Tuesday 7 May 2013

3 Reasons Why The Economic Downturn Doesn’t Have To Stop You Making Money


Since 2007/08, the world has been plunged into another Global Recession – this one made all the more harrowing by the fact that, in the 21st Century, we have access to the internet, and so can really see what the ‘Global’ means in a Global Recession.
With all this doom and gloom still being reported – now 5 years since the Northern Rock disaster – it is easy to think that it’s simply not worth trying until the economy picks up a little.
But that’s not necessarily the case! We’ve already covered how some buinesses thrive even in adverse conditions, and help out the economy to boot. And studies by organisations like and Social Enterprise UK  show that SMEs usually have the flexibility and resilience to withstand the knocks of recession better than some larger companies.
But what does that mean for you? It’s all well and good us showing you big examples like the Eden Project, and quoting stats from other organisations. But what can you, as a budding entrepreneur, do to help your business weather the storm? Of course recessions are scary, and there are those who suffer majorly because of them. But here are just 3 reasons why this isn’t the case for everyone:

1. You can make use of freed spaces

A group of artists in Chester recently took over a boarded up shop in their town centre and used it as a showroom.
With the headlines flooded with photos of closed high streets, here’s a little secret for you – the councils don’t actually want to see the shops close. Anything that they can do to generate footfall in a precinct they should jump at. If you need a space to display your ideas, or you need some publicity, have a talk with whoever runs your centre. You might be able to get a ‘pop-up’ shop for relatively cheap (or even, depending on the nature of your endeavour, for free!).
This doesn’t just apply to boarded up shopping centres – take the idea further and see what else you can get on the cheap.

2. Remember that the Economy can be seen as a closed system…

…which means that someone has to gain when people lose. Why shouldn’t that be you? Pop quiz: What do Disney, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have in common? Answer: They were all founded during recessions. You don’t need to check the FTSE100 to know that these are three companies that don’t seem overly fazed by anything.
Sometimes when the chips are down, it’s worth remembering that even huge corporations all had to start somewhere. Recessions can bring out the best innovators and, as the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
One of the reasons for this is that during a recession prices for certain things tend to go down. This means that the money you have can go further, so take advantage of that. Now of course, being a recession, it might mean that you actually don’t have that much money. But that leads me nicely onto my final point.

3. Austerity shows you the things you really need

I graduated from University last summer, and without a grad scheme lined up I was somewhat unceremoniously ejected into the real world with nothing in the way of a career path laid out in front of me. I’m not overly worried – I have a roof over my head, and I can still eat, drink, and most importantly, check twitter. But my current lack of vast wealthy has made me reassess a lot of my expenditures.
One of the things I did was to check my bank account to see where my money was disappearing. I ended up saving nearly £40 a month by cancelling a number of direct debits – everything from gadget insurance that I didn’t need, to magazines I’d subscribed to as a student to “broaden my knowledge” but that really I’d rarely read. I didn’t even need to outright cancel everything; at a time where companies are desperate for customers in any way, in some instances I’ve managed to still have a lot of the same services, just a discounted rate.
Whether its on a personal level, or for your business, having a ‘spring clean’ of your finances might leave you surprised as to how much you can save
And if none of that convinces you that recessions aren’t always the end of the world, here’s a little fact for you: Did you know that over the course of the 20th Century, the Stock Market has gained on average 10% every year? This, in a century with 2 World Worlds, the Great Depression, and a great deal of political unrest across the world. In other words, despite all the knocks that the economy suffers, so far it’s still done pretty well. And that can be of some comfort to budding entrepreneurs.


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Sunday 24 February 2013

The Top 5 Best Kept Traffic Secrets Smart Bloggers Are Using To Divert All The Readers


Have you been looking for high speed internet traffic to your website, blog posts and articles? If you’re tired of getting stuck on search engine optimization (SEO) with little or no traffic to show for the long hours and efforts, in this post, you’ll discover 5 best kept traffic secrets of smart bloggers. Read on.

