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Maintaining Your Blog’s Focus

When writing a niche blog, one of the most important things you can do is maintain your focus on the niche.

It’s tempting, when you have a blog and are having trouble finding something in your niche to write about, to toss in an off-topic post here and there. That’s not a good idea for a couple of reasons.

First, off-topic posts draw untargeted search engine traffic. These people will come to your blog expecting it to be about one thing, when it isn’t. They won’t click on your ads or read your other posts. They’ll realize they’re in the wrong place and leave. This is what happened at Selaplana.com. The blog gets a large amount of daily traffic, but most of it’s drawn by the off-topic posts and doesn’t convert well for the on-topic advertising.

Second, your regular readers read your blog because they’re interested in your views on your niche. An off-topic post doesn’t provide value to them. Put enough off-topic posts in, and you’ll lose the interest of your regulars.

If you have a significant amount to say about a topic other than your blog’s niche, then start a second blog targeted to that new niche. Maybe you have to cut down your posting frequency in your old blog to contribute to the new one, too. That’s okay. Pick a posting frequency for both you can live with, and go to it. Your regular readers in your old blog will still get content that’s valuable to them, if perhaps a bit slower. Readers to your new blog won’t be attracted thinking it’s about one topic, when it’s really about another.

I’m probably in the minority in my thinking on this, but I consider paid reviews to be off-topic for most blogs. Sometimes the topic of the review matches the blog’s niche closely enough that it’s valuable, and you can imagine the review would have happened anyway, but most of the time there’s the sense that the review wouldn’t have happened without the money. Paid reviews are a way to make you money, but don’t provide much niche value to your readers unless you’re pretty strict about which reviews you accept.

Also off-topic are the various viral marketing schemes designed to increase your blog’s page rank or search engine results positioning. If you have a blog that’s about SEO, then testing these schemes is entirely on topic. But I haven’t seen yet a blog that comes back with concrete data on the results of using a viral marketing scheme.

Of course, if you’re writing a personal blog, then anything goes. JohnChow.com is a good example of a non-niche blog. It’s supposed to be about making money online, but covers such a variety of other topics that I’d consider it more of a personal blog than a niche blog. A personal blog is where you post about whatever you feel like, airing your rants and wisdom equally, which pretty much sums up John’s blog.

People read niche blogs for the information they provide on the niche. People read personal blogs because they like who you are and how you present yourself through your writing. It’s important when you start a blog to know which kind you’re starting, and to keep your focus.

Examples of niche blogs in the make money online niche that keep their focus are Self Made Minds and DoshDosh. Every post is about the niche itself.

I’d love to hear other examples of niche blogs that do a great job keeping their focus on their niche content. Leave a comment and let me know your favorites.

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$100 Review Contest Entrant #7

Julia, over at Bunda Work At Home is the latest entrant in the review contest.

Most of Julia’s posts are in Indonesian, since that’s her target audience. Since I don’t read Indonesian, and automatic translators usually produce results that are more funny than accurate, I’ll focus on the English parts of her blog.

Julia’s a fellow Marketing Pond member, which regular readers will remember as a collection of free money programs. Another opportunity Julia covers is photo sharing revenue. You can put your pictures online and make some money doing it. Check that link out for some of Julia’s photos. The landscapes are beautiful!

Julia’s blog is monetized nicely, a couple of banners and an unobtrusive set of Adsense text links. You don’t get the feeling that the purpose of her blog is to make money, but rather to help her audience, a motivation I can certainly appreciate.

If you’re reading this and haven’t entered the review contest, you can see the rules here. You have until the end of June 16th to enter, approximately 8 hours from now.

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$100 Review Contest Entrant #6

Cman writes a blog about making money online, Cman’s Money Page – Profitable Productive Blogging.

Taking a look at the archives for the blog, it looks like Cman got off to a slow start, but has really warmed up to his topic and is posting more often now. Cman’s a supporter of some of the same free money sites I recommend as part of Marketing Pond. A classic case of great minds thinking alike!

Cman’s site is monetized in a variety of ways, and many of his posts talk about Adsense, Bidvertiser, AdBrite, and more. In addition, he’s gone the extra step and created a Google Group for people interested in making money online to discuss how they’re doing and share tips.

Cman also has a newsletter in addition to the blog. This is something I’ve struggled with personally, the relation of a newsletter to a blog. Cman and Jane May both have newsletters, but for me my blog is my newsletter. I know that’s dead wrong in Internet Marketing terms, but there you have it.

So head on over to Cman’s Money Page and signup for his newsletter!

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A First Look at the New Squidoo Stats

Squidoo is great for putting up a quick web page that will rank more highly in Google for its keywords than a brand new website (all other factors being the same).  And Squidoo lenses generally get ranked in Google search results in a couple of days.

But one of my pet peeves about Sqiudoo has been the poor stats offered.

The old stats gave you charts of the number of visitors your lens had, the lensrank of it, and how many outgoing links were clicked (but not which links).  In modern terms, this was primitive!  Especially when Squidoo itself uses Google Analytics, so they had the data available.

The new stats that just rolled out expose more of the Google Analytics data for your lens. 

Here’s an example of one of the sections of stats for my Roleplaying With Kids lens.

You can see that it breaks out the traffic (for the last 7 days) by source, which is nice for getting an overview of where your visitors are coming from.

It’s curious to me that I have some direct traffic coming to the lens.  That would be people who didn’t click on a link, but bookmarked the page or typed the link into their web browser.  I wouldn’t have predicted this.

Google accounts for the majority of the traffic to the lens, which is what I would expect, since Squidoo lenses rank highly in Google results.

 

 

Also provided are lists of keywords used in search engines:

This is the most valuable section of the new stats.

Everyone talks about long-tail keywords being valuable, but predicting a good long tail keyword is difficult. 

This listing shows what long-tail keywords my content is attracting that I hadn’t thought about originally.

The keywords with a little + next to them are keywords that are not targeted by my lens.  Some of them may very well apply, but others may not be a good match for the lens, and point out new niches to explore.

You also get a list of sites that are in the referral section of the summary above.

This helps you to know where your traffic is coming from.  If someone has linked to your lens, it’s worth exploring their site to see if there are other niches you can create a lens about, or other content to fill out your current lens.

The clickouts section (below) shows you which links leaving your lens are being clicked on (the count of clicks is also given).  This helps you to know which outgoing links are most popular, and might indicate either a good candidate for expanding your information about, or breaking out into a new lens.

 

You can adjust the stats to get information for the last 30 days, just today, or just yesterday, as well as the default 7 day period.

There’s also a royalties section that shows details of any Amazon.com orders that were placed due to using the Squidoo Amazon.com module.  My lens doesn’t have any links to Amazon.com, so I can’t show you that section.

I’m excited about the new stats, and expect to be able to improve the traffic to my lenses by using the information they provide. 

If you’re not already using Squido, you can sign up here and create your first lens within minutes.

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A DoFollow Directory

I’d mentioned in a recent post that I’m now using the DoFollow plugin as a way of rewarding commentators to the blog with a link that search engines will follow.

I just ran across a post about a DoFollow directory. The basic idea is that if your blog uses the DoFollow plugin, you can submit it to the directory. If you want to find blogs that use DoFollow, you can use the directory.

Finding other blogs that use DoFollow is helpful for two reasons.

First, supporting those blogs keeps them alive, and increases the chances that more blogs will use DoFollow.

Second, leaving comments on those blogs will have a positive effect on your blog’s page rank and and search engine results positioning.

It’s worth noting that keyword stuffing is considered to be impolite in DoFollow blogs, though. Keyword stuffing is using a keyword as your name instead of you name, in order to rank higher for that keyword in search engines. Some DoFollow blog owners will not approve comments that use keyword stuffing.

If you have a DoFollow blog, head over to the directory and add your blog!

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How to Learn Internet Marketing

There are many ways of learning Internet Marketing. I’ll highlight some of the ways in this post, starting with free resources and moving on up in expense.

Blogs

There are a lot of blogs out there providing Internet Marketing tips. The main problem is finding information that’s reliable. One key is to try and determine if the person who wrote the blog knows more than you do. If so, there’s a chance you can learn some useful information from them.

Another key in evaluating a blog is, when they link to a product or service, does their blog post sound like the sales page for that product or service? If so, then they might be trying to simply earn some affiliate income. I don’t have a problem with clicking on an affiliate link in a blog, but I want the review of the product or service to be a review, not a sales pitch.

My current “must reads” are Self Made Minds and DoshDosh. Both are ahead of me in the Internet Marketing curve, but not so far ahead that I can’t learn from their posts.

For a newcomer to Internet Marketing, of course, the archives here at Online Opportunity have some good information.

One of the problems learning from blogs is that it’s a bit like learning how to play piano by reading about it. At some point you have to start practicing Internet Marketing to gain the skill and confidence you’ll need to succeed.

