Soft Sell Takes Another Step Into the Mainstream

By Jim Sniechowski Platinum Quality Author


We just received an email quoting very successful copywriter, Bob Bly. He's been writing for years and is very well known in Direct Marketing as well as in Internet marketing industries.

A few of his many clients are: CBS Market Watch, Forbes, Harvard Business School, Kiplinger, McGraw-Hill, Nature, Nightingale-Conant, New York Times Syndicate, Prentice Hall, Scientific American.

Here's the quote:

"The teaching of how to make money marketing information on the Internet has gone from an honorable, honest profession to a hype-filled, slime-infested jungle. Each day, the claims get more and more outrageous.

'I made $1 million in 17 seconds on the Internet!' one promoter screams.

'Join my Delta Mega Force Team today and get a Rolls Royce with your first affiliate commission check,' another shouts even more loudly.

"Does brag-and-boast advertising like this - especially from so-called marketing gurus you never heard of before - make you skeptical?

"To me, these outrageous promotions ... sorely lacking in credibility ... make me want to toss my cookies!"

That's what we've been saying all along. Outrageous. Not credible. Hype-filled.

Copywriters who depend on hyperbole aren't believable because their copy isn't authentic. It lacks a sincere emotional connection because they're not sincerely emotionally involved. Their entire focus is on making the sale rather than truly servicing those who might be interested.

When genuine, heartfelt emotion is absent copywriters are compelled to use hype which pushes them over the top because they're forced to try to generate a feeling response from their readers but they only have their brain-space to work with.

We welcome Bly's acknowledgment of the problem for which Soft Sell Copywriting and Soft Sell Marketing is a solution.

Because we all need to treat our potential customers with respect and dignity. And it serves our own integrity and the growth of our businesses to use a caring conscience to create compelling presentations in our writing, whether blog post or sales letter.

It's the human-to-human, heart-to-heart connection that makes for the best sales.

Remember, your marketing campaign stands on your Internet platform. You can get solid, proven guidance on how to build your Soft Sell platform by downloading our FREE 60 minute audio - "How to Build Your Soft Sell Platform - at http://www.bridgingheartandmarketing.com/platformbonus

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Internet Marketing Tips - The Best Kind of Internet Marketing Income

By Roger Hoggers Platinum Quality Author

The best income of any kind is always residual income. With internet marketing, what you are always trying to accomplish, if you are doing it right is to develop residual income.

What is the difference between residual income and regular income? When you go to work, you work for a period of time and are paid for the time that you are at work. When you develop a residual income, you work for a period of time, and you are paid on an ongoing basis for the work that you did. Even if it is a small amount, it is important because they add on to each other.

Lets say you build a website which earns you $20 per month. That does not seem like very much money, but if you build 10 websites that all average about $20 per month, now you have $200 per month and you are starting to see the value of residual income.

One of the best ways that I have ever come across to build a residual income is internet marketing. In one of my past careers, I have been a real estate agent. This was fun and lucrative. When I sold a house, I would earn a great deal of money for the sale. However, if I wanted to earn more money, I would have to sell another house.

In my current career, I can very easily build a website, and earn a certain amount of money practically for ever. If I need more money, I can build another website.

What are the 3 things that internet marketers must do to survive?

Find out this and more with the help of Action-Innovations.

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Making Money Online - How Do You Find a Product That Will Sell?

By Andy Mordley Platinum Quality Author

I make money online by selling other people's products via affiliate marketing. I find a niche, find products that I can promote and then set up a website to market them. Finding products to sell is one of the trickiest parts of any project - and my choice of product has led to some huge successes - and some monumental failures!

The most important aspect to consider is what people are likely to be searching for when they come across your product. Are they looking to buy something (or could they be persuaded to buy) or are there just looking for information. You could get 1 million visitors to your website, but if your not selling a product that those visitors would want to by then you won't make any sales.

To illustrate the problem I set up a website recently to sell an autism information product. I thought that I couldn't go wrong - a high quality product, a great sales page, a very poplar condition (1 in 160 births) and virtually no competition in AdWords. I set up an amazing website and launched a pay per click campaign. I had loads of targeted visitors but didn't make a single sale. And the ppc campaign cost me a fortune. Why did it fail? Because people trying to find information about autism aren't looking to buy because there's heaps of free information out there.

When selling information products you need to focus on finding products that are likely to appeal to people who are after something for nothing, trying to achieve the impossible or are likely to buy out of desperation. These buyers are always very eager to part with their money out of hope. For example, information products promising cures to poorly treated and unpleasant conditions always sell well as do products teaching people how to improve their appearance or figure (weight loss or muscle building). Is this ethical? Yes! Welcome to the cruel world of marketing. It goes on all around us every single day. Think about cosmetics for example - you can sell a cream for $100 a gram if comes with a promise that it will make you look 10 years younger. When finding products to market one of the most effective strategies is to focus on selling hope.

Bear in mind however that you must also focus on finding high quality products. Promote poor quality products and the refund rate will be high and people will never buy from you again. I never sell a product unless I have personally bought and reviewed it myself and feel happy and comfortable with the content.

If you are interested in learning more about what types of products to promote there are blueprints available elsewhere on the net that not only tell you precisely what products to promote, but also exactly how to go about marketing them.

Check out Andy's website to learn about online income generating methods which can be successfully applied by anybody - http://www.smallonlineincomes.com

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Name Some Methods to Make Money With Ebook Writing

By Sean R Mize Platinum Quality Author


Looking for ways on how you can make more money from your electronic books? Then, read on and find out!

1. Go with profitable topics. If you want your ebooks to sell like hotcakes online, you better write about topics that are interesting and valuable to the lives of your potential clients so you can easily convince these people to make a purchase. Instead of doing the guessing game or relying on your intuition, it's better if you can do a keyword research that can help you identify the most searched keywords/subjects within your chosen niche. You may also opt to talk directly to your potential clients and ask them about the information that they need through relevant blogs and forums or by sending them surveys or questionnaires through your autoresponders.

2. Multiply the number of your ebooks. You can easily augment your earnings from this endeavor if you can boost the number of your ebooks. Just make sure that you don't sacrifice the quality in the process so you can still offer your readers with their money's worth. Stay productive by managing your time effectively, staying focused and motivated, and by writing short ebooks instead of lengthy ones.

3. Satisfy your readers. This is not only to promote repeat business among these people but also to convince them to recommend your ebooks to their friends and family members. Remember, word-of-mouth advertising is such an effective advertising tool that can help you augment your online earnings in no time. Ensure that your ebooks are of high quality and offer your readers with after sales support.

