out what works & what does not. A few metrics could be (a) number of followers / community members you gather (b) activity rates on your communities – how many new comments are posted daily (c) relevance of comments – are these comments relevant to your business or product & how do they add value to your business (d) the cost per new member – how much money you are spending on direct marketing, advertisements for every new member that is joining your community etc
• consistent messaging across all your online communities – make your messages consistent in all your communities, however be keen to adapt to any specific needs of the social networks you are building your community on
• moderate conversations – keep a tab on all the comments & micro communications within your communities & jump in at appropriate times to moderate. Several of these communications could have legal impact that would be best to prevent upfront. You may also be able to influence comments in specific directions by participating & moderating comments

In Part 2 of this mini-series (read here Effective Blogging – Creating Communities with Blog Readers Part 2) I will focus on using available technology to build your social media campaigns. Technology could help you channelize your social media marketing efforts effectively & with the right tools, could save you both time & money.

Advertising with traditional contextual advertisers have usually given us low returns when compared to our experiment with Twitter advertising. They usually varied from 5% to about 20% in most cases. Publishers are also affected by stricter (and often erroneous) click forensics – Harsh Click Forensics Affecting Publisher Incomes – Are you Affected in your CPC Earnings from Blogs Websites?

Advertising with BidVertiser – has typically given us better ROI. They varied from 20% to about 30% & the higher returns are for 2 reasons. They offer flexible & custom ad formats for publishers. These different format shapes of ad blocks allow publishers to place ads in ways that the standard IAB formats cannot work.

Moreover, Bidvertiser gives you $20 of ad credit in FREE clicks when you sign up.

Advertising with Adbrite has also been good. Typical returns with Adbrite ads had been from 10% – 25% in many cases, though the conversion rates with them had been comparatively less.

I would guess that the click through rates are higher because they allow publishers to put as many ads on any single page as the publishers want, increasing visibility. At the same time, the conversions are lowers because too many ads could be clouting the reader’s focus.

Our Advertising with Google Adwords had been on the poorer side. Click through rates had been low, around 5% or less & the conversion rates even lower. Of course, we had experimented with fixed price bids only with all the three.

Refer to earlier posts on how, as a publisher, we have been affected by poor returns from Google Adsense:

1. Adsense Revenue 2009 Continue to Drop – Balancing with Adsense Like Ads

2. Ineffective Google Ads Leads to Low Clicks Low Earnings – Google Adsense Alternatives

3. Major Problems with Google Adsense – Drastic Drop in Adsense Clicks & Earnings

4. Google Adsense Problems – Google Adsense Alternatives for Blogs

Looking to Social Media & Twitter for Better Advertising ROI.

We signed up with a new advertiser account with 3 popular Twitter advertising networks:

A. Magpie Network (also called the Be A Magpie network) – you can set you price, choose from the options of paying per tweet, or paying per view or paying per click & drive readers directly onto the campaign pages.

• Click Here to Advertise with Magpie.

B. Twittads Twitter advertising network – its a Social Media Affinity Network that connects Advertisers and Twitter users. Advertisers can reach internet users & mobile users at the same time.

• Click Here to Advertise with Twittads.

C. Sponsored Tweets for Direct Marketing Campaigns on Twitter – lets you set your own price & pays out on either views, clicks or conversions.

• Click Here to Advertise with Sponsored Tweets.

We have had successful targeting in our campaigns for a retail website (Top Discount Center). We found a few things that indicate to the effectiveness of advertising on Twitter:

1. Twitter Advertising is very quick – you set the message (or let the publisher create his / her message) in less than 140 characters & set your price. The Twitter advertising network selects the prospective publishers & sends them an offer & also takes care of approving the right one.

2. Twitter advertising is extremely targeted – the publishers are selected based on several criteria you provide. It could include the number of followers, the intensity of activities of the publisher’s Twitter account, the category (technology, shopping, family etc). This makes the tweets very effective.

3. Frequency of Tweets – depending on the performance of the tweets, you could decide to tweet your ad more than once, typically up to 3 times, increasing the potential of higher clicks.

In our tests, we got higher click through rates & a total ROI of over 600% in advertising on Twitter. Due to the better targeting, we have seen the conversion to click ratio to be higher than traditional advertising, almost as high as 45%.

You can sign up for free with Magpie Network , Twittads & Sponsored Tweets networks to begin your Twitter advertising campaigns now.

The several features built into the new Pro Shopping Theme allows the seller to quickly customize the product pages as well create clean landing pages for search marketing campaigns.

Here is a quick preview of the upcoming ProShopping Wordpress Theme for Small Online Retail Businesses.

The ProShopping Affiliate Sales Theme header

Top Features included in the ProShopping Theme header:

• rotating single line ads on the top – this can be used effectively to promote affiliate products & new affiliate campaigns or could be used to show text ads
• social media links – the text links to social media is built into the header. You can link it to any of your preferred social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc

The Top Category Browser in ProShopping Theme home page

The Pro Shopping Theme has a unique slider that shows the leading products in a few categories. The sliders contains built in Get It Now buttons that can be linked to external credit card sites like PayPal or Google. The Buy button can also be deep linked to your affiliate product pages too if you want to make a pass through sale.

The Product (Post) Pages

The key features of the individual product pages on Pro Shopping Theme:

• the individual product pages are designed to increase click through rates & increased conversion
• the product pages on Pro Shopping Theme show multiple ads to make advertising revenues
• there is an addition advertising option on the top portion – you can show custom text ads for the product or you can show general text ads. There is no limit on how many text ads you can show here
• you can add any number of product images – there is no limit to how many images you can show

• the pricing & the Get It Now buttons are programmed to show only when the product is in stock
• you can add any number of discounts that you are offering – there is no limit to showing the number of discounts or incentives for the product

The new Pro Shopping Online ECommerce Retail Theme for Wordpress driven online stores is now being tested by advanced affiliate marketers & experienced online retailers who run their own small business online.

We shall incorporate any important feedback that comes in from the usability tests for the next week & release the theme here as well as on Business Themes.

The secret is to be early in the game & partner with the best affiliate programs (Click Here to read our Evaluation of the Best Affiliate Programs). And to persist for at least 12 – 18 months before deciding on whether to quit! The last & probably the most kept secret is to be able to decide whether you want to sell volumes of products with less margin or sell less of those with high profit margins.

Personally, I go with the first option – go with high volume of sales. In most cases these products are easy to sell & are priced under $50 making them quite affordable to the general people, even if it is towards the end of the month.

The other reason for my success at the cost of 2 hours a day & zero advertising dollars is that I have chosen the best affiliate network programs. (Click Here to See All the Top Affiliate Networks We Work With)

In addition, we have also implemented almost all the 15 Ways to Make Money from Blogs in various capacities. With time, they have brought us great results & higher incomes.

I had published 2 interesting posts earlier:

• 10 Popular Niche Blogging Areas
• 5 More Niches for Affiliate Marketing

Subsequent to that, I had numerous emails telling me how extremely competitive these niches are. Popular niches imply 3 things:

• there is always a huge demand for products & services in these niches & thus almost anyone can make some money in these niche areas
• because its easy to make money, there is tremendous competition in all these niches marketing areas
• because competition is high (& so is the demand) the successful affiliate marketers in these niches sell in volumes, & to keep their price attractive, make less margin on each sale

For new bloggers & new affiliate marketers, it could be very intimidating to spend thousands of dollars in advertising or quite frustrating to make pennies from each sale! For the new bloggers, the emerging niche areas are often more suitable to gain market & build their online business.

Here is a small list of some of the new & emerging niche markets that could be great for all new bloggers & new affiliate marketers. And if you are experienced, you can quickly build your own market in these niches.

• Online Marketing Kids Products – great niche with numerous possibilities to extend your network in kids’ products, kids’ toys & kids games. Click Here to Read Quick Ways to Set up a Kids’ Store
• Alternative Medicines & Herbal Products – most of these are still confined to a small number of retail stores, but the demand for such herbal products & herbal medicines are increasing every day
• Mobile Software Distribution – mobile software especially on the new Android & Symbian platforms are going to be in immense demands in the coming few years with most cell phone manufacturers adopting the Android or the Symbian OS
• VOIP & Telecommunication gadgets – this includes devices like Magic Jack & teleconferencing products that can be used in home offices & small businesses
• Security Software Distribution – with higher percentage of people depending on the internet in the upcoming years & the increasing dependence on collaborative & cloud computing technologies, the need for security software will grow immensely in the next few years
• Small Business CRM Software Packages – with small businesses emerging from recession there will be a huge focus on shifting the fundamental business processes on technologies like CRM & ERP. So far, these have remained with the large multi billion dollar companies like IBM & Oracle. But a lot of new software makers are now coming up with CRM & ERP versions for small business & home businesses

Many of these have traditionally belonged to the enterprises that could spend billions of dollars in infrastructure set ups, security & advertising. But the Web 2 & Web 3 revolution is paving the way for smaller, individual distributors & affiliate marketers to build their own customers in these niches.

The ProStores Wordpress ECommerce Shopping Theme is very easy to set up, without any maintenance cost & lets you to be very flexible in displaying your products as you would have in any retail stores.

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

The Pro Stores Online Retail Shopping Theme includes many of the premium functionalities & design you would see in the most highly acclaimed online retail shopping stores like Target, Walmart or Office Depot.

You can read the details of the ProStores Shopping Theme Here including all the important features that make this theme one of the best options for small online businesses running online retail shopping stores.

The essential features include:

• absolutely easy to set up – you could have your online retail shop up & running in less than 10 minutes with the Pro Stores WP Theme
• customizable navigation links
• custom welcome messages & promotional banners on home page
• the Pro Stores Shopping Theme promotional banners can be linked to other pages on your site or any page of your affiliate business, increasing conversions

• easy Sign Up area for your visitors to sign up to your newsletter mailing lists
• display custom categories that either convert well or have high returns on conversion on the home page of the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme
• customize which all categories of products you want to display on the home page

• internal product pages (posts) lets you upload & display any number of product images – there is absolutely no limitation on the number of images you can show
• images on the Pro Stores Shopping Theme expand on clicking & shrink back again after its viewed
• quick conversion box displaying prices & any additional incentives you are offering to your customer
• bold ‘Buy Now’ button to convert quickly – the button could link to Paypal or Google Checkout or any other credit card processing site
• custom messages in case products are out of stock

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

Other features of the Pro Stores Wordpress Online ECommerce Shopping Theme include the integration of social networks, ability to send any of the product pages by email to any email address, ability for the visitor to print the page.

The ProStores Shopping Theme is also a Multi Ads Theme, having all the high paying AD Formats built into the theme. The 300px wide sidebar widget can also be used to display additional ads if necessary.

This is a great Wordpress Theme for any online retail shopping business & small online businesses. This is especially suitable for Affiliate Marketers who run promotions on affiliate products & can display as many products as they want for better conversion.

Like all our multi-ads Wordpress Themes for small business, the ProStores theme is also priced at an affordable under $10!

Click Here to see  Demo & Download the Pro Stores ECommerce Shopping Theme.

What follows is a practical approach on a small budget to help you protect your online blogs websites & other online assets.

Security Password: You must have heard this a million times, but it helps & does make a difference. Create a strong password, using alphabets, numbers & special symbols & about 8 – 12 characters long. Also remember to change this password every 3 months or so.

One common mistake that people make is to have the same password for more than one website or blog that they maintain. Bad idea! If you get caught on one, you get caught on all. It is best to have different login IDs and different passwords for the separate websites that you run.

If you are running Wordpress blog, be sure to have an equally strong password for your mySQL database. You set the password when you first install Wordpress but you can always go back & change it later on.

File Permissions & Access Priviledges: Check your files on the hosting server to see if any of them have a permission of ‘777′ which means that you can write & execute those files. The safest thing is to remove all ‘write’ & ‘execute’ access from the files that don’t need them.

If you use a software like FileZilla to FTP your files, simply clicking the right button on your mouse pointed on a file or a folder will show you the exisiting ‘Access Permissions’. You can change it on the fly.

Setting Up Mailboxes correctly: When yu register a domain or buy a hosting service, you get an email option by default. You may not be using it but the email server still exists. It is popularly called the SMTP server.

The email server contains your domain name (if you domain is mydomain.com, then your email server will be called mail.mydomain.com or something very similar). Phishing emails can often be routed through mail.mydomain.com server without you knowing it. Since it contains your domain name as the one that is sending / forwarding the scamming or phishing emails, it could land you in trouble.

Different hosting service providers have different ways to protect their email servers. Talk to them & find out what you need to do to prevent others from using your domain email server.

Using Professional Email Marketing Services: External professional email service providers are white listed with the majority of the ISPs. So even if your domain is under attack or worse, banned, you can still send emails to your readers & customers.

In the article Email & RSS Subscription Services I have recommended a few of the best & cost effective email service providers we have used.

Using the Best of the Breed Website Hosting Services: Even the best website hosting services cost less than $10 a month these days. If spending a couple of dollars a month more on the best could protect your online business & your web assets, I think you would be wise to do that.

The web hosting service providers are also impacted daily from these scams & phishing emails as well as the more worrisome hacks. The best of the breed takes all the security precautions on their end to help survive any such attacks. It is definitely safer to sign up with the best hosts & stop losing all you have.

Control External Access: Limit the number of people who can access the core technical areas of the heart of your business. Like who can sign in as an “Administrator” and modify settings & files on your host, or who can change passwords & email settings at the back end.

If you have outsourced your work, completely or partially, in whatever capacity, verify that your out-sourced partners have the proper security & access methods in place to access your sites from the backend.

Back Up your files & Data Frequently: This is not really a prevention but a way to bring your online blogs websites & business online again in a short time after you have been attacked.

Website hosting service providers provide various easy to use tools to back your data, database & files on a regular basis. If a disaster does strike, then you can ‘restore’ your blogs websites & other online assets from the latest backup files.

These are simple ways, under your control, that you can practice to control to prevent falling into the traps of these online scammers. Choosing the right website hosting service provider definitely is the first major step in the right direction.

Minimizing the risk with a separate email service provider helps to prevent sudden disruption to your business in case something fatal does happen to the host. And lastly, the best safe security practices that you use daily to prevent unwanted access to your core technical data & files should provide added cover to protect your online business.

Email providers spend billions of dollars annually keeping their systems ready to catch as many phishing emails & scamming attempts as possible. But yet, many of them get through to your Inbox. And they sure find some unsuspecting people to fall into their traps.

Typically, it is easy to identify these emails even if your ISP doesn’t mark them as spam.

They communicate a sense of urgency – as if the whole would fall apart if you don’t click on a link right now. Their “call to action” is usually very promising with phrases like “Click Now to Avoid Disruption of Service“, “Click Here to Prevent Closure of Your Bank Account” & “Click to Take Action Now“.

The return email does not match the email address it came from – since these scamming & phishing emails are routed through various mail servers worldwide, the return email address is often different from the email address you received the email from.

Technically, it is possible for anyone with very simple knowledge of mail servers & Unix programming language to send emails using a false “Sender’s Name”. However, any email has to be sent through an email server. Scammers often use the domains & email servers of unsuspecting webmasters to send out these emails. It could happen to you or me, we never know!

The “click here” link routes you to a different location – if you notice in the picture below, the link in the body of the email gives you the feeling it has come from the Bank of America. When you bring your mouse on the link, the status bar shows a different link at the bottom left corner of the screen. In this example, it shows:

http://bucatasosetapp.com/BOA1/www.bankofamerica.com/sslencrypt218bit/online_banking/index.php?boaaboaaboa

Are these phishing emails affecting you indirectly?

Absolutely Yes!

You may not be clicking on these links but you could be affected in more ways than one.

1. Abusing your email services – The phishing emails could be routed through your email server. If you are running your online business & host a website or a blog, you have access to email services. Hackers could get into your web host & use your email services (also called SMTP servers) to send these phishing emails.

Your domain could be identified as a spamming domain without you even knowing it.

2. Your newsletters could end in junk – If you are running your online business & you have users who have subscribed to your updates, your emails could be ending up in their junk folder or worse still, the ISP could be blocking your emails altogether.

This would render all your email campaigns useless & cost you a lot of money to fix.

3. You could transmit viruses in your emails – If hackers & spammers have access to your email servers, your emails could be made to transmit illegal content, virus or any other type of software programs that could cause disaster to anyone who opens them.

This could have severe legal implications & at the least, you will have a lot of your trusted readers unsubscribe from your email programs, costing you a lot of money & falling business revenues.

4. It could hurt Google earnings & Adwords spending – Scamming emails & phishing emails affect Google advertisers & publishers alike. So if your business makes money from Google ads, or spends money on Google Adwords for advertising, your earning as well as your spending will be affected adversely. This is closely tied to the ways in which Click Frauds are identified. Read about a snapshot of international Click Fraud Heat Map.

This could bring your ad revenues down with increasing your advertising spends, cutting into your profit margins.

In the next post, I shall share a few ways in which you can protect your users and your online assets. There are some simple ways to help you safe guard your online content including your email services & websites.

There is a huge market for affiliate marketers & affiliate bloggers in the niche of  kid’s products.

If “How to Get started?” is bothering you, then we have an answer right away! You can make money with your own online store for kids with iKids Place. They will give you all the tools needed to open your very own turnkey online business solution to profit from this expanding market.

Right now, they are offering a free trial to users with shipping costs of ONLY $1.97!

This is a great online affiliate marketing opportunity. It’s a very specific niche with low  competition & not overcrowded like the traditional Business Opportunity markets encouraged by Google, eBay, etc. This has been a cash rich niche with almost no competition!

You can immediately start selling with your own online store, complete with popular kids products in a variety of categories. The free kit includes the iStore Quickstart Marketing Guide that will give you the step by step instructions in the  to begin getting customers to your store.

The best part is you don’t have to handle any inventory or manage any logistics. You simply get customers to your own website & the parent company does all the rest for you.

Click Here to get started for Free or click the button above.

One of the major issues that we wanted to protect ourselves from was the downtime of our sites. The second issue on our radar were security & safety. Infrastructure is one of the key areas of focus for any webmaster.

We wanted to leverage the popular Web 3 Tools & SaaS options to keep our content safe & available in case anything bad happened to our hosting services.

Option 1 – Safe Secured & Easy to Use Internet Storage from BOX

We have been using the Free Box account for years now, not so much for media files (like images, audio or video) but mainly for the content. This includes all our files related to the sites as well as back up of our contents.

Apart from just storing the files, this system lets you securely access & share all your files over the internet. We don’t send large files in emails any more – we load them on our Box account & send the link in an email. We can also protect certain content with passwords so that no everyone can see them.

Since we do a lot of work from our mobile offices (read about Setting Up a Simple Mobile Office & how its an easy & low cost option), using the Box system saved us a lot of internet bandwidth too. Now I even send presentations to my customers from the same Box account without physically printing the large presentation files.

Option 2 – Similar Internet Based File Storage system from Amazon S3

This is also similar to the above except that you pay for only the bandwidth you use. The S3 stands for Simple Storage Services. This is supposed to provide the customers with a scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

However, as we found out, that Amazon S3 has too many problems. Apart from being the cheapest solution, S3 did not appear to be the right solution for us. Setting up Amazon S3 is painful & time taking & so is maintaining & uploading files. The biggest challenge is that it only works with Firefox!

I spoke to a lot of my colleagues who run high traffic business blogs & they all seem to agree on the hassles of using the Amazon S3 services. Mary Jaksch published a similar report on the difficulties in using Amazon S3.

Our Final Decision & Recommendation

We chose to go with Box. We have used them over a year now. Using the services is as simple as A-B-C. And we have not had any problems so far.

They also provide free trials so that you can test out their services. We have now opted for the more reliable Enterprise version. The customer support for all Enterprise Accounts is prompt & there are practically no downtimes. They already have close to 2 million international users & the number is growing. Though it is slightly costlier that the S3 (it is still less than $25 a month), the amount of time it would save us is immense. And any of my team members can learn to use it in less than 2 minutes flat!

Click Here to Get a 14 Day Free Trial with Box.

Since the launch in early 2009, our themes have become popular among online affiliate marketers, especially those who want to combine the power of an online store & the punch of a blog together.

The currently available WP themes are:

WP Themes with Multiple Ads – Bold Ad Themes & Quick Ad Themes

WP Themes for MLM & Online Affiliates Business owners – Advance MLM Affiliate Marketing Theme & Pro Affiliate Theme

WP Shopping Themes – i-Sales Theme, Webstore Theme & Shopping Theme

Wordpress Discount Shopping Theme – Coupon Ads Theme

WP Brand Building Theme with Multiple Ads – Marketing Ads Theme

The most downloaded themes so far had been the Coupon Ads Theme for people setting up discount shopping blogs & the Shopping Theme.

How do we design the themes to make them effective?

The idea & subsequently the design concepts come in from the experts in the business. Our partners & sponsors provide us with the design & the requirements that would make such a theme very effective.

A prototype is created & given out to them to try out & see if other variations could make them any better. All their feedback are then compiled & necessary changes are made to create the final version of the theme.

Why are they so cheap?

We have been asked this question over & over again, simply because similar themes are sold at over $150 in the market. Well we have our reasons for selling them for dirt cheap too.

• we are in the business of teaching people effective blogging methods & best ways to make money by blogging, creating themes is a complimentary function & not our primary goal
• the themes are unique in designs & for the business. We are one of the few who make WP themes for MLM business, Affiliate marketers & multi-ads themes for new bloggers, so we sell well. And the price point just makes it easier to sell (its the price of 3 Starbucks Latte!)
• we sell the entire theme – the style sheets, the scripts, the images all together so that our customers can modify them later if needed. We keep our expenses low by not customizing the themes too much
• we make our themes so robust & we provide good documentation so that we do not have to spend time in answering supporting questions. When we do get them, they are quite simple & quick to solve
• we also want new bloggers to use our themes. Since money is a big problem for new bloggers, we intentionally kept the price under $10

We only request that our links at the footer be kept. That helps us to build links & in the long run somewhat compensates for the cost with a good page rank.

Have you checked out our themes too?

“30 Minutes”? I asked. “You could be making me well in 15 minutes”.

“Really? Well can you make that TEN?” he tempted. So began the race to set up his music business website in 10 minutes or less.

Here is the exact run time that took me to create a fantastic music business website for him. All that Gordon wanted his website to do were:

• help him brand
• help him link to his videos on YouTube
• help him display advertisements to make some early money
• let people contact him from his website
• help him display a series of his mp3 music
• sell MP3 & track his downloads
• have shopping carts & be able to process international currencies & secured shopping
• allow people to rate his music
• connect easily with other fans & musicians on social networking sites

That’s pretty basic & expect for a theme that he liked there is nothing new or different. But this race is not about being different. It is about setting Gordon up on his business & money making website in TEN minutes.

• First – He already had his domain name registered before – it took me about half a minute to redirect his website to another DNS where his new blog would be up & running.
• Second – Signed him up with a Reliable, Affordable Business Hosting from Bluehost.com Wordpress Hosting Service. They have a one-click Wordpress installation & works even if you have never heard of Wordpress.org before! Since I knew the guys at Blue, it took me about 4 minutes to process the new account, make a call to their help desk & set up a new blog on the latest Wordpress.
• Three – implement the theme. Since Gordon was interested in making some money with ads & also wanted to have a distinct theme, he downloaded the Quick Ads Multiple Ad theme from our collection of Business Themes for Wordpress. This took us less than 3 minutes to have the theme process & installed.
• Four – Signed him up in less than 1 minute with a email subscription management program. Now he can track his subscribers & promote his music business even through emails.
• Five – Signed up to let people Download & Buy his mp3 music. Gordon already has a good collection of his own mp3 music that is ready to go on sale. All he needed was an automatic setup to help him sell. I signed him up with the best affordable e-retailer e Junkie & they even take care of credit card payments! He can even have shopping carts integrated on his site & it took us less than 1 minute to have his set up!

And that’s less than 10 minutes! In less than 10 minutes Gordon is all set to start making money with his new music blog. A few things are still left to be done though.

1. Since this site will be selling music, Gordon will sign up with some of the top Shopping Ad Networks to compliment his website
2. He would also sign up with other top contextual advertising network programs to increase his earning from blog advertising
3. He would also need to budget for advertising his new music blog. There are some good references here & here

Gordon’s website is on its way. He now has to focus on content & marketing his website. But knowing that Gordon is a great musician himself & has some great musician friends to help him grow his online collection of music, I am sure in less than 3 months he would start making handsome money from his website.

I would post again on Gordon a couple of months down the line to let you know how his music business blog is faring. While working with him I did realize that there is a need for some good music business themes too.

My next project on Pro Media Blog as well as on Business Themes Blog would be to come up with some great ideas & a few themes for the people in the music business.

Popular Money Making Tips on Pro Media Blog:

• Best Affiliate Programs for bloggers & online affiliate marketers
• Make Money from Blogs for a lot of tips on ways to monetize your blog
• Adsense Like Ads as Alternatives to Adsense to make money from blog ads
• Monetize all posts on your blog by Selling Text Links
• Best Chitika Shopping Ads for bloggers
• Top CPM CPA CPC Advertisers to make your choice on the various ad networks to choose from to monetize your blog
• More Shopping Ad Networks to monetize your blog
• 3 Places to Invest Money for Building a Business Blog
• Writing Paid Posts & Getting Paid to Review Products lists 6 of the best sponsored post networks
• Top Tools to Increase Blog Earning on all tools to maximize your blog revenue
• Tips to Monetize Images & Videos for all pictures on your blogs & especially if you run photo blogs

These are some of the popular posts on ProMediaBlog. My readers have found them useful & have wanted me to write more of these tips in the coming days. There are a lot more to come & I will again publish a similar summary next quarter.

By the end of this post, you will know how to shape your blog & make it stand out. I have practiced these 10 Simple Tips to Make my Blog & Content Stand Out & over a period of 3 months, I doubled my traffic & my conversion from my business blogs.

For more articles & future posts, click here & subscribe to our email newsletter.

10 Tips to Make Your Blog & Content Stand Out

Effective Blogging Tip 1 -Consistent Content - by being consistent, I mean keeping your business blog focussed on the topic that you are considered an expert. I write for new bloggers who want to know the best ways to make money from the internet.

In this blog, I dont write about technology or movies even though they could get me huge traffic. Consistency proves your expertise over and over again to your readers.

Effective Blogging Tip 2 -Regular Content - there are too many bloggers writing too many posts everyday. It is easy to get lost in the crowd, especially when you are new & not many people know you or trust your expertise. Regularity keeps you fresh in your readers’ minds.

When I began this blog to help new bloggers make a business out of it, I was writing 4 posts or more a day. This practice has more advantages that I will write in Tip 4 later in the post.

Effective Blogging Tip 3 -Unique Content -your readers are looking for information but more importantly they want to listen to what you have to say. We all know that “Content is the King” & it has to be Your content. Look into each line where you can & must add your own value.

A good example is to interpret a news item that you have read in your own words & how that will affect people like you & your readers. This practice too has great effects that I will explain in Tip 5 later.

Effective Blogging Tip 4 – Keeping Search Engines in Mind -even the top bloggers get close to 50% of their traffic from search engines. Although you write for humans, you must keep search engines in mind. Right use of TITLE, DESCRIPTION & KEYWORDS META tags are the beginning. But you need to keep the content tight enough for search engines to rank your pages high.

Effective Blogging Tip 5 -Keeping Advertisers & Sponsors in Mind -sponsors pay over 50% of the total revenues from blogs. To make it worth your sponsors’ money you have to write enough for them as well. There are various ways in which you can do it.

Simple methods could involve putting up text links or buttons, or writing about them in a few lines at the end of your posts. Unique content build page ranks that alo helps you make more money for your sponsors.

Effective Blogging Tip 6 -Designs Themes & Layouts -effective theme designs & layouts that impress your audience & helps develop credibility. We have heard from our business customers, those who bought Business Themes from us, that they are effective in keeping the readers happy at the same time making money from multiple ads.

Effective Blogging Tip 7 -Keeping Everything Simple -simplicity is the key. Keep your design simple, your content readable, your links clearly visible & your language easy to read & understand. Remember, people on your blog want to read your writing & your thoughts.

Be controversial if you have to be but be courteous. People interested in business also have a hunger for data. Share as much as relevant data as possible. Charts & graphs are great ways to keep things simple too.

Effective Blogging Tip 8 -Giving the Reader Enough to Make Them Come Back for More -success comes to those who give more than what they ask for. There are 2 aspects to giving information. One, be absolutely truthful. Your readers want to believe in you, don’t give them a reason not to.

And two, make your information relevant with analogies & examples. Readers who can relate easily & see your point of view, will always come back for more.

Effective Blogging Tip 9 -Getting Back from the Page Hits -there are a zillion ways to make money from your online blog. But don’t be tempted to make money in whatever opportunities come your way. Be judicious & dont use opportunities at the cost of your readers’ inconvenience.

As an example, if a reader is leaving your page, I would rather ask him / her to sign up for my newsletter rather than making a penny from an exit pop-up or pop-under ad.

Effective Blogging Tip 10 -Free eBooks are Not Always the Greatest Incentive -a great content is the first incentive to keep your readers coming & buying from you. Lately there are over a million blogs who will give a free eBook if you signed up for their blog updates. Though this technique works for the famous bloggers, I doubt if this will work for the new bloggers.

I have used partner products with extended licenses as a free gift in many cases & that worked pretty well for me.

Try these easy effective blogging tips. They can make your blog stand out among your competitions very easily. You could also click here & subscribe to our newsletter updates for more effective money making blogging techniques.

I often refer to this course as the “Bible of Money Making Blogging” – because it is a complete course that starts from the very basics of selecting a name for your blog or website & moves on to the last detail of social networking.

The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program is a one stop shop for anyone aspiring to become a professional blogger & make an easy living publishing blogs & marketing affiliate products online.

This is also one of the few coaching program that I promote. Because it has helped hundreds of people like me in a very short while. I had been running my photo websites from early 2001 but never knew how to monetize any of my online real estates. Now I do!

Click Here to Read more on Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Coaching Program.

I have detailed out the courses to help you understand how this will benefit you. However, one word of caution. Any coaching program can only train you & make you aware of things that would make you successful. You have to put in the effort to make it work.

And it is not an easy task! When I began, I had put in over 20 hours of work each day for months together. However, as I have repeated over & over again, you have to persist till you make it work for you.

The internet is more competitive now that it was 5 years back. And it is getting more competitive everyday. The quicker you get yourself trained & the harder you work today, the faster you will succeed.

And this coaching program, also called Profit Blogging, will help you for the very beginning. Read the details of the program to evaluate how this will help you transform your outlook from a regular blogger to one who makes money from the online business of blogging.

Click Here to Read Details on Profit Blogging.

One of the biggest challenge that new bloggers face is to find the right affiliate network programs that would work for them. There are tons of affiliate networks & many of them are good. But I have worked with only a few.

For reference, you can sign up for the affiliate network programs that I have worked with & had great success:

• Best Affiliate Network Programs for New Bloggers

Choosing the right affiliate network is the first important step to a successful money making strategy. What will follow is a continuous effort to build your affiliate sales business.

Few of the problems that I hear from bloggers who are new to affiliate blogging are:

1. I am blogging very well but my sales is very low
2. Visitors are clicking on my links but my sales are very few
3. My products are not doing well may be I have not chosen the right product to sell
4. My sales vary widely from month to month etc. etc.

Do you have these problems as well? Then you are not alone!

Majority of these problems are because of a single reason – the way you are promoting the products. It is not the problem with the products, but the way you are blogging about them.

The other important issue here is that you may still not have the trusted followers you could sell to. So while visitors are clicking on your link, you are not able to convince them on buying the products from YOU!

Affiliate Blogging is Different than Casual Blogging

The earlier you realize this, the better for your business. Many normal casual bloggers try to write about a product from the affiliate network & expect people to buy them. It does not work that way. This is the one area many early bloggers falter.

You have to Train your Mind & Learn How to Sell from your Blogs

Anyone who is making $5,000 or more from their blogs from affiliate networks have trained themselves on how to blog effectively for affiliate sales. Once you are trained, blogging is the easy part.

So What Affiliate Program I Recommend?

There is only one affiliate training program I, or any other successful affiliate blogger for that matter, will recommend. This coaching program comes in from Yaro Starak the master affiliate blogger.

Click Here to Read the Details of the Blog Master Mind course.

I have mentioned this coaching program many times before. For 2 reasons. One, there is no alternative to this course & all the pro bloggers of today, including Darren Rowse (of ProBlogget.Net fame) & Brian Clark (of CopyBlogger.Com fame) have benefited from this course.

And Two, this course is a complete all-round course. It starts from the basics of blogging & shows you step-by-step how to get to the $10,000 earning mark!

This course is very costly. Off course you would earn much more than the cost of the course in a few months. This course is very intense & would require your complete attention & dedication. I would strongly suggest that you do not sign up for this coaching program is you are not serious about affiliate marketing or making big money from your blogs.

You do have the backing of a big enterprise to bear the risks of your failure. This makes it even more essential that you do all that are necessary to equip you with all the right tools & the training to help you succeed.

I have detailed out the benefits of Blog Mastermind Profit Blogging coaching program by Yaro Starak. This is a complete all-round coaching program ideal for anyone trying to be successful as a profiteering blogger or an online affiliate.

The complete coaching program uses audio, video & text to teach you from the very basics of how to make money blogging. Sections of this training course to become pro-bloggers also deep dive into case studies. It analyzes why certain websites are successful & why some are not.

Click Here to Read the details Blog Mastermind Profit Blogging Coaching Program.

Do you have the experience of any similar programs that could help bloggers to transform their online business?

While some of them require you to have your own blog, many want you to write guest posts for a handsome pay. Nonetheless, blogging jobs are now a popular option especially for freelancers & anyone who wants to make money blogging.

Here is a list of 10 Places to Find Great Blogging Jobs.

1. Freelance Writing Jobs – on enlisting you get offers from organizations who want you to blog for them. The pay varies from $10 for a 200 word article to over a couple of hundred dollars for any experienced blogger.Click Here to Sign Up for Freelance Writing Jobs
2. Blogging Jobs in Business Magazines – one of the best places to look for freelancing are the freelancing & business magazines. These periodicals list hundreds of opportunities every month.Click Here to Sign Up for Entrepreneur Magazine for Discounts
3. Blogging Job Boards – companies advertise for blogging & freelance writing jobs. In most cases they do not require you to have your blog. But they do expect that you have experience in blogging.

   Click Here to Look Up Blogging Opportunities in Job Boards

4. Paid Blogging – you can get paid to write about products & services. Many marketing agencies look to getting their products verified & their reviews published. Bloggers often make over hundreds of dollars reviewing such opportunities. You do need your own blog for this though & you would be willing to back link your sponsors for each of the paid content.

   Click Here to Sign Up with 6 Top Sponsored Posts Agencies

5. Paid Guest Posts – expert bloggers get paid to write guest columns. Many of the top running blogs make thousands of dollars from advertising & sales. And they pay other expert bloggers to write posts on their networks. The cost varies from a few hundred dollars upward for the well known networks.

The dilemma that new bloggers run into is how much ads to show on a page? Now that you have signed up with some of the best ad networks, you have the intense urge to show as many ads as possible!

In this part of the Effective Blogging Series, I will share some tips & information on choosing the right theme & focusing on effective advertising on your blog.

For reference you can read:

• All the ways to make money from blogs
• Advertising is the First Step to Monetizing your blog
• Earning the Most from your Ads

There are plenty more posts talking about selecting the right ad networks, optimizing the ads on your blogs & positioning the ads to increase the click through rates.

Why cannot you show too many ads?

There are a few challenges of showing too many ads & over time that hurts your credibility & could bring down your subscribers & hence reduce your income too.

1. readers come to your blog to read your content & not to see the ads. They do understand the necessity to show ads to make money but they prefer content over advertisements
2. ads could be distracting to the readers depending on what type of ads they are and where they are positioned
3. several types of ads could crash the visitors browser – be sure that those readers will never come back to your blog again
4. search engines, including Google, could mark your blogs as spam if there are more ads than written content
5. search engines will penalize you with a low page rank if your site shows too many ads

How many ads is too many ads after all?

Most advertisers have the rule to be shown over the first 600 pixels on the browser – that is on the top portion of your blog. This automatically limits the number of blogs that you can show to really make high click-through-rates & higher cost per click.

About 3 to 4 ads on a long page is probably a good number. If you are showing multiple ads, you may read my earlier post What Ads to Use – Choosing Between CPC CPM & CPA Ads to help you make the best of your ads.

Footer ads & ads below the 600 pixel mark will earn you very less. And in all probability, you will not have any reader clicking on your footer ads either. But you can still show image ads that pay per impression in footers in the hopes that some visitor will browse through the end of your blog page & render that ad visible.

The Last Suggestion – choose a theme suitable for multiple ads

Many bloggers download free themes & customize them by adding ads wherever they think would get them right in the path of the reader’s attention. An extremely bad idea! For 2 reasons;

1. let the reader focus on your content – if the readers are satisfied they will look into your entire page & will come across your ads too
2. adding ads anywhere in the theme often breaks the optimization done for search engines

I had written about Choosing the Right Theme for your Blog earlier. A great theme will impress your readers, they bring your content forward & have ample opportunities to show multiple ads to make money.

You could choose from some of our collection of Business Themes for Wordpress or you could Create your Own Unique Wordpress Theme online too.

This is only a few of some of the advertisers we have had great experience with. In various phases they have helped us achieve quite a few milestones.

• increase awareness about our websites & blogs within international blogging communities
• build buzz around our product launches for our product related sites
• general all round advertising
• increase sales
• increase website registrations & sign-ups
• increase our search engine ranking with effective advertising

We advertise year round as a part of our marketing strategy. our networks allow us to plan out an affordable annual ad budget & monitor our spends & ad effectiveness.

• How seriously do you plan your advertising?
• How frequently do you run campaigns?
• What percentage of your blog earning do you budget for advertising?

You can literally sale 12 months of the year. And with a little planning ahead of time, you can do well with these international holidays & festivals.

• January: New Year’s Day, Chinese New Year, Martin Luther King Day
• February: Valentines Day
• March: – Holi (also called the Festival of Colors)
• April: Earth Day
• May: Mother’s Day, Labor Day (also called the International Workers’ Day, May Day, Memorial Day or Decoration Day)
• June: Father’s Day
• July: Independence Day
• August: Friendship Day
• September: Back to School, Eid ul-Fitr (also called Id or Id-ul-Fitr)
• October: Dīvali (also called Dīpāwali or Deepavali)
• November: Thanksgiving, Veteran’s Day
• December: – Christmas, Hanukiah (also called Menorah, Festival of Lights or Festival of Dedication)

Each of these (& these are only the major ones known & celebrated internationally) holidays 12 months in the year are great opportunities for growing sales. Apart from these you should also focus on any of the regional holidays.

Use this as a affiliate blogging tip & focus on any such events that people often go out of their way to shop. Each country & community would have their occasions to celebrate too & you would have a year planned for selling.

• Have you tried selling specifically for any such events in the past?
• How much time do you spend planning for any of these potentially huge sales events?

There are numerous articles on the internet, as well as tons of books, helping people to become a better blogger. So I have always focused on effective blogging on ProMediaBlog.

This is first of a Series of articles on Effective Blogging. You may want to subscribe to have all articles emailed to you on time.

So what is an effective blog?

Although definitions & expectations could vary, any money making blog is effective if it makes money! It should actually make you more money than what you spend on it, in other words, it has to drive profit.

Like any internet business, blogging can also build long term residual income for you. An effective blog will not only make money for you today, but will continue to help you build recurring long term residual income.

How do you know when your blogging is effective?

There are several ways to measure effectiveness of your blog. One simple way is to treat your blog like your business. Depending on what your business objectives are, you will have various ways to know if your blog is effective. Here are a few ideas:

• are you getting enough traffic?
• is your traffic increasing over months?
• is the percentage of regular visitors increasing?
• is the email subscription increasing?
• are you seeing an increase in the quality of comments?
• are you getting inquiries from sponsors for your blog?
• are you making the money that you targeted every month?
• is the number of back-links to your blog & product pages increasing?

I would not like to put advertising revenue as a way to measure effectiveness of your blog. The reason being, ad click-though-rates & ad earnings depend on too many factors to say whether your blog alone is responsible for low ad earnings.

Similarly, I would not put Page Rank to be a valid way of measuring effectiveness of your blog. Your blog is to make money, not just to keep search engines happy! Although at a later point in the series, I would also write about how to run your business blog without compromising on search engine rankings.

In the subsequent posts on this Series of Effective Blogging I will elaborate more on the ways in which we could measure effectiveness & how to make your blog effective. I would also share a few exercises that would help you turn your good blog into an effective blog.

Our Google Adsense ad revenues have been affected negatively from March 2009. I reported out that there were severe drop in ad clicks-through-rates on all our sites. On further analysis I found out that Google was not serving contextually relevant ads.

What were the Problems With Google Adsense that Caused a drop in Adsense Revenue?

Problem 1 – Low Cost Per Click – due to a poor economy advertisers had cut down on their ad budgets. This in turn caused the cost per click to go down drastically. In some cased we noticed that the drop was as big as 90% (i.e. if each click were giving $100 earlier, now they were giving only $10)

Problem 2 – Irrelevant Ads – the Adsense revenue drop was mainly due to Ineffective Google Ads that had nothing to do with the content! And over 60% of the time Google were promoting its own products like Google Chrome or Picasa etc. These products are so common & so widely used that unless you are a newbie to the internet, these ads will not attract your attention.

What were the solutions?

Solution 1 – Replaced Google Adsense with Adsense like Ads - we balanced out income quickly by using other Adsense like Ads. The effect was almost instantaneous.We replaced Google Ads with other contextual ads.

Solution 2 – Improved Content – we looked deep into the contents & found out that there were many ways to make the content richer. We made changes to a large number of our posts & improved the content.

Solution 3 – Started Long Tail Selling – we signed up with a couple of new affiliate programs that are well known for their success in long tail products. In these products the commission per sale was less but there were high volume of sales that made up for our blog earnings.

Solution 4 – Miscellaneous Improvements – we also tuned our themes & made ad filters stronger to make the ads as relevant & contextual as possible. Using proper ad filters also eliminated common products from being advertised & hence increasing the click-through-rates.

Which Top 3 Advertisers Did Well in the Poor Economy?

• Ad Brite including Ads for Videos & Pictures
• Widget Bucks
• Chitika including Premium Ads & Search Ads

Which Affiliate Programs Provided the Products that are Selling Well in the Poor Economy?

• Never Blue Affiliate Programs for all new products & pricing
• Click Bank even though the lead time to make money was higher, the returns are fantastic

What has been your experience with Google Adsense in the first half of 2009?

How did you balance your revenues?

Which Advertisers were your Top Performing in the first half of 2009?

In 6 months I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month from that blog selling pictures. That is when I started affiliate marketing as well. I had picked up on the business aspects of blogging for money with my other photography sites as well (Journal Image for motion & candid street pictures & Photo Duniya for nature & impressionistic art photography).

At the beginning my affiliate marketing did not go well as I wanted to. And now, when I make more money from commissions, I look back and see that I had done quite a few things wrong.

Here are the 15 mistakes new affiliate bloggers make, especially if they have been a successful blogger & have just taken up affiliate marketing;

1. affiliate marketing is not the usual blogging – the same success factors do not always work for affiliate bloggers. You just cannot writing what you want when you want – everything has to be planned when you are blogging for affiliate marketing
2. affiliate bloggers need a longer time to succeed – you cannot be an overnight millionaire & the lead time to profit is high (& so are the earnings)
3. affiliate bloggers have to focus on the best tools to succeed – marketing tools are an absolute must to grow your affiliate blogging business
4. online networking & branding is very essential – affiliate business has to do with sales & hence you need to build your brand that eludes trust & confidence. You can refer to my article on How to Start Building an Online Network to help you get started
5. affiliate blogging is a serious business much like running your own stores – you need to value your online business as much as you would do if you had invested a million dollars in it
6. affiliate blogging needs careful wording to close sales as efficiently as possible – you cannot leave any article open ended
7. email subscriptions is very much essential – email is like soft cash to affiliate bloggers & successful affiliate bloggers focus on email subscribers from day 1. I have published an article on Email Marketing Trends & another one on How to Market your Business with Emails
8. affiliate marketers need a lot of training – bloggers need training on products & marketing rather than being a copywriter
9. you can be a successful affiliate marketer without being a blogger – technically speaking, affiliate blogging is more marketing than blogging & quicker you realize this the faster you earn
10. affiliate marketing needs investments – it could be as low as $100 a month but it does have expenses for promotions & advertisements
11. affiliate marketing needs serious planning – I know affiliate bloggers who have set plans (for investments & earnings) short term plans (for the next 30 days, 60 days) as well as long term brand building plans (that extend to a year or more)
12. affiliate bloggers need professional marketing themes – specialized themes are necessary to build their business. Look at our themes for Coupon based affiliates & Online Web Store themes to understand the differences. More such themes on our Business CMS Themes site
13. affiliate bloggers use professional plugins for their blog – I have listed out all the plugins that are used by affiliate marketing bloggers at the later part of this page. The important ones to begin with are
    1. WP Affiliate Pro Plugin
    2. WP Link Cloaking Plugin
    3. WP Dupe Magin Plugin
    4. WP 3X Automation & Social Networking Plugin
14. choosing the right affiliate program & products need experience – there are numerous affiliate programs that all look attractive but it needs market knowledge & an understanding of the challenges of affiliate marketing to be able to choose the right programs & products to sell. I have published a list of some of the best affiliate programs that are suitable to new & experienced bloggers
15. affiliate marketing bloggers have to understand SEO & Search Advertising very well – driving traffic to your affiliate products’ page involve deep understanding of landing page creation, search engine bidding & search advertising. There are lots of books available to help you train yourself. I follow Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization: Drive Traffic, Boost Conversion Rates and Make Lots of Money (Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guides) by Jon Rognerud.

Affiliate marketing & affiliate blogging is a highly rewarding business model. If I had to do it all over again, I would avoid these 15 mistakes. If you have been blogging for some time & want to move onto becoming a successful affiliate blogger, you can easily relate to these common mistakes that I made.

You will get a lot of educational & training resources to Start Your Own Business at Entrepreneur Publications.

• What would be your tip to new affiliate bloggers?
• What normal blogging practices worked or you in affiliate blogging?
• What practices did not work for you?

The challenges of email marketing are also too many. In my earlier post on Email Marketing Trends – Right Email Marketing for Blogging Business, I wrote about the technical & logistic challenges that need to be overcome.

I have worked with a lot of these email marketing agencies & have experimented with a lot of them. There are several good ones out there. But if asked to recommend a few, especially for new bloggers, my suggestions would be:

• iContact – Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Sign Up with AWeber – the favorite email marketing system of all bloggers

You could sign up with any of them without thinking twice. They all offer:

• extremely affordable & flexible billing plans based on the volume of your subscribers – as your subscriber list grows (and you earn more money) you can pay out more to these agencies
• very customizable emails in professional layouts (templates)
• customizable responders
• customizable content – could be aggregation of your posts, or custom text or both
• you define the frequency of emails depending on your campaigns
• ability to run campaigns & measure the effectiveness
• no long term contracts
• so many other advantages

However, the most important factor is that they employ superior technology & constantly upgrade their technology so that they do not get filtered out as junk, or worse, get tagged as spam. They have higher deliverability (ability to reach the recipient’s Inbox without being filtered as spam or junk) rate in the industry & that is solely because of their technology & reputation.

As I had mentioned in my earlier article, changing email marketing agency in the middle of your program is a big risk. Although it is technically possible to move your subscriber list from one host to another, it results in loss of a lot of your confirmed subscribers.

So, while I give my recommendations because I have used them in my blogging business, I suggest that you do your research before you sign up with any of them.

From what we have received so far in terms of the requirements to develop this theme, we believe that it has to have a combination of training, magazine & information.

We have not begun to design the Wordpress Theme for Real Estate Business owners. We are open to suggestions & your thoughts. We do believe that any theme to help the professionals in the real estate business must have the following features:

• website should have the WoW factor!
• ability to connect easily with people
• should be able to demonstrate videos & possibly audio
• should be able to show multiple images of the property
• should be easily searchable on locations, zip code, types of estate etc
• should be able to show references & testimonials
• should be able to integrate with financial data or banks for specific properties
• should also be able to show multiple ads relevant to real estates

These are only some of the suggestions provided to get us started. While we research more on this, do let us know your suggestions.

• What do you think a Wordpress Theme for the Real Estate Business owner should have?
• what are the most important features of a Real Estate Business theme?
• what are the good-to-have features of the theme?
  

This should not surprise you that many people do not intend to earn money from their blogs. It has been a sore topic whether one should earn money from blogs.  In fact, when I seriously started to blog for money, I did not believe that I can make any money out of it!

The reason is that while most of us “blog”, few look at it as a business & hence focus less on marketing. I wrote about this in a previous article titled Making Money from Blogs is More Marketing than Blogging.

Whether you decide to make money or not, once you have some content on the internet, search engines & search marketing companies will still make money from your content. How?

Ever searched something on Google? The results show up with sponsored Links on the top, sides & bottom of the page. Anytime you click on them, Google makes a tiny bit of money. And the content is all user generated. Your website or blog could also show up in the search results along with others! So even though you do not get any money, someone else does!

This post is not about the age old argument of whether to make money from blogs or not. My website is to help you produce the best content & make money blogging in all possible ways. This post is to ask you one question.

• Did you start blogging to make money? or
• did you get serious about making money from blogging when you started to earn some?