Forums

The main problem with learning from forums is that low cost of entry to post in a forum. Anyone can post and claim to be an expert, and many forums are plagued by spam bots. Strong moderation in a forum is key.

The Digital Point Forums are one of my favorite forums. I found the logo design company who created my logo there, and they have boards for nearly every topic related to Internet Marketing you can imagine. The moderators are firm, keeping the spam to nearly nothing. The Digital Point Forums also share Adsense revenue with its members. You won’t get rich this way, but it’s a nice way of acknowledging the people who contribute most.

Forum Know How is a new forum about Internet Marketing. Forum Know How’s attraction is that they have 8 heavy hitters in the field recruited as experts, including names such as Pat Lovell and Liz Tomey. They each provide advice on a different aspect of Internet Marketing. The forum is so new some of the boards don’t have posts in them yet, but the potential is nice. Forum Know How does charge for access (currently $10 a year), and has disabled in-forum registrations to keep spam bots out. Instead you register through the link above.

Wealthy Affiliate is another experts forum, run by Kyle and Carson. I’m not a member of this one, since it costs $29.99 a month. The tools and services offered sound impressive, though. They offer tools for doing Adwords market research, and a mentoring program where Kyle and/or Carson will examine your landing pages and Adwords ads to give you advice on how to improve them. I personally don’t consider Wealthy Affiliate a good investment unless you’re looking to become serious about doing Adwords campaigns, and want some help getting past the learning curve.

Ebooks

Most ebooks available are not really worth the money. There are some notable exceptions, such as Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, but many ebooks provide information that is freely available elsewhere and don’t really add value. Providing a free ebook is also an Internet Marketing technique in itself, so they’ll often provide enough information to get you interested and link you to their website for the rest (where you often have to pay for it).

I do ebook reviews in this blog primarily to help newcomers to the field avoid ebooks that will just drain their money without providing any added value.

Trial and Error

I list trial and error last, because I consider it to be the most expensive way of learning Internet Marketing.

You can certainly try techniques to see what works, but be careful about how much money you spend to try the techniques. In particular, an Adwords campaign can suck a lot of money out of you if you’re not careful (set a budget you can stand to lose). Other forms of traffic generation may cost money, and seem like a good deal, but not be effective.

Trial and error can be the most effective way of learning, but be careful to not spend much money in the process.

What are your favorite resources for Internet Marketing?

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$100 Review Contest Entrant #5

Lori, of B Money Savvy, is the latest entrant in the $100 review Online Opportunity contest.

B Money Savvy is a blog about how to make money at home. The blog itself is monetized fairly heavily, from Adsense to affiliate programs to BidVertiser to the now ubiquitous Buy Me A Beer plugin. You can read more about how the blog is monetized in this post.

Topics covered include whether Adsense is right for your site or not, how Lori’s done with the My Credit Card Cash opportunity, and a link to a free SEO book.

Regular readers will recall that Lori’s the one who pointed me to the My Credit Card Cash opportunity in the first place, so is responsible for my reviewing it. If you’re interested in other opportunities like that, check out Lori’s blog.

We still have until June 16th for entries to the review contest, so if you’re interested in entering the $100 Review Online Opportunity contest, see the original post for the rules.

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Using Traffic Exchanges for Traffic

The basic formula for making money online goes something like this:

Traffic * ConversionRate* Commission – Expenses = Profit

In that formula the commission is usually fixed, although if you get the other factors in good shape switching to a similar product with a better commission can have a great effect on your profit. Normally, though, you can more easily affect Traffic, ConversionRate, and Expenses.

I’ll focus in this post on using free traffic exchanges, to boost Traffic and lower Expenses at the same time. Note that traffic exchanges are not targeted traffic, no matter what they say in their advertising, so your conversion rate will be lower. But it’s free, except for your time. And I’ll talk later about how to improve your conversion rate when using traffic exchanges.

Boosting Traffic

The basic idea with a traffic exchange is that you agree to view other members’ websites and they do the same for you. Your hope is that your website will be so compelling that, despite themselves, they’ll buy something (or signup, or whatever your “conversion” is). Their hope is the same. Traffic exchanges generally have a timer that forces you to have a website up for a certain amount of time before you get credit for having seen it. The more websites you view, the more times your website gets viewed.

The archetypal traffic exchange is Traffic Swarm. You get 100 credits (views of your website) as a signup bonus, although you have to view some number of other websites to activate those free credits. While you can choose your interest areas in Traffic Swarm and other traffic exchanges, it’s a bit pointless. The object is not to find something interesting to buy (which would increase your expenses) but to view as many websites as possible while avoiding buying anything. So just check all the interest areas so you have as many websites to view as possible.

Traffic Roundup, and TS25 are two other traffic exchanges that work in the same way as Traffic Swarm. StartXChange is another Free Manual Exchange.

The cheapest way to earn credits on the traffic exchanges is to set your browser’s start page to the traffic exchange, so you earn a credit every time you open a new browser window (and get in the habit of using new windows, not new tabs). But if you’re working all three of the above traffic exchanges, how do you set your start page to all three?

A URL rotator will give you a single web address that cycles between some number of other web addresses. A very nice free rotator is available at the TEToolbox. The free version allows rotating up to 5 web addresses, which is plenty for traffic exchange purposes. So create a rotator that cycles between all the traffic exchange surf pages, and then set your browser’s start page to the URL of the rotator.

Increasing Conversion Rate

Traffic exchanges will get your traffic up, but typically are not good for conversions. After all, their purpose for viewing your website is to get traffic to theirs, not because they’re really interested in buying or signing up.

There are two keys to increasing your conversion rates through traffic exchanges: offer them something useful, and use a splash page.

The people using traffic exchanges are all interested in Internet marketing, so you could offer a free report of some sort on how to boost traffic to their website. This works well if you’re interested in building a list. Just make sure you’re offering something of value to them, otherwise the value of your list will be low since their trust in you will be low.

Splash pages are the biggest key to increasing your conversion rate through traffic exchanges. Traffic exchange members must keep your web page up for a certain number of seconds. They do not have to look at it for more than the half a second it takes to load, or the half a second it takes to close the window when the timer expires.

Send them to a page full of text, and they won’t bother to read any of it. Send them to a splash page with graphics and a clear message in large text, and you just might catch their attention long enough to get them to click through to your real website.

Creating a splash page is easy at the TEToolbox. They have a WYSIWYG editor and a built in library of cool clip art that’s free for your use as a member. You can easily point all your traffic exchanges to your splash page, and from that point on the TEToolbox will track how many people saw your splash page and how many people clicked an outgoing link from your start page.

For example, here’s a screen shot of the stats for a splash page I setup to promote Marketing Pond.

You can see that I have an 8.4% click through rate, which isn’t bad for traffic exchanges in my experience.  Of those 85 click throughs, about 25% converted for me, resulting in a bit over 20 signups.

The TEToolbox will also give you stats based on the referring traffic exchange, and how many of those people were repeat visitors.

Other Traffic Boosting Programs

There are some programs for boosting traffic that are not traffic exchanges, but are worth mentioning.

ClixSense pays you for viewing advertisers’ pages for a given amount of time. You can convert your ClixSense earnings into advertising credits, or you can just buy a certain number of hits. ClixSense has some nice targeting options based on demographics. You can target certain areas of the world, certain income ranges, etc.

Traffic Digger and Free Viral are both viral marketing schemes. People sign up in order to get their website viewed for free by thousands of other people. Each person who signs up must view the websites before adding their own. There are generally 7 pages listed, and when you add yours it goes into the #1 slot. As you refer others, your page will go into the lower slots, until it drops off the end. By the time that happens you’ve gotten a lot of views of your page.

These programs all have the same basic quality of a traffic exchange, in that the traffic doesn’t want to convert. So use a splash page to catch their interest.

Have any favorite traffic exchanges I haven’t mentioned? Leave a comment and let me know.  More traffic is always good!

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Get on the First Page of Google, Guaranteed!

I saw that headline, or something similar, while exploring the web today.

The advertisement was for a company that guaranteed you’d be on the first page of Google within 48 hours, for only $5 for 7 days. There were testimonials from customers exclaiming about the service. One gentleman was mystified as to how it had been done.

Of course, anyone who has been looking into Internet Marketing for any length of time would read that sales page and understand exactly what the company was offering.

They would create a Google Adwords campaign, and pump up the cost per click of the ad until the ad was on the first page of listings. A nice little bit of fine print stated that the $5 cost did not include Google click costs.

While the company would do exactly what it advertised, the hidden costs could be enormous. Competitive keywords could require cost per clicks of up to $5 or more to get on the first page. The conversion ratio of your website, and the amount of profit you would make from each sale, might not pay for the advertising costs.

I’m a bit saddened to see this sort of thing, and to know that people who don’t know better probably buy into it.