4. Aggressive marketing strategies. You cannot possibly generate huge sales if no one knows about your ebooks. Give them the right kind of exposure by advertising them using all efficient and cost-effective tools that are available in the internet today. If you don't have the money to spare just yet, you can focus your time and energy on free advertising tools. These include article marketing, forum posting, ezine publishing, email marketing, blogging, and SEO.

5. Sell ad spaces. Another way to augment your earnings from your ebooks is by selling ad spaces to interested marketers. To bring value to your readers, ensure that the ads you put on your content are highly related to your main topic. If you are writing about weight loss, diet pills and supplements are the best choices.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article writing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Writing

Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: Secrets of List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.

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Make Easy Money Online in 3 Easy Steps

By Steven Wagenheim Platinum Quality Author


Everybody wants to make a killing on the Internet and they want to do it fast. Well, I'm going to share with you the three best ways to make some real easy money online. They won't cost you more than a few pennies to implement and you'll be raking in the bucks before you can say "Bob's your uncle." Sound good? Great, then let's get started.

Step one is to go get yourself a free blog at either Blogger, Wordpress or wherever. It doesn't really matter where. The reason you want to do this is because Google, for whatever reason, has a love affair with blogs. If you have a blog and update it often, you'll find that Google will shoot you right up the ranks of their search engine pretty quick. This in turn will translate into you getting a lot of traffic.

Step two is to sign up with an affiliate program like Clickbank. You're going to promote one of their top affiliate products. The niche almost doesn't matter, though some are better than others. What you want to do is write a review of this product and post it on your blog. Why? Because people looking for products are looking for reviews so that they can make informed decisions about the product. Write to the creator and ask for a free copy. Tell him you want to promote it. Nine times out of ten, he'll send you one.

Step three is the critical step. Write articles based on the topic related to this product and submit them to article directories. Make sure in the resource box that you have a strong call to action to go to your blog to read the review of the product. People will then go to your blog, read the review, check out the sales page and ultimately buy the product. If this sounds too easy, trust me, it is. All you need to do is follow the steps.

For more info on just how to make this work like magic, check the link in my signature.

Making money online really IS easy...once you know how it's done.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to really make this system work like magic? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and turn yourself into a money making machine literally overnight.

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If You Can't Make Money Without Money, You Can't Make Money With Money

By Daniel Massicotte

Picture a student living in a 1.5 room apartment with an internet connection, a full course load and a driving passion to make on online business that works. Ten years ago, most people would have thought this student is a fool.

Today, I know that this student is going to find what he is looking for, because of one word:

Resourcefulness

The saying goes, "You need money to make money." I disagree.

Allow me to explain with three scenarios:

Student-entrepreneur A makes a business of his HTML site building skills to make websites for people at $100/contract. All he needs is a computer and an internet connection. Because this entrepreneur has taken advantage of a skill he can provide (that he is really good at) at no additional cost to himself, upon graduation he is already ahead of his peers.

Student-entrepreneur B writes an E-book to guide his fellow classmates when they give an oral presentation in class. He has had countless success stories of presentations he has given with positive results. He sells his book on the internet to other students who are looking for the key to giving a good oral presentation. The book is a flop, but he keeps trying to find ways to market new products and gain experience.

Here we have two examples of students who have nothing but free time on the weekend and an internet connection to begin taking control over their own lives.

Let me give you a third profile.

Student-entrepreneur C is studying business in university. Unlike the first two he decides to wait until he graduates before he takes on any new projects. He has some great break-through ideas, but all his advisors are telling him to focus on school because "it is a full time job in and of itself" and "your grades will follow you for life." Upon graduation this entrepreneur gets a full time job in Documentation at a paper company and during his evenings he works on his business projects. He also gets married, buys a house and starts raising a family.

In which of these examples do you see Bill Gates? What about Steve Jobs?

Of the three entrepreneurs, which ones do you think are following their passions?

Since I am throwing quotes out quite a bit, here is another one:

"What a man does on his free time determines who he really is."

When you graduate with your undergraduate degree, employers are looking for experience. Unfortunately, you can only get experience by being hired by an employer who understands that you have NO experience...but all the employers want candidates with experience!

There seems to be a vicious circle.

However,

If you have been working in tune with your passion, this should not be an issue. If you are passionate about starting businesses, or writing books, or geography or politics-You should have plenty of experience from initiatives you have taken up on your own. Enough that would amaze any employer.

Daniel Massicotte, Fourth Year Student at McGill University (English Major, Business Minor). Have a Presentation You Need to Ace? Visit http://www.aplus-students.com for more tips and a student-priced e-book that guides you step by step to make it to the top of your class.

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7EASY STEPS HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH ZERO BUDGET

By Rudy Tanaka

Are you a newbie marketer and trying to make easy money from internet??
Maybe you have heard many way to make easy money from internet.Or you have tried many programs that promise you a lot of profits and you have lost much money for those programs but you didn’t able make money with them.
Many people have asked why they didn’t make money even they have paid much money.
Or even you are one of them before…….
Don’t worry…
Today is your lucky day.Because this article will tell you how to make easy money online just in 7 easy steps with zero budget.

These are the 7 easy steps to make easy money online:

1. Find a niche
First of all, find your niche.Pick 1 spesific category you interest or you can analyze what is hot right now.You can find what is hot now at Google by using “hot trends” keyword or you can find it at Amazon what is best seller now.

2. Find your product
Now, I assume you have make your “hot” niche.The next step is find your product.But don’t create your product first because it will spend your time and of course your money.This is why most newbie quit from internet marketing.They have spend much money and time to make their product and no sale...
You can find your “hot”product in few affiliate programs.This is simple and you must not make product.Once somenone buys the product through your link, you immediately get commission.Simple and easy right?

3. Create a website
Next, build a website to place your product in.You can find many free hosting on the internet.
If you are an experienced programmer or are familiar with html, frontpage, or dream weaver, then creating your web site should be a cinch.
If you are beginner I recommend you to use blog because it is easy to manage.

4. Write Article related to your niche
Now you want to add article related to your niche.You can write that article yourself.Or you can read other website and rewrite the information in your words.The article must written in your words to avoid duplicated content that will hurt your site rangkings in search engines.
If you don’t have time to write that article you can hire a writer.Even you can make your name as the author.But you must pay to the writer.


5. Give Something to your customer/visitor
Don’t let your visitor or your customer leave your site with empty hand.Give them free download ebook that you have written with your link in it.Beside your visitor/customer happy you can promote your website and your product in it and increase your website traffic.