1. Answer Questions In Exchange For Web Traffic

Bring those askers home (to your blog). Question and Answer (Q & A) sites are great traffic sources you should not ignore. This traffic strategy allows you to offer your expert knowledge to people who are asking for help in the Q & A sites, and you get a chance to leave a link to your blog post or article link below your answer. Your answers with links will remain there for years to come, so that anyone with a similar question that lands on that page may trace your back to your blog. That’s free traffic.

Here’s how to get to get traffic from the Q & A sites:

  • Look at your blog contents, pick one post and search yahoo answers using your main keyword, for unanswered, related questions. You can do this every time you publish a new post in order to increase exposure to new posts.
  • Next, in a list format or brief summary, provide honest complete answer to the question and then end by leaving your blog post URL as the source.
This strategy will score you free traffic plus a free backlink, every time you answer a question.
Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn-Answers are two of the high traffic Q & A sites you can start with. The members of LinkedIn love conversations and you’ll do well to use Q & A to brand yourself as an expert in that community as well as pull in more traffic to your blog.

2. Get Traffic To The Images In Your Blog Posts

An increasing number of bloggers are using images in their blog posts, some of which they create themselves to drive their points home. Flickr and Photobucket are on the list of the top 1000 websites and so have a huge potential to drive you traffic from people searching for images (Google and Yahoo Image search).
Do you create images, infographics and screenshots for tutorial and how-to posts? Those original images on their own can generate you tons of traffic and backlinks too. Here’s how to start getting traffic to your images:
  • Submit your images (same ones you create for your posts) to top image hosting sites such as Flickr and / or photobucket in order to generate additional traffic.
  • Ensure to enter relevant keywords as tags for every image you upload – that will ensure that your images will bring you only targeted traffic. If you can, insert watermark of your blog link on the images so that when other people download them, they also have a reminder to check the image source (your blog).
A few days ago I found one of my images (screen-shot created by me) used by a photo blogger; now, that sent me a backlink and is sure to send traffic.  Twitpic is another image site that is gaining popularity among bloggers, and so should not be ignored. Remember social media traffic is on the increase.

3. Get Social To Get Traffic

traffic social secretsSocial bookmarking sites help increase exposure by spreading the word about your posts; ignore them at your own peril. These sites allow friends and friends of friends can share your contents with just a single push of a button – that’s the multiplying power of these social sites. Below are 3 social media traffic strategies you can leverage on.
High Traffic Social Networks: Sharing your posts as status updates on high traffic social media sites will greatly expose your contents to your social media followers and their followers too (see the multiplying power?). Ensure to join these high traffic social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Mixx and Friendfeed.
Niche Social Networks: Take advantage of new and niche social bookmarking sites such as wordpressjunkies, serpd, dimbler, blogengage, mmosocialnetwork, sphinn, BizSugar and Dzone. If you are in a special (non-internet marketing niche), you may want to search for top traffic social bookmarking sites in your particular niche.
Leverage Automation To Gain Traction and Maximum Reach: The more social bookmarking sites you share your posts, the more combined traffic you’ll get (from an aggregation of all the followers your content reached across all the social networks you bookmarked). To be more effective and productive with your social bookmarking tasks, leverage on automated social bookmarking tools such as Onlywire.com and socialadr.com (both are free) to automate your social bookmarking – so that you can plough back saved time to working on other aspects of your online business blueprint.

4. Expand your Coast – Piggyback on the Huge Traffic of Famous Bloggers

There’s no gain-saying that popular bloggers get more traffic than their unpopular counterparts, even when they write zilch. Readers like shortcuts and they easily pass on trust from their favorite blogger to a new underdog blogger. Blogging contest offer opportunities for underdog bloggers to come to limelight within a short duration of time the contest runs.
Participate in Contests – Blogging contests (any type) and guest blogging contests are some of the fastest ways to increase reach more audience that you would not have reached just by yourself. Organizers and sponsors of blogging contests, who are usually famous bloggers heavily promote posts submitted by contest participants – that’s how you can ride with the buzz, on the wings of established bloggers to gain recognition and popularity. With popularity comes massive traffic, because bigger blogs have massive traffic and a humongous reader base that can rub off on you if you simply write one single guest post for them.