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Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs

I’ve mentioned affiliate programs in other posts, but haven’t explained the nuts and bolts of them yet.

Unless you’re absolutely new to Internet marketing, you know the basic concept of an affiliate program. You sign up with a company to get commissions anytime you refer someone to them who purchases a product. You’re becoming a sort of roving salesman. Imagine making an arrangement with your local Barnes & Nobles bookstore, so that you could wander around town and tell everyone you meet, “Barnes & Nobles has some great books, tell them Jay sent you”. When they went to the bookstore and bought something, and said “Jay sent me”, you’d get a commission.

That’s basically what happens with online affiliate programs. The way you referrals say “Jay sent me” online is by clicking on a link that you place on your website, in your email signature, in a forum signature, or anywhere. The link will contain a piece of information that says you’re the one referring this customer to the company. For example, a normal link to Sears might look like “sears.com”. An affiliate link to Sears might look like “jay.sears.com”.

There are basically three steps to making money online with affiliate programs:

  1. Find your market
  2. Find your product
  3. Advertise

Find Your Market

To sell anything, online or offline, you need to have a market ready to buy. It’s pointless to pick a product without having a market. So, look for targeted groups of people online. Forums dedicated to specific topics are good places to start. You’ll probably run across markets you never new existed.

To find forums, do a web search using the phrase “powered by phpbb” or “powered by vbulletin”. Those are two popular forum packages. If you have an idea of a niche already, add in some keywords for the niche to find forums specific to that niche. Those forums represent markets.

Find Your Product

Once you have a market, you need a product to sell to the market. Don’t just pick something that seems likely and advertise it to the market. Research likely products, and buy the top three to make sure they’ll fit the needs of your market. You’re wasting time advertising a product that doesn’t fit the needs of your market.

Some companies run their own affiliate programs, while others use affiliate clearinghouses. A popular affiliate clearinghouse for ebooks and software is Clickbank. The Clickbank marketplace allows you to search through all their products. Or, if you have an ebook or software application to sell, you can go to their publisher page.

Commission Junction is another popular affiliate clearinghouse. While Clickbank deals exclusively with products that can be delivered electronically, Commission Junction deals with everything. You must apply to be an affiliate with a company in Commission Junction, and they may turn down your application if your website doesn’t match how they want their products marketed.

There are numerous other affiliate clearinghouses (ShareASale and FusionQuest are two more). Individual companies sometimes manage their own affiliate programs, though. For example, the Internet Marketing Center has 9 Internet marketing products, plus 4 software programs for online marketing. By joining as an affiliate there you get access to sell all the products.

It goes all the way down to companies that have only a single product, and you must signup at their site to be an affiliate for that product. Don’t limit yourself to just the clearinghouses when looking for products. Do web searches like your market would, and find the products they would find. On the websites, look for a link that says “Affiliates”, “Opportunity”, or “Referrals”. They may use other text, too. If you don’t see anything on their website, check the clearinghouses to see if they’re listed there.

So let’s assume you find a product that you think your market is ready to buy.

Advertise

You have to get the word out about your product in some way. The easiest way is to put your affiliate links on a website you control. This might be a blog or some other sort of website. That gets the links to where people can see them and click on them. Now you need to get your market to go there.

When you pick a market by finding suitable forums, you can use forum marketing pretty easily. The idea is to put a link to your website in your forum signature. Most forums do not allow affiliate links in signatures, so that’s why it’s important to have your own website. Create a blog on Blogger.com if you can’t manage anything else, and populate it with posts about the products you’re selling. Mix in some other normal blogging type of posts, too.

As you participate in the forum, people will naturally click the link in your signature to see your website. This’ll happen more the more you participate, and the better the quality of your participation. While this won’t get a huge amount of traffic, it will be very targeted.

Work several forums populated by the same market for best effect.

Article marketing can also be used to target specific markets. You generally cannot put affiliate links into articles, so stick a link to your website in your author’s bio box. You can also link to specific pages in your website, if the article targets a specific product.

Another topic to mention is affiliate link cloaking. This is turning an obvious affiliate link into a non-obvious affiliate link. Affiliate links are perceived as unprofessional, and unscrupulous people might use their own link instead of yours to purchase. This is especially prevalent with Clickbank products, where it’s an easy matter to use your own Clickbank ID instead of someone else’s. Affiliate link cloaking makes affiliate links look more professional, and makes link stealing harder. I’ll go into details on affiliate link cloaking in a later article, since this is already running long.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of how to advertise affiliate products. What ways do you find effective?