Monday, September 8, 2008

Free Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.

2) Submit Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.

3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.

4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.

5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers.

6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.

7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.

8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com.

9) Run a Contest
Start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in new visitors.

10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your blog ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily

How to Start an Online Business Fast and Easy

The fastest and easiest way to start an online business is buy a turnkey e-commerce website. A turnkey website is a website that ready to generate sales and make money online. The website is completely functional and provided with everything you need.

Where to buy a turnkey website?

There are many companies offering a turnkey website in web hosting business. These companies generally are web hosting service providers. You can own a web hosting business by joining a web hosting company’s reseller program. Many of the reseller programs usually are free to join and you are allow to set your own price for each product you selected for reselling. To search for a web hosting reseller program, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'web hosting reseller program'.

If web hosting business doesn’t sound interest to you, you may consider starting an online store. You can buy an online store for less $100 from a website calls getestore.com. They allow you to choose from 3,500 items with brand name such as Sony, Xbox, Panasonic and many more for reselling on your store without paying upfront for inventory. The suppliers will also handle all the packing and shipping works for you.

If you are only interested to start an affiliate marketing business. Pluginprofitsite.com is your solution. The site will recommend you to join several popular affiliate programs. After you have joined their recommended affiliate programs, the owner of Pluginprofitsite will create a brand new professional e-commerce website for you to promote all the affiliate programs you have participated. The cost isn’t cheap; you need to pay about $50 per month for hosting your website and the affiliate membership’s fee.

To generate sales, you need to drive targeted visitors/traffic to your site. The more traffic you get the more money you will make. Here are some of the techniques you can use to drive traffic to your site:

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising programs offer an opportunity to advertisers to promote their websites by bidding for top-listings in the search engines on the keywords of their choices. PPC advertising can drive instant traffic to your website but they can be very expensive if you don’t use them wisely. Here’s a link to download a free e-book that will teach you how to use PPC advertising effectively for your online business:
http://www.googleadwordsmadeeasy.com/1

Search Engine Optimization
Search engines can bring you a lot of free targeted traffic for long term if your website ranks top in their listings. To rank high, search engines optimization is a must. Search engines optimization involves optimizing your webpages for your targeted keywords and increasing the number of websites link to your site. It will take a lot of time and effort in search engine optimization. Here’s a website contains helpful basic and advanced SEO tutorial:
http://www.seo2020.com

Article Marketing
Writing articles and publishing them on article directories is another free way to drive traffic to your website. You will promote your business in the article’s resource box by introducing yourself and your website. Your articles can drive thousands of visitors to your site within weeks if your content is impressive.

by: Alan Liew

Paid Survey, How to Get Started?

Make money with paid survey, is it just a scam or non-sense. Well, there are actually a lot of reputable market research and consumer companies welcome people to become their members to earn cash participating in their online survey. It is a legitimate way to make money online. Additionally, Paid survey is very popular, there are more than 100,000 people searching for paid surveys every month in Yahoo as recorded in Overture Search tool.

However, the downsides of paid survey is that you will not know how much money you make ever month. The companies only send paid survey invitations to you if you are eligible. If you receive more surveys in the month, you'll earn more. Another problem is that most paid surveys only available to US residents, so people outside US will find hard to make money with paid survey.

Start Earning with Paid Survey in 3 Steps:
  • Step 1 - Create a new e-mail account specially for receiving paid survey invitations. You can use Yahoo, Hotmail and other free email services. This will make finding your survey invitations easier compare to using an existing email that receives plenty of mails daily.
  • Step 2 - Go to Yellowsurveys.com to sign up with as many online market research companies as possible. The site compiled a long list of market research companies that offer paid surveys. Sign up with the companies in "Most Popular" category first and then continue to join the rest. This can take few days of work.
  • Step 3 - Wait for paid survey invitations send to you. It can take fews days to months to receive your first survey invitation. You shouldn't rely on paid survey as your main source of income. It can only be a way of earning extra money.

Google SEO Tips: Content Updating is Getting More Important

Google's ranking algorithm has never been consistent, recently, I discover that the frequency of content updating on blog and website is getting more useful in increasing Google ranking as it uses to be. I think it started about a month ago.

The search term "make money online" is a good example to strengthen my point. If you often use this search term, you'll notice the websites listed in top 10 result fluctuate from time to time. The frequent fluctuations have lead to websites with decent number of backlinks that have stayed in first page for long period of time gradually one by one drop from top 5 to top 10 and from top 10 to top 20; and allowing more blog with frequent content update to get into top 10 listing. I have been in the niche of "make money online" for more than a year and never see it happens this way. It is obvious that Google has changed their ranking algorithm again and place more weight on content.