5. Host A Free Webinar

Plan an open webinar or Skype meeting on a topic that most people in your niche would like to learn more about. Invite other people to your webinar, using social media tools such as twitter and Facebook events.
You can also contact other bloggers and marketers to do a webinar for their subscribers.
At the end of the webinar, invite attendees to get your free report that deals deeper into the Webinar subject (by opting in to your list). I bet you, if you wow your webinar attendees and taught them something that they can truly use to get results, they will come back to your blog. Then they will subscribe (good list building technique) and you will ensure to convert them to regular blog visitors by sending them (subscribers) notices of every new blog post.
Next Steps…
There you have it – the top 5 best kept traffic secrets that smart bloggers are using to get all the readers to their blogs. Now, it’s your turn to go put those free traffic strategies to use, else this post would simply be a nice read. As you can see, you do not necessarily have to be a SEO expert or perform heavyaffiliate email marketing to amass tons of quality traffic – now you know how smart bloggers do it. Also don’t forget to keep a close eye on your Alexa report.
Finally, two things I want you to do for me before you go:
Share this post: Help a friend see this post – share it, tweet it, facebook it, stumble it… Use the easy share buttons above.
Comment: I’d love to hear your traffic results, let me know if there’s any free traffic strategies that I missed on that list above.

Friday 22 February 2013

Money Matters


Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting – hooyah! OK, not quite, but armed only with plastic, Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis is here with his financial self-defence class.
1. Don't stash cash under the mattress — it's only covered for £750
I was recently sent this tweet (to @martinslewis): "My grandad just passed away. Found £22,000 in his flat. £3k in various jacket pockets and drawers, £19k in a suitcase." It's a shocking amount, and fills me with fear. Not only is it forgoing interest, which could be tax-free in a top cash Isa, but most home insurance policies only cover up to £750 cash and require proof via a receipt/bank statement, meaning if something happened to it, it’d be very difficult to claim back.
Plus, as fireman @ddukeofdarkness told me: "Money under the mattress makes a nice accelerant in house fires for us to deal with."
2. Save in a UK bank and you're covered for up to £85,000
The alternative is money in a bank, building society or credit union savings account or cash ISA (not supermarket or savings schemes). Provided it’s UK-registered, if the bank were to collapse, the Government's Financial Services Compensation Scheme promises to pay out up to £85,000 per person, per financial institution.
Don’t think means UK-registered means only UK banks. The vast majority of big banks have this protection including Santander, HSBC, ICICI and more. The only major players that don’t are ING Direct and the Bank of Cyprus. With those, you’re reliant on the Dutch and Cypriot governments, respectively, for protection.
To check your bank's protection, see Martin’s Are My Savings Safe? guide.
3. Pay 1p on a credit card to protect a £5,000 purchase
Another tip inspired from a sad tweet: "My 86-year-old dad put a £120 deposit at a restaurant (he doesn't believe in plastic). It's gone into administration, what can he do?" Unfortunately, the answer is not much.
If you need to pay, the safest way, counter-intuitively, is by plastic. Buy goods for £100-£30,000 on a credit card, and legally the card firm's jointly liable under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, so you can claim a refund from it. This isn’t just for failed delivery but covers all your consumer rights (see trading standards info) so even if an item breaks later, you could claim from the card firm. Surprisingly, even if you pay just 1p on the card for, say, a £5,000 kitchen, it's still liable for the WHOLE amount.
So I always pay for big things on credit cards – yet crucially, set up a direct debit to repay in full each month so there’s no interest to pay, otherwise the cost dwarves the safety dividend.
4. Even debit cards have more protection than cash
While the credit card protection is legal, there is a lesser protection on a debit card. Pay on a Visa or Mastercard debit card (any amount on Visa, min £10 on Mastercard), and if a company goes bust or fails to deliver, you can ask your bank to get the money back from the firm’s bank via a chargeback scheme. It's only a last resort, and you must complain to your bank within 120 days of realising there’s a problem for it to work. But it's better than nowt.
5. Beware recurring payments
If a firm wants your long card number, beware. Direct debits are set up with bank account details, and allow easy cancellation rights. Yet if with subscriptions, eg, where telecoms firms, payday loan companies or websites want your credit OR debit card’s long number, it's a recurring payment (or continuous payment authority). These let them take payments when they want, and can be a nightmare to cancel.
They shouldn’t be a nightmare. In November 2009, rule changes now mean if retailers refuse to cancel, your bank/card firm MUST cancel if you ask – but they often don’t know this and it can be hell. If a bank refuses to cancel, take it to the free Financial Ombudsman Service.
6. Just because it's legal tender, shops needn't accept your cash
You may be surprised that NO bank notes are legal tender in Scotland. In England and Wales, only Bank of England notes are. Yet legal tender is meaningless in day-to-day life. Anyone can choose to accept or refuse any payment. Legal tender only means it can't be refused as settlement of court-ordered debt. But a quick word to English shopkeepers: please accept Scottish and Northern Irish notes. While not legal tender, they are UK Parliament-approved legal currency, which makes them a perfectly acceptable way to pay.


http://www.itv.com/thismorning/life/money-matters-with-martin-lewis-180612/

Monday 18 February 2013

Make Your Money Work Harder


Too many of us let cash languish in accounts or in products paying rotten returns. Shake off this laziness to give yourself better returns, and hunt down any forgotten funds or concealed cash. You may be amazed at what you find.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/make-money#workharder
1.

Give yourself a 25% pay rise

There's nowt more powerful than sorting out your own finances. By shifting to the best deal on every product you can give yourself as much cash as a 25% pay rise, without cutting back. Before anything else, this is the most important starting point.
How much? The average UK family could gain £2,500 to £5,000 a year doing this.
How do I do it? Use the step-by-step Money Makeover guide.
2.

Get paid every time you spend

Cashback credit cards pay you back a proportion of what you spend each time you use them.
Set up a direct debit to pay it off in full each month, so there's no interest cost, and you can earn £100s/year. Just use the card for all your normal spending.
How much? The top cards pay 5% cashback for the first three months. It's also possible to get 3% for petrol/transport and 1% for supermarkets.
How do I do it? For updated best buys, see the Top Cashback Cards guide.
3.

Don't accept pitiful savings rates

If you've got savings, ensure they're working well for you. Too many people leave their savings in pitiful high street bank accounts where the money is actually shrinking.
Even worse, you may have it in a current account earning just 0.1%. Stop! Five minutes' work will let you increase the interest massively.
How much? For every £5,000 you have in a top savings account, as a basic rate taxpayer you'd earn £120 a year more than in a poor account.
How do I do it? See the Top Savings AccountsStarting Saving and Best Bank Accounts.
4.

Always pay off debts with savings

Most people who try to save while they're in debt are simply throwing their money away. The amount you pay in interest to borrow is much more than you earn on your savings, so pay the debt off with savings and you're quids in.
How much? Someone with £5,000 on a credit card and £5,000 saved is likely to be £700 a year better off by paying off the debt with the savings.
5.

Get all benefits/state pension

There's a plethora of benefits available - the key is working out whether you're entitled to them. The rather nifty tool from benefits specialists Entitledto and Turn2Us in ourBenefits Checkup guide does the work for you. It has a regularly updated calculator that works out everything you can get in one go.
Plus it may be possible to get more in your retirement by purchasing extra National Insurance Contributions (NICs) though there are drawbacks here, so read the full State Pension Boosting guide.
How much? If you've a family income under £42,000 it's worth checking, but in rare cases families with £72,000 can qualify, as you could get any of these: working tax credit; council tax and housing benefit; pension credit; child benefit; child trust fund and child tax credit. Plus, by boosting your state pension, you could end up £1,000s better off.
Find out more: Read the full Benefits Check-upState Pension BoostingHousing Benefitand Childcare Costs guides.
6.

Use your credit rating to stooze

Many credit card companies are willing to lend you money at 0% interest, so why not use this cash for everyday spending, replacing all other credit & debit card spending?
This means you'll now have debts on your 0% card (make sure you make the min repayment each month) and a similar amount in your current account, which you can save in a high interest ISA.
Pay off the full balance before the 0% ends, having earned interest on the money saved. This is known as stoozing. It's legal and can be profitable; yet it's only for the really financially savvy.
How much? This depends on what you'd normally spend. It's this amount that will be gaining interest in a top savings account, but if you stoozed £5,000 in a top rate ISA, you'd earn around £100 over the year.
How do I do it? Use the step-by-step Stoozing: Make Free Cash guide.

Thursday 14 February 2013

Targeted Traffic


Owning an impressive site will give you an almost endless list of possibilities to succeed in the digital world. Especially if you have targeted website traffic, you may find that you can actually do more than just market and sell your own business to ensure a steady stream of profits.
Expect affiliates to become going after you and prepare to take care of several connections as marketers are going to do their best to showcase their very own business via your pages (you need to be careful to affiliate having a direct competitor)

So why are you likely to attract the attention of the members, if the traffic to your site is targeted?
First, of course, you targeted traffic is something that can be targeted to their industry or specialization. For example, if your site offers high-speed Internet, then your traffic can certainly be beneficial for a subsidiary that sells anti-spyware. Anyone who uses the Internet is likely to breach of privacy because of programs that can be unknowingly installed on your computer.
When your site features content material relevant to a specific subject, then you become a good authority in the topic. This kind of authority transcends to just about anything that shows on your site which is likely to be clicked because of your targeted visitors. Consider a shopping mall that is visited simply by men and women due to its recognition in a specific area.
When a franchise business rents an area within the mall, the franchise business is sure to enjoy the popularity of the latter.

Hence, anybody who needs an internet connection might definitely think about the purchase of anti-spyware as well. This is where your current targeted site traffic becomes an excellent find for additional related businesses (especially for your competition – and that’s why you have to constantly make sure that your website possesses ideal search engine authority to obtain all potential targeted traffic).

A website that receives targeted traffic may also grab the opportunity to officially collect information about its visitors. You may give your visitors the option to subscribe to your site by getting their email addresses (or even post addresses and phone numbers) so you can send them notifications whenever developments in your site take place.

This is exactly similar to an affiliate renting or buying a space from any of your web pages. Of course, the franchise business would have never rented a space within the mall if not for its outstanding daily visits. As for your website, without the targeted traffic which is most likely due to a poor content, you can never be an authority and hence you will never catch any affiliate’s attention.

A website that receives targeted traffic may also grab the opportunity to officially collect information about its visitors. You may give your visitors the option to subscribe to your site by getting their email addresses (or even post addresses and phone numbers) so you can send them notifications whenever developments in your site take place.

Monday 11 February 2013

12 Easy Ideas For Making Money Online Through Blogging


Courtesy of Google
Making money online has become increasingly easy as more opportunities and innovations arise. Before launching out on the internet I spent lots of hours and days reading and analyzing the many products, schemes and techniques that people seem to be using to make money from just a few bucks to hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions. Honestly, I’ve been burnt a few times from trying some get rich quick stuff.
However, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are some very simple, popular and legitimate techniques for making money online with very high success rates when done properly. So, I’m going to be sharing 12 money making ideas and I’m sure there are a couple here that will fit your blog’s niche or business model.
I’ll start with some basic techniques that can be implemented into every blog:

1. Make Money Through Google Adsense

This is by far the easiest method to start earning from your blog. Google’s adsense gives you access to their huge network of advertisers through which you can display advertisements that are relevant to your blog’s audience. You earn whenever someone views and clicks your ads. More visitors to your blog will mean high earnings and clickthrough rates. Ensure that you setup adsense ads for your feeds as well, google provides this option once you sign-in to your dashboard.
Click here to sign up for Google’e Adsense
Several Alternatives – Here are some alternatives to adsense that offer the same types of services. ChitikaText Link AdsAdBrite

2. Selling Private Advertising Space

This is another method for earning from your blog where you reserve certain spaces on your site for advertisers to place their banner or text ads. This way you specify your rates which are usually paid on a monthly basis. The cost of these ads will depend on your site’s popularity.
You can have as many as 8 advertising spots on your site without it being too intrusive for your readers. Each could bring you and average of $12 per month which means about $96 per month. You can find advertisers through theBuy Sell Ads network.

3. Paid Job Board

Setting up a job board to complement your blog is fairly simple. Through this you can offer free and paid job listings for visitors who may be interested in job opportunities. To earn from this, simply offer premium listings that will get more exposure than the average posting. Charge anywhere from $10 to $100 per month for listings. The price, of course, depends on the amount of traffic your blog receives.
Here are some up and running job boards to help you get the idea: ProBlogger Jobs and BloggerJobs.Biz

4. Accept Donations Through This Awesome Widget

Depending on what your blog focuses on you can accept monetary contributions paid directly to your paypal account through the ChipIn Widget. This is a flash based web service that simplifies the process of collecting money using a neat little widget to catch your visitors’ attention as seen in the setup example below.
Now for some more advanced techniques for monetizing your blog:

5. Writing & Selling E-Books

If you are an expert in the niche you are blogging about you can write unique e-books that provide a vast amount of useful content for your readers. Your first e-book can be sold anywhere from $7 to $30 depending on the quality and uniqueness of the content. If you’re serious, your e-book can be completed within a couple of months and provides a solid long-term income. Imagine selling an e-book for $12 with 1,000 copies being sold. That’s $12,000 in sales and is a lot of money even if its earned over a 12 month period.

6. Create & Sell WordPress Themes & Plugins

If you have great web development skills or have a few friends who do, you could design and develop a few WordPress themes and plugins and sell them for a minimal price of around $30. Think about it, there are over 100,000 blogs being launched daily. These bloggers are looking for themes for their new ventures; many of them are willing to pay for premium themes to get their journey started.
In addition to promoting your work on your own blog, you can sell your themes through the Themeforest marketplace. They’ve sold over 47,000 different themes on behalf of designers and developers and their site is one of most trusted and visited on the internet.

7. Theme Reviews Using Affiliate Links

You could also write in depth reviews of new themes that may be launched by other developers and themes builders that offer commissions for their affiliates. Sign up for an affiliate account with these websites and start writing the reviews. Visitors who read the reviews may be interested and click your affiliate links to purchase the theme. These visitors will be counted as your referrals and earn you commissions. Some sites that offer these types of affiliate earnings are: Woo Themes and Elegant Themes

8. Write For Other Paying Blogs

There are lots of opportunities for bloggers who are willing to write for blogging networks or other individuals and businesses who may need your help. These sites pay from $5 per blog post up to even $100 per post depending on the popularity of the blog and quality of content you will be required to produce. You can find freelance blogging jobs at BloggerJobs.Biz or my job board at Sam’s Job Board.

9. Creating & Selling Blogs

I always say that owning a website or blog is like owning a piece of virtual real estate and in the same way that you can buy and sell homes and other properties, you can use the same techniques for selling websites. The value of websites appreciate depending on many factors like, domain age, content, actual earnings, traffic, etc. and these factors affect how much your site can be sold for. You can buy some interesting domains, build up some blogs that focus on specific niches and once it has a steady flow of traffic you simply sell. Flippa.com is an excellent marketplace for buying and selling websites.

10. Write Sponsored Reviews

SponsoredReviews.com allows you to earn cash by writing and posting honest reviews on your blog about their advertisers’ products and services. Advertisers will benefit from your reviews since it increases backlinks, popularity and search engine rankings for their product sites and that’s what they’re paying for. Depending on your readership and the quality of your blog, you can earn from $5 to $1,000 per post.

11. Become A Consultant Through Your Blog

If you are a specialist in your field, offer consultation services that are charged at an hourly or daily rate. You can also charge for speaking engagements at conferences and other types of offline forums. Ensure that you market these services effectively through your blog to ensure that visitors can readily see that you are available.

12. Private Forums, Memberships or E-Courses

Your regular blog’s content is one thing but you can go a step further by offering premium content on a paid membership basis. This especially works if you offer a specialty in your niche and already have a decent readership that enjoys your regular content. Create membership areas of your site that requires your readers to pay a small subscription fee to login. A small fee of $5 per month can easily accumulate to thousands of dollars per month if your are truly dedicated to providing superb content for your members.
There are quite a few plugins on the market that can create password protected areas of your existing blog and integrates a platform for accepting payments.
Other facts to keep in mind
To maximize your earnings through your blog, you really need to ensure that you are aiming for high quality in all aspects. Factors such as a user friendly blog design, easy to find and read information and your character as a blogger can affect the ultimate earning potential of your blog.
Also, ensure that you have:
An Advertising profile – This provides basic information of your site such as your readers’ demographics, your alexa rank, monthly visitors, banner ad prices, your google pagerank, number of feed subscribers and any other useful information for potential advertisers
A Serious Focus On Your Niche – Most advertisers only advertise within their niche. Its easier to attract advertisers when they see that you are focused
Build a Mailing List – Use AWeber or Mail Chimp to build your e-mail list or at least ensure that you have feedburner setup so that your readers can keep updated on your new content. This is the easiest method for contacting your dedicated readers when you are promoting a new affiliate product or service. You should have already built some trust with your subscribers and thus it will be easier for them to make a purchase from you.

Conclusion

Its pretty easy to start monetizing your blogging efforts; and the ideas above are guaranteed to give you a kick start in the right direction. Check out this list of the 30 Highest Earning Blogs on The Internet to get an idea of the potential of blogging and the simple techniques that are used to make a killing online.
What money making techniques have worked best for your blog? Which ideas are you excited to start trying. Please share with us in the comments, we would love to hear from you.

Saturday 9 February 2013

Getting your Website Ranked and Found in Google


We are often asked how to get a website listed on the organic search results (SERPS) of Google and so we have pulled together this step by step guide to take you through the process. We strongly recommend you use available SEO tools if you really want to get the most from your web marketing activity.
As you read through our guide to getting your website into Google’s index you will see that it is fairly straightforward to get your website listed but it can take time and effort to consistently achieve high rankings.


STEP 1: Quality Content

Even before you submit your website to Google you will need to make sure that your website not only meets their webmaster guidelines but also offers visitors to your site relevant, high quality content.
Why is great content so important?
Your site will be competing with a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) other web pages in Google's index. If you're not offering relevant, interesting content to your visitors you really should consider going back to the drawing board.
Remember though that whilst your content might be really interesting, if the wrong visitors are coming to your site it will have little impact on your business. It must therefore also target the searches actually used by your potential customers so that the search engines index it correctly and they find your site.
So before you start writing, consider what Keyword Phrase you want to target.
Use software such as Wordtracker's Keyword Research Tool to help identify niche keywords that will set you apart from your online competition.
You can also use Google's free tools:
Keyword tools can help find the keyword phrases currently being used by searchers all over the world.
TIP! Targeting longtail keywords can quickly get your site found on Google and generating internet traffic far faster than going after (more) competitive keyword variations.
Optimising your site for search engines should ALWAYS start with keyword research and then the processes of on-page and off- page optimisation can take place.
Get more information about Keyword Research here

STEP 2 – On-Page Optimisation

Now your content is correctly targeting relevant keyword phrases you will need to ensure the rest of your website is aligned to help your site get indexed. Things to check your website for are:
•It is structured correctly with a clear internal hierarchy
•It makes relevant use of text links
•Text is being used rather than text embedded inside an image - search engines cannot read the contents of an actual image
•Your title tags are unique and descriptive for each and every page
•All pages offer unique content and are not duplicated copies of one another (if not possible to remove duplicated content then they can be regulated with the canonicalisation tag)
•ALT tags are being used to describe images correctly
•A sitemap is included on your website (this is not an XML sitemap) to link to every page online
•You include a robots.txt file to instruct Google's robots when they arrive at your site
Once you have sorted out the on- page elements of your optimisation then you need to increase the trust factor with your website by focusing on off-page factors.
All sound a bit technical or too time consuming? Get some help by outsourcing your SEO

STEP 3 – Off-Page Optimisation

A large factor in whether your website is listed and ranked by the search engines is how much they trust it compared to your competition. Off-page optimisation techniques, when correctly executed, will help you build the trust levels.
When considering off-page optimisaton the main things to ensure are:
•All links are correct with no broken links either to other pages on your site or external websites
•You have links from at least 7 to 15 established ranked websites of a similar nature or theme to yours
•You have a natural and balanced link profile with links from a variety of sources
Don’t forget that building links takes time, patience and care – don’t expect to do it all immediately. Get some good quality links at the start and then continue to build them over time.
Find out more about building links to your site.


STEP 4 – Keep it legal

One of the most important steps in the process is to double check that what you have applied meets best practice search engine optimization techniques. White hat SEO is the only way to ensure you get listed and rank well for the long term.
Google’s webmaster guidelines give you help to make sure you don’t inadvertently break the rules.
Now that all of these elements are in place you can submit your site before creating a sitemap.


STEP 5 – Create an XML Sitemap

Go to Google Webmaster Tools and set up an account . Before you go ahead and start using this tool you will need to register a Google Account if you have not already done so (it is a good idea as that way you can sign up to more of Google's Products on offer to help you and your business online).
Once your website has been verified which may take a little time you can use a third party tool to help you generate your sitemap:
This tool can generate your XML site map for you. It’s very simple easy to do.
Once your XML Sitemap is set up ready to go you can then move to the next stage.

STEP 6 – Use Webmaster Tools to check your site

Use Google's Webmaster Tools to review and check your website. The tool will identify and potential issues with your website so that you can address them.
Your XML sitemap can help Google's robots analyse your site in far greater depth. It is unlikely your website will be listed any faster for your targeted keywords but the easier you can make life easier for bots then the better (just make sure your site's internal page structure is clear and concise).
Webmaster Tools can also track links to your website together with monitoring 404's for broken pages on your website.

The load speed of web pages is becoming an increasingly important factor in web optimisation so it is also critical you work with your web developers to make sure your website content loads quickly - for more information we recommend you check out Google Page Speed.
So your site has been optimised using both on and off page techniques, you have a site map, you have used Google Webmaster tools to check your site so what next?
Well now you have to wait and leave it to Google to index your website pages.
Consider when they do, how will you know if your site is successful online once listed? That is where another free Google tool will help.


STEP 7 - Google Analytics

Every marketing campaign needs to have some way of measuring whether it has been successful and web marketing is no different. Google Analytics is a free tool that enables you to measure your sites success online by recording and providing detailed information on key indicators such as:
  • The number of visitors to your site
  • How visitors were brought to your site
  • What keywords they entered into Google to find your site
  • Their behaviour once on your site - how long they stayed, how many and which pages they looked at
  • Whether they undertook a specific action that you have decided to monitor (by setting goals) such as completing a contact form or adding a product to a shopping basket.
With all of this information at your finger tips it means you can continually develop your website and online marketing strategy to increase your sales.


STEP 8 – Ask for Help

Still unsure how to go about getting your site listed and ranked with Google? Why not contact an experienced Web Marketing Company to help.
At All Things Web we do just that - helping businesses of all sizes make their websites a success day in day out.
Having completed each of the tasks above the obvious question everyone asks is:
When can they expect to see their website in Google’s results?
We get asked this question a lot and the answer is simple, it depends very much on whether you have followed the steps above correctly.
If you have identified and targeted popular keywords with less competition and then aligned your content and on page elements accordingly, built links to your site to help the search engines trust it and made sure everything meets best practice SEO techniques then it is possible your site will get listed and start to rank reasonably quickly.
On the other hand if you're targeting one or two word keyword phrases that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of websites competing, don’t utilize the relevant SEO techniques correctly then you've got your work cut out!
To find out more about how to get your site listed and ranked with Google, check out our SEO Resources Page and Blog or sign up for our newsletter all of which are full of useful tips and hints.