20. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Blogging

There’s no way to become a blogger without being self-motivated. Whether you blog or not is strictly up to you. Without a boss breathing down your neck, you might be inclinded to “screw off”, which will ultimately hurt your efforts. So when you decide you’re a blogger, you have to “crack the whip” to make sure the work gets done.

A blog can’t exist without posts. So, in the final analysis, you’ll need to constantly expand your archive in order to be a successful bloggers. Most of your visitors will land on an archived page, so the more landing pages you have, the more potential visitors will show up.

It’s not easy to be self-disciplined. That’s why so many people fail at certain tasks. But if you are able to muster up enough effort with blogging, your efforts will be well-rewarded.

Make sure to stay focused on your goals.

19. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Blogging

I ended up taking some days off last week. The main reason was I was feeling that I was in “the advanced stages of burnout” as I like to call it. When you’ve been working ceaselessly on your computer, there comes a time when you must abandon your terminal, at least for a few days. If you don’t, you’ll end up continuing on despite running out of things to say.

If you take a quick break, you’ll end up back on the job in a much better mindset than before. At least that’s the basic idea. I know today I’m feeling pretty chipper, since I haven’t blogged since last Wednesday.

How long you take off is up to you, of course. But it better an amount of time that’s sufficient to rest and come up with some new material. Otherwise, you’ll continue on in the same mode as you did before.

Ahh, isn’t that better already?

13. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

If it don’t flow, it won’t go. Now maybe that sentence does not contain the best grammar ever used, but it should convey a message to the astute visitors who read it. Online marketing is not about forcing square pegs into round holes. Rather, it’s about identifying trends and trying to be on the right side of them.

It’s not always easy to catch every trend at the exact right spot, but we all end up making an effort.

The flow online can be steady, or can be rocky, depending on the type of website you build, but the flow can help carry you along. More and more people access the internet every day, so there’s always someone who hasn’t seen your website out there. Just get word to them somehow, and you might have another regular visitor.

If you try swimming upstream online, your fins end up getting very tired.

12. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

There are a lot of great things about internet marketing, but one thing I think that towers above the rest. I feel the low costs of internet marketing are what make the practice so profitable and unavoidable. Nowhere else can you get so many qualified visitors to your website than you can through search engines and social media websites, and if you conduct your internet marketing in an ethical manner, no one will complain.

If you can add something valuable to the internet, your marketing job just got that much easier. You won’t have to sit around hyping your own message all day, others will excitedly refer people to your website because they like it.

That kind of positive word of mouth traffic will really expand any business. And that’s where internet marketing pulls away from the pack. If you get a viral word of mouth campaign going, you’ll earn revenues steadily with very low costs.

09. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

Let’s face facts: some products sell a lot better than other ones. So if you want to try and increase revenue at your website, you have to consider how much interest products will draw. Hot sellers are bound to attract more interest than more lukewarm offerings, so you have to devote more time to placement for them.

There’s a number of ways you can focus on hot sellers. You can write a review, if you have something to offer. Or you might just set up landing pages that can get people to click for further information. Whether using CPA or PPC, either will still end up driving revenue. If you can land somewhere in the Top 10 for a hot product and you send the traffic to the right sources, you’re bound to do well.

How can you find these hot sellers? It’s generally easy to do. Amazon, in particular will list them, right down to which one is the hottest seller in that hour. Check out the ones that are hitting the hardest, and go from there.

08. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

Let’s take a look at some ways to improve your CPM. This is a matter of importance if you derive a good bit of your website revenues from Google Adsense. The key to raising your CPM is somewhat simple. You need to make sure that you are developing traffic that is looking to actively buy a product, and also you need traffic of people who click. No matter how many pages you add about webmasters, since most don’t click, the sector is almost always relegated to low payments.

Hot-selling products tend to always maintain a high paying CPM. It’s not hard to understand why. People are searching to buy something that makes a decent profit for the seller. Therefore you can expect that they’re willing to pay a premium for the visitor. If you can consistently find traffic like this, you’re on your way to an upswing in CPM.

Certain times of the year, like right now, you can expect even more shoppers online. If you make landing pages that help these buyers find the products you’re looking for, expect a decent November and December. Just look for hot-selling products that you have an interest in and building websites/pages about them.

It’s as simple as that!

06. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

It may surprise you to hear marketing online being referred to in terms of energy, but that’s precisely what it takes to get the word out. The more enthused energy you can put into your marketing efforts, the easier it is to sustain sales. That’s why people always tell you to sell something you believe in. If you believe in the product, it’s easier to promote it.

If your enthusiasm for a project is waning, it could mean that the quality of the product is not up to speed. Perhaps you’d be better served spending time on raising the quality, and come back to the marketing after you make beneficial changes. Otherwise, no amount of marketing will make up for your lack of enthusiasm, or the product’s low quality.

Improved quality is definitely a way to stay psyched about marketing. If your product really is the best on the internet, it doesn’t take much to motivate you to keep selling. Over time, constantly tweaking your quality and energizing your marketing efforts will lift you through any sales slumps. The internet is a vast marketplace where you can always increase sales, if you just work at it hard enough.

05. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

There are a great number of ways to monetize websites these days, and many of them work in conjunction with each other. Before long, you can end up running quite a few monetization plans on one website. But is there a limit to how well these ads will perform? At some point, degradation of revenues and user experience would seem likely.

The key things to look out for would be:

1) Clutter.
2) Usability. All of these ads pulling from different servers could cause degradation of performance
3) The “cheapness” of a walking billboard.

If you’re attempting to offer an information resource to the public, you might hurt your chances by appearing to be too commercial. When this exact point is hit, it can’t be said easily. But chances are, you’ll know it. If visitors go down at all, ease off a bit from the ads.

02. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Blogging

Akismet has been doing the job for quite some time. They finally added a “delete comment spam on messages older than 30 days” option to make my job even easier. All in all, the basic WordPress anti-comment spam protection seems to get the job done. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be hand editing thousands of messages a day. What a waste of time that would be.

Comment spammers never quit. I guess they must still be getting some links that way, so it’s doubtful you’ll ever see an end to that type of action. But at least you can mostly automate the job of removing the comments, since the spammers have undoubtedly been automated the whole time.

If you haven’t installed Askismet for some reason (I think it’s the default), make sure to do so. It will make you life just a little easier. You can spend more of your time on writing posts and less on weeding the comment garden.

01. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Blogging

Not all news days are created equal. Sometimes you’ll scan your RSS reader and find lots of compelling news to comment on. Other times, you’ll see just some picked over tidbits that you already used. On a slow news day like these, it’s probably best you just go ahead and get original. At least that way you can add something useful to your main body of work.

Being original will generally pay dividends for the simple reason that a lot of bloggers don’t bother with unique content, and instead prefer to link out to material they find. If you can execute a well-written piece that resonates with someone, perhaps you’ll gain a few incoming links that can actually bring you traffic.

If worse comes to worse, you could always go ahead and link up some of your old articles and put together a cohesive piece that ties together some of your past work. It’s not really the most exciting of posts, but people who visit your blog should still find the efforts worthwhile.