6. Increase your website traffic
Join some forum related to your website.Or you can find some website related to your website and ask them to exchange link.Beside that, I recommend you to submit your site to famous search engine like Google, Yahoo, etc.You can also submit your article to article directories like ezinearticle.com.
Find popular blogs that are related to your website's subject. Frequently post feedback and be sure to include your website's address. Be sure that the feedback is genuine and useful, so it is not viewed as spamming. Give helpful comments often, and others will visit your website.

7. Generate Your visitor
Of course you must build a relationship between you and your customer,Ask their email when they visit your website so you can email them regularly about your new product and helpful information.So promote, promote and promote..
These will make more, more, and more money for you…
An don’t be forget to update your site continually.

Good Luck in your adventure!!!

I strongly recommended of “make easy money with Google” because in that book therea are so many secret about adsense and of course you can make easy money from Google adsense.Get it for only $6.68 in here


Do you want to learn more about make easy money online and the secrets of make money online?Get it for FREE in here!!!!

Rudy Tanaka is a internet marketing specialist and dedicated to helping others and offering the best information on how to make more money online.

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How To Make Money Easy

By Guillermo Puyol

Are you trying to find out how to make money easy online? You are in luck! This article will tell you what I've found that works, and what doesn't.

In the few years I have been marketing online I have stumbled upon several programs that promise miracles but they just don't follow through. I also witnessed how some people would accuse great programs of being scams, not because the programs were faulty or because they made untrue statements of income, but just because these people were not able to make money with them. They just didn't follow the system and gave up. It is like accusing a gym of not working just because you paid for the membership and didn't lose weight. It is not the membership fee that helps you it is the workout. After all these experiences I realized it is not a matter of finding out how to make money easy, it is a matter of finding a system that you are willing and able to follow, and something that doesn't clash with your personality.

It is important also to realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything requires an investment, whether you invest time or money it is up to you, but you must put something in to get something out. Online businesses are the same. If you want to be able to make money online, you must also either invest money or time. There are programs out there that promise autopilot profits and the set it and forget it types of things, those are either scams or they are not as automated as they make themselves out to be.

The following is a way of how you can make money easy from the comfort of your own home.

Craig's List

Garage sales are very common. People empty all the junk from their garage and put a price to it. Others, visit their street, buy their stuff and go back home happy with their newfound treasures. Craig's list is the same!

People find stuff around their house or garage and list it online at craigslist.com. Sometimes these people have no earthly idea how much their junk is really word and they let it go for pennies on the dollar. That is were you come in. If you take the time to check Craig's list frequently enough, you are sure to find some of those deals. When you do, just buy it, and list your item back online at an auction site like eBay. Just make sure you start out with a low investment because you really never know what is going to happen with the things you buy.

Another great thing about Craig's list is that they have a huge free section where people list things they are ready to part with. Usually they ask that you pick them up, so this works better if you can move around your city with ease. Find free items you think you can sell, pick them up and sell them for one hundred percent profit. There is no risk at all with this tactic.

This is just one of the ideas I discussed in my website, follow this link to find out how to make money easy

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TOP 7 HOW TO MAKE EASY MONEY FOR NEWBIE MARKETERS

by Rudy Tanaka

Are you looking for the easiest way make money online??Here, I’ll tell you how to make money money from your site from A-Z…But before we get into actual marketing techniques I want u to understand what internet marketing is, how vast the opportunity really is and the important is making money is not easy..You can’t looking for a get rich without working for it..

After u understand all of it, let’s begin the lesson.
I’m sure that you have thought before about making money online or even you have already tried some online business strategies provided by many internet business experts.I will tell you my plan to make money online using one of the simplest money maker, Google Adsense.

Maybe you have heard about that affiliate, but you must know only 5% success making money from adsense.But don’t worry I’ll tell you the way how to make money money form adsense.

The main idea is to build a site based on some keywords and try to get it at the first result of search engine;we will take Google as our primary search engine.
In the following step, you will provided how to make money with Google adsense program right now.

Here is my easiest way make money online:

1.Choosing a good niche(keyword)
First, you must determine your niche, you can choose whatever niche as you want.But I recommend you to choose niche you know more about it or you can choose niche you interest in.In addition when you determine a keyword I hope it will be 3 -5 words.Because it will be more specific and most of search engine like it.Again more specific the keyword you choose, the better chance it wil get sales!!!!

2.Build a site
I assume you have finished the step 1.Now, step 2 is build a site..You can find many free domain site in the internet.You can also build a blog.I recommend you to use blog because it is easy to manage.

3.Write article and submit it!!
Now you want to add article related to your keyword.You can write that article yourself.Or you can read other website and rewrite the information in your words.The article must written in your words to avoid duplicated content that will hurt your site rangkings in search engines.
If you don’t have time to write that article you can hire a writer.Even you can make your name as the author.
After you write that, you can submit it to article directories.This is one of the effective way to increase your site rangking.
4.Submit your site at search engine and other website/Blog directories
Now you have website or blog and the content in it.After that you can submit your website or blog at search engine and other website/blog directories.

5.Join Forum
You can also join forum to increase your site traffic. Most of the forum provides you with signature. You can add your URL to your signature.

6.Exchange link with other TOP 10 related website.

7.Update your site continually and be patient.

Good Luck in your adventures!!

Do you want to learn more about easiest way make money online and adsense secret?Find out more in here.

Hans Ikegawa is a internet marketing specialist and dedicated to helping others and offering the best information on how to make more money online.

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Guide to Pay Per Click Search Engines

by: David Greene


Search Engines. What is a Pay Per Click Search Engine?

A pay per click search engine is designed for pay for performance advertising. That means that an advertiser pays the search engine owners only for traffic that is delivered to his web site in accordance with key words that the advertiser chooses to bid on.
Example: An advertiser has a web site that advertises vacations to Thailand. The advertiser can bid on "vacations to Thailand" as a key word. If he wants to be in the number one position on the search results page he can place a bid that is one cent more than the existing high bid for the key word term "vacations to Thailand". Let's say that the present high bid is $0.20 per click. A bid of $0.21 would than gain the top position for the advertiser.

If his key word was clicked on 10 times in one day he would pay 10 X $0. 21 , or $2.10 for the traffic that was delivered to his web site for that day. The advertiser is paying only for performance. There is no charge for the number of times that the advertisers ad appeared on the search engine web site that day. The charges are based only on the number of times that a visitor clicked on the key word and was delivered to the advertiser's web site. Thus the name "pay per click".

Why Use Pay Per Click Search Engines?

In just a few words it is because the leading Pay per Click Search Engines (PPC) can quickly deliver quality targeted traffic to your web site. Anyone who has build web sites know that building web sites is the easy part. The tough part of the process is in driving enough qualified traffic to the site to make it worth while from a commercial view point.
Even if you are successful in building a web site that the search engines love it will take some time, probably two or three months, perhaps longer, for the search engine spiders to find your site and for your site to be listed in the search engine. If you are trying to make money on the Internet that is a long time to go without traffic.

No traffic means no sales and no income. That should not be your objective unless you enjoy building web sites no matter how few people ever visit them.

With pay per click search engine accounts you can almost immediately drive qualified traffic to your web site. If you are serious about building a business on the Internet that is a pretty good reason to use Pay Per Click Search Engines.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Tips.

1. Use quality pay per click search engines that already have a high volume of traffic. It doesn't matter how cheap the bid for your key words may be if there is little traffic on the search engine and your key words are never clicked on.

2. Know your market. If you are selling "vacations to Thailand" do some research to find out what words and phases folks who are thinking of traveling to Thailand are actually using in their searches. An excellent tool to assist in this research is Wordtracker . Wordtracker will quickly help you to decide which key words are truly worth bidding on.

3. Quality pay per click search engines will have starting bids from one cent to five cents per key word. It is important to know that about 80% of the traffic for any key word will go to the top three bids. So if you want a lot of traffic to your web site try to position yourself in the top three spots. Just as with real estate location makes all the difference in results.

4. Set up a realistic budget for each search engine. Quality pay per click search engines get a lot of traffic so be prepared for a lot of traffic to your site if you bid on popular key words.

5. Popular key words can be expensive so choose your key words with great care. It is best to stay away from key words that are too general in nature. Thus to continue with the example above bidding on the key word "vacations" would not be wise if you are selling vacations to Thailand. Yes, you would get a ton of traffic but it would be more than likely be too general and you would spend a lot of money for poor results. It is almost always a better strategy to bid on phases instead of one general keyword. Therefore bidding on "vacations to Thailand" would be a far better choice than bidding on "vacations".

If you are selling vacations to Pattaya Thailand it would be better to bid on "vacations to Pattaya Thailand" than on "vacations to Thailand". The more keywords that you can find that exactly match up with whatever it is that you are selling and that folks will be searching for the more money you will save (less money will get you in the top three spots) and the better your results will be.

Wordtracker is an excellent tool that can find key word phases that are actually being searched for and that you would probably never think of going it alone.

6. Think about using a lot of keywords rather that a common few. The common few will be expensive and will likely deliver to your web site a lot of poorly targeted traffic with poor conversion ratios (traffic to sales). People search for the darnest things and those who actually plan on buying something usually search by using phrases. With some effort you can find phrases that are cheap and that will deliver highly targeted traffic...the kind that converts into sales.

7. No matter how much traffic you drive to a web site if you are marketing sorry products or services or if you have excellent products and services but you have a sorry website you are wasting your time and money. Everything must be right to achieve business success. Make sure that your site is "order taking ready" before you turn on your pay per click traffic.

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How to Mint Money Using Affiliate Products

By Jo Mark Platinum Quality Author


Most of the people start an online business because they lured in by the success of other online marketers. But there is no magic wand that you can wave and begin to make money. Like any other business, it takes real work to do well. But you can eliminate some of that hard work by promoting affiliate products. And, as an added bonus, you can begin to make money right away.

The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don't have to develop a product or service on your own. This saves a lot of time and money that otherwise would have been invested in creating your own product. So, if you are an affiliate marketer, you have a product readily available for sale. You are also totally free from the responsibilities associated with developing, launching and maintaining a product. The merchant takes care of the details; he creates th product, develops an attractive sales page, takes care of the payment terms, sales, delivery and customer care. All you need to do is visitors to the sales page.

Another advantage of affiliate marketing is the generous commissions you can earn. You earn a commission every time someone you refer buys the product. The amount of commission varies between 30% to 75% of the total sales price. It is difficult to find another business that pays such high commissions. In addition, you don't have to pay anything to enroll in affiliate program. There is no registration fee and it is up to you decide the number of products that you wish to promote.

Even newbies can make money promoting affiliate products. Many vendors will provide you with sales aids and marketing tips to help you get started. Some provide you with free study material including reports and videos to train you. Added to this is the free supply of sales tools like email and sales reports that makes it totally hassle free. Other impressive features are; versatility, flexibility and the freedom to run your business at your own pace. At any point of time, you have the option to drop a particular product or stop promoting it if you are not satisfied for some reason.

Are you interested in knowing how I mint money? Then, try my latest ebook and mint hot cash online.

FREE Ebook - Make Money Every Day! http://www.milliondollararticle.com

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Easiest n Quick Way to Make Money

By Michael Nalbone



Still struggling? Damned shame. It's not that hard to make money
online.

Heard that before, have you? Well listen...I'm going to lay it
all out for you, right here, right now & I'm not going to charge
you a dime - you can thank me later.

This is by-far the easiest, fastest way to make money. But it's
important that you follow-through.

Step 1: If you don't have a ClickBank affiliate id, go there now
& get one. It's free.

Step 2: Browse through or search the ClickBank Marketplace and
find a product to promote that pays at least $25 in commission.

If you don't have any money to get going, write a short article
that relates to the ClickBank product. Explain how using the
product will benefit those reading the article. Include your
cloaked affiliate hoplink within the article body as well as the
"about the author" footer. Submit the article to article
directories. Write and submit one or two articles per week.
Within a week or so, you should start seeing some cash coming in.

Step 3: If you don't have a Google AdWords account, go there now
& open one.

Step 4: Gather some relevant keywords & launch a PPC campaign to
promote the ClickBank product.

Step 5: UNDERSTAND THIS: Make sure you use the proper hoplink
format! I cringe every time I see someone post an ad for a
ClickBank product & use the wrong link. Then they wonder why
they're not making any money! The correct format is:
http://affiliate.vendor.hop.clickbank.net - It is NOT
http://www.some-vendor-site.com/?hop=affiliate - You MUST send
the visitor to CLICKBANK in order for the affiliate cookie to be
set & proper credit awarded for the sale.

Step 6: Keep your keyword bids low and test different ad versions
until you get one that pulls some traffic. If the ClickBank
product has even a half-decent sales page, you should be able to
make more than you spend on the ads. If it doesn't, you're either
paying too much for the keywords, or the sales page sucks - in
which case, dump it & try a different product.

That's all there is to it.

Re-invest your profits to launch & test new products/ad
campaigns. Branch-out and add Commission Junction products to the
mix. Grow slowly & use the money you've made to create your own
product. If you can't write, hire someone to do it for you. Have
some graphics created & set up a sales page of your own.

Repeat the process until you're making the kind of money you're
happy with. It isn't rocket science. I know it works. I've been
doing it this way myself & this method has allowed me to quit my
job & enjoy true freedom. Anybody (and I do mean ANYBODY) can do
this. There's no reason that you can't make money online &
finally tell your boss to kiss-off too.

Here's To Your Freedom! - Mike Nalbone

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Make Money From Your Content Site

By Derek Vaughan

If you're a Webmaster whose site receives even a modest amount of traffic, you've no doubt dreamed of the untold riches that lie untapped in your traffic stream. The burning question is: "How can I make the most money possible from my Website traffic?" This article will help you answer that question, as we explore several of the most common and profitable methods that are currently being employed to convert page views into dollars:

*Traditional banner advertising
*Pay-per-click (contextual) banner advertising
*Subscription revenue
*Affiliate and CPA programs
*Text links

We'll finish up with a review of the finer points of online selling.
Traditional Banner Advertising
One of the earliest and most prevalent forms of monetizing site traffic is the ubiquitous online banner. Originally most popular in the 468x60 pixel version, banners are now available in many different sizes and shapes. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau now lists 16 standard ad units in its guidelines. It's not hard to find a site that uses banners: CNN displays a 728x90 banner at the top of the page, eBay uses a 468x60 banner spot at top of listings pages, and AOL displays banners of various sizes throughout the site.

Business Model and Mechanics
The basic business model of the banner is simple: the Website vendor sells page views (impressions) to the advertiser. There are 2 basic banner ad payment models: paying as you go for every thousand impressions delivered, and a flat fee that's charged regardless of the number of visitors who actually see the ad.
Under the pay-as-you-go model, the most common metric is cost-per-thousand (impressions), also known as CPM. Prices will vary depending on targeting, volume, term of commitment, and market forces. Typical CPMs for less targeted inventory can range from $0.25 to $5.00 per thousand impressions. Therefore, a media buyer who wishes to purchase 100,000 impressions at a $5 CPM will sign a contract for $5,000. Targeted impressions are worth much more to an advertiser. If your site attracts car enthusiasts who are an attractive demographic for a local or national car dealership, you can expect to command 10 times the rate of untargeted ad inventory. Typical CPMs for targeted inventory run between $10 to over $100 per thousand impressions.

It's also common for a site to charge a media buyer a flat fee for an advertising spot. Depending on the placement and traffic, the fees can be quite high. For instance, a fixed placement on the home page, in a prominent spot, with a 100% share of voice on a targeted site is quite desirable.
The advantage of running banner advertising on your site is that you may be able to get paid purely on the basis of page views, thereby monetizing all your available inventory. The drawback may be that not everyone is willing to pay simply to be seen: often, advertisers demand a response to the advertising. Media buyers may be looking for a per-click type of payment arrangement.
The main disadvantage of running banners on your site is probably the adoption of maintenance responsibilities for someone else's creative units, and the responsibility for a banner's performance even if the banner is poorly designed, or the advertiser's Website doesn't convert well.
To make real money from banner ads, it's essential that you have a clear idea of how many unique visitors visit your site, and how many page views they generate -- data that any decent Web analytics program will show. You then have a basis on which you can establish realistic expectations of how much money you might earn.
Next, decide where on your site you're going to display advertising banners. I would suggest testing ads both at the top and bottom of your pages -- this is a proven model that has worked well for large publishers. Once you've decided on ad placements, you should set up an ad server to display the banners, and keep track of pages views and click throughs. I would also suggest developing several banners that 'sell' the ad space, which can run when you have excess inventory. The banner might say something like, "See Your Ad Here -- Contact Us to Advertise," and link to your advertising rates page.
Once your ad server is set up, sell! This is a hurdle for many; we'll address it later in this article.
Pay-Per-Click (Contextual) Banner Advertising
With the emergence of Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, the business of pay-per-click banners has exploded. This type of ad unit offers the tantalizing combination of ease-of-use and payouts for each and every click, regardless of whether that visitor converts to sale or not. It's no wonder this unit is so popular with the likes of Slashdot, which shows PPC marketplace links on the right-hand side of the site's main categories and posts, and Go.com, which uses Yahoo! Search Sponsored Results to power its search function. And these are just two among many, many other sites.
Business Model and Mechanics
As the name implies, pay-per-click banners are ad units that pay out each time they're clicked (with obvious fraud prevention engaged to prevent self-enrichment). These ads are sometimes called 'contextual' advertising, as the ad suppliers will often regulate where specific ads are placed, to ensure that they're relevant to the Web page on which they're viewed, and the audience that sees them.
The bounty paid out on each click is usually determined by the value of that click as set by the advertiser. This is a nice way of saying that you really don't know what you're going to earn from any given click until you check the back-end reporting.
Don't neglect checking out alternatives to Google's AdSense program. While Google is large and established, many smaller services actually share more of the advertising revenue with you. For example, bidvertiser.com is one alternative that pays out at a much lower threshold ($10) than Google. Also, if you specialize in Webmaster or Web hosting-related traffic, a new service at Webmaster911 offers much higher revenue sharing than Google currently offers.
Subscription Revenue
Any site that has recurring or frequently refreshed content may be a good candidate for a subscription revenue model. News sites fall into this category, with the Wall Street Journal and CNN offering some form of subscription service for their online content.
Business Model and Mechanics
Subscription-based services migrated from the offline world to the online world. The most common forms of subscriptions were originally used for newspapers or magazines. The end-user of the news or information service typically pays a weekly or monthly recurring service fee (subscription fee) to have full access to the publisher's content. The practical implementation of this model online may work as follows.
A publisher offers additional coverage, or premium content that is only available to subscribers. Under this model, the content is usually in a special password-protected area of the site. A new subscriber may gain access to the content by filling out an online form including (usually) credit card information for billing purposes. Once the credit card transaction has been authorized, the subscriber is emailed a unique and secure password permitting access to the subscription-only content. Typical subscription fees are in the range of $10 per month. For example, CNN charges $12.99 per month for its 'NewsPass,' which permits access to premium streaming video content on the site. The Wall Street Journal currently charges $6.95 per month for access to online content for those not already subscribed to the print edition.
A hybrid of the pure subscription model is simply to charge an increasing fee as access to higher level services increases. This model is common in online forums, where additional charges are levied to access certain forums, or users' signature lines are expanded at higher fee levels.
Affiliate and CPA Programs
Affiliate programs have existed from the infancy of the Internet. Amazon.com was an early adopter, and was able to convince many Webmasters to offer relevant books for sale on the site in exchange for a share of the profits -- today, Amazon has an extensive affiliate program. Affiliate programs have matured considerably since then, and there are now many more options for making money from your site traffic.
Basic Business Model
Affiliate programs essentially work like this: the Website owner (affiliate) offers the merchant's goods for sale on the affiliate Website. When a visitor clicks through the affiliate link, an identification code is associated with the visit (usually via a cookie) and in the event that the visitor takes the appropriate action (visit, conversion to a lead, conversion to a sale) then the affiliate is paid by the merchant. The merchant or affiliate network will also usually provide tools for the affiliate to monitor various metrics, such as the number of visitors sent to a merchant site, the number of clicks or sales generated, and the earnings accumulated.
Affiliate relationships may be established either with each merchant directly, or through an established third-party affiliate network. The two most popular third party affiliate networks are Linkshare and Commission Junction.
Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet.
Heidi Messer, President and COO of LinkShare Corporation sums up the service this way:
If you are looking to partner with the Internet's top brands, then LinkShare is the affiliate network to join. Find programs for Fortune 500 and other leading companies such as American Express, Avon, Dell, Office Depot, Apple Store, 1-800-Flowers, and more - only at LinkShare. We don't use cookies to track, so you don't have to worry about blocked or disabled cookies. And with our proprietary SynergyAnalytics application, LinkShare affiliates have a wealth of information and reports not available anywhere else to help them optimize their relationships. We're the leaders in the industry, and will continue to pave the way in both service and technology to foster profitable relationships online.
Text Links
In this era of ferociously competitive search engine optimization, competitive online marketing, and the race to appear first in the search engine results, an active market has arisen in the buying and selling of text links.
The beauty of text links from the Website owner's (or seller's) perspective is this: in order to boost search engine placement, the link must go directly to the Web page that's being optimized. There can be no tracking mechanism, or third party ad serving to interrupt the click. Therefore, these links are not scrutinized in the same manner that more conventional advertising is. It's simply not that important how much traffic comes through the link, or whether it's really being noticed by site visitors at all. This means you can have the links tucked away at the very bottom of your pages in a footer, and use a small font. The links can be very unobtrusive to your regular site traffic: as long as your Website meets the buyer's criteria, they will continue to pay for the link. Of course, as the likes of the TopXML and phpbb sites show, text links can be cleverly integrated into a site's design to provide a prominent advertising feature.
So what criteria do buyers look for, and what are they willing to pay? You can check the spot market for text links at sites like http://www.linkadage.com/Auction/XcAuctionPro.asp.
Another benefit of text link selling is that you don't have to really maintain the 'ad' at all. As long as the link is active on the page, you've done your part. This is much less labor and resource intensive than building an ad server into your site, rotating ads, and keeping creatives up-to-date.
Finally, as if it weren't already a great deal, you can have up to 20 text links on a page without suffering any negative consequences in the search engines. So, even if you only sell your links for $25 each (read: cheap) you can still net $500 per month just for letting the links sit there.
A Word on Selling
Let's face it: even the most attractive inventory won't move unless someone gets out there and sells it. That someone may have to be you, if you're an entrepreneur. Many people view selling with disdain, or they hate the rejection that goes hand-in-hand with the selling profession. You've got to get over this in order to be successful in translating your page views into dollars. If you can't do it yourself, then work out a commission-only arrangement with someone who can sell your inventory.
Jean Landry is a sales executive with The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper, daily offering readers from coast to coast unparalleled national, international and business reporting, analysis and commentary. The Globe and Mail has nearly 1,000,000 readers each weekday and even more on weekends: their online version at globeandmail.com attracts over 2.5 million visitors per month.
Jean offers the following key selling points for Webmasters:

