The focus of this discussion had been on Making Money by Blogging Effectively (that is what ProMediaBlog is all about) & how to become an Effective Affiliate Marketer.

The Complete Q & A Session is available for download to our subscribers only.

Q1: What is the best time to get started with Affiliate Blogging & Affiliate Marketing?

When you are new to blogging, everything seems exciting & all these websites make you feel that you can make tons of money the moment you set up a website or a blog. I wish that was true!

It usually takes smart people anything from 6 months to a year to understand the basics of blogging, what you can use & what the effective channels of marketing are. I would suggest that if you have just started blogging, give it about a year before you go full time into affiliate marketing.

Q2: So what all do a New Blogger have to learn before they go into Affiliate Blogging & Affiliate Marketing?

If you look at the entire process of effective affiliate marketing, you will see that there are a few areas that you need to focus on. Essentially, if you master these areas, you will tremendously increase your chances of making huge money online.

Affiliate Blogging or Affiliate Marketing is more marketing than blogging. So you have to quickly learn how the money flows from buyer to the seller to you. An affiliate is much like a middleman – who does all the marketing, drives visitors to the affiliate pages & then hope that there are conversions (someone buys the product).

Being known in the right circles of customers as well as marketers is important. And one way to do that is to become an authority in your niche. So when you begin, try to learn as much about the niche as possible.

• What is the niche about?
• What is the potential of the niche?
• What are the customer’s expectations in this niche?
• Where all are the customers in this niche?
• How do the customers behave before & after buying a product etc?

Q3: Would you recommend any Training Program for Affiliate Blogging & Affiliate Marketing?

Yes, certainly. The most reputed is Yaro’s Mastermind Program. Click Here to Read About the Mastermind Training Program.

This is an expensive training program but an essential one if you are seriously thinking about making money online or setting up your own Online Blogging Business. Apart from the course itself, this training will offer the opportunity for new bloggers to meet & talk to a lot of experienced affiliate marketers & get to learn from their experience.

Q4: What Affiliate Programs do you Recommend for New Affiliates & New Bloggers?

There are a few ways to answer this question. So let me broadly classify this into 2 methods of making money online so that you can decide for yourself which is best for you.

Method 1: You can simply create a strong website or blog & earn sufficient money from advertising or promoting products by reviewing them on your sites. You can also make money by referring other people to sign up with these advertisers or promoters.

Click Here to Find All Ways to Make Money Online.

In this method, you focus on creating a strong content that drives readers either through organic searches or from advertisements & you make money from ads, links, referrals & product sales.

We also have several eBooks available only for registered members that gives you further details on each niche, programs & such.

Method 2: The other way is more appropriate affiliate marketing, where your focus is to sell. You will run extensive promotions, both online & offline, to drive visitors to your product pages & would focus on converting visitors to customers.

Click Here to Read our Recommendations on Top Affiliate Networks we work with.

In this method, which is significantly different from the first one, you drive very specific set of readers to your websites & convince them to buy from your site. You make money from the commissions mainly.

Q5: What is the best way to start Affiliate Marketing for New Affiliates & New Bloggers?

These are 2 completely different tactics to make money online. However, many affiliate marketers start off simply by creating content (Method 1) & get to learn the ropes around internet marketing before they completely move onto affiliate marketing (Method 2).

Remember though, pure affiliate marketing (Method 2) earns you more money compared to content marketing (Method 1) & have completely different tactics to succeed.

Q6: Why do most people talk of building lists for Affiliate Marketing?

An email ID is one way to reach out to potential readers & customers even if they are not visiting your websites regularly. You can reach out to them proactively when you are running a special promotion or when you want to engage them in any discussions.

Q7: So if I have a large list of emails, will I make a lot of money by sending promotional emails?

That is the basic idea, what you send emails using the lists & they come to buy the products you are marketing. But the reality with lists & emails is quite different.

We work with a few email marketing companies for our businesses. Click Here to Read about our Preferred Email Marketing Partners.

Q8: What is the cost to set up the entire online business system for New Affiliate Marketers & New Bloggers?

Cost (& expenses) is the most important inhibiting factor for anyone who is starting new. However this also causes another problem that you do not notice upfront. While trying to save cost, new bloggers & new affiliate marketers either leave out essential things or do them in a cheap way that becomes a challenge when your business starts to grow.

We have a complete service from Creative Business Themes that set up a complete online business system in a way that is cheap, easy to maintain, low running costs & very scalable. If you are starting new, it will cost you less than USD 100 to get started.

Conclusion

The complete Q&A session was more exhaustive with about 20 questions that are very pertinent to anyone who is just beginning or are in new to affiliate marketing. However, these questions & answers will address most of the important ones that would help any new blogger or new affiliate marketer to get started the right way.

The Complete Q & A Session is available for download to our subscribers only.

You win all rounds! So how does one write such a post? Here is what we have experienced with our articles that can give you several ideas to make your’s popular.

10 Tips to Make Your Posts Popular

A popular post is not just about good copywriting. A popular post is an effective blog post that combines facts, statistics, humor & criticisms. It is like a short story that conveys a message with examples.

1. Write what you know the best & write facts

When you write about the subject you know best, you give out facts & the truth. Readers love facts, numbers & statistics. Often in choosing between facts & the truth, readers often love the facts & when these facts are supported by numbers, they tend to become the truth

2. Write with authority & quote others who have same opinions

In your posts you often use thoughts, ideas & opinions you have read somewhere else. Since readers have come to your post searching the internet, when you give them the references & links to others who have expressed similar opinions, you offer a small value to your readers by saving them the time looking for them elsewhere

3. Challenge yourself to create a virtual discussion

Be your reader while writing your post. Think of what the reader would be thinking when they read your article. If your post raises questions, challenge yourself & express your argument both ways so that all the reader’s questions will be answered by the end of your post

4. Use an interesting picture or a video to create your story

A post is like a short story. Most writers don’t use pictures & videos effectively to create their stories. You will find numerous pictures on Flickr (available for use with simple credits) & numerous videos on YouTube that can help you supplement your post with additional humor or content

5. Write for your readers, not for yourself

Each post is like a sales pitch, it has to have something for the reader. Its a good idea to write one post on one topic & keep focused on that. Once done, read your own post & see what it offers you as a readers – does it solve a problem? does it give you that additional information you could not find elsewhere?

6. Link only when necessary

Don’t clutter your post with links, a post is not a link directory. People re-tweet posts that are original & strong on content & usually where there is no hard selling. People especially do not share posts on Twitter or Facebook that have too many links or a series of sales pitches

7. Write something evergreen

“Hot topics” are not always right for everyone to write on. Instead choose some evergreen topics, that do not loose its meaning in a short time. We have seen that such topics become more popular over time than the once that are “current” in nature.

On the other hand, “hot topics” like a great deal, or a paparazzi picture of a Hollywood star, or a rumor about a new Nikon lens get tweeted & retweeted more often than evergreen posts, while they significantly loose readers’ attention in a short while.

8. Opinions matter – make your opinions loud & clear

People are on your blog post to read your opinions. Do not hesitate to share your own opinion, no matter what others might have said elsewhere. This is your chance to be honest or even controversial.

This is especially true if you are offering some sort of a review of a product, like a new Nikon lens for example. The famous photographers might have said something good, but if you have found the opposite, go ahead & voice your opinion.

9. Do not sacrifice your post for SEO

I have seen numerous bloggers do this frequently – write the keywords first, the title second & then frame the post with appropriate keyword density. Its good for search engines, not so good for readers. Especially if you are not an experienced copywriter (most of are not), this is the sure shot way to ruin your post.

Write your post in a fluid manner so that it is easy to read and understand, using simple words. You should use the TITLE & the META tags effectively to optimize your post for good SEO.

10. Leave something for the readers to think & take home

Many time I have seen good posts ending abruptly or with closed statements. Leave something for the readers to think & come back to comment on. A good way is to end with a direct question asking for opinions & feedback from your readers

Those are the 10 simple ways we have learned to make our posts popular. Dont go by how many tweets or re-tweets you have. If you look popular blogs like Gizmodo etc, you will see most posts with 300+ re-tweets. That is nice to have but these are not just organic tweets – meaning, normal users would just not come to these sites & re-tweet.

When you have 20000+ daily readers & above 200 people writing on your blog, like many of these sites have, getting those many re-tweets would seem quite natural to you.

What do you do to make your posts popular?

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!

We Wish a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year 2010 ahead.

In the coming year, we shall publish more ebooks for our readers & subscribers. We hope you will enjoy reading them, benefit from the tips & share them amongst your business communities.

You will see more ideas on Effective Blogging here on Pro Media Blog, more ways to make your blogging effective & optimizing your online businesses. We will continue to focus on being effective – being an effective marketer, an effective online business owner & definitely a very effective blogger. You will have more articles & case studies helping you & your business becoming more effective in strategy & operations.

This year had been tough, financially & economically. We hope that the coming year 2010 brings you the much needed success & growth & that your community benefits from that!

]]> http://www.promediablog.com/merry-christmas-a-happy-new-year-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.promediablog.com/blogging-for-money-10-ways-to-use-twitter-effectively-for-advertising-making-money/ http://www.promediablog.com/blogging-for-money-10-ways-to-use-twitter-effectively-for-advertising-making-money/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:00:50 +0000 Ranjay Mitra http://www.promediablog.com/?p=1766 This post is a continuation of the Blogging for Money Series, where we will look at 10 Simple Steps to use Twitter Effectively. This post is not about the Twitter technology, but more on how Twitter could be used in conjunction with a blog to increase effectiveness.

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.

This ebook is free for redistribution. If you are running your own website or blogs & would want to offer this ebook to your readers, you are free to do so. You must however keep the credits & the content intact. The copyright will belong to Pro Media Blog.

Click Here to Review & Download the ebook.

We will continue to publish many such ebooks going forward. While most of them would be available to all our readers (and you can redistribute them freely from your websites) some of them are only available to our email subscribers.

You can either sign up as a subscriber free of cost, or you could download these special copies for under US $5.00 anytime. These special copies are not for licensed redistribution.

All Ways of Making Money Online Working Part Time is a free ebook about how people like you & me can still make a substantial amount of money blogging online & only for a couple of hours a day.

Subscribers to ProMediaBlog newsletters will have the link at the end of the email. Simply download this ebook & use it as a handy guide to get started. The main challenge of part time bloggers is to choose the right income stream & this ebook lists 15 different income streams to choose from.

Effective Blogging is only one of the ways mentioned in this ebook & while you will find extensive details on making money with an effective money making blog, this ebook will also show you both traditional online income streams as well as the emerging ones.

Subscribe by email below to get this ebook All Ways of Making Money Online Working Part Time delivered in your email now.

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.

If organic search is your only marketing tactics, then your site has to be fairly optimized for your keywords. But if you are running an affiliate website, or a blog, I would say, stick to the basics.

You can read these articles I have posted earlier:

• Basics of Search Engine Optimization – Top 5 ways to optimize your website on your own
• 10 Simplest & Easy to Implement SEO techniques for your Websites & Blogs
• Basic Layman’s SEO – Page Ranks & How Page Rank Impacts Web Traffic

Very recently I wrote about Google PR & If Google Page Rank is at all Important for an Affiliate website. Many of my readers & subscribers wrote back to me asking how far should they go investing in SEO & Google PR.

If you are running an affiliate campaign, then your Google PR is not sufficient to get you enough organic search clicks to make any significant money. You have to depend on paid searches & search advertising.

If you are not investing in these advertising campaigns, or a new blogger or new to affiliate marketing, I would recommend going with the basics of SEO:

• focus on the META tags (TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION)
• focus on using H1, H2 tags & bulleted lists for important keywords & key phrases
• keep the content tight with an average keyword or key phrase density of 15% – 25%
• use image(s) is possible & name them, tag them (ALT tag) with a good description
• keep post length between 300 words to about 450 words

I would recommend using the professional plugins for further Search Engine Optimization. I have recommended them in this article:

• Affiliate Marketing Tips – Wordpress Plugins for Affiliate Marketing Blogs

If you are not willing to pay any money for these professional business plugins, use a free one from Wordpress. Plugins are easy to use & do not need much to maintain or update either. But you must remember to manually fill in the SEO details & not continue with a “system generated” META tags.

Another point I would recommend is to submit your site, blog or even the campaign landing page to search engines. You can do it for free & you do not need to pay out any money. Click here to get a list of all the popular search engines your should submit to. I would recommend submitting again every 3 months.

The last point I would recommend is to ensure that your website or campaign page loads fast. Google for example will now look at page load time for each page before it assigns a Page Rank (read Preparing for Caffeine Page Rank – 5 Tips for Improving Site Loading Time). Apart from Google’s PR, a slow site is also one of the main reasons people lose sales. More than 35% of all shopping carts are abandoned just because of slowness of the site!

For example, consider 2 websites, Site A with PR 5 & Site B with PR 4, are both about “birthday cakes”. So when someone searches for “birthday cakes” in Google, they see Site A listed before Site B.

You can either install the Google Toolbar to see PR of any website or use an external tool to give you the PR of any site or page (online PR Checker for example).

Is Google Page Rank Important for Your Blog?

You can live without any Google PR actually. While Google will probably serve your pages less frequently due to a low PR, it may not affect your business at all. SEO experts will give you a lot of ways to build inbound links (back links) but no one can assure that it will increase your Google Page Rank!

Unless you are selling links from your site, PR would not hurt your business or revenues. Sure you will get less hits (since your site will not appear as many times as others) & this could reduce your overall advertising earning.

In general, commercial sites tend to have lower Page Ranks from Google. So if you are running an affiliate website, Google will tend to assign lower page ranks. There is no record that advertising with Google Adwords will help you get better ranks.

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.

Technorati, Digg & StumbleUpon buttons ran on almost every website & blog. But with Twitter & Facebook gaining popularity in 2009 as an alternative social bookmarking tool, the others have taken the back seat.

Here on Pro Media Blog we experimented with the effectiveness of some of the very frequently seen social networking websites. The objective was to find which social sharing buttons should we continue to retain on our websites & which social networking sites are no longer effective.

Here are the results on the effectiveness & popularity of some of the social bookmarking buttons on a couple of our websites:

Social Bookmarking Buttons that are Very Likely to Be Clicked by Readers

• Tweetmeme
• Twitter Retweet
• Facebook Sharing
• Yahoo Buzz

Click rates were 60% or more for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that have Moderate Likelihood of Being Clicked

• Technorati
• Digg
• StumbleUpon

Click rates were 20% or less for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Social Bookmarking Buttons that will Possibly Never be Clicked

• Del.icio.us
• Reddit
• Newsvine
• Plurk

Click rates were negligible (less than 2%) for these buttons compared to the rest of the ones we put up on the same posts & pages.

Positioning the Social Bookmarking Buttons for Effectiveness

The second parameter in our experiment to find the effectiveness of the social networking buttons was to find which location caused the most clicks.

Of the various 4 corners of the post, the top left proved to be the most effective location. We had over 30% more clicks on the social bookmarking buttons that were positioned on the top left corner of the post.

Our experiment were conducted mostly on the technology related websites but could we safely extend the findings to any blog in general?

1. Have you had any different experience with the effectiveness of any specific bookmarking button – shape, size, colors or location?
2. Which Social Bookmarking Buttons worked for you?

Let us know.

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”.

You can follow these instructions carefully & you will see significant changes to your website or blog’s time to load.

Load Time definition: In layman’s terms, it is the time that is taken to render a single web page completely on an internet web browser.

The First Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to benchmark your site’s load time before you make any changes. You can use a free internet tool like Pingdom.com & note 2 things:

1. how long your takes to load now

2. which all sections (images, scripts etc) takes long time to load

The Second Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to carry out these following modifications.

• Tip 1 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Reduce File Sizes
  

Make your website files smaller in size. Blogs use template files, while static websites could be made up of individual pages (with various extensions like .htm, .html, .asp, .jsp, .php etc).

Edit your files or blog templates to delete any white spaces. Each space, line break, tab that you insert in the template files or the website page adds to it’s size. Deleting any such unused spaces will reduce the file sizes & make your page load faster.

Note that spaces are often kept for formatting & it usually helps to maintain & edit them later on if you have spaces.

Similarly, remove any unwanted comments from your pages & blog templates as well. Comments also increase the file size without affecting the look & feel or the contents.

• Tip 2 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – use CSS stylesheets rather than inline styling
  

A stylesheet (files with extension .CSS) contains the codes that define how your website or blog would look, including areas of texts, images, links etc. You can also define these look & feel by including styles within templates & individual files. These are called inline styles and override the ones in stylesheets.

But each inline style you use, your website or blog page’s loading time increases. Remove all inline styling & copy them into your stylesheets.

• Tip 3 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Consolidate Javascript functions into 1 file

Much like stylesheets, Javascripts can be coded inside the individual pages or templates. Or they can reside outside of them in files with extension .js. Instead of using multiple small javascript files, you can copy all your scripts into one single file.

You can edit individual javascript files, copy all the content & paste them into 1 javascript file. You can then refer to this single file in the <head> section of your page or template.

• Tip 4 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – reduce image file sizes & eliminate “include” files
  

Look into the the report you had from Pingdom.com in First Step. Find out all the images that are taking long time to load. Edit them to a smaller file size.

Check your files & blog templates for places where you are using the “include” function. In Wordpress templates, you will find codes like <?php include(“filename”) ?>. Its best if you can avoid including external files & bring them into the main page or template directly.

• Tip 5 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google Caffeine Page Rank – enable caching on your server

Speak to your website hosting service provider & ask for steps to allow “server caching”. If you are using Wordpress, you can use any of the popular caching plugins. The ones that are very reputed are WP-Cache & WP-Super Cache.

Caching plugins help you to serve cached pages to the visitors automatically. Cached pages load faster than normal template based Wordpress pages or posts.

A Note on Using Advertisements & Analytic tools

Advertisements & analytic tools built into the pages often slow down the websites. It is a good idea to place ads strategically so that they do not slow down your website to a large extent. As for the analytic tools (like Google Analytics, Site Counter codes etc), it is best to place them in the footer of your website or blog templates.

The Third Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to measure the loading time again, after you have implemented all the 5 recommended steps. Use pingdom.com & measure the improvements against the benchmark you had before you made any changes.

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.

Google also publishes updates on the Caffeine blog & has posted an interview with Mike McDonald on YouTube as well. Google has already started to roll out Caffeine in various data centers & its believed that by the time the holidays are over, Caffeine will be in full effect.

While many bloggers are technology savvy, most are not. But there are several easy ways to ensure that your website loads fast & you can implement several easy changes to improve your website or blog’s loading time.

In the follow up post, I will provide you with 5 easy & quick changes that will help you. You do not need to be a programmer to try out any of those.

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.

In this section of the Blogging for Money Series I will talk about my approach to affiliate marketing is slightly different from many other pro-affiliate marketers. I use the consultative selling methods to market products & services. And that’s where my choice of the best affiliate program networks help.

While hardcore affiliate selling would involve email marketing, promotions & advertising, in consultative selling you simply define a problem, offer solutions & along with that recommend products & services that could solve the problems.

The most important success factors with consultative marketing is your ability to choose solutions & compare products that meet the needs. This requires me to choose my programs that offer multiple solution providers.

You can read about the top affiliate network programs that are extremely suitable for soft sellers & new affiliate marketers & new bloggers. These are the best of the lot!

Recommendation 1 – Never Blue Affiliate Network

You get a wide range of providers to choose from, from technology & technology service providers, to small business solutions. They also have a wide network of advertisers in finance, health, nutrition & diet categories too.

Their payment is always on time & even though they pay by check, once you start earning consistently, they can start paying you through paypal.

Click Here to Sign Up with Never Blue Affiliate Network

Recommendation 2 – Revenue Ads Network

This is an international network of advertisers & you can monetize most of your international traffic. The major advantage that we have seen with this network is the number of alternative products in each niches.

Click Here to Sign Up with Revenue Ads

Recommendation 3 – Click Bank Affiliate Network

This is one of the oldest affiliate networks. Along with products, they have upgraded their systems to show advertisements in specific categories too. Their commission structure varies from 50% to over 70% for most of their products.

This has consistently been a great network especially for software products, software downloads, training & educational products & financial solutions especially for home business & small business.

Click Here to Sign Up with Click Bank Affiliate Network

Recommendation 4 – Affiliate Bot Network

This is a comparatively new network with the latest technologies & payment structures. Much like the others, they have an extremely wide range of advertisers ranging from technology, home improvements & social niches.

Click Here to Sign Up with Affiliate Bot Network

If you are new to affiliate marketing or you are a blogger getting into affiliate marketing, here are a few tips to improve your ROI.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 1: It takes time to start generating high incomes consistently. Please be patient & keep publishing & promoting for the first 12 months without really worrying much about how much you are earning.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 2: Keep advertising under control. Most advertisers would want you to advertise & compete on search campaigns to sell. It is easy to spend more in advertising without realizing that you could be losing more money than you should. Track your ad spends carefully, especially in the first 12 months.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 3: Choose only a few networks, but choose the best affiliate programs to partner with. Simply signing up with a large number of affiliate networks will not help. It could be disastrous too. When advertisers see that you are constantly failing to generate revenue for them, they might ban your company from participating in their programs.

Affiliate Blogging Tip 4: Unless you are in a niche, try out various types of products & see which ones work well for you & your website visitors. This could also give you a fair idea on what niche to choose from. Choosing a variety of products also help to balance your earnings over the course of the year & reduces your risk of failure in case one specific product line does not work out.