There is a huge difference in the above two & I have noticed, from talking to a large number of bloggers in these two categories, that people who became serious about making money blogging but did not begin with that idea, find it difficult to develop the habits of a professional blogger.

They also take longer time to make the same amount of money than people who get into blogging with the only purpose of making it a successful business. There is no statistical proof on this yet, but I am making that conclusion after getting the feedback from other bloggers.

• What has your experience been?

I will shortly have more content for people who are now serious about making some big money from their blogs. I will try to work out a 6 or a 8 week plan to redress their habits, build new habits  look at the unique ways at your blogs or websites to run it like a profitable business.

BrightRoll believes that the new pricing models based on CPE & CPV will offer more efficiency, flexibility & value for money to the advertisers. BrightRoll handles large customers, who include Wal-Mart, Visa, Sony and Warner Brothers among others.

You can read the Yahoo report on BrightRoll Announces CPE, CPV and CPC ‘Performance Pricing’: Breakthrough Model for Online Video Advertising.

In the CPV model advertisers only pay if the viewer watches the entire clip to completion. CPV implies Cost Per Completed Video (CPV) where the cost is based on successful user-initiated video completion.

Advertisers have also been testing pricing models based on Cost Per Engagement” or CPE, under which they only pay when the viewer interacts somehow with the ad — playing a game, taking a poll, rolling over an ad unit for a specified amount of time, or taking a product tour. In short, Cost Per Engagement (CPE) implies the cost per each user-initiated video engagement or start.

For reference, here are the previous topics:

• 10 Popular Niche Blogging Topics
• Top Affiliate Blogging Programs
• 10 Most Popular Blog Topics to Make Money

These 5 additional Niche Blogging Topics to Make Money are suggested by our readers who make significant income from blogging on them.

1. Cooking & Recipe Blogs – cooking can be treated as a passion, an occupation of respect as well as a lifestyle. Hence the possibilities of blogging on cooking no wonder makes lots of money. The competition is severe & social marketing is key to creating buzz about your blogs.

2. Literary Blogs on Poetry & Short Stories – bloggers who focus on literary aspects lend a personal touch to making them popular. One of the basic ways of making money from this niche blog topic is selling ebooks & publish their own copies through Amazon.

Literary bloggers also make money on reviewing other literary works, commenting on published work & recommending new publications to their readers & subscribers.

3. Dress Designing – this requires basic skills of fashion designing & designers share their ideas on new designs. One of the biggest money making opportunity for dress designing bloggers come from dress makers & clothiers. Their designs are sold & they often auction their designed dresses on eBay as well.

4. Home Improvement Blogs – there are too many ways to make money from blogging on home improvement. Tim Carter, the founder of one of the earliest home improvement websites, make anything between $10,000 to $30,000 a month from his home improvement website (Google report).

5. Alternative Medicine & Natural Health Care – this is a very profitable niche blogging area. With alternative medicines becoming popular (herbal treatment, yoga) this is a very prosperous nich blogging topic. The 2 main challenges that new bloggers face is to build credibility to be able to recommend any product & then finding the right products that are affordable & easily available.

A big thanks to all of you who suggested these fantastic niche blogging & business ideas. If you have the knowledge of any other popular niche blogging topics that could help people make money online, you can share it with the rest of our readers by leaving a comment or emailing me.

This article is based on our understanding of the growing niche blogging topics, market data & feedback from some of the top niche bloggers.

As a reference, you can read our previous articles on:

• Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
• Popular Topics on ProMediaBlog
• 10 Most Popular Blogging Topics to Make Money Blogging

You will find numerous references to money making resources in these articles that will help you to choose & sign up with some of the best blogging programs.

Niche blogging is one of the oldest blogging styles. Bloggers deep dive into specific areas & write extensively in that area. Over time, they become experts in their niches & are seen as advisers by the readers.

Here are some of the Popular Niche Blogging areas:

1. Specialized Sports & Hobbies – examples include golf & angling where bloggers passionately write about their hobbies & sports. This also includes areas like car racing hobbies, toys & popular mechanics.

2. Adult Relationships & Dating – more & more people are getting into the business of marketing adult relationships & dating programs. These are usually subscription based programs & hence bloggers & webmasters in this niche earn a lot of money quickly.

Some of the popular high paying affiliate programs in this niche include:

• People Finders Affiliate Program
• Ashley Madison Adult Dating Affiliate Program
• Singles Network Affiliate Program

3. Cruise Travels & Exotic Travel – cuises & travels to exotic countries have picked up in the last couple of years & with countries spending billions of dollars to build their tourism industries, this niche business area is likely to grow a lot.

Niche blogs on Cruise & Exotic Travels have started to replace the traditional travel agencies since they are able to offer custom & cost effective travel plans.

4. Video Games & Online Games – gaming is one of the biggest industry in the world now & niche bloggers in this area also make a lot of money. The industry is also conducive to this niche since hundreds of new games are rolled out almost every day & there are numerous free downloads to keep the readers happy.

5. Personal Development & Training – as long as there is competition in the job market, this niche market will continue to grow. Bloggers in the niche business of training & personal development make money by connecting trainers with trainees & selling training materials.

6. Mobile Phone Downloads & Ringtones – this niche is suitable for technical bloggers & phone marketers.  With the increase in mobile phone users & the teens using mobile phones not as a utility but as a fashion accessory, this niche is growing by leaps & bounds.

7. Fashion Kits & Beauty Products – with the increase of social networking & the spending power of teens increasing, sales of fashion & beauty products are on the rise. Niche bloggers in this niche promoting fashion kits & beauty products are seeing huge income from their niche blogs.

8. Real Estate Marketing – real estate has always remained a local business. Partly because people are more comfortable in their locality but mainly because of lack of awareness of great real estate deals outside their locality.

Niche real estate bloggers are seeing an increase in sponsorships for their blogs & real estate agents are also paying bloggers for promoting their properties.

9. Antique Items sales – although eBay has been the power website for sales & auction of antiques, this is still a very profitable nich blogging area. The challenge is to run these niche blogs as a community & bring in business.

10. Handicrafts  Hand Crafted Life Style Accessories - there are very few bloggers in this niche. But those who write & sell international handicrafts & hand crafted items for daily use make a lot of commission from these sales. This niche has an international appeal & bloggers see sales rising very quickly.

Note that niche blogging business takes longer time to make as much money as other popular blogging topics. You will need all the Pro Blogging Tools to get you started & make quick money from any of these niche sites.

However, if you look at it, you are still investing money everyday to build & grow your blogging business. You pay the website host (to many this is the only investment!), you pay to register your websites, you pay for email marketing & then you spend time to write (which is probably the biggest expense!).

• So what are the choices of investments?
• And what are the best places to invest to build your blogging business effectively?

1. Website or Blog Registration & Hosting:

There are too many people offering website hosting services. We have worked with 5 of them & they are the best. They offer unlimited domains, complimentary website registration, Wordpress ready & cheap monthly billing. Most importantly, they are very responsive to their customers’ questions & you will get to speak to them 24×7 in case there is a problem.

• BLUE HOST – Free Domain With $6.95 Hosting Package. With a cheap monthly billing, you can Host Unlimited Domains for 1 account at $6.95 Per Month
• Host Monster Web hosting – Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account. For a cheap monthly rate you get Free Domain, Free Setup, Host Unlimited Domains for $6.95 a month
• Lunarpages Web Hosting – for a low monthly rate, you get a website from $4.95/month with Unlimited Emails, Storage & $700 Free Bonus Software – Limited Time Offer!
• Hostgator web Hosting – you get Quality Support for 24/7 Via Phone, Live Chat, and Email with Web Hosting Services from Hostgator
• GoDaddy Web Hosting – you can get your own online store in minutes with Quick Shopping Cart with GoDaddy.com

All of these web hosts offer one click Wordpress set up with full integration with shopping carts, emails & ftp accounts. It is worth spending a dollar or two more on your web hosting service rather than lose thousands of dollars in sales with hours of downtime (this is when your web hosting services bring down all the websites for maintenance & no one can access your websites).

2. Email Marketing for your blogs & online business

I have mentioned in other articles (Email Marketing for Bloggers) how important a subscriber’s or customer’s email is to anyone doing business online. However, to drive & grow business with that email, you need a solid foundation of technology that comes from your email marketing partner.

Here is our recommendation of the best affordable email marketing partner for your blogging & online business. Either of them is absolutely suitable:

• iContact – they have a range of sophisticated features bundled into a single, affordable product
• Constant Contact – provides Email Marketing and Online Surveys making it easy to connect with your customers & grow your online business. Now you can – Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• AWeber – this is one of the most popular email marketing services among bloggers. It offers flexibility & low costs that work out in favor of new bloggers
  

We still suggest that you do your research before you sign up & talk to the customer service managers to understand how their email services will work for your blog & business. Note that it is a big risk to have to change email marketing agency in between.

3. Business Logo & Professional Accessories

Logos, business cards or even business courtesy gifts & accessories are not something that we focus on everyday. However, they represent how serious you are about your business & gives a sense of professionalism & comfort in the minds of your customers.

The nice thing about these accessories is that with so much of competition, a lot of these office products come in free. We have always used these 3 agencies for our business related products.

• The Logo Company – for professionally designed Business Logo Design for your blogs & business
• Business Cards – you can get free business cards to start off with & when you have designed your own logo you can start printing business cards with your own logo. Vista also gives huge discounts all throughout the year
• Overnight Prints – provides very highly discounted but high quality office products & marketing stationery

These are 3 of the essential products & services where you need to plan your investments & expenses. These are essential expenses & many of them are ongoing expenses too. Having a good partner in these 3 key areas will give you the peace of mind as well as help you grow your online business.

Our earlier popular articles from this series had been:

• Lessons from the Corporate Life – 10 Tips on How to Build Relations for Successful Small Business

This article is on some of the facts, ideas & tips on marketing your small business. Bloggers & online business owners will find this useful to build your brand, create a buzz & increase sales.

A. Think Global – internet is every where & anyone can access it. So while its nice to have a website, think of all the people who are reading about your product. A few tips to help you on the way to becoming global:

1. overcome the language barrier - your website should be readable in some of the popular language – use localized translated pages to communicate globally

2. overcome the currency barrier – currencies are different in different countries. While the cost of the product is almost constant, the shipping costs would vary

3. know the pulse of the regional community - each culture & community has their own soft corners such as national holidays, local heroes & celebrities. Use these icons to the best to make your brand buzz

B. Plan & Budget ahead of time – while its easy to say, this turns out to be the one that is least followed. While big corporates with tons of money will not be affected by expense over runs, small business could run into the ditches. Here are a few tips to help you plan  &budget your marketing expenses:

4. use technology to save costs – technology could help you cut travel & communications cost. Use web seminars, online media & computer based training courses to save recurring costs

5. save on the big expenses – too many people are penny wise & pound foolish. As an example, it makes sense to store your downloadable products onto a secured paid server & pay a monthly carge of 10 dollars for that rather than try to save the 10 dollars you are probably losing a lot more on sales!

6. track & review your expenses quarterly – track only the large expenses & allow your budget for small pocket type expenses. The key is to track your planned large expenses. Most of the large corporates fail to see the variance early in time

C. Consolidate your marketing programs & promotions – a lot of time people do not evaluate the effectiveness of marketing programs (like email campaigns) before they rush into another. If the first promotion did not yield the results you wanted, in all probability, repeating that will not give you any better results. Here are a few tips to make your marketing programs & promotions more effective:

7. use social networks effectively – market survey shows that people use 4 social networks on an average. And when there is a new network, people usually rush to find out what it holds. Use social networking & social media early on to build buzz & brand awareness

8. don’t spread your efforts too thin & focus on a few good ones – if your product or service is for the local market (say your restaurant business), focus more on the local market & the local population to build your business. Take up ony 1 – 2 marketing programs or campaigns at a time & not more. Also look for seasons where people are more open to accepting your promotions

9. what worked for others may not work for you – being their first helps, but most of us will not the the first one. And being next tempts us to replicate & copy what other successful businesses have done. While copying is a low risk act, success is not guaranteed & may often label you as a copy-cat which could be detrimental for your business

D. experiment & innovate – this is the biggest advantage of small businesses over large corporates. You can quickly decide on new ideas & innovative marketing. Large corporates have to work through a lot of paper work to get the work done. Here is a tip on experimenting & innovating marketing for your business:

10. being bold is not always bad – the biggest comedian is who can joke on himself. You can do something outrageous (or simply stupid) to get attention. Note though, flaring a controversy is not always a good way to get attention & so is pointing mistakes in others! Be conspicuous without being obnoxious

We would like to hear your ideas on marketing your business.