Know your audience. Conduct a user survey and collect research when your visitors sign up for newsletters, pdf's, and registrations. Carefully profile your visitors. You may think you know who your visitors are, but you'll need to prove it to people, especially when HP says they want to buy up 10 million impressions from you for $50,000/month -- they'll most certainly want more than who you think is coming to your site.


Know your competition. Find out what your competitors are charging for their ad space, what ad unit sizes they are offering and what advertisers want. You may keep an eye on your competitors, as well, to determine their inventory churn or rollover. If you go back every 2 to 4 weeks and you see new advertisers all the time, it either means the site has a really aggressive sales person, or that it can't return results for advertisers, so clients are canceling.


Understand the language and understand the benefits and uniqueness of online advertising as an advertising medium. What's a cpm? What's a clickthrough? What does CPA stand for? A few months ago, we interviewed people for an online sales position and candidates couldn't answer those questions. Spend a little less time watching TV and a little more time reading Clickz.com, eMarketer.com, and MarketingFind.com, or check out adglossary.com. Industry knowledge and research can really help you move your inventory and sell online advertising. For example, I bet you didn't know that Internet accounts for about the same % of media time for consumers as TV now -- each accounts for 30% of their media usage time! However only 4% of media budgets are going towards online, while about 25% are going towards TV ...sounds like a pretty good opportunity to reach a huge untapped audience doesn't it?


Be creative! Online advertising is boring and predictable and doomed for failure if all you are going to sell is the standard 468x60 banner at the top of your Web page. Ever heard of banner blindness or banner burnout? It means your visitors tend to ignore the most common or basic forms of advertising online if you don't put some thought into their delivery and placement. You need to think about offering content sponsorships on your site, targeting your ads to geographic regions, day of week delivery, etc. Think strategic and offer strategic advertising solutions. If you have a section of your site dedicated to Web design, why not think of a creative way for a major brand's new Web service to sponsor it with customized buttons, content, or an online custom quote service?


Be aggressive in your sales...but be professional! And remember online advertising is not new, it's not trivial, and it shouldn't be given away for free or always be performance based. Don't be pushed around by arrogant media buyers who think that they can bully you into not paying their balance just because they didn't make 15 sales (not to mention the fact that they never signed a cost per acquisition agreement -- CPA).

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Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

by Ali Husayni


March 27, 2008 -- HIGHLANDS RANCH, COLORADO -- When it comes to search engine positioning, selecting appropriate keywords is the most important component of a successful campaign.

It is imperative for dentists seeking to optimize their Web sites and increase traffic to them to know what words people enter into search engines when looking for their practice, said Sinai Marketing Founder and President Ali Husayni, a search engine positioning expert.