Lately I have several readers asking me about my recommendations on choosing the best way to publish a print book. Though I have not published any printed book yet, I can tell you what I have heard from the others who did.

Of the several options to choosing the best self publishing tool, here are the ones that I have heard good things about. These are all Print On Demand services. It means that you can design your entire book & publish it. You could do the order fulfillment yourself by keeping a stock of the books, receiving orders & shipping them yourselves. Or you could sell your printed books from several online retailers & pass on a hefty commission to them. Either way, you own the rights to your books & would be responsible for any legal issues.

Amazon Publishers: Amazon gives you are very competitive rate to publish your books in color or black & white. The print prices are reasonable & any book will come with an ISBN. If you self publish books with Amazon, your book will be automatically available on Amazon.com & they will do the fulfillment too.

In return, they will get 30% of the retail price as commission.

The advantage with self publishing with Amazon are many:

• You get the best price for print
• Your book automatically comes with an ISBN
• Your books are automatically available on Amazon.com
• You can create alternate versions to your print book like ebook & downloadable books for Kindle (available for regular Kindle Wireless Reading Device as well as for the Latest Generation Kindle DX

Lulu Self Publishing: Lulu is one of the first companies that revolutionized the self publishing business by letting people design, create & publish their printed book in less than 2 weeks. Their process is very simple.

Once you have created a PDF version of your book, you upload them onto Lulu’s servers. Lulu then creates a sample book as a proof & sends it over to you for authorizing them to publish. You could make any corrections from the first proof before you publish. Anytime you make a change you must order a proof copy from Lulu.

Lulu also runs their own online bookstore much like Amazon. They also take their commissions everytime a book is sold from their stores. But you dont need to pay anything unless you have sold.

Lulu has the option of attaching the ISBN barcode but you have to apply for it separately. They are working on a process to make it easier for self publishers to obtain ISBN codes right from their website.

Blurb Self Publishing: I like using the Blurb software especially for photography books. The pr-edesigned templates are very attractive & could make printing a photo book a breeze!

With Blurb, you need to download the publishing software onto your computer. Once you are ready with your pictures & text, you choose the best template & start adding the pictures & adding the text. Once done, Blurb software will connect to their servers & upload your copy. And you are all set to print your first book.

Much like Lulu, you must buy the first copy of your book. You can use this as a proof reading copy to make final changes or go ahead & ask them to publish the book.

Blurb also runs their own online stores & if you want you can use that to sell your books. Blurb will keep a commission every time you sell a copy. At this time, they do not have a mechanism to add ISBN codes automatically. They are added subsequently when you design your cover, provided you have already received your ISBN number.

Whichever way you publish, the copyright remains with you. Amazon, Lulu & Blurb would not be responsible for the content & assumes that you have all the legal documents necessary (like model releases for images etc).

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.

This is an absolute new system, so there isn’t much to write about how effective sponsored advertising tweets could be. They have been running sponsored tweets for a little over six months now and mostly in the areas of pay-per-click tweets.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

I have tried their beta system for over 2 months, mainly to experience how sponsored tweets work & if it could have a good potential of making money for the twitters. My choice had been the pay-per-click tweets & although I measured a large number of clicks, the earning had been less than $50.

Twitter has the potential to be a great marketing & branding channel, but I believe that marketers could beat this system to death. There has to be some control in how a sponsored advertising PPC system should work on Twitter. And we still don’t know how advertisers are measuring the validity of the clicks.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

As long as you have over 200 followers you are eligible to get sponsors. You set your own price and if the advertiser finds you credible enough, you will get an offer directly from the advertisers.

As for sharing the profit, you, as a tweeter, get to keep 50% and the system will retain another 50%. So if you are asking for $1.00 for a tweet, the sponsor has to pay out $2.00 to the marketing agency.

But then again, advertising on Twitter will get more complicated & competitive. So I would suggest that you register now & start experimenting. If nothing else, you would still get to learn how sponsored tweets work & if at all that could get you a handsome income in the future.

In addition to this, we have also made significant money from tweeting relevant ads & sponsored messages with these Twitter advertisers below. If you have a Twitter account, you can sign up for free with all & be on your way to making money from Twitter.

• Advertised Tweets – Click Here & Sign Up with Adly & Make Money tweeting messages on twitter
• Tweet Paid Ads – Click Here to Sign Up for Free with Twitter Ads & Make Money on Twitter
• Twitter Revenue – Click Here to Sign Up With Twitter Revenue & Make Money Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter is also a viral way to advertise. Read our experience on how we earned 600% advertising on Twitter here.

The title probably does not do justice to the post! I call these the “Easy Ways to Make Money Online” for 2 reasons:

1. Reason 1 - these are proven techniques & hence there are less possibilities of failures
2. Reason 2 - many of these websites can be run on auto-pilot, meaning you do not have to work continuously to make money, making them good channels for long term residual income streams.

• Easy Forex Trading – is a revolutionary Forex trading platform. A pioneering display of animated trades enables an intuitive and simple interaction with the financial market.
  

You can easily Access real time Forex rates, easily connect with the Online trading community. To help you profit easily from the foreign exchange rates, the system will provide you with trading charts & Innovative trading tools.

If you have some experience in the financial trading market, this could be a great way to make money online, working part time from the comfort of your home or even during any free time at work.

Click Here to Start Your Forex Trading Business Now

• Open Your Own Kids Online Store – over $221 billion dollars are spent on kids every year making this is a great niche for online business.

This system will gives you all the tools needed to open your  own turnkey online business solution to profit from this expanding market. They are offering a free trial to users with shipping costs of ONLY $1.97.

You can take a break from the overcrowded, traditional Business Opportunity markets (Google, eBay, etc) and cash in on a niche with very less or almost no competition!

Click Here to Start Your Own Kids Online Store Now

• Online Pet Stores – much like the kids stores, this niche has an estimated $40.8 billion spent every year on pets in the US alone. When you sign up, you will receives free information about having your own online pet supply store.
  

There is no set up fee to begin earning money in this niche offer. There is not much competition in this niche either, especially from the small business & individual business entrepreneurs, making it another great place to make money easily.

Click Here to Get Started with Your Own Online Pet Stores Now

• Join Survey Team – You can sign up for free & start earning money from online surveys. Marketing companies spend millions of dollars gathering feedback on various products & services.

Once you sign up for free, you could earn $3 bonus just for signing up, & in addition you can own the products you review, depending on the particular survey. This is a no risk way to make money online, but the returns are generally low earning you cash rewards of up to $80 for each simple online survey you complete!

Click Here to Join Survey Team for Free & Start Making Money Online

• Make Money the Easy Way with Inbox Dollars – much like the earlier system, here too, you can make money by taking surveys, playing games etc. These are promotional reviews, paid for by the companies that are marketing the product. The earnings are not high, but it is one of the easiest ways to earn cash online.

Click Here to Sign Uo with Inbox Dollars & Start Making Money Now.

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.

Funneling refers to channeling or diverting visitors. This necessarily means that you already have some means to reach out to your readers – either through existing blogs, websites or emails etc.

This article is not about getting readers from anywhere else, this is all about funneling readers from one or more of your existing sites to one specific blog or a specific post.

I have described some of these topics before (as in 15 Ways to Build Traffic or Using Daily Emails to Get More Visitors etc), but not necessarily in the context of funneling traffic. In this article, lets see how you can divert some of your existing readers to your blogs or sites in a more congenial manner.

1. Using Microsites or Satellite Websites to Funnel Traffic

You can set up a set of smaller websites or blogs that can act as funnels. Many people use their blogs on Wordpress or Blogger to bring in new traffic. I would prefer a Wordpress microsite over a Blogger blog. Wordpress has an extremely active community & the system automatically links “related posts” from other bloggers (that can be seen an free advertising for you!).

Moreover, they have an active dashboard that run feature posts, latest posts in specific categories that make it easier to get attention of the million plus Wordpress bloggers.

You can post articles of one of your blog or website on these microblogs & get those readers onto your target blog. Since these existing sites already have your trusted subscribers, it would be easy to bring them onto your other blogs or sites.

2. Funneling Traffic from Web 2.0 Social Networking Sites

This is one easy way to bring your friends & followers onto any of your existing or even new blogs or websites. The basic is to set up your profile right, with a pictures & a website URL that people can check out.

Various social networking sites & different ways to share information. The “Status” on FaceBook, or the RSS Application on FaceBook is a great way to share your latest news on the profile. Twitter also lets you share links in your “status update” provided you keep it within 140 letters.

Similarly, LinkedIn has a new application for Wordpress that can let you share RSS feeds. All your updated could be made visible to anyone connected to you on LinkedIn.

References:

a. 10 Twitter Features & Tools to Use

b. Twitter Plugins, Badges & Feeds

c. Top 20 Social Networking Sites

3. Advertising Your New Blog for Free

Advertising helps get new visitors. However, you can cross advertise within your own group of sites & blogs. While full fledged advertising could be expensive, we have some easy tips of choosing advertisers. But when you are advertising your sites on each other, you do not have to shell out any money.

On similar lines, you can also set your asking prices for the CPC & CPM ad networks & divert any residual traffic with your own ads for one of your sites or blogs. Google for example allows you to show your ad in case they have no ads on their inventory. Using this “back-up” advertising feature causes you to lose no potential earning from ads either.

References:

a. 3 Great Options of Free Advertising

b. Reviews of Best Ad Networks

4. Using Videos & Images to Funnel Traffic

You can leverage your profiles on Video & Photo sharing websites to funnel some of your readers to your other blogs & websites. Using YouTube Channels or Flickr friends effectively can help you bring in new readers as well as your existing connections from these sites to your new blogs.

You can even create an introductory video for your new site describing what it does & how it can help solve some specific problems & upload it onto YouTube. Tagging the video correctly with the right keyword could get you a lot of visitors from YouTube & other video sharing sites.

References:

a. Using Videos to Get Traffic

b. Using YouTube to Get Traffic

5. Funneling Traffic Specifically from Popular Posts

This is again a very easy way to cross pollinate your posts or blogs. You can pick up a handful of posts that always receive high traffic or constantly receives comments & link that to your new blogs or sites. You can do that by mentioning it as a link in the content.

In posts that has a lot of comments, you can also “reply” to the comments more frequently & display the link to the new blog or even a link to another specific post as your signature.

References:

a. Tips on Writing Articles that Gets High Visitors

Let me know how these funneling techniques work for you.

The bad part of the situation is that it could stop you from blogging for a long time if you do not address the situation. The good part is, may of these current challenges of part time blogging could be solved to a large extent.

I have not faced much of these challenges as a part time blogger. But I have friends who have. And many of you who have written to me have also given me some ideas to cope with the sictuations that I am going to share here.