So if your website have experienced a drop in Google and you think that you have not done anything wrong. The frequency of content updating may be one of the main reasons. You may take a look at your competitors website to see whether they have started adding fresh content often. If yes, you may think about updating your site in on going basis as well. It will give you a better chance in re-gaining your Google ranking.

Guide To Choosing A Web Host For Your E-Commerce Web Site

There are many things to take into consideration when setting up an e-commerce website to start making money online and one of the most important things is choosing a web host company to publish your e-commerce website. When selecting a web host, it is always best to research each potential host and compare all of the offers and prices before settling on the company that provides exactly what you need.

First, you should determine what you will require from the host. The basic business requirements may include:

- Disk space
- Bandwidth
- Shopping cart or similar technologies
- Email accounts
- FTP ability
- Technical support

You should make sure that the web host company you deal with provides the basic features your site will require otherwise you will end up paying for them separately. For example, for e-commerce you will have to be sure that the web host has facilities of a shopping cart and mailing lists along with a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate. Shop around and ask lots of questions. Make sure your host can meet your needs.

Security of your shopping cart is of primary importance. Some large companies offer firewalls, protection against denial-of-service (Dos) attacks and even virtual private networks (VPNs) at an extra cost. You may pay more for these additional services and it may be worth it because any security lapse can undo all the effort that you have taken in building up an online business.

Downtime is a death knell for an online store. Imagine the frustration and reaction of a buyer who tries to but cannot access your site or if it goes down when he/she is actually putting items in a shopping cart. The obvious assumption is going to hurt you and make you lose prospective buyers. Some of those who experience such incidents are liable to spread the word around too. To ensure that nothing of the sort happens to you, it will be good idea to check out the uptime guarantee offered by the web hosts and the technical support that it will provide in the event your site goes down.

If a host offers 30 days trial. You may sign up the trial offer to see whether the company delivers their promises. Although this can mean a small loss to your business due to delay in launching your website. But it is worth it to make sure that your customers can find, use and depend on your website.

Once you have narrow down the list of potential hosts, it is time to compare prices. Budget hosting usually comes with several downsides, such as lesser facilities and lack of technical support that could ultimately prove to be more expensive in terms of loss of profits. This is of course, not all budget-hosting companies provide such a low quality service, but keep these things in mind before going with a cheap deal and regretting it later.

The web hosting industry is very competitive, you should be able to find a good deal after doing some researches. Finding the right host will save your money in the long run and help you get your site to its complete potential immediately.

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

1) Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs
CPC advertising programs are the best money making programs for most of the bloggers. They are suitable to all kind of blogs with family-friendly content regardless of their traffic level and age. CPC programs work well on blog because they display contextual ads that are highly relevant to blogs content and bloggers will earn anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents for each contextual ads click by their visitors. With proper CPC ads optimization and consistent amount of traffic, a blogger can earn a steady amount of money displaying CPC ads on his/her blog. Google AdSense is no doubt, the undisputed king of CPC advertising programs and Yahoo Publisher Network is the closest alternative of AdSense.

2) Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Advertising Programs
CPA programs is quite similar to CPC programs except CPA programs don't pay bloggers for each click on the CPA ads hosted by bloggers. The blogger only makes money when the visitor takes an action on the CPA advertiser website. The action can be a sign up, making a purchase, generating a lead, downloading a product and more. CPA networks pay a lot more than CPC programs, for a visitor sent by the blogger from his/her blog to a CPA advertiser website and the visitor taken an action on the advertiser site, the blogger can earn few dollar to fifty dollar depend on the niche. But CPA ads tend to work well on large traffic blogs only. AzoogleAds.com, Commission Junction and Advertising.com are some of the largest CPA networks.

3) Promote Affiliate Programs
Marketing affiliate programs is very common nowadays. You sign up with affiliate program of an online company, then decide whether to use the company's text link or banner ads on your blog to promote the company's products or services and earn affiliate commission when a visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs can be promoted without a website and blog too.

4) Pay Per Post Programs
Pay per post programs started last year. The programs pay bloggers to write a blog post about a sponsor's website. The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Google PR and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollar for just writing one sponsor post. Here's are the two most popular Pay per post networks that offer this type of earning opportunities:

www.reviewme.com
www.payperpost.com

The downside of pay per post is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

5) Sell Text Link Ads
Selling text links on your blog can be a great source of additional online revenue. It is not difficult to get started, just go to Text-link-ads.com to sign up an account, then decide which part of your pages you want to display paid text links, set your price and you are ready to take order. Text-link-ads.com will handle all the promotional works. Another company that offers the similar services as Text-link-ads.com is Reverselinks.com

6) Hosting Web Poll
Vizu Answer offers a pretty new way to monetize your blog's and website's traffic. The pays the publishers on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis for hosting targeted web poll. The money a blogger can earn from hosting poll is depending on the page views. The more page views, the higher the earning.

from: http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/