There are many tools SEP experts use to determine those keywords. One of the most effective tools actually is free- Google's Keyword Tool.

An Internet-savvy dentist might question the wisdom of paying a SEP expert to use a free tool, instead of doing it himself or herself. That is where experience comes into play.

"It's a free tool, but it's important to know how to use it to get the best results out of it," Husayni said.

Knowing how competitive a keyword is determines how difficult achieving first-page placement will be. That information enables a SEP expert to give clients an idea of how long it might take to get on the first page of search results and what the SEP campaign must entail to achieve that.

Selecting the Right Type and Number of Keywords

Search engine positioning can be described as a never-ending battle, Husayni said. Dentists interested in getting to the first page of search engine results and staying there must maintain a steady campaign to achieve those results.

The client also must provide input as to the specific keywords to target for their Web site.

"We can offer input on which ones they need to use, but we must work closely with the client to determine their keywords list," he said.

That keyword list also must include variations of different keywords. For instance, Los Angeles cosmetic dentist is a different key phrase than cosmetic dentist in Los Angeles. Both of these variations must be included in the keywords list and steps must be taken to get positions for both of them.

"We don't want to just have one keyword because then we're putting all of our eggs in one basket," Husayni said. "We must have as many keywords as the site allows, and we must try to position for all of them."

A general rule of thumb is not to optimize one HTML page for more than three keywords.

Inbound Links Another element SEP experts look at is the number of links a Web site needs from other Web sites to move up in position, Husayni said.

These inbound links can be created by having other Web sites link to the client's Web site and by posting documents on the Internet that provide optimized keywords that link back to the client's site, he said.

Read the full article titled Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

Learn More If you would like to learn more about selecting keywords, link building and search engine optimization, or you would like a free analysis performed to see how a SEP expert might assist you in marketing your Web site, call Sinai Marketing toll free: 877-932-6559, or (303)-932-6559 for international callers. Or visit the Sinai Marketing Web site: www.sinaimarketing.com.

About Sinai Marketing Sinai Marketing is a search engine positioning firm that utilizes knowledge of the Internet market and ongoing research to develop and implement search engine positioning strategies for its clients. Ali Husayni created the Sinai Marketing firm, based in Highlands Ranch, Colo., in 2004. Husayni serves as the firm's chief executive officer and search engine positioning expert.

© 2008 Sinai Marketing. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this article is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

Selecting the Right Type and Number of Keywords

Search engine positioning can be described as a never-ending battle, Husayni said. Dentists interested in getting to the first page of search engine results and staying there must maintain a steady campaign to achieve those results.

The client also must provide input as to the specific keywords to target for their Web site.

"We can offer input on which ones they need to use, but we must work closely with the client to determine their keywords list," he said.

That keyword list also must include variations of different keywords. For instance, Los Angeles cosmetic dentist is a different key phrase than cosmetic dentist in Los Angeles. Both of these variations must be included in the keywords list and steps must be taken to get positions for both of them.

"We don't want to just have one keyword because then we're putting all of our eggs in one basket," Husayni said. "We must have as many keywords as the site allows, and we must try to position for all of them."

A general rule of thumb is not to optimize one HTML page for more than three keywords.

Inbound Links Another element SEP experts look at is the number of links a Web site needs from other Web sites to move up in position, Husayni said.

These inbound links can be created by having other Web sites link to the client's Web site and by posting documents on the Internet that provide optimized keywords that link back to the client's site, he said.

Read the full article titled Selecting Appropriate Keywords is Vital in Dental Internet Marketing

Learn More If you would like to learn more about selecting keywords, link building and search engine optimization, or you would like a free analysis performed to see how a SEP expert might assist you in marketing your Web site, call Sinai Marketing toll free: 877-932-6559, or (303)-932-6559 for international callers. Or visit the Sinai Marketing Web site: www.sinaimarketing.com.

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Best Way to Make Money Online

By Willie Davis Platinum Quality Author

Are you looking for the best way to make money online using free traffic methods? If you are new to your online venture and are scared of overspending on your marketing efforts; then you will definitely want to read this article in its entirety. We will take the time to discuss the best way to make money online using free traffic methods.

If you were to start an offline business then you know that there is no way to really begin your business without spending money; whether it is your own money or someone else's money. However the beauty of internet marketing anyone can begin making money online; even if you do not have a lot of start up capitol. So what is the best way to make money online if you do not know a lot about marketing or using the internet to begin making money?

Affiliate marketing is the best way for any newbie to begin making money online. You do not have to have your own site or product. There are many affiliate networks you can join to begin promoting other people's products. So what is an affiliate network you ask? It is a market place that has thousands of products in several different niches that you can browse and literally begin making money today. However when you begin browsing these sites you want to know what people are willing to spend money on. Otherwise you can spend a lot time putting effort into something that does not work.

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks that people join. They keep track of all your sales for you and will even give you statistics of what people are willing to spend their money on. I highly recommend it for anyone who is just beginning. You can begin getting biweekly checks from them whenever your commissions reach $25; so the pay out is extremely low.

If you can get enough traffic to the sales page that the affiliate program provides you can begin making sales today. This is the most important part of any business; whether it is an online business or offline business. Without any customers you can forget about making money in any venture.

However when you are first beginning I highly recommend not spending too much money on your marketing efforts; as it can be a huge learning curve and not many people understand how to really use PPC (pay per click.)

If you are looking for the best way to make money online using free traffic methods; visit our site below. Yes you will still need a little bit of start up capitol; however I can guarantee that in just 30 days you will begin getting commission checks from Clickbank. If you are willing to follow a proven system that will take you step by step on how to succeed online with an affiliate program. The best way to begin making money is to follow someone who had success in the area you are looking to have success in!

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Simplicity With Money Works!

by Sharman Lawson

Some people say we are in a recession and some people say we are headed towards a depression. However, no matter where the economy ends up, unfortunately, most people are living the "American dream" paycheck to paycheck and that has created problems for many. With downsizing, reengineering, economic slowdown and everything else wrong with the economy, wouldn't it be nice to have a life of simplicity?

What is simplicity? Webster's Dictionary defines simplicity as "freedom from complexity, absence of luxury, or a simple state of quality." Most American's lives have become very complex, because they have given themselves a false sense of security by not using common sense to manage and spend their money.

Simplicity is a way of thinking and doing things--it's a way of life!