Change your Blogging Schedule – this is the easiest thing to do & naturally what most would do. If you were writing 5 posts a day, drop it down to 2. I am suggsting publishing fewer number of effective posts rather than blog large number of half hearted articles. There is no excuse to writing poor quality posts.

Be Flexible with Time & Place – many bloggers always write at a specific time at a specific place. It could be after work in Starbucks or late night at your desk. Learning to be flexible with the time & place where you generally write could refresh your body & mind.

True, it will be an inconvenience to begin with, but with the changing habit you could write anywhere! A friend of mine now car pools & writes down his thoughts & sketches on the commute, making it easier for him to publish when he is back with his computer.

Take Up a Fitness Class – I have done this personally & know it helps. I was struggling to keep the schedule with a demanding full time job, a tough customer & often I was not able to leave my computer for hours. Toxins set in the body & slowly starts to take away your energy from within.

I started to find sometime for getting back to swimming. In about a week’s time started to feel rejuvenated & completely energized. Try the gym or some free hand exercise after work – it helps.

Using Lunch Hours for Blogging – usually we would take a break for anything between 30 minutes to an hour for lunch. Use your lunch hour away from desk in a conference room & write. If you are using the lunch hour also for your gym, then maybe you can still squeeze in about 15 minutes for your blogging work.

Using a Personal mobile Office – I have rarely used my employers computers for my personal business. I have Set up my own Mobile Blogging Office so that I can publish from anywhere I want. It is just a matter of habit & now blogging has been fun & easy.

If a $200 netbook & a $30 netbook broadband connection could give you the freedom to publish from anywhere, then why not go for it?

These are just hard times, and like everything else, it will pass. However, you must keep writing, maybe less, but you must keep publishing your best content even during these tough times. Your effective blogging could start becoming your full time occupation very soon!

• How have you solved your problems with making time for part time blogging?

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Probably the reason being they are still not sure how far Twitter would evolve & if they could make a revenue channel off these advertising tweets.

You can listen in to Biz by joining his 1,200,000+ followers on his Twitter.

Numerous advertisers are coming up with CPC Advertising for Twitter. Sponsored Tweets are already becoming common on twitter – much like any sponsorships, they pay the users a flat monthly fee to promote their company on Twitter.

I have not used Twitter for advertising yet (I have been making the mistake of ignoring Twitter & I have only been using it to re-post my blogs, mainly due to the lack of time!). I have heard from other marketers & bloggers that even though its easy to tweet ads on Twitter, the income is still very low.

As an example, someone with 5,000 active Twitter followers, a sponsored tweet is getting them slightly over $15 a day. That is peanut considering the fact that these are all 5,000 active followers. I would guess that marketers are still not sure of how to track the valid clicks.

For those who have been growing their followers list with the idea of affiliate marketing, Twitter could become a steady revenue earner. If not for people buying stuff right away, but definitely from CPC ads & sponsored ads.

You could follow me on Twitter for more such updates & articles & subscribe to my newsletter too.

Having been a part time blogger for many years, I can relate to their problems. I have decided to share some of the unique problems that part time bloggers face for my readers here.

The reason for this post, and the one coming after where I talk about various ways to help part time bloggers succeed, is first to mention that most of us face them. And second, not all of them can be solved! Simply because they are circumstancial & not within your control.

Lack of Time – this is the most common problem. Especially now, with the weak economy & numerous reports of job losses, there is a fear within employers that they could lose their jobs too. This fear makes them stay longer in office, not necessarily adding any value!

Any additional time at work automatically cuts down the time they used to spend on writing their blogs or working in someway to promote their small business.

More Stringent Office Rules – although people blame it on the current weak economy, office rules have not really changed much. They are just being exercised more rigorously to save every penny.

This affects they way many part time blogger use their lunch hours, or office computer for their blogging business. Work place supervisors now seem to notice every minute of every task that you are doing. And employers are also stopping their people from using their computers to access several internet websites (to save bandwidth costs etc).

More Business Travel – this came out to be the part-time-blogging challenge for many bloggers, especially those whose full time job involved some amount of business travel. With sales dipping in this economy, there have been rigorous travel schedules for any business trip.

A trip that was done in 10 days for example, even till the last year, is now expected to be completed in four. And if there were follow up trips with a couple of days break in between, well, there is no break now. People with a mobile office can still save some time for their blogging work.

On the other hand, many companies & employers have cut down on travel & getting majority of their meetings done on phone or video conferencing systems. Many organizations are even running presentations with their clients remotely to save time & money.

Unable to Attend Conferences & Blog Meet Ups – this again relates to the long hours one is spending at work that is taking up their personal time. Part time bloggers are finding it hard to attend blogging conferences & meet ups & even spend time for social networking.

One of the major impacts to this has been on new affiliate bloggers. Since a lot depends on learning affiliate marketing, unable to make to these seminars & educational meetings are a big set back.

Stress & Health Issues – this is probably a culmination of long hours at work, ad-hoc schedules & traveling as well as the uncertainties of the job. They all build stress & causes sickness, depression & numerous health issues.

A failing health is probably the worst sort of a situation if you are trying to set up your own blogging work. Moreover, study shows that a lingering symptoms of depression could cause any past diseases to relapse easily.

• How has your part time blogging schedule been affected?
• What had been your challenges to part-time-blogging in these economic times?

It’s very frustrating, especially if you are having the same page views or increasing number of page views but your CTR is going down! In my case, with my technology web sites, as traffic grew my web sites recorded the same number of clicks as earlier. Even at a time when my page views doubled, the number of clicks remained almost same, lowering the CTR.

My ad revenues dropped drastically from these tech & photo blogs. Although at that time, I was mainly depending on Google Adsense. I experimented a lot and devised a way to fix this problem of low ad CTRs.

Note that this article is not about low earnings from ads, although with low CTR your earning will be less that what you may have estimated. This article is about analyzing what lead to the low ad click through rates in the first place.

What lead to high page views but low CTR of my Ads?

1. Ineffective Ads that were Non Contextual – I ran tests for months on various types of content & various ad position & found that in many cases the ads were not contextual. You can read about that on Ineffective Ads Lead to Low CTR & Low Earnings.

2. Ads were Not Always Displayed – In my experiment I also found that with higher page views, many of the ads were not showing up. Since I was not using any back-up ads at that time, all my ad spots were showing up empty,

3. Google Adsense Showed Proprietary Ads – Google was showing large number of their own ads like that of Picasa, YouTube or that of Adsense & Adwords. These products are so common & so popular that people would usually not click them anyway.

4. Theme Design Issues – Web Analytic Data showed that many of my readers were using older version of Internet Explorer & some were using browsers that my WP Themes did not work correctly on

5. High Bounce Rates & Low Time Spent Data – Again, analytics showed that fewer visitors were seeing more than 1 page & most of theme were not spending enough time on the pages to view or click ads. The longer people stay on your pages, the possibilities of them viewing or clicking ads go up

6. Incorrect Site Analytics – This one is tricky, even though my analytics showed a hit, the pages were not loading completely, rendering them almost useless. Though the occurrences were low, but this did happen

7. Images & Videos Performed Poorly – post with images & videos had almost zero clicks. This affected my photography sites & one that related to photography gears since I had images & mostly product demo videos. Due to lack of content the ads performed very poorly

8. Mobile version with No Ads – I had implemented mobile versions of many of my technology & photo sites. They all had the StatCounter tracking codes in them but none of the mobile sites had ads. This naturally showed higher page views on the reports but skewed the data for CTR

How did I fix the problem of high page views & low Ad CTR?

Before I begin this section, I must say that many of these solutions were through experimentation. It took time, almost a couple of months, before I saw the CTR consistently rising again. I am not sure if these are the only solutions or even the best, but they worked for all my technology blogs & websites.

1. New Theme – It is so important to have the Best WP Theme if you are trying to make money from your blogs. The first thing I did was to change theme to a more appropriate theme. These themes are tested in various web browsers. I also tested them out on older versions of the popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari & Mozilla

2. Modified Posts & Made them SEO Compliant – Many of my posts were very short with an image. Well, images can say a 1000 words but search engines & ads still need more than just an image to work correctly. I increased the length of my posts & started to put ALT & TITLE tags for more relevant visitors from search engines making sure that the Basic SEO is in place

3. Google Adsense Specific Changes – I used the standard Google Tags & marked sections of my content for Google that would be relevant to their ads & make more contextual ads.

Start every content section with the code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –> (CONTENT to emphasise STARTS HERE)

End every content section with the code:

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

This pair of Start & End tags has to be repeated for every section that is relevant to your content.

4. Increasing Reader Engagement – This is the biggest winner in the long term. Of the several means I experimented with I had great success with some. I wrote about that on 15 Ways to Keep & Bring Your Visitors Back. At the end, nothing beats great content to engage your readers for life

5. Variations of Ads – Since there were problems with contextual ads, I introduced Adsense Like Ads & tried out different positions of the ads within the post. What worked for my sites are the top position, sidebars & within the post itself.

6. Optimize the number of Ads – This could be surprising but I actually reduced the number of ads on the page itself. I experimented with the various High Paying High CPC Ad Formats. More of this on Choosing Between CPC CPM & CPA Ads & on the 4 Part Series:

• What Sort Of Ads Earn Most Money – Part 1
• What Sort Of Ads Earn Most Money – Part 2
• What Sort Of Ads Earn Most Money – Part 3
• What Sort Of Ads Earn Most Money – Part 4

7. Choosing Ads for Pictures instead of Adsense – I changed the strategy for pages that had more images in them. Especially for my photography related websites, I started to publish ads for pictures instead of Google Adsense.

8. Solving the Problem of Incorrect Page Views – To fix the problem of incorrect page view count, I put the tracking code in the footer (I used to put them on a sidebar widget for convenience. So the tracker would register a hit as soon as the widget came up on the browser & did not wait for the entire page with content to show up)

In the article 5 Easy Tips to Get Better Ads & Higher CPC in a Bad Economy – Blog Ads Tips I have also shared some simple ways to increase the cost-per-click. Combining a high CPC with a high CTR could result in dramatic increase of your ad revenues. You could also read the post Earning the Most from Your Ads – Maximizing Ad Revenues that talks of similar ideas.

While you can try these methods right away, the key is to experiment what will work best for your web sites. It will also take time before you start seeing the improvements. I am sure these suggestions above will help you to fix the problem faster for you.

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.

• Identified the Effective Habits you Must Have to Succeed as a Business Blogger
• Setting up your Business Assets & Mobile Office
• Designing the WP Theme that’s right for your Business Blog
• Systems to Measure your Progress
• Setting up Your Automatic Email Subscription system

Just having great content, or a great sponsor may not be enough to make good money. In order to make money consistently, you have to follow certain principles, try out new techniques & most importantly know your competition. Its also about great marketing.