• does your annual marketing cost exceed 15% of your annual earning?
• is advertising your only way of marketing your business?
• what have you done different for your business that turned out great?

Other articles on ProMediaBlog that you will find helpful in planning your marketing programs:

• Marketing Your Business with Emails – Email Marketing & Mail Blasters for Bloggers
• Email Marketing Trends – Right Email Marketing for Blogging Business
• 11 Top Marketing Tools for Bloggers – Build your Brand & Increase Blog Earning
• 10 Online Internet Services to Help Your Business – Free Small Business Resources

Reference:

1. Study: Deliverability Could be Better on MediaPost

2. E-mail’s Killer ROI Less Lethal by the Year: DMA on DirectMag

How is this affecting bloggers, especially who have been trying to build their email subscription list in order to sell & market more.

Affiliate marketers & bloggers who sell affiliate products depend heavily on email marketing. They are used for various reasons – to build relations, build brands, educate people on products (pre-sales) and off course in an attempt to sell.

On talking to various experienced email marketers & money making affiliate bloggers, I got some great insights into what the problems are & how some of them could be avoided.

The Challenges faced by Money Making Affiliate Marketers & Bloggers:

• not all emails are valid – people often give false emails to get free stuff, like free eBooks or free training courses
• not all emails are monitored regularly – many people maintain more that one email IDs. They use them for various reasons – a few for personal emails, a few for business & a few to trick marketers. I dont know how they do it, but they do!
• not all subscribers confirm their subscription – email marketing legally requires double opt-in by subscribers. However, many people do not go back to confirm their subscriptions & hence fall out of all the email marketing campaigns
• email set-ups change without the owners’ knowledge – many people use free emails (hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc), many use the ISP’s emails while many use their business emails. The technical changes to stop spam & junk emails often require some action from the email owners – like saving email IDs in the ‘Safe List’ failing which certain  emails will end in the junk folder
• frequent emails could end up in the junk folder without people even realizing it
• emails with lots of links & attachments could end up in the junk folder too – not all email systems scan attachments or links to check their validity. Some simply route them to junk folder
• not everyone checks their junk or spam folders regularly to retrieve valid emails – so if your email has, for some reason, ended in the junk folder of the recipient & is not retrieved as “Not Junk”, your emails will continue to be routed to the junk folder
• email marketers often fail to build a relation & the recipient does not care – email marketing is often dull, one way communication when the affiliate wants to sell a product
• sometimes email marketers change their email marketing agency – such change requires that the new agency send out a new “opt-in” email from their system to you existing subscribers. This confuses people & often many of them do not opt-in again & you get to lose important valuable subscribers
• there are several other challenges but none as significant as the above that could hurt your business

There are no easy solutions, especially if the recipients do not care for your business, are indifferent to your messages or are completely unaware that your emails are ending up in their junk folder.

However, these experienced bloggers & affiliate marketers also gave a few tips to avoid many of them. In my blogging business I have found that these tips work.

• don’t try to run your own email mailing lists & manage subscriptions – there are many software programs that let you run your own campaigns & manage your own subscribers. Its a good idea when you have 50 subscribers & you’re a small affiliate but it is a severe handicap when your subscribers increase or your affiliate business grows
• don’t change your email marketing agency – decide on one & stick to it. Do your research before you choose your email marketing partner & let them do the thing that they are good at – email marketing
• build limited auto responders – one good use of auto-responders is at the beginning to ensure that subscribers do opt-in & for any regular updates (like a weekly update on your business)
• communicate in person – make your emails more personal & less official. Ask questions & ask for help (everyone feels good when asked for help!) & don’t be pushy more than you need to
• have textual content in your emails & not just links
• send reminders to check their junk emails in case any of your emails have ended up their. many suggested that you should drop the subscribers who have not opted-in after 4 reminders
• respond to your subscribers’ emails – this is a big challenge in case you have a large subscriber list & you are the only person handling email marketing
• its a good idea to pre-sale any product for a week or two before you finally pitch your product – always draw reference to prior emails to refresh their memory & do not expect that they remember your last email
• share success stories & make them feel a part of your success or failure. Occasional free gifts & giveaways are a great way to do this. Many people often run competitions to encourage participation & awareness of your business

The subtle point in all these tips is to keep email marketing simple & realistic. We also recommend these email marketing agencies that are quite well known for their high quality of service & the features they offer for small business & affiliate business bloggers:

• iContact – Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Sign Up with AWeber – the favorite email marketing system of all bloggers

Share your thoughts with us too:

What has been you experience with Email Marketing?
What challenges have you faced in your email campaigns?
How did you solve your problems to improve your email marketing effectiveness?

This limited time free money making blogging tool kit contains:

• 4 step success program & work kit
• Instant Traffic & writer’s guide
• Special Bonus of Making Money with Google Adsense &
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The Blogging for Dollars kit is usually available for US$ 50 but now its completely Free. You just pay the few dollars for shipping & handling.

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With the help of this Free Blogging for Money Toolkit, you can start your own cash-generating blogging site and:

• Own a cash-generating business about your favorite hobbies or interests! You decide what you will blog about
• Earn some quick cash & get quickly out of debt while enjoying longer vacations and driving nicer cars!
• Your blog will never sleep! It’s always online, making money when you’re working, playing and even sleeping!
• Generate additional wealth! With a blog you can keep your day job and blog for a few minutes a day to create a huge supplemental income!

Along with all the tools, tips & tricks to make money, this Free Blogging for Moeny offer also lets you have your own money making website.

Launch your own website in minutes! With your own pre-built blogging website, you can have blog entries, pictures, your biography, and much more, live and online!

That’s not all. the Blogging for Money Tool Kit will hold your hand through the whole process. It’s quick, easy, and is the best way to start earning money part time!

Sign up for The Free Blogging for Dollars kit now! It’s free for a limited time so you don’t get to lose anything.

The easy answer is Business CMS Themes, a collection of Wordpress themes that we have created for small business & for those professionals who run business blogs for selling & marketing!

There is another great option too, where you can instantly create fantastic looking, unique Website templates and Blog themes.

It’s the Web Design Generator – Artisteer.

This auto-theme generator is also the:

• a popular Automated Web Design Software for Blogs, CMS and Portals. Generate templates for Wordpress,  Blogger, Joomla and Drupal.
• #1 Wordpress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Wordpress Themes.
• #1 Drupal Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Drupal Themes.
• #1 Joomla Template Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Joomla Templates.

While I write about Wordpress, there are numerous people who are using other free open source softwares like Joomla & Drupal. The exciting part about theWeb Design Generator – Artisteer is that you can create innovative designs, unique to your own business blog, for any of the technologies – Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger or even static HTML.

Why is it so easy? Can you really create your own layout or theme in minutes?

• you choose a layout from the software – whether you want a left column or a right column or both, or whether you want the usual columnar layout or a magazine style
• you choose the colors – this is a very unique part to get the colors to make your website look great, so the software suggests the best color combination for columns, body, headers, navigation
• choose your unique style – this includes fonts, links, headings, body, footer & navigation
• once done, you export the design for your business blog – you can save it as a template for Blogger or a normal HTML & as themes for Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla

You can change your design later & all you need to do it to export it for your system & upload it to your website!

Click Here to Get Started with the Web Design Generator – Artisteer.

Twitter emerged as an online tool to exchange quick notes – sort of a sticky, open instant messaging system. Today, Twitter is talking about ways to make money off the popular microblogging site.

MySpace, Twitter & FaceBook have been experimenting with ways to monitize their sites. On & often we have seen ads on Twitter while MySpace & FaceBook have been showing ads more regularly.

Here are the news articles from Reuters:

• MySpace to be the new place for social networking where people can play video games - this move is explained more in lights of New Corp’s intention to build business in the video games market
• Twitter to pitch as platform for Business Marketing – Biz Stones report that Twitter is pitching add-on tools to make Twitter as a marketing platform for businesses

Many small online publishers & thousands of bloggers (if not all) have used faceBook, MySpace & Twitter since they were created. Many have started to depend on the amount of business that these micro-blogging & social networking platforms are bringin in. With the moves above, what changes should we see in the way we use Twitter or FaceBook?

The obvious questions that come to my mind are:

• are small publishers & bloggers going to compete with the big enterprises on entertainment & social sites as well?
• I can imagine an “enterprise Twitter” being rolled out for intra-company blogging, but how will that impact the small publishers?
• will these social sites continue to be useful to the bloggers & small publishers in spite of the big businesses coming in?

What do you think?

• Ineffective Google Ads Leads to Low Clicks Low Earnings – Google Adsense Alternatives
• Major Problems with Google Adsense – Drastic Drop in Adsense Clicks & Earnings
• Google Adsense Problems – Google Adsense Alternatives for Blogs

Although Google continues to give very poor Adsense earnings, I have balanced it well with numerous other Google Adsense Alternatives to boost my online income.

A recent news in the Forbes talks about the improving scenarios in online advertising spends. The article reports that a Pubmatic study shows that online ad prices are on the rise. The report says that the prices of banners & ad boxes sold by third party ad networks increased by over 35% over the same period in 2008.

The reason for the decline in the ad prices in 2008? Quoting the article:

The explosion in popularity of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace was largely behind last year’s decline in ad prices. Those sites introduced vast new amounts of ad inventory into the digital marketing business, depressing prices for ads sold by nearly all types of publishers.

MySpace, Facebook and such other social sites are not going anywhere & some have firm plans to sell ads on their sites as well. Twitter also reported that they are also finalizing their plans & infrastructure to monetize the site.

Given that these social networking sites are the new hot spots for advertisers, will small online publishers & bloggers see an increase in their inventory prices too? Advertising agencies are also improving their technologies to match up web surfers with the right ads – Google has introduced a new technology in which Google uses the DoubleClick DART cookie on publisher websites displaying AdSense for content ads.

These will help agencies serve more relevant ads, not only to the context but also to align to the web surfer’s behavior. Although bloggers have not yet reported any major improvements in either the click-through-rates or the blog ad earning, these moves by the agencies seem to be in the right direction that will eventually help online publishers & bloggers.

I would like to hear your comments on this:

• have you seen growth or decline in your blog ad earnings in the first half of 2009?
• have you tried any of the alternatives to Google Adsense to increase your income?

I have been asked these 2 questions very frequently:

1. What are the Right Affiliate Programs for Bloggers? and What are the best Affiliate Programs that I would recommend?

2. How do you choose the Right Affiliate Marketing offers? What are the key features of a good affiliate program?

Other references on here that you may find useful are:

• To find out about all the ways in which you can make money bloggin, read my recommendations on 15 Ways to Make Money from Blogs.
• All the various advertisers that could help you make money from blog advertisements, read my recommendations on Best AdSense Alternatives to Make Money from Blog Ads

In this article I am going to share thoughts on how to evaluate the best affiliate programs for your line of blogging. I would love to hear your comments, ideas & suggestions on this too.

1. The Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

Amongst the hundreds of Affiliate Programs for Bloggers available these days there are a few that has proved to be good for all experince levels of bloggers.

Once you sign up with an affiliate program, you would like to be partners for a long time. The simple reason being that it takes time & effort (and money at times) to build a good market for them & you would like to see the market grow over time. You would not like to choose an affiliate program that runs out of business in a year or two. So you choose affiliate programs that have been in the business for a period of time & has built its own credibility among bloggers.

1. Here is a list of some of the best affiliate programs we work with & who have been recommended to me by other successful bloggers (Click Here to Read the Complete List of Best Affiliate Networks)

Never Blue Affiliate Program – this affiliate network has products & services in some of the very niche markets. One of the best features is that they have many internation offers. Since many of your website visitors & followers would be international, it pays to work with an international affiliate team.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Never Blue Affiliate Program.

LinkShare Affiliate Program – this is also an international top affiliate program for bloggers. They are tied up with some of the best international brands with e-commerce business solution for over 3.5 million online relationships & over 500 premier online merchants.

• Click Here to Sign Up with LinkShare Affiliate Program.

Chitika Affiliate Program – this is a relatively new affiliate network but has significantly grown in terms of inventory & has brought in new advertising tools. This is also a part of the Shopping Adverising network, which means that they also have PPC based click ads to help you make money from blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Chitika Network

Click Bank – this is another great affiliate marketing network. They have a great variety of products & services in their inventory that would attract a wide variety of bloggers. At the same time, they also have a very strong brands in their inventory that could definitely help you to sell well. Click Bank has worked great for niche marketers & niche bloggers. People are known to have made tens of thousands of dollars selling & promoting their products on websites & blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Click Bank Affiliate Network Program.

