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

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

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

Click Here to Become our Affiliate & Make Money Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To buy these 10 Amazing Multi Ads Themes Pack for under $40, Click Here Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me rephrase a few of these questions here:

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

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

3. Why do you recommend Multi Ads Business Themes ?

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

Multi Ads Business Themes for Wordpress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Why do you recommend Multi Ads Business Themes ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prior to this, we had written about Various Issues Faced by Part Time Bloggers & shared a few ideas on How To Solve Their Problems. The sorry state of the economy, now in its 14th month has made part time incomes more essential & even more challenging. Many of you have shared all the Challenges Part Time Bloggers are facing in the time of a recovering economy & I am going to share a few of them here.

5 Challenges Faced by Part Time Bloggers & How You May Overcome Them

1. Longer Time at Regular Job – this is the most common challenge that most of the part time bloggers are facing these days. While companies are still downsizing each employee is expected to put in longer hours at the same pay or lower

2. Time Spent on Travel – many jobs that did not require to travel before, now has a lot of time spent on the roads. When you could have gone back to writing in a normal situation, you are now spending in flights, in the airport & on the road

3. Working International Timezones – many companies have outsourced various functions offshore. Many are required to now work different hours coordinating with an international workforce

4. High Tensions & Physical Sickness – many part time bloggers have reported high tensions, higher blood pressures & various other sickness resulting from high stress at work. Sickness also results in poor concentration levels & low morale to keep publishing

5. Stress in Relationships – many part time bloggers, who have been going through extreme stress at work also reported very high stress in their relationships with colleagues & immediate family. Many have endured separation from their co-workers, many of who were also their blogging partners, which has hurt their ability to focus on their blogging business

Solutions to these challenges

There is no easy solution to any of these problems. There is definitely uncertainty in the economy and any of us could be affected. Stress is one of the main issues that result in numerous problems & if you do not control it now, it could lead to severe issues in the future.

No matter what, exercise your body & your mind. You may not be able to prevent a colleague’s loss of work, but you can certainly prevent your blood pressure from rising by eating healthy!

There is stress now & there will be stress in the future too. If your full time job is valuable to you, give that number 1 priority. But do not give up blogging altogether. Blog on weekends for a few hours & schedule your posts to publish in the future.

If you are traveling a lot, use a voice recorder to record your thoughts & ideas, so that when you get the time, you can play them back & write up posts. I used to do this very frequently, as well as during my 2 hour daily commute during that time, & listened to audio books & record my own thoughts.

During stressful times, you will find it hard to get new thoughts. You may also find it hard to keep a positive tone in your posts. One good way to overcome this is to look back on your previous posts & rite summary articles on the popular ones.

Instead of writing posts, you could spend some time in reading others’ & leaving comments. So although you are not publishing on your blog, you are still building relations & some backlinks!

You have to be innovative. The situation is dire & it is not likely to return to something great within the next 12 – 16 months. About 2 million jobs are lost till now & not everyone’s life will be the same again. Moreover, this situation can & probably will arise again in 5 – 7 years. You have to find new ways to help yourself & extend a helping hand to those part time bloggers friends of yours too.

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

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

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

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

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

Click Here to Start AWeber for Just $1 Now.

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

Why is Aweber the Right Choice for Your Email Marketing?

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

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

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

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

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

5 Teaching Tips for More Sales

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

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

2. More than the Product Features, Explain the Benefits

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

3. Use Audio, Pictures & Videos if possible

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

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

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

5. Always provide an unbiased review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Tips to Move or Migrate your Email Lists

Tip 1 : Communicate, Communicate & Communicate

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

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

Tip 2: Educate Subscribers on what They Need to Do

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

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

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

Tip 3: Offer Additional Incentive when your Switch Email Providers

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

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

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

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

Tip 5: Send a Thank You Note

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

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

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

10 Facts You Cannot Ignore About Email Lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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 o