At the same time, your business should be able to generate substantial money on its own in a short period of time, so that you can focus on activities that could help you grow faster. Automatic income also means more free time for you & you could spend more time with your family, or vacationing or doing all the things you always wanted to!

So let us look at some of the ways to create online revenue channels.

1. Selling Products & services from your affiliate network – there are tons of affiliate networks in the internet today. We have worked with a few & we can only recommend a few of them. You can read our recommendations on the best affiliate networks & may want to join them for free. We still find Never Blue to be the best of the lot & can help you build a strong stream of residual income too
2. Online Consulting for Other Businesses – this takes some time but once you become an authority in your business line, you can start consulting other business owners to make them profitable
3. Teaching & Training Associates & Marketers – as you become more experienced, people pay you to teach techniques, present analysis & reports. It is not necessary that you have to teach in person. Video tutorials, eBooks, online presentations are great ways to grow your business. You could easily market your products like these through Click Bank, Never Blue Network or e-Junkie or all of them together!
4. Recruit Your Affiliates & Train Them on Selling – much like point 1 above, once you know how to sell, you can start focusing on building your own online affiliates & instead of selling on your own, teach them how to sell. This could become a viral marketing scheme. However, too many people try to recruit affiliates too early without actually knowing how to do the job themselves. I doubt if they succeed in the long run!
5. SEO Consulting – many profitable & experienced bloggers often become Search Engine Optimization experts. They find their niche as SEO authorities & are available for consultation
6. Marketing Liaison – once you have a great expertise as an affiliate marketer & have thorough knowledge of how the internet business works, you could act as a liaison between product & services companies & the online marketers. They connect the right people together – an art that could make or break a business
7. Social Media Consulting – much like Search Engine Optimization experts, Social Media experts are extremely valuable these days. With the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, people are now focusing on selling & branding through relationships built through web based systems like FaceBook or Twitter. The easily you can build relations online, the greater your possibilities of making this a strong online revenue stream
8. Domain Auctions – this is another niche area & requires a lot of time to flourish, but nonetheless this is another great way to generate online revenues. You could be a domain affiliate buying & selling domain names or you could liaise between a buyer & a seller. Various web hosting companies like BigDaddy & Sedo run domain auctions. You can sign up with them for free.

This may not be a complete list, but this will give you most of the ideas to build on. I would like to reiterate the point on affiliate marketing one more time though.

First, you have to know how to sell. And you must sell & learn the trade yourself. There is no substitute to first hand experience.

Second, you sell long enough to gather all the experience you need to, build great relation among both buyers & sellers.

Third & finally, you build your own affiliate teams & train them on all that you learned. This is the best way to be successful in any business.

You may also want to read all the ways to make money from an online blog & get started by signing up with the partners.

You are getting enough hits from the search engines but the time users are spending on your website is very less. You are getting readers but they are not viewing more than one page. Your hits are growing but your repeat readers are not. You are losing subscribers. You are not able to retain your readers for more than a few seconds.

If this sounds familiar, then you are probably not providing a great experience to your readers. They come in, they see, they leave & they don’t remember you any more!

The great thing about this problem of readers’ experience is that it can be improved. The bad thing is, expectations increase with great experience. So you will always have to play catch up. You can implement simple changes that can improve your readers’ experience while they are on your blog or website.

Experience depend on who your readers are.

Readers coming from search engines are looking for something specific, where as your subscribed readers will read you either because they like to read your articles, find them informative or they want to engage frequently.

Either way, your post has to be useful. To keep both these types of readers happy, keep your post compact & deliver the message upfront. Ensure that your article matches your post title & match the keywords correctly.

Experience depends on the ingenuity of the article.

No one likes an incorrect post or wrong information. No one likes to read duplicate articles or those copied from someplace else. Keep your content your own & deliver your personal message. Readers also appreciate honesty – so if you are quoting someone, reference the author in your post.

For affiliate marketers & especially if you are selling something, be sure to let them know what you feel about the product or the service you are selling. If you have not used them, let them know that.

Experience depends on the distractions around the reader.

Normally advertisements come in the way of the readers’ attention & distracts them. Or the audio that plays automatically when your site shows up. Pop up ads as well as glaring moving images also distracts the readers.

Now that you have written a compact post, if you let them read through your article in peace, there is no reason they will not click on a link to another article & then another.

Experience depends on providing just a little over the required information

This is where the ‘Related Posts’ comes in. If your reader has not found sufficient information in the post that they read, it is likely that they will go back to Google & search for more. Why don’t you provide them that option with some of your other articles & save them the trouble of leaving your website?

You don’t need to go overboard with this one. 5 – 10 related article should be a good way to have the reader stay a while longer. It also helps if you provide an option to search your site towards the end of the post.

Experience depends on how you respond

The complete experience of a reader includes you & your article. Many readers will leave comments or send you emails. Their complete experience will include how you treat them in person.

Being on the softer nicer side helps, even if the emails are provoking your to react differently. Courtesy always wins at the end & sometimes a simple Thank You does the job.

These are some simple ideas that can help you improve your readers experience while they are with you, on your website. Sometimes, and I have done this multiple times with great results, ask your readers how they want you to make their experience enriching. There can be nothing more valuable than their feedback!

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?

You can get a copy of Free: The Future of a Radical Price at the Amazon.

I had read reviews of this book by some of the best known CEOs, entrepreneurs & the top pro-bloggers including Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo!, to name a few.

The book talks about the how the age old marketing philosophy of distributing something for free could create a market demand for something else, has evolved in today’s age of the internet & the global emerging markets. If you are new to this (you cannot be new to the cliche that “there is nothing called Free Lunch!”) you will see examples that will make you think again.

I don’t know if the concepts from Gillette’s example of distributing free shavers to create a demand for blades could be directly implemented in our world of blogging & micro-blogging. But for those in the business of affiliate marketing can certainly experiment with the successful examples drawn in this book. This is a great marketing book for bloggers.

I recommend this book to anyone & everyone. Even if you have nothing to do with marketing, or blogging, you will still find this a very exciting read!.

Get your copy of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price now!

This economy had taught all the full time employees a big lesson! And something that new bloggers could think more about. More importantly, for those of you who are still waiting to start your blogging & grow it like your business, here is your chance to start now!

Companies Look for Profits & Margins – thats the only focus, to keep the shareholders’ happy. If you are not perceived to add enough value, you are on the brink of losing your job. It is good to have a back up income that can help you tide over uncertainities

Companies are Made of People & People Change – maybe when you began your employer had a philosophy that you appreciated. With time people change & philosophies change. You may no longer find your employer to have the same philosophy that once encouraged you to work for them

Companies often React & Not Necessarily in the Right Way – in the face of challenges, corporations react often without enough data or foresight. Combine that with people who are leading changes for the time time & you have an enormous confusion. People get hurt in these turmoils & no one will seem to care

The Godfather Concept – call it having a Godfather who is extremely powerful in your organization who can protect your back in tough situations or the age old fraternities who can dictate terms, who is looking after you?

There is No Job Security – increasingly jobs are becoming insecured. New entrants are working for cheap & talents are available from the global workforce. Large corporations no longer spend money in workforce harmony & acclamatizing a global employee base. These are all taken for granted & you will always compete with almost everyone else in the marketplace.

Economies will change with time, people will change with time. What does not change is your need & urge to improve your lifestyle! This might be a good time to look back & see how the economic slump affected your family & life.

• Does it call for looking at other alternative means to make money?
• Is your regular job your only security?
• Do you wish to start building your blogging business part time now?

While there could be many great bloggers out there, a few network well enough & get the right sort of person speak for them. The owners of ProBlogger, CopyBlogger & some of these large authoritative bloggers have reaped the benefits of networking with someone you either trust, or with someone who can easily earn your trust.

This, by no means, belittles their own efforts. They are great bloggers & over a period of time have added tremendous value to many of us. They have showed us the ways, they have warned us of the problems & they have gone all out to share the so called “tricks to succeed”.

The one thing common you would notice among them is that they all speak good about each other in their blogs. So if you trust one, he / she is leading you by your hand to trust his fellow blogger too. And they keep writing repeatedly, with some message, that the fellow blogger is all so important that you cannot afford to miss his / her work! Well, in any case, that is true!

Just being a great blogger with great content is a quarter of the battle. It is important that you have a solid network, who would find it mutually beneficial, to write about you & promote you. That is, finally, the basis of affiliate marketing.

When I started off ProMediaBlog in the mid of 2008, I started to write about this website on my photography websites. My Nature Photography website PhotoDuniya was already popular because I was also teaching photography in California & my Street Photography blog was quite popular amongst the musicians of San Francisco ever since I started to document them personally. I had helped numerous people in their photography efforts over the past 10 years & all those good work came back to me when I started this website!

For new bloggers, it is hard to find someone who would vouch for them so openly. It could just be a matter of not having enough time for the new comers, or just an issue of not being in the same “network” to be written about.

While meeting on the internet is still good (& off course easy & does not cost you any money), face-to-face meetings are essential to seal the bond. Seminars, social events, marketing launches, Open Worlds are excellent places to shake hands & exchange business cards, followed by a phone call.

• Go viral on your network & seek help to promote you
• Go ahead & write a fabulous article on someone you trust & wish that your readers too knew about him / her
• Forget Page Ranks for a moment & link to the new bloggers who you think are writing great & need just a little push
• If you have more than one site, write about one on the other are promote yourself
• Take the first step & lead by example

“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.

And I found some great software apps, that are free & are definitely productivity tools that make managing social networks easier.

Here is a list of some of the best free apps for Instant Messengers, MySpace, FaceBook etc.

1. Add Glitter & pomp to your public profiles on MySpace, MSN Live etc with free software from Ask.com – click here to download
2. Digsby IM Client to integrate your MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Facebook, Google etc accounts into one interface – click here to download
3. Create customizable avatar that can be used on your blog, chat, social networks like MySpace etc – click here to download
4. Record Internet Radio, Podcasts & Streaming Audio casts – click here to download Crawler
5. Connect with people on FaceBook with free FaceBook App Zoosk – click here to download
6. Social Mini Toolbar that integrates with Facebook to provide users with status updates, news feeds, photo updates all from the convenience of their current browser window – click here to download

All these social networking applications are free & do not have any adware or spyware. They are fun & adds some productivity in managing social network profiles & messengers.

Every now & then you might pause to think “How much would someone pay you if you sell your blog?“.

Technorati has devised a way to calculate, but eventually it depends on how your blog compares with other blogs in your same niche. Don’t get carried away by what Technorati or any other calculator says the value is – the number could be misleading.

So what builds the net worth of a blog?

1. Age of the blog – how long as the blog been on the web, usually blogs that are new (even a few years old blogs) are almost worth nothing
2. Blog URL – whether its an indicative URL or a vanity URL, the URL adds a very high weightage to the blog’s worth & a meaningful URL that is search friendly adds more value to your blog
3. Volume of content – blogs with more content is valued higher. When I say content, I mean worthwhile content. Everything remaining equal, the blog with better, worthwhile content will score much higher in its worth compared to one that is simply comprised of links or copied materials
4. Unique Hits, Repeat Visitors Count & Monthly Page Views – this is a no brainer, blogs with larger numbers of visitors & higher page views will be of higher worth
5. Blog niche – the total value of your blog also depends on the niche. Blogs on popular, highly sought after information (or rumor!) are usually valued higher. For popular blogging topics read the earlier posts on 10 Most Popular Blogging Topics, Popular Blog Topics on ProMediaBlog, 10 Popular Niche Blogging Topics, 5 More Popular Niche Blogging Topics
6. InBound & OutBound Links – it is not only the links but also the quality of links, who links to your blog, who do you link to, what category of blogs are linked to you etc. There is also a fascinating post by Simon Owens on this
7. Number of Subscribers – this is one of the most valuable assets of your blog, especially the email subscribers. This asset can persist & continue to deliver business value even if your blog is taken offline someday
8. Number & Quality of Comments – valuable comments is a great asset to any blog. This indicates popularity, authority as well as followership, all vital assets for your blog
9. Search Engine Ranks – this includes Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank etc indicating how strongly your blog is aligned to your niche

Though there is no straight forward calculation to finding the true value of any blog, certain blog auction services could help you get a more realistic worth of your blog. You could try the services of GoDaddy or Sedo to get a more appropriate value of your blog.

For more tips & great articles on blogging for money, you may want to subscribe to have all articles emailed to you on time.

However hard or sometimes silly these things are, I will slowly implement in my blogging practices. For those of you who have someone like Atom or Tipsy with them, will surely agree with me!

So here are the 11 Things I Learned from Atom & Tipsy About Blogging:

1. Choose your topics carefully – given multiple chioces Atom & Tipsy would make their choices carefully. They usually pause for a few moments, stare at their choices, observe them & finally pounce on what they want

2. Keep your attention on your blog – every moment have your attention on your blog, your readers & your business. Each word of each post & each page. Once Atom or Tipsy gets what they want, they dont let it slip past their attention even for a moment

3. Don’t stop until you have written enough – your readers need more & they need content with substance. Dont finish off & post your article that lacks meat

4. Entertain with wit & variety – dont let your blog readers go through a passive dull experience with your articles. Keep it lively, entertaining & focused that will keep them coming back for more

5. Throw in those treats from time to time – we all like treats. Throw in those freebies from time to time. A good e-book, a free software and anything that your blog is related to

6. Let them find a unique use or a benefit – when I hand over anything to Atom & Tipsy, they invariably come up with something new & unique to do with it. Have your readers play around & experiement with your ideas – encourage & if possible reward the great ones

7. Publish your posts on time every time – posts are food for the eager mind. Keep them coming at the same time every time. If you have a defined publishing schedule, you may want to let your readers know about that too

8. Keep it simple to digest – I give a complicated game to Atom or Tipsy & they lose interest in a few seconds. Give your readers something that they can easily understand & keep their interest in your blog. Analogy is another great way to share something complicated in an easy to understand way

9. Go as you learn – I never knew what it would be like to have Atom & Tipsy around. I learned tips & tricks as I spent more time with them. Go easy & learn from your readers as you go along & have fun along the way

10. Make it social & connect your readers – this is a difficult one & takes time to build a social readership that could connect with one another. The benefit is immense, since in turn you get connected to new readers too. I have more friends now that I got to know the friends of Atom & Tipsy & I did not have to do anything special

11. Communicate with your readers & look for all ways to communicate – use comments, emails, guest posts and any means to communicate with your readers. Atom & Tipsy have taught me to keep a keen eye for the subtle signs of communications & pick up the hints & signs.

Atom & Tipsy have been teaching me unique ways to communicate – achieve more with less. I am still learning & will continue to share them with you.

In case you are new here & are wondering who Atom & Tipsy are, they are more than my friends. Atom is now about a year old labrador & Tipsy is about 7 months old husky.

In this I am going to talk about the really dumb strategies that companies have tested without success. While some large companies have enough money to overcome their failures, you are smart enough not to make them!

Dumb Sales Strategy 1: Think & Advertise their product solves everything – be honest about what your product can do or cannot do. Customers are intelligent enough not to believe whatever you tell them.

They research & read reviews before buying. Word of mouth is also a factor that influences customers’ knowledge of the product. Be specific on what problem your product solves.

Dumb Sales Strategy 2: Tries too hard to convince customers their product is better than their competitor – honesty is always the best policy. Be honest about what your product can do & be sharp about any advantages your producy has over competing products.

Just because you decide to hide your products’ weaknesses does not mean your customers wont figure that out! Buyers spend time reading reviews & publishing other customer’s feedback is a good way to win trust.

Dumb Sales Strategy 3: Not enough testimonials to speak for the product – it helps when others speak good of your product, your service & you. Sales people often do not have sufficient references to speak for them or their products. Many references are often poorly arranged at the last moment!

It is always a good idea to request your customers to send in their feedback. Do ask them if you can publish them with their emails or contacts for future references.

Dumb Sales Strategy 4: Think that everyone will pay the price – there are too many “me too” products out there & it is possible that some or many features would also be available with others. You would be competing with equally good products & definitely cheaper products.

Dumb Sales Strategy 5: Discount the product too early – price is important but sales people too frequently drive the conversation to prices without exploring the product in depth.

This is why I admire the first principle of Direct Door to Door Sales – within the first few minutes hand the product to the potential buyer. Let them play with it for a while. The possibility of closing the sale successfully increases tremendously if you focus on the key component – your product!

Dumb Sales Strategy 6: Not enough customer or affiliate training on the product – product knowledge is essential & so is knowledge of competing products. Too frequently I have seen the frontline sales people poorly trained on what their products can do.

Knowledge about your product & competition makes you an “authority” & gain respect & trust, the vital elements to being successful in sales.

Dumb Sales Strategy 7: Weak promotional & PoP materials – few marketing managers spend enough time & money on creatives, making anything from a sloppy logo to stale brochures & fliers.

I have seen successful marketers spend more time on fewer promotions, engage the right creative agencies to make the best of their campaigns. They rather run fewer but more effective ones.

Dumb Sales Strategy 8: Incomplete Comparison with a Direct Competitor – this is one the the most common mistakes that corporate marketers make, maybe in their push to sell more. Incorrect competition data, especially with direct competitor is the worst mistake people make.

Your product is what it is. Keeping the best interest of the customer is the best that anyone can do, so if your product solves your customers’ problems, you may be well off without focusing on the competition as much rather than misleading your customer with wrong information.

Dumb Sales Strategy 9: Wait too Long to Launch till Everything is Right – no launch is perfect, yet many sales managers plan extravagantly for the launch. Too many things have to be right at the same time to make their great strategy work.

There is no one right time for your business. The faster it is the better. Off course you have to have the basic infrastructure right & comply with any legal requirements that your product might have at launch.

Dumb Sales Strategy 10: Do not Plan Enough for Customer Feedback – well, there are always feedback forms & direct reply mails but no feedback is enough. Sometimes the volume of feedback is so high that corporate managers don’t really know what to do with them, or even thank the customers individually for their time.

I have known many successful online affiliate bloggers run email campaigns just to connect with their readers for genuine feedback & reward those whose suggestions are valuable.

Can you relate to any of these common mistakes made by corporate marketers to your own?

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?

There are new challenges in opening up your blog to guests. The one that has the biggest impact is whether your readers will appreciate that? I have not seen may reader express their opinion but they can drop off silently without you even knowing!

• Do you plan to open up your blog to guest posts?
• When do you know you are ready for publishing guest content?
• How would you prepare your readers before you publish guest’s posts?

I would like to share a few tips to fellow bloggers on how to prepare for opening up your blogs to guest posts.

1. Prepare your readers well in advance - your readers are your most important assets & it is not fair to surprise them with someone new writing in your place

2. Take feedback from your readers after the first couple of posts – feedback is a two way sword, so be prepared to handle criticism. You have shared your audience & it is fair that you ask for their experience

3. Communicate the expectations to your guest ahead in time – many new bloggers who look to writing guest posts do not have a big-name blog, but you may encourage them by allowing them to share your blog

4. Work out the financial terms – many guest bloggers expect payment for their posts. You have to plan ahead on your budgets in case you are interested in paying your guests for writing on your blog

5. Word out a frequency of posts & the length of the content - many blogs expect guest bloggers to post with certain regularity. That, sometimes, is one of the main conditions of allowing anyone to post as a guest. Many bloggers also expect guests to write posts of a certain minimum number of words, 300 to 500 is the average. If you have any requirements like that, be sure to notify the guest ahead

6. Lay down the quality norms with the guest writer – quality has its own meaning to every individual. Explain in details what quality means to you & how guest bloggers need to adhere to your quality norms. It is often a good idea to review guest posts in the beginning before you let them post on their own

7. Plan out the logistics ahead of time – this could become a cumbersome process if you do not think ahead of time. Is the guest going to log into your blog & post directly? or is the guest going to send you an email with the content & you post it? How are you going to acknowledge credits to the guest? Is it with a link to his or her blog or a picture with a short bio data?

8. Legal, privacy & copyright issues – you need to plan to legally safeguard your business too. How would you ensure that guests are not breaking any copyright laws, or handle any possible legal infringements? Many bloggers also prevent guests from posting articles that they have already published in other blogs or submitted them in mass article repositories. You may allow guests to only write new authentic articles on your blog

If you have guests posting on your blog already, what would your advice be to the others who want to publish guest posts?

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.

In this part of the Blogging for Money Series let us look at emails, subscriptions, RSS feeds & how to set up monetizing them. All these when done effectively, not only builds your reader base but also increases your long term earning from your blogs.

For references on what emails, subscription, RSS feeds are so important, you could read these following articles ahead of time:

• Email Marketing Trends – Right Email Marketing for Blogging Business
• Top 10 Tools to Increase your Website or Blog Earnings
• Marketing Blogs Business with Emails – Email Marketing Mail Blasters for Bloggers
• 3 Places to Invest Money for Online Business Blogging

In all these articles we have written in depth about the strategic role your emails, subscriptions & RSS feeds play in the growth of your online business. But it is not enough to have a large subscription, it has to be effective in your business growth.

First, a few tips on getting people to sign up to your blog

1. make the subscription button visible – beginning of the post, end of post or top of the sidebar are good places to get noticed
2. place a clear privacy statement on your emails
3. you may offer some incentive to the subscriber – many people offer their ebooks

If you continue to provide value to your readers, your subscription will continue to grow. But then your challenge will be to grow your subscriptions. There are several reasons that could cause readers to unsubscribe. And I am not considering those who sign up only to get the free incentive – they never were your readers & they never will be anyone’s readers.