It doesn't matter how much money you make or do not make. Simplicity is a way to improve the quality of your life while making headway toward your financial goals. So how do you move towards simplicity? Simplicity is getting back to the basics of what's important in life. For example:

* spending quality time with your family, kids, and friends

* watching a good comedy eating popcorn at home

* lying in bed reading a good book

* having a quiet picnic in the park

* walking on the beach

* going to a free concert on the waterfront

* having time to hug your child

* setting aside time to just "think"

* letting people know you love them, and

* taking some time for you

That's right, simplicity is FREE--it doesn't cost you a penny! Simplicity says bigger isn't always better, newer isn't always nicer, and more isn't always more desirable. It's being content with the little pleasures in life. The Bible says Godliness with contentment is much gain. Simplicity is a hidden treasure that can determine the way you think, spend, and respect your money!

Debt is the opposite of simplicity! Debt causes a lot of pain, stress, sleepless nights, and can ruin the best of relationships. Debt says live a materialistic life, have expensive do-dads you can't afford to maintain, work 60 hours per week, live paycheck to paycheck, have no time for your spouse or kids, have a car payment as high as a mortgage, and have a closet full of designer clothes you can't afford to clean.

Simplicity says get the house, car, clothes, or bike I can afford, start to save for the future, stop trying to impress family and friends, and be willing to make small sacrifices in order to have a better financial future. Simplicity allows you to stop, look, and listen to your mind, heart, and spirit. It gets rid of the clutter in your life and replaces it with personal and financial freedom.

Today you have a choice. You can choose the complex life that debt affords you or choose to go back to the simplicities of life that brings freedom. I've chosen freedom, will you?

Sharman Lawson is a debt, money and financial coach, speaker, and author of the book 12 Steps to Eliminate Debt Forever. Sharman Lawson and her husband paid off all their debt including their mortgage, in less than five years, on a combined income of less than $50,000 a year. Contact Sharman Lawson at 770.429.9670 for a FREE 30 minute consultation. Visit her website at www.sharmanlawson.com.

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How To Crank Out Million Dollar Product Ideas From Scratch

(C) Copyright Ewen Chia, http://www.EzineArticle.com

Are you currently stuck trying to think up ideas for that million dollar product?

I’ve got a surefire formula to get you unstuck and on the road to generating more profitable product ideas than you can handle.

First, let’s talk about the real reason people hit a blank wall when they start brainstorming. The sad fact is that our brains are a bit lazy. The human mind hates sustained concentration and always seeks the shortest, quickest and easiest path to solving any problem.

When you sit down with pen and paper in hand and ask yourself, “What product do I want to create?”, you’ve just given your brain an overwhelmingly open-ended question…

The problem is that the term ’product” is far too abstract. It includes literally thousands of possibilities. Your mind gets overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to begin. Think of your mind as a young child on a playground. You want to give him a clear set of boundaries. He can play freely and safely as long as he knows your parameters – but set him loose with the command to “do anything”, and he’s likely to run out of your control.

Fortunately, there’s a formula you can use to take control of the brainstorming process… This formula gives your mind something it absolutely loves: order and categorization.

When you use this formula, ideas will come to you automatically. The reason is that you are giving your mind a logical map to branch out from, rather than asking it to start in the middle of nowhere.

Are you ready to learn the formula for churning out million dollar product ideas at will? Here it is:

==> Consumer Class + Product Purpose = Winning Idea!

Each of the above variable represents a set of questions you must answer. Your answers do not lock you into anything. Instead, they create a series of sub categories to guide you in your brainstorming sessions. These sub categories enable you to open up new tightly defined niches the farther you go.

(1) Let’s start with the “Consumer Class” variable...

Who is your consumer? Is he/she:

- An individual?
- A small business?
- A large business?
- An end user at home or at work?
- A single product consumer?
- A bulk product consumer?

Also ask the question of what your consumer is interested in, and which market niche he/she belongs to.

(2) Now, let’s look at the “Product Purpose” variable...

What is the purpose of this product? Is it:

- Pure information and education?
- Aimed at solving a problem quickly and efficiently?
- Designed for entertainment?
- Factual or fictional?
- Text only or will it include software, audio or video?
- Complete as is or will it require updates?
- Suitable for download or better off rolled into a membership site?

You can even add additional variables to plug into the formula if you want.

Notice how each variable opens up further room for categorization? Let’s say that you chose “a single product consumer” for your consumer class variable, and “fiction” for your product purpose variable. What you really have is a fictional entertainment product. At this point, you have a new map to branch off from.

What comes to mind when you think of a single product consumer? E-books come to mind. Maybe the product should be a work of fiction in e-book format? This sounds good, so now all you have to do is figure out what types of fiction people are actually searching for online…

The next step is to go to overture.com and type in some keywords. In this case, I tried out “e-book”, “fiction” and “stories”. It appears that Harry Potter e-books are popular, but you risk copyright infringement on that topic. The number one niche for “fiction” happens to be “fan fiction”. Fan fiction usually involves new story lines (often of an explicit sexual nature) between popular science fiction characters. We’ll pass on that one as well.

However, the keyword “stories” pulls up something interesting: ghost stories! Here’s an area where you could collect a lot of content from the public domain (For tips and secrets on using public domain for profit, you can find excellent information in “Public Domain Riches” at http://tinyurl.com/5xkwn).

You could also hire a professional fiction writer from Elance.com and have him or her put together some ghost stories or old wives’ tales for you…and voila! Instant niche product.

You can come up with other fun ideas within this one niche by continuing to play with the variables. For example, if you repackage the product purpose in the audio-visual category, you might come up with other ideas like:

- A CD or downloadable set of mp3’s containing “spooky sounds”
- A set of graphics or screensavers for Halloween
- Some novelty software like a virtual ouija board or ghost-hunting game

Now, wasn’t that easy? Four new ideas generated almost instantly and you didn’t even have to break a sweat...just fill in the blanks of this formula and the product ideas pop out like magic!

A powerful way to reap huge profits here is to act on the right ideas fast. Turn million dollar ideas into million dollar products.

If you're stuck with the actual process of product creation, look to proven blueprints like "Create Your Own Products In A Flash" (http://www.l1nk.com/urr/productsinaflash.html) or "How To Create Best Sellers Online" (http://www.l1nk.com/urr/bestselling.html).

These will help you churn out profitable products easily in no time!

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How To Make Money From Your Blog

by : Steve Pulina


StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

* blog publishing software
* HTML/CSS
* blog comments (and comment spam)
* RSS/syndication
* feed aggregators
* pings
* trackbacks
* full vs. partial feeds
* blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
* search engines
* search engine optimization (SEO)
* page rank
* social bookmarking
* tagging
* contextual advertising
* affiliate programs
* traffic statistics
* email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Text Link AdsAutomated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment. :)

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.
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