Monetize Your Site’s Content With FinditQuick – this is a 3 in 1 affiliate program offer with very high potential of residual income. I call it 3 in 1 because it let’s you make money from selling ads, make money from search engines (much like Google with some additional features) & one of the highest paying affiliate program.

• Click Here to Join the FinditQuick Search Engine Affiliate Program.

Commission Junction – it is another very popular affiliate marketing program to focus on. They have been in business for a long time & have superior systems & reports to promote your affiliate business on your blogs.

• Click Here to Sign Up with Commission Junction Affiliate Program

The above are some of the large international affiliate network programs for bloggers. You will find great support from the affiliate managers, training & tips from them as well as timely payment & detailed reporting. I recommend signing up with them to beging making money from affiliate programs.

There are a few smaller & very niche programs that I also recommend. They are particularly suitable for new bloggers who are in the business of online downloads & make frequent monetary transactions on the internet. These programs, though they seem insignificant at first, are very rewarding in terms of their usefulness to the users. They are easy to sell mainly because of their all-encompassing features.

e-Junkie – this is an online system to help people sell their inventory online. A very useful & cost effective system given that they help you run your own affiliate networks as well as sell directly on eBay. There are 4 benefits to using e-Junkie in your online business:

(a) helps you sell your inventory by providing a secured online hosting service at the most affordable cost (about $5 a month only!)

(b) helps you run your own online affiliate marketing network by allocating affiliate links to your partners

(c) takes care of all the financial transactions for your affiliates so that you can focus on marketing your products

(d) track your sales & even integrate that with Google Analytics to be better able to optimize your websites

• Click Here to Sign Up for e-Junkie Affiliate Network Program

PayPal – we use Paypal for more than just accepting credit cards. We have PayPal integrated with our websites for shopping carts, for our affiliates networks as well as for any of the eBay transactions. PayPal also has an affiliate program that we use & promote. This is a very rewarding program & PayPal is very easy to sell to anyone who is involved with online business.

• Click Here to Sign Up for the PayPal Affiliate Program

So that sums up our recommendations of the top affiliate network programs for bloggers. Please note that we are part of many of these networks & our affiliate codes are built into these links. If you decide to sign up, please use these links above so that it could be a mutually beneficial act.

Now coming to the second question, as to what are the features of the right Affiliate Network programs & what to look for before signing up with any of them. I suggest that you sign up with only the ones you believe could be helpful to your business now & in the long run.

You would like to partner with affiliate programs & build on their products & your service. Any disruption in the days ahead could cause severe dents in your earnings.

2. What are the features of a good affiliate program & what should you evaluate before you sign up with any of them?

• how long have they been in business – an affiliate business trives & grows with trust. So any affiliate program that is in the market for a long time surely enjoys the trust & contribution of a large number of successful marketers
• what is their product mix? Are they only promoting very niche products or do they have a wide variety? Most bloggers who also sell affiliate products like to promote a variety of similar products through their online websites & blogs. Having too niche products could become a big risk in the long run
• what is their reputation in the market? Search the internet for reviews on the affiliate programs & learn what others are saying. This will give you a general flavor of whether the affiliate program is worth looking deeper into
• how much do they help their affiliate partners & bloggers? Do they run educational campaigns & training camps? Many of the top affiliate programs run their own training sessions for the bloggers & affiliate website owners to help them sell better & sell more. They also train their affiliate partners on newer ways & technology that can be used to sell better
• how do they report out on performance? Reporting is very crutial to understand if any of the marketing campaigns have worked well for you. The top affiliate programs will have numerous ways to promote – web based promotions, email marketing, incentivized sales & search marketing are some examples. The affiliate programs should be able to provide you with detailed reports on the performance of every campaign that you do
• how much do they pay? when do they pay? After all you are working to make money! Generally the best affiliate programs will pay within 30 days & they will also provide detailed reports on which all products have earned you the commissions. You may read through their websites to know more on their payment terms

Please take all the time, consult as many people as you want, even write to the affiliate managers or call them up to clarify all your questions before you decide to sign up. Once you do, plan for the long term. Seek advise from them as well as from your fellow affiliates to help you get onto making money.

The most pertinent questions I hear from people new making money blogging are:

• How to choose the right theme?
• What are the important features that anyone in the business of blogging should look for?
• And finally, where to get the best Wordpress Themes for business?

1. Choosing the Right Theme for your Blogging Business

People blog for several reasons. I will focus on those who blog for money. Having chosen the Right Theme for Blogging for Money, you will see several benefits:

• will make your blogging easy & fun
• will build your online brand
• will sell & promote your brand & your affiliate products (or the means by which you make money from your blogs)
• help you make the best of social networks
• tuned to your specific products & inventory
• market your business in the right way

As an example to explain the above points, if you are in the business of selling computers, a magazine theme is probably not the best choice. If you are in the business of blogging about pets, a theme that helps sell discount coupons probably isn’t the right choice again.

2. Key Features of the Best Theme for Business Blogs

Since most of my readers are, I am assuming that you are a new blogger, blogging for about 2 – 5 years & are about to earn significant money from your blogs. There is no definite set of features for business blogs, but I have experimented for a couple of years & will share what worked for me:

• professional look & feel – it has to provide the reader & customer the confidence that you are serious about your business
• fast loading pages – the pages should load in 3 – 5 seconds & the blog has to be designed in that way. There is also the WP Cache Plugin by Donncha O Caoimh, one of the best for fast loading pages
• built in tools for social networking – should have built in RSS feed subscription, ability to connect on social communities like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr & FaceBook etc
• good comment, pingback & trackback management & display
• able to display ads effectively – the ad positioning is critical to making money from blog ads & the positioning is critical to achieve that. However, the ads should not be distracting to the reader
• theme maintenance should be easy – you should not have to edit theme files every time you want to change your ads or basic layouts. Using themes with sidebars & widgets is a good option
• various media are important to business. The theme should be able to display images, audio & video with ease

3.  Where to get the best themes for business blogs

There are plenty of good designers creating fabulous Wordpress themes & designs that can be used on business blogs. It is difficult to recommend anyone as the best. However, avoid free themes as much as possible.

They are not unique & are often not upgraded with further upgrades of Wordpress & could jeopardize your business suddenly. Also, many of them add footer or sidebar links from their sponsors to keep them free.

Here is a small list of some of the best & dependable Wordpress Theme designers & where you could find great business themes. If you are looking for free themes, the best place to look for them is on Wordpress itself.

This is a list of my personal favorite Wordpress Theme designers;

• Brian Gardner is very well known within the theme developers’ community & some of his best themes that are very well suited for online business blogs are LifeStyle, Corporate Theme & Streamline Theme
• Michael Jubel Hutagalung is also a very popular Wordpress Theme designer & his popular designs are Arthemia & Platformate
• Jai Nischal Verma who runs Blog Oh Blog. Jai has numerous free & premium Wordpress themes available on his website. However, the ones I like,  & the ones that can be used as a business theme are Statement, Techicon & Identity
• James McDonald has produced less themes but whatever he made has been a great asset. His most famous is the Bloggin Pro Theme that stands out till this day as one of the best themes for Google Adsense ads
• Darren Hoyt is another of my favorite Wordpress Blog Theme designer. He is original, unique & designs contemporary themes. His most popular contributions to the Wordpress community are the TimThumb plugin & the Mimbo Theme.

We also publish very selective Wordpress Business CMS themes especially for online marketers, MLM business owners & online affiliate marketers. All themes on our site is less than $10 – priced with the intent to have the best themes at the cheapest price!

The high selling themes are Bold Ads Theme, Coupon Ads Theme, Pro Affiliate Theme, Shopping Theme & the Quick Ads Theme.

If you are running your blogging business, tell us:

• what features do you look for in business themes?
• how effective have your blog theme been to your blogging business?
• which theme designer would you recommend to others who blog for money?

Though most bloggers & businesses are now on Twitter, very few use the essential helpful features that Twitter provides.

Here is a list of some of our popular posts on using Twitter for small business & bloggers.

• Innovative use of Twitter in Transportation Business
• Flutter as an alternative micro-blogging tool
• Interview with Twitter creator Biz Stone
• Using Twitter as a Small Business Marketing Tool
• 10 Ways to get Popular on Twitter
• Easy Twitter Tools for New Bloggers

Here are 10 Essnetial Twitter Features & Tools that could help you maximize its benefits to your blogging business.

• Twitter Search – use various keywords & operators with Twitter Search to find posts and tweets related to any specific subject.
• Using Free TweetDeck as Twitter & FaceBook Desktop Widget – use Twitter, view Favorites, friends, Replies & Direct messages from your desktop. You can separate Tweets into columns to large number of follow messages.
• TwitPic – post pictures on Twitter with TwitPic. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone or from the website.
• TweetShrink Shortener – this is a free service that replaces common phrases with symbols from Twitter feeds. Since each tweet must be within 140 characters, using tweetShrink allows you to use more words in your tweets.
• Finding common topics with Hashtags # – hashtags are words prefixed with the hash symbol (#). They are used to link tweets that share a common topic. Though anyone posting tweets could start a hashtag, it is usually more effective when a lot of people tweet on the same topic.
• Follow Users with WeFollow – unlike the built in Twitter follow tool, WeFollow is a people powered directory of interesting people worth following on Twitter.
• Use Tweetlater to Schedule Tweets – this is a free service that lets you schedule your Tweets. Much like you schedule Wordpress posts, TweetLater does the same for Twitter tweets. It works with multiple Twitter accounts too.
• Find Popular Twitter Topics with TwitScoop – though Twitter also provides a Trend list of the popular topics on Twitter, TwitScoop is another free service that helps you to find out the latest hot & popular Twitter posts. The list is updated in real time & moving your mouse over any word will list the latest 5 tweets using that word.
• Find Twitter Statistics on TwitterCounter – TwitterCounter is a free service that will give you your Twitter account statistics. It can also help you compare more than 1 Twitter account to compare the individual account statistics.
• Disguise Twitter at Work with SpreadTweet – created by Elliott Kember, SpreadTweet is Twitter that looks like an excel workbook spreadsheet. Versions of this Twitter disguising tool are available for Office OSX, Office 2003 & Office 2007 versions of Microsoft Office.

If you know of any other Twitter tool that you have effectively used with Twitter, please share it with our readers.

Depending on what your blog marketing strategy is, here is a list of 11 Essential Blog Marketing Tool that you will find immensely helpful to grow your online blog business.

1. Professional Business Cards – this is one of the most essential marketing tools for anyone. Get professionally made business cards with your logo & catch phrase.

• Click Here to create MOO Business Cards, MiniCards and Postcards – Create unique Business Cards and Stickers to help your business stand out!
• Click Here to get discounted Business Cards from Overnight Prints

2. Web Based Custom Surveys from Blogs – create a lot of user interaction & get readers’ feedback through polls & visitor surveys. Get professional surveys customized to your blog done by Creating custom web-based surveys and get rapid results! Create custom web-based surveys and get rapid results!

• Click here to Sign up for custom marketing surveys for your blogs
• Click Here to Build your Business with Online Surveys from Constant Contact & FREE 60-Day Trial

3. Print Professional Brochures, Flyers & Marketing materials – You can create & distribute various marketing materials from time to time. Many bloggers use such material as promotional materials to keep in touch with potential clients & dedicated readers.

• Click here to create marketing brochures, flyers, newsletters & postcards
• Click Here to get discounted Brochures & marketing tools from Overnight Prints
• Click Here to Save up to 90% & get FREE Shipping on all Marketing Products

4. Create Large Marketing Posters – these are absolute essential marketing tools especially for marketing & blogging events. Pro Bloggers & network bloggers have their logos & messages printed in large formats for distribution at kiosks & stalls.

• Click Here to Print Your Photos, Logos & Messages Extra Large!

5. Design Professional Logo for Your Online Brand – a Logo is essential to create a unique brand identity. There are numerous sites & sevices that provide free logos, but none of them are unique. You need to employ professionals who can understand your themes, the specific audience & create a custom logo.

• Click Here to Design Custom Business Logo

6. Email Marketing Services for Blogs – email marketing is an essential tool to succeed in the business of blogging. It helps you to be in constant contact with your readers, subscribers & use your affiliate products to recommend sales to your email subscribers.

• Click Here to Sign up Today for a 15 Day Free Trial with Email & Subscription Marketing
• Click Here to Build your business with Email Marketing from Constant Contact & get FREE 60-Day Trial

These are some of the essential blog marketing tools that every professional blogger have used over time to build their own brand, market their blogging business on the internet as well as in various marketing forums & meets.

If you want to share any other technique & marketing tool that you have used for marketing your blogs, please share it with our readers here.

This has also inspired us to launch a separate channel for Business CMS Themes to help small business owners get the best Wordpress Themes for Small Business.

Here is a list of some of our most popular articles:

• 10 Most Popular Blog Topics to Make Money Online from Blogs
• 10 Top Tools used by Pro Bloggers to Make Money Online
• 15 Ways to make Money Online from Blogs
• Google Adsense Alternatives for Blogs to Make Money from Blog Ads
• Best Shopping Ads for Blogs
• 10 Small Business Ideas to Make Money from Internet
• 25 Top Part Time Business Ideas Working from Home
• Top Wordpress Plugins for Affiliate MLM Blogs
• Increase Your Blog Income Dramatically – Learn from Best Blogging Gurus & Best Business Plugins
• Performance Review of Best Advertising Networks for Blogs – Ad Tips for New Bloggers
• Advertising on Blogs – First Step to Monetize Blog

Most of these popular topics have to do with sharing our experience on making money from blogs. These are great articles especially for new bloggers & for small online business owners. They contain our reviews as well as our recommendations on chosing the right advertiser & the right sponsors for your blogs to make the most money from them.

The last section that has been extemely popular especially with bloggers who have turned pro, is the Wordpress business themes download section. This section contains all our latest Wordpress Themes suited for Multiple Ads & Small Business, including MLM & Affiliate Business & Blogs related to Shopping Websites.

If you have a specific section or article that you want us to write more about, let us know or leave your comment here.

Professional Bloggers use a variety of tools to create content, create social awareness & buzz & gather trusted followers. There are automated tools available, along with training materials, that you have to know & implement to reach the next level of making substantial money from blogs.

In this article I shall detail out the Top 10 Tools that all Pro Bloggers use to Increase their Blog Revenue. You may need to implement few or all of them depending on how much money you want to make from your blogs & websites.

• Social Bookmarking Automation Software Blog Comment Software – with this automated software, you can Get Unlimited Supply Of High PR Backlinks And Laser Targeted Traffic
  From Major Bookmarking Sites. Just Fill In Some Blanks And Press The Start Button, And You Can Start Increasing Your Affiliate Commissions, Product Sales And Adsense Income Today – All Done In Minutes On Autopilot
• Push Button Marketer – Automation Software For Internet Marketers – this automated software Automates Tasks Like Email, Writing, Creating Websites, Checking Stats, Blogging, Website Maintenance, Posting Ads, Research, Product Reviews, And So Much More. It can also help in Managing websites, Managing PPC campaigns, Building websites or web pages & manage social networking.
• Learn How To Blog [Step-by-Step Video Tutorials] – Easy To Follow Video Tutorials Showing You Exactly How To Set Up Your Blog. All You Have To Do, Is Follow The Paint-by-numbers System Weve Put Together. Its Never Been Easier To Learn How To Set Up & Make Money from Your Very Own Blog.
• Super Affiliate Handbook – Start Your Own Home-Based Affiliate Marketing Business With Super Affiliate Rosalind Gardners Expert Guidance! Topics Include Blogging, Market Research, Affiliate Programs, Web Design, Problem Avoidance And So Much More! It will give you all the tips, tricks and the secrets of the Affiliate marketing trade to increase your affiliate blog earnings.
• Learn How To Make Money Blogging – Blog Mastermind – this is one of the BEST programs available on the internet, done by Pro Blogger & millionaire Yaro Starak. The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Led By Six-figure Yaro Starak Teaches You How To Set Up And Profit From A Successful Blog. Start Making Money From Blogs By Following This Step-by-step, Weekly Coaching Program.
• Wp Affiliate Pro – The #1 Plugin For WordPres Blogs – this is a Wordpress plugin with which you can Instantly Identify, Manage & Track Your Highest Performing Affiliate Links Over Your Entire Wordpress Blog In Less Time Than It Takes To Pour A Glass Of Kool Aid And Make More Money Doing So. It lets you focus on the highly popular pages, products & services increasing your blog earning dramatically.
• Automatic Rss & Blog Submission Tool – this is an automation software to Submit Your RSS Feeds And Blogs To Over 58 Directories And Sites. Save Time And Let Our Software Do The Work. Blogs that always show up on the top of the search pages are submitted repeatedly, once a month to once a quarter, to all the key directories.
• Cash Cow Guide To Adsense Wealth – a great tutorial on all the Adsense secrets for bloggers who use Adsense to generate blog income. It is a Step-by-step Formula For Creating Profit Pulling Wordpress Blogs.
• Wordpress Affiliate Elite – New WordPress Plug-in - A Powerful WordPress Plug-in. Convert Any Keyword In Your Blog To An Affiliate Link With Only A Single Mouse Click. This saves time in creating individual product links to earn commissions.
• Auto Content Cash – Wordpress Auto Blog System – all pro bloggers use auto content, either through PLR articles or opening it up to other members of the network & paying them to write for you. Auto Content Cash is based on the very latest gray hat marketing strategies that anyone can easily apply.

As I have said so many times before, persistence is the key to making money from your blogs. When you combine your persistence with effective strategies & social networking abilities, you blog income will increase dramatically.

If you have benefitted for any such programs above, please feel free to share it with our readers by leaving a comment or writing on Pro Media Blog.

I share my experience, what worked for me & what did not & some of the best tips on advertising, on this blog. In this post, I will share some of the resources provided by the established blogging Gurus.

• Roadmap to Becoming a Successful Blogger – Free Video Tutorials to help you get started with your online business & how to make money blogging.
• Blogging to the Bank – an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to become a pro-blogger & making thousands of dollars from your blogs.
• Wordpress Goldmine – all our blogs & affiliate websites are built on Wordpress. Thousands of affiliates & individuals have built their marketing & blogging network on Wordpress to make millions of dollars online. This invaluable resource shows you the tips & tricks to convert your ordinary Wordpress blog into a money making blog & affiliate site.
• How To Make Money Blogging – Blog Mastermind – this set of blogging resources come from one of the best in the business of blogging, Yaro Starak. The Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Led By Six-figure Yaro Starak Teaches You How To Set Up And Profit From A Successful Blog. Start Making Money From Blogs By Following This Step-by-step, Weekly Coaching Program.
• Earn 6 Figure Incomes from Professional Blogging – 6 figure incomes are possible from professional blogging. This is one of the top rated resources for blogging professionals. It has the Best In Class Content, 260 Pages Of No-nonsense Expert Advice, Stack Of Videos, & Completely Updated For Wordpress based blogs.
• Cash Fusion Success Videos – a complete video tutorial on blogging, from the basics to the finer elements of differentiating your blog from the remaining. These videos teaches you the art of Hyper Article Marketing & Super Affiliate Blogging that makes bloggers earn thousands of monthly dollars a month.

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Along with these educational resources & extensive step-by-step video tutorials to help you create a professional blog to make money online, here are a few of the most important Wordpress Plugins that are essential to making money from blogs:

• Wordpress Plugins that Automate your Blog – automation is the key to increasing your internet wealth. It frees up your time to do new business or spend time on your passions. This is a set of essential Wordpress Plugins especially for the professionals who are building Wordpress Blogs to make money online. These plugins are not available from any other online stores.
• Wordpress Link Cloak Plugin – affiliate links earn you money, whereas the same link, left open could also lead you to lose a lot of money. The Link Cloaking Plugin hides the affiliate links & secures your legitimate earnings from affiliate business.
• 2 Profitable Wordpress Plugins for ADPS & Zip Poster – Adps2 & ZipPoster Are 2 Powerful Wp Plugins That Will Automatically Drip Feed Content For Months Or Years To Come. Especially for affiliate & marketing blogs, with these plugins you can Add Affiliate Datafeed Products, Or Load Up 100s Of Articles Instantly.
• WP Affiliate Pro – the Number 1 Plugin for Money Making Wordpress Blogs – this is a plugin that is used by every Wordpress blogger who makes money from their blogs. It helps you instantly identify, manage & track your highest performing Affiliate Links over your entire Wordpress blog automatically. You can thus focus on promoting the links that already sell high & devise your strategy for those links that have the potential to do better.
• Wordpress Affiliate Elite Business Plugin – this plugin is used by all the affiliate marketers and anyone who makes thousands of dollars from product sales, either from Amazon or any other affiliate program. The more you can link products to your affiliate links, the more you earn from your blogs. This business plugin is a Powerful WordPress Plug-in to Convert Any Keyword In Your Blog To An Affiliate Link With Only A Single Mouse Click.
• WP Spinner Plugin – this is a great Wordpress business plugin to help online bloggers eliminate duplicate content from your blogs. Along with this, this plugin also protects your online business blog from Proxy Hijacking. It also Dynamically Rotate Ads, performs A/b Split Testing to find the perfect format & location of ads & adds Affiliate Tools & affiliate-programs to your blogs.

These are some of the treasured resources that are used by all professional bloggers & by business bloggers who make money from blogging. Although many of the business plugins I recommended on this post are for Wordpress, I am sure similar ones will also be available for TypePad or MoveableType blogs as well.

You can download these resources right now & spend some quality time understanding the tutorials. They are made by the Blogging & Online Business Gurus & have helped millions like myself to earn significant money from online blogs.

Read our articles on Google Adsense alternatives & all the ways to monetize blogs.

Very quickly we realized that Widget Bucks have started to earn us more money than most other shopping ad networks. Read the details on using Widget Bucks to make more money from blogs.
Click Here to Sign Up for Widget Bucks Ad Network & start making more money from blogs.

There are several reasons why we would recommend this blog ad network:

• extremely suitable for product advertising
• professional & eye-catching layout & display within all the IAB approved formats
• highly contextual product ads leading to high conversions
• very high CPM & CPC rates per ad
• international clicks are allowed which increases your chances of making more money from any visitor across the globe
• payment on time, every time
• easy to use reporting format to help you identify which all ads are making more money from you
• great referral program to earn residual income for life
• 3 distinct ad channels – technology products, local businesses & travel – all three are extremely popular within internet visitors

We have almost doubled our ad revenues when we started to focus on blog ad networks apart from Google Adsense. Moreover, Widget Bucks can be used along with any other ad network. You can also optimize your blog space by using competitive ad networks against them – so that the one with the maximum bid gets to show their ads on your blogs.

Click Here to Sign Up for Widget Bucks Ad Network.

One of the biggest road blocks to getting away from a regular paid job to starting a business is the feeling of insecurity if anything goes wrong! When I started my online work I too had the same fears, but I had a good plan in place.

Although I am still on a full time paid job, my online earning has grown significantly. Thanks to a solid plan & some great ideas!

Here are 10 Small Business Ideas Anyone Can Make Money From – Online Business:

1. Freelancing Online Jobs - you can start freelance writing for other businesses. Find thousands of freelance writing and editing jobs fresh jobs daily. Kick start your writing career for just $7.00. Click here

2. Join a Permission Research project & earn money for your reviews & opinions - Make Your Opinion Count, Join PermissionResearch!

3. Write & Promote products online – this is more like an affiliate business but you do not really have to hard sell. Often product & service companies will sponsor website owners to showcase their own products & services. This is also termed as paid research & paid reviews.

4. Promote a small local business in your network – using your social networks, both online & offline, you can promote a small local business & get paid. One of the best ways to promote businesses is to distribute online coupons.

Usually large organizations pay millions of dollars to social marketing companies to help create a buzz & be a social spokes person. You can do that for small local businesses too within your own network & get paid for doing that.

5. Set up an online domain & rent niche content – you can set up a domain (choose from the best domain hosts). Find a niche content & rent out your sub-domain for a monthly fee. This is a great business model for newer entrants who find it hard to promote their products or services on their own.

They often look to communities to get better visibility. Community sites like photo.net, youtube.com etc get millions of visitors each month & their owners earn a lot of money from advertisements.

6. Auction domains & Parked Domain ads – you can buy & sell domain names. People pay a lot of money to get the domain names of their choice. If you happen to own a domain that someone else needs, they pay you to transfer the domain in their name.

That apart, while you still own that domain, you can still earn money from parked domain ads. You can sign up with Sedo to register buy sell online domains.

7.  Make money from ads – if you already have a website (or a blog) you can signup free with advertisers and make money from ads. You can choose between CPC & CPM ads to earn an optimum amount of money. Good content always gets good advertisements.

Many publishers have started to move away from Google. There are a lot of Google Adsense alternative advertisers who also provide ads with high CPC rates.

8. Sell your p