So that brings us to the next step of keeping your readers happy & growing your readers.

Second, a few tips on keeping your subscribers happy

1. provide full articles to your subscribers. There is a strong debate on whether to provide full feeds or partial feeds that would require readers to come back to your website. They have the pros & cons, but since many subscribers now read feeds on their mobile devices too, a full feed makes sense
2. understand the right frequency to deliver your subscriptions – you have the options of daily feeds or weekly feeds. If you have fewer posts, I would recommend a weekly subscription whereas if you are posting 4 or more articles a day continuously, a daily subscription helps the reader to not miss any articles
3. if you have an offer or incentive campaign running on your blog, your readers will not know that from your subscription emails (emails usually contain posts). Take care to let your email subscribers know of those campaigns so that they can visit your blog
4. do not change your email agency – any change will require new opt-in from the readers & you will fail to transfer all your subscribers onto your new email partner

Now that you have the option where readers can easily sign up for your updates newsletters & you have kept your subscribers happy with great focused content, let us get to the point of how to monetize your feeds.

The Last Point, few tips on making money from your emails, subscriptions & RSS Feeds

1. the first option is ads in your feeds
2. send affiliate marketing offers
   
3. run paid opinion polls & paid surveys – its is a good idea to let your readers know if they are paid campaigns
4. selling your own products like ebooks etc

Conclusion

Simply having a growing list of email or RSS feed subscribers is a good thing, but making these subscriptions effective will open up the doors to growing your online business.

At the end, I would recommend 3 email marketing partners who we have used in various capacities & are completely happy with their operations, deliverability, flexibility & off course affordable pricing. I have my affiliate links built into these 3 so I will make a tiny amount of money if anyone subscribes from these – however that is insignificant compared to the money you will make with having an effective email subscription system!

• Aweber Email Marketing – one of the most popular amongst bloggers
• iContact – this is perfect for managing your email lists, you can use tons of our features with your free trial. Get your free trial 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

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.

For online affiliate marketers not having to see the prospective customer is challenge enough. Having a poor call to action would be the end!

So what is the best & the simplest call to action for online affiliate marketers?

It could be as simple as a Click Here!

You would see that many bloggers who are selling affiliate products & services make an explicit Click Here statement & some in a bold bright color to get all the attention they can.

But is a Click Here good enough?

Absolutely not! Yes, the Click Here call to action emphasizes the point but a few things are essential to make that work. Again, from my corporate life I have experienced this over & over again, that very few salesmen take the time to educate their potential customers.

Whether its the urgency to sell or the lack of knowledge or the time, sales people forget the most important aspect of selling – Educating Your Customer is the same as empowering them to buy your product.

• I would suggest to stress on pre-sales. Think of all the ways you can make your customer more knowledgeable. Videos help & so does references from other customers. For online marketers, product specific landing pages are helpful.

And ask questions to ensure that they know as much as it is necessary to buy from you. The point is, they have to buy it from you! There could be hundreds, possibly thousands of other affiliates who are pitching for the same product. But you need to make them choose you over the others.

What Makes you Different from the Others?

The answer is simple – its You. When you have proved yourself to be credible, trustworthy & not to desperate to sale, they will choose you over others.

From my experience I know that often analysis & references to competing products often help to build the trust. Customers are intelligent & they will know what are all the competing products. But that coming from you is important to build the trust.

After all if a product cannot hold against competition without any unique advantage, why will anyone ever buy it? So if your final pitch is only on this unique aspect of your product, that is enough.

What is the biggest challenge of the Click Here technique?

The answer is – Email Campaigns.

Firstly, most email campaigns are time bound & are contained in the body of the email. The constraint on the amount of text you can put in an email & you are likely to make a sales pitch too soon.

Secondly, emails with Click Here links are more likely to be caught in spam filters & never reach the audience.

Conclusion

Develop your call to action statements but keep the majority of the time to educate your customers. Provide competitive data on similar products to educate them & do not shy away from making an effective pitch to close your sale.

For similar articles follow the Lessons from Corporate Life Series.

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.

• where you are today
• where your competition is today
• what is getting you traffic
• where is your competition getting traffic from
• how effective your website is etc etc

Analyzing these data points will help you know what is working for you & what you should focus on to be where you want to be. I am assuming that your blog has competition (which also means that you are not doing something unique or new). This is both a blessing & a challenge.

Let me explain that:

It is a blessing because if others have succeeded in doing what you are doing, you will be successful too.

And it’s a challenge because you will find it hard to get noticed, stand out from the rest of them. For every penny of what you will earn, the others who have already established themselves, will make a 100 times more!

Don’t despair. Everyone has to start someday & it is not all rosy from the very beginning. Recently Ali Hale wrote about her experience as a beginner blogger on Pro Blogger on the same topic.

Why is the Source of Data Important?

Data source is as important as data. Some data are free & some data have to be paid for. Paid data is more exhaustive & that is what all professional bloggers who make money depend on. Although almost all of us use as much of free data as possible from Google Analytics, its the “competitive information” that takes us a step forward!

Social media is now very much a part of our daily life. And people seem to spend substantial time on social networking sites like FaceBook & Twitter.

Here is a link to James Surowiecki’s presentation (in case the embedded video does not load). You can check on TED from time to time to listen to these inspiring & innovative presentations from the best speakers in the world.

In another fascinating post on Wired, they published a chart on the time average people seem to spend on social networking sites now a days.

This is a symbolic representation & even if this chart is near reality, people spend an average of about 60% of their time on social networks. In another study across various segments of the US population, it was shown that people on average use at least 4 social networking sites. The popular amongst them are FaceBook & Twitter.

Having set up the infrastructure right, it is time to make sure that your blog or website has all that it takes to make a reader inspired  & happy. In this article I shall write about what makes a blog tick & what ticks off readers!

When was the last time you put yourself in the reader’s shoes & asked yourself – This works great! This is how it should be! This is fabulous!

The Theme

This is one of the most important faces to your online business. You have to shop around a lot to get the theme that looks perfect to your line of business.

I had written about Choosing the Right Wordpress Theme for your Blog earlier where I gave the links to some of the best Wordpress Theme designers who give away themes for free. There is absolutely nothing wrong with free themes – in fact, if the designer is good, the free theme will be as good as any premium theme.

But these are also very general themes. In order to make it work for your business you may have to customize it a lot. We also make specialized themes for small businesses, affiliate business & online marketers. All these Wordpress Small Business Themes are available for under $10.

The Contact Page

Make it easy for your readers to contact you. A email address or a phone number is the best, depending on what your business is. If you are in the affiliate business, I would recommend giving your contact number as well.

Think of how many times you wished you could speak to a sales rep or a technical rep to fix your cable problems or your computer problems? Being able to speak to a human being has it’s own advantages. Especially so if you are in the business of hard selling.

WP-Email is a free email contact form plugin from Lester Chan. This is a widely used plugin & could help you build a contact page with email in your Wordpress blog without sharing your email address.

The Easy Sign Up & Subscription

Does your theme take the extra step to let people sign up? While people debate on whether RSS subscription is as good as email subscription, I still favor the second. However, if you are not in the business of selling & you just make money from ads, RSS subscription is good enough.

I would recommend signing up with a professional email subscription management partner for your blog. The reasons are many & the advantages are plenty. I have provided my recommendation on choosing the best email subscription partner earlier.

The Advertisements

If you have been blogging for some time, you would know that showing ads is the easy part. Making money from ad clicks is tough. I have detailed all the ways to make money from blogs as well as all the alternatives to Google Adsense that you may use.

Not all ads work on all business blogs. However, you need to balance your risk with multiple ad partners to make enough money from ads. Ads have to be completely integrated with your Business Themes & you may need to have Themes with Multiple Ads.

Whichever ad network you sign up with, please do read the rules & the policies. Google Adsense for example are very particular of not showing ads very close to images or disguising ads as “Sponsored Links” unless you are displaying Google Referrals.

The most common mistake people do in the anticipation of earning more clicks is to misguide readers that their ads are actually Recommended Links! That’s a terrible idea! The readers will know that instantly. You will not only lose the trust but you may be suspended by the ad network as well. Show ads as advertisements & you will win in the long run.

The Easy of Navigation

The most difficult part of a theme design is to show everything all at once to your reader without cluttering. That is just impossible. However, you can have some of the easy tools that readers will find helpful.

Sidebars with Recent Posts, Popular Posts & Recent Comments are helpful. A breadcrumb navigation on top helps readers navigate between pages. Most of the business themes will also include popular functions like Relevant Posts & Most Viewed Posts too.

The Professional Business Plugins

Plugins make your work easy without the need to change your theme. Some of the free plugins are available on Wordpress Plugin Codex.

However, there are a ton of commercial plugins that are absolutely essential to build & grow your online blogging business. I have listed a majority of them at the end of this page as well as on the Affiliate Plugin page. Review them & choose the ones that work for your line of business.

The Final Reminders

The value is not in the millions of people who could be your readers & subscribers. The value is in those who already are. Take those extra steps to keep them happy!

As a final reminder to visitors who are leaving your website you may wish to flash a subscription page one more time. Many people offer freebies to encourage sign ups. This works sometimes.

Ebooks are the most popular free gift you will see of the internet these days. If you have a better idea go ahead & experiment. It might just work!

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?

Here are a few of the videos on YouTube on Christian the Lion:

• Christian the Lion 1 minute 16 secs
• A Lion Called Christian – Their Story from Animal Planet TV 2 minute 8 secs
• Interview with John Rendall (2008) 7 minutes 44 secs

There are tons of similar videos on this amazing story of a lion cub, called Christian, who transformed from a house pet in London to a survivor in the wild African jungles.

The story is about John Rendall & Anthony Ace Bourke rehabilitating a pet lion & set him free. The story ends with Jon & Anthony re-uniting with Christian a year later & the emotions in the few seconds when Christian recognizes his trusted friends & rushes to greet them!

The book is an excellent read with over 50 images of Christian from a cuddly cub in London to a magnificent lion in the wild in Africa. Here is a link to the book on Amazon: A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and a Lion

The videos of Christian went viral on the internet starting off with YouTube, collecting over 44 million hits very soon it was uploaded. The total hit count exceeded hundreds of millions with the amazing story of struggle & perseverance of Christian along with the determination of Anthony & John to give him a free life to live.

A good read, both entertaining & highly emotional!

Long Tail first appeared in Wired Magazine in October 2004 & after the popularity & the relevance to the internet marketing trends finally came out in print.

You can get a copy of Chris Anderson – Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
from Amazon.

It will take me some time to complete the book. It is detailed with data & market analysis & quite a few ideas on newer trends & strategies. I will post further updates as I progress to completion.

You can read & follow Chris Anderson on his blog.

• Have you read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail?
• Did you find it relevant to tomorrow’s internet marketing?

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?

Whether you are a full time or a part time blogger writing for money, you have to set up your office much like in any other business. This discipline is important & builds a professional attitude towards your work.

No matter how much your earning is today, your personal office should be easily scalable when your online blogging business grows. It could happen in 6 months or 12 months time, but it will happen. You would not like to think about your infrastructures & your tools when your business has just started to sky rocket. Thats why you think of them now, when you are taking the turn to running your blogs like a business.

There are 3 key areas to focus on that will lay down a solid foundation from the beginning. You can build on that as your business grows with time & will not have to think of re-doing any of them from scratch ever again!

How do you publish? What is the basic infrastructure to focus on from the beginning?

1. Most of us need one or two computers at home (or at work)
2. You need a web host to set up your online blogs & websites
3. You need an online storage to secure your essential files & media (even though you have copies on your computer)
4. You need a contact number & most of us use a mobile phone (& better still if you use a smart phone)
5. You need a professional email subscription & user management partner

Once you have these detailed out & set, you are good to grow & scale up as & when the opportunity comes. I will write briefly on each of these & give you my recommendations. Note that these are my personal recommendations (& I also have my links built into them so if you go along with any of these, I will get to make a tiny bit of money).

1. Computers Hardware & Software

This is the main tool of the trade. I use a central computer that all the others connect up to. So I might work on my laptop at home, but at the end of the day I save all my work in this central computer. I take all the precautions that this computer is safe & secured from any online or offline threats (this includes virus, disk crash, spyware etc).

When I am traveling I use my mobile blogging setup that includes a NetBook & my BlackBerry Storm.

For software, I mainly depend on the Open Source Software purely because they are excellent, stable, works on all types of computers & are free. However, I limit software to the minimum. Any excess could become a problem to maintain or upgrade later on.

2. Website or Blog Hosting Services

Nowadays most of the well known website hosts support Wordpress. But you still need to look into your hosting service providers diligently. And here, cheap always isn’t the best feature! I recommend a few points to bear in mind when you are picking a web hosting service provider.

• what is their uptime? Uptime means how long do they keep the websites up & running before they have to bring them down for maintenance. The good ones know that keeping your website up and running means a lot to your business – certainly, any time your website is down, you lose sales or you frustrate the visitor who needs the information on your site
• what measures do they have when they are maintaining their servers? Most of the good ones will usually keep your blogs & websites running on back-up servers while they maintain their systems
• how frequently do they backup their files? how easy is it to recover your files from the backups? do you get help from the tech support in case you need to restore files from the backup? Remember, backup is not important until, one fine day, your website crashes (or gets infected or is hijacked) and you lose all your webpages. Most of the good hosting service providers will have a daily & weekly backup schedules & some (like the ones I recommend below) also help you restore your websites in case of fatality
• ability to host unlimited domains & providing high bandwidth. This is very essential for growth, since with time, not only will you require higher bandwidth for your existing sites & blogs, you would also require to set up multiple domains for different business channels. Many of the recommended hosting service providers allow unlimited domains to be hosted free of charge & unlimited bandwidth for each of your sites
• do they have the latest software & hardware? Wordpress will keep on upgrading to better technologies that would require the latest software & hardware to run on. Your web hosting service providers also need to upgrade their systems accordingly. Since all our recommended providers allow one click Wordpress hosting (that is, they are preferred Wordpress hosts too), this should not be a problem

Our Recommended Blog & website Hosting Services

• Host Monster – you can host unlimited accounts & you get a free domain & free setup for under $7 a month
• Blue Host – you get reliable & affordable business hosting with unlimited bandwidth & unlimited accounts for under $7 a month
• Lunarpages Web Hosting – you get unlimited space & bandwidth along with professional support for under $5 a month
• Hostgator Services – you get unlimited domain hosting & bandwidth with professional support services for under$10 a month
• GoDaddy Registration & Hosting – you get the complete range of services & support from domain registration to professional website & blog hosting for around $12 a month
• FatCow Web Hosting Services – you get unlimited disk space, unlimited transfer, unlimited E-mails & free site building tools for under $5 a month

We run a host of websites & blogs & we have hosted our sites on all these hosts. We have no complaints for the last 3 years. The uptime had been 100% in all the cases (when there were maintenance issues they had their backup servers up & running). The best part of the service is that there are real tech support people who you could talk to for any help regarding your blogs & get your problems resolved over phone.

3. Online Storage for files & media

If you are maintaining computers at home, why do you need an online storage system? A very pertinent question to ask before you go ahead & sign up with one. There are 3 reasons why I do it & I suggest that you do it too:

a) having your files online means you can access them from anywhere in the world. You don’t need to carry them around in your laptop or a zip drive. You don’t need to worry about the files getting corrupted in the process of saving or opening them. And you don’t need to worry that someone else could steal your data & files from your USB drive while you are traveling. Storing your files safely & securely in an online storage system is ideal in situations like these

b) you may have more than one person working on the files. For example, if you are creating a video or a podcast for your website with 3 – 4 speakers, you cannot maintain separate audio or video files. You & your team will be working in collaboration to create one final audio or video file. An online storage system is ideal for situations like this

c) in the unfortunate case of losing all your files from your computers & your web host crashing down, you still get to have all your web files on the online storage. You can quickly transfer them onto your computers & website host to rebuild your website or blog

This is a necessity in case you are planning to safe guard your online blogging business from risks. It is not essential but a great to have feature in your infrastructure set up. For our work & collaboration, we use the services from Box.net. We are completely happy with the features & the services.

I encourage you to sign up for a free 14 day trial of Box.net & evaluate how it adds value to your business.

4. Connecting with you

If you are a part time blogger with a full time job, stop using your regular phone to connect with your readers or using it for your business. Use a contact number dedicated to your business. At the beginning this could be an overhead (so go for a low monthly plan to begin with, like under $30 a month), but with time, your blogging income will well compensate it.

I use a BlackBerry so that I can use it to connect my laptop computer to the internet when I am traveling for business. Since I do a lot of photography too, I have to travel in unusual places where I always do not get “Free Internet” in the hotels. I have to use my BlackBerry to connect to the internet & keep publishing & uploading photos on the online storage systems.

5. A Mailing List Management partner

You can do this for free with FeedBurner (from Google) but FeedBurner has too many limitations to be used flexibly in your business. Though many people have been using FeedBurner or FeedBlitz (FeedBlitz is free but they will show ads in your feeds to make up for the cost).

There are professional partners to manage user subscriptions & build your email contact base to further your business. No matter what business model you choose to adopt, subscribers emails are the main point of contact between you & the readers & probably the only way for you to communicate anything beyond your regular posts.

You can wait till your email subscriber lists grows to an extent in which you will feel that a mailing list management partner is necessary. But most of these partners have a flexible payment plans to help you get started. You can begin from as low as under $20 a month.

Remember though, when you change your email management agency, you will need to move your existing subscribers over. This is not an easy process especially the new agency will again require all the subscribers to opt-in again for your subscription. Typically, you would lose 30% – 60% of your confirmed subscribers in this process, since they will never know that they are required to opt-in again!

We have detailed the needs & the beneits in a previous article Marketing your Business with Emails, but here is a quick list of some of the most recommended subscriber email management agencies for bloggers:

• iContact – Incorporates an Array of Sophisticated Features Into a Single, Affordable Product
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days
• AWeber – This is one of the most popular email subscription management partners among bloggers primarily because of the variety of features & flexibility of using auto-responders

That brings us to the end of Part 2 of the Blogging for Money Series – Blogging for Money – 5 Focus Areas in Setting up Scalable Mobile Office. I shall continue to post on this series for the next several weeks till I cover all the key aspects of being able to run your blog like a true business.

The effect of not being able to manage your blogging time would result in low earnings from your blogs. This is a vicious cycle eventually leading to people completely giving up on their business dreams.

Time management is a matter of habit. It takes time & effort to build this habit & believe me, in a couple of weeks you will see how it helps you become a regular publisher.

This does not discount the additional hard work you need to put in to be successful. I work for over 20 hours at times on weekdays & over 16 hours on weekends at times to meet my readers’ needs.

Here are 10 of the Best known Time Management Tips. Give it a shot – this is not rocket science, I am sure you can do them too.

Time Management Tip 1 – Get yourself a day Planner from FranklinCovey & Use it Everyday

FranklinCoveypublishes a lot of fantastic Day Planners & Monthly Planners to plan & track your daily & monthly activities. Try one of their WEEKLY DEALS to get discounted planners. If you are more comfortable with planning & keeping track of your time on the computer, you can get the PlanPlus for Microsoft Outlook software too.

You will have 2 benefits in the first month itself:

• you will know where you are spending more time (more than necessary or planned) & hence where you are spending less time (less than what you wanted to or what you planned). If you are a part time blogger, you will see that bad time management is eating up your blogging time!
• you will start planning in advance & every week you can review the amount of time you thought you would spend on blogging & the time you actually spent. You will have the chance to adjust your time in the coming weeks to make up for the time you could not blog

Time Management Tip 2 – Habit grows Slowly

Time Management is a matter of habit & hence a slow process. Do not start with very aggressive schedules to begin with – start slowly by changing your schedule one hour at a time. Then slowly increase the time you think you should spend blogging.

Time Management Tip 3 – Do your researches ahead of time

Writing may not come naturally to you. And to make a compelling post, you need to do your research & organize your thoughts well. Sometimes, to write a 500 word post, you would have to research for days together.

If you set to write the post without planning, you will surely do a poor job (which you cannot afford anymore). Use the planning calendar to broadly plan what topics you would write in the coming few weeks & research ahead of time.

Time Management Tip 4 – make your commuting time a learning time for you

Use the time to commute wisely. I use this time (almost an hour each day) listening to audio tapes & personal development audio books in the car stereo.

2 of the best audio books that I have always referred to everyone I know & I still have them in my car are from Jack Welch & Jim Collins.

• Jack Welch – Straight from the Gut
• Jim Collins – Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap And Others Don’t

You can also download audio books & audio mp3 for your computer & iPod from Audible Books.

Time Management Tip 5 – Don’t compromise on your Full Time Job

Employers often have a notion that part time bloggers use paid office time for their personal business. While this could be true in many instances, you should not give your employers any opportunity to suspect you of that. Keep your personal work out of office & plan your schedule & publishing time beyond office hours.

If you are blogging part time, in all probability you do not earn enough just yet to go on your own. So do not risk your job by blogging during office hours.

Time Management Tip 6 – Involve Family & Friends & Make use of your Social Time (to provide new ideas you can write about)

Social & family gatherings are often good sources of new ideas. You can also take opinions on some of your writing topics from your friends & family & make good use of the time.

These social & family gatherings are also good ways to beat your own drum