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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
   The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
   Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
   First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
   Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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5. Tag Your Content
   Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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6. Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
   There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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7. Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
   Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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8. Link Intelligently
   When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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9. Invite Guest Bloggers
   Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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10. Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
    I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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11. Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
    Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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12. Cover Topics that Need Attention
    In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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13. Pay Attention to Your Analytics
    Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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14. Use a Human Voice
    Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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15. Archive Effectively
    The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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16. Implement Smart URLs
    The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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17. Reveal as Much as Possible
    The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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18. Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
    Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
    If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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20. Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
    When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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21. Build a Brand
    Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.

p.s. Note to self - starting long blog entries at 11:30pm is not conducive to a good night's sleep. At least Angela got kicked off Project Runway tonight.

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Top 10 Tips For Affiliate Promotions

Product Launches – How To Dominate Them – My Top 10 Tips!

Today’s post is all about YOU earning more money as an AFFILIATE promoting other peoples products.
Now I appreciate some of you will be thinking — I don’t have much of a list or much of a following – so how can I go about promoting a product launch.
Well of course in theory the bigger the list you have the more sales you will have – but let me make another point. Some of the most successful affiliates for the Pre-Launch of PopUp Domination actually had relatively small lists but what they had that more than made up for it was a very responsive list.
So you might ask how do you build a responsive list? There are a number of factors that matter – but the two I would highlight are:
1) Your reputation with the subscribers on your list. If you are someone who consistently offered your subscribers great value in the way of information and strategies then the more likely that they will read your emails and more importantly take action based on your recommendation in those emails.
I have said it before, but I will say it again (and please take it as read when I discuss any affiliate promotion) – only ever promote products you believe in and would buy yourself. The quickest way to lose that good reputation is to constantly be peddling and hyping STUFF – just because you might make a few commissions.
2) The second factor is of course your niche. I have a pretty responsive list but if I was to start promoting a course on Pay Per Click marketing I can bet the response would not be so good. You see most of the people on my list are not using PPC – but rather are bloggers.
People (myself included) have often said the Money is in the List — well that is true, but the real fact is that the money is in the responsiveness of the list!

OK, let’s get started – here are my Top 10 Tips for being a successful Product Launch Affiliate:

1. Review The Product

Reviews have been one of the most powerful things I do for launches, for a lot of reasons including:

• Proof I have the product and am not just promoting to make money
• Proof it works
• Long team sales from new readers coming to my site
• SEO Rankings. Tip: Name your post something people will search in Google to find it.

You want to of course do a write up on the product and include screen shots and a video would be a great addition. One great example of a review was by David Risley for my launch, he was able to sell over 100 copies of my plugin by writing a post, adding images and a video then emailing it to his list. He still get’s regular sales although he posted it nearly 2 months ago which just goes to show the power of blog posts, long term sales!
ANOTHER TIP: Not sure when product launches are happening? Visit your competition and the gurus in your industry and sign up to their list, if there is a product being launched, they will be promoting! Then you can go about getting involved, usually you can find the affiliate page is linked to in the footer of the sales page.

2. Email Pre-launch

For a long time I was against emailing pre-launches because I was scared I would lose a whole load of my list to someone else, however this isn’t the case, your readers will not unsubscribe just because they opt-ed into someone elses list, the fact is, they probably already are on dozens of other lists already. As long as you provide value, your subscribers will stay with you!

Emailing pre-launch is great because it builds momentum and interest. The problem with emailing a direct sales page is that people have no idea why they need to look at the product in the first place, it’s a lot easier to tempt them in with a free video or download from the pre-launch so that they can learn about the product and why they so desperately need it. It’s also a good opportunity to build trust and the fact is, most of the time, your readers don’t realize you are promoting a squeeze page because your make money of it, but rather because you are being nice.

3. Follow Up

Often you have 3 or even more opportunity to email, blog, Facebook, Twitter etc… a launch:

• Launch Day
• 24 Hours Till Close/Price Increase
• Reopen for 24 hours/Webinar

We all know email is the most important thing you could be using right now, that’s why all the big marketers do so much to build a list. It’s simple really, you build a list and then at any given time you can email your subscribers a product launch and cash in. For me it literally is the closest thing to printing money. I have friends who travel the world and live off just emailing promotions to their list, a lot of people don’t mind being send promotions, heck if I minded, I wouldn’t be on half the lists I’m on. If you want more information on list building, check this post out!

4. Interview Creator

Typically product owners will be mega busy coming up to their launch, however this is pure gold as well. I often interview people before launches such as Adam Horwitz. When he launched his most recent product I was getting 100′s of visitors a day from people interested in who the guy was before they bought. A great chance for you to “steal” traffic and sales from other affiliates.

5. Split Test Emails

I have many different lists, something I recommend everyone does. What I do is email one of my lists (for example my Retireat21 subscribers) a new promotion / product launch. When I do this I use two different Subject Lines in the email sent out and then whichever SUBJECT LINE gets the best open rate – I roll out and use on the rest of my lists. I mean if your email doesn’t get opened – you may as well not have sent it!.
This is a very simple split test (there are a lot more complicated split tests you can do another day) and I have been blown away with how beneficial it has been to me. I used to just use one subject line — sometimes I nailed it and got lots of OPEN’s but other times I did not. At least with this simple Split Test I am assuring myself a lot more opens with the majority of my list by testing on part of the list first.
The other advantage of doing a smaller mailing first is that you can discover if the OFFER is converting. If I get bad results with my initial mailing using two different subject lines I may well not roll out across all my lists.
From the screen shot above you can see to emails I sent out to my Aweber list, same content just different titles. One got 5.9% open rate and the other 6.7% which may not seem like much but when your talking about 1000′s of people, it soon adds up.

6. Promote The Right Product

There is no point me promoting a Pay Per Click product to my readers and buyers because I have never talked about PPC and most probably don’t have a clue about it and if they do, they probably don’t want to do it, hence why they are on my site learning about blogging. You want to promote something with broad appeal to the subscribers on your list. Let’s take for example, PopUp Domination – this is software that could be used on just about every website because it will make the website owner more money. That means that just about everyone in the internet marketing industry can promote it. Bloggers, Social Media People, PPC guys, Product Creators — all of them need a product like PopUp Domination. The advantage to me of course is that I have a very wide range of people who I can approach as potential affiliates – even though in many instances it would not make sense for me to promote their product in return because my subscribers are not interested in their specific niche. That is what I mean by BROAD. Of course there are lots of people who will say to go NICHE and sub-niche. That works as well – I am just pointing out that with PopUp Domination we deliberately went BROAD.

7. Offer a BONUS!

This is one of the most important things you can do when promoting someones product – ADD A BONUS for all the buyers who buy via your affiliate link. A lot of people follow most people in the industry so by you offering a free consult, review, product, download etc.. you will stand out and choose to buy via your affiliate link over someone elses.
Recently when promoting a product launch by Gideon Shalwick I put together a special bonus offer for people who bought via my link. This proved to work quite well because several people commented that they bought via my link because of my bonus offer. This also means they can’t go through their own affiliate link to buy but instead have to buy via me if they want my great bonus! James Schramko mentioned how he built a business around offering a bonus for each product he promoted in an interview with Yaro Starak, click here to see it!
TIP: Adding a exit popup will also increase your sales conversions.

8. Use It In a Tutorial

Depending on what you are promoting, you can sometimes use it in a tutorial, for example, Aweber. I can teach people how to make money with email and promote Aweber as my choice of email software. This I have also found to bring in a good quality of long term sales.

9. Use All Of Your Resources

There are so many ways to get the message out, some people simply over look them, you can:

• Blog about the product
• Tweet/Facebook about it
• Build a review site (someone did this to PopupDomination and is making a lot of sales)
• Email your mailing list
• Submit articles to article directors targeted about the niche of the product and at the end promote it.

10. Think Out Of The Box – Just Ask!

Most of things I have got in life are simply just because I asked, it’s something we all need to learn to do. Sometimes it doesn’t work however when it does, it’s work it so here a few examples of things you can ask for:

• $1 Trial Offers
• Special Landing Pages
• Webinars (these convert like crazy, see Lewis Howes and Steven Beck)
• Discounted Price
• Special Bundles
• Coupon Codes

At the end of the day, product creators rely on affiliates to make their launches a success so will at least listen to what you have to say.

How To Get 100 Visitors a Day, Every Day Starting Today

10 Ways To Get 100 Extra Visitors To Your Website Today!

Sometimes it seems extremely hard to get those first 100 visitors to your articles and it can be frustrating when this happens; especially when you are new to the world of Internet Marketing and you just don’t know what you are doing wrong. Well I’m here to help you with these ’10 Ways To Bring Visitors To Your Articles’ admittedly this is not going to be a masterclass which draws on and on; this is all about helping you to get to your first 100 visitors as quickly and easily as possible without a ton of jargon. So here you go guys I hope this truly helps some of you out. If you enjoy this post, you should also check David’s other posts such as 10 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers!

1. Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! might be losing the search engine market share battle but they still dominate in the Question and Answers arena. People ask thousands of questions every day in almost every niche and industry you can imagine. A quick search for “Search Engine Optimization” shows over 1,300 questions that can be answered. The key to driving massive amounts of traffic from Yahoo! Answers is to give genuinely helpful answers. Instead of trying to create a blatant advertisement for your website work on becoming an authority in your industry. This technique has the potential to send you far more than 100 visitors. When people use search engines to look for the questions you answered often times a Yahoo! Answers result will appear near the top of the search results. This will give you and your website a ton of exposure if you answer commonly asked questions!

2. Social Bookmarking

If you create content that people enjoy it can easily become popular or even go viral. The important thing is to put your website and content in front of people that are looking for it, right? Social bookmarking is a super easy way to do just that. Social bookmarking sites allow users to bookmark their favorite websites that other people can publicly view and vote up or down. If you bookmark useful content other people will find it, share it, and vote it up so others can enjoy it. Oh yeah, and it only takes about 30 seconds to bookmark your site. The 3 most popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. These 3 sites get over 8 MILLION unique visitors a month – funneling off a chunk of that traffic to your website is very doable. (There’s plenty to go around ) Just remember to create content that people will enjoy and/or find useful. The most popular content on social bookmarking sites are usually check lists, “Top 10” lists, tools & resources, and breaking news – so keep that in mind!

3. Squidoo

Squidoo is a website full of 100% user generated content that allows you to create what’s called a “lense.” A lense is a page about a specific topic that you choose to write about (usually something you’re knowledgeable in). After creating your lense other people can find it by searching for terms and keywords related to your lense. Let me just start off by saying Squidoo is an absolute powerhouse in the search engines. Its very easy to rank Squidoo lenses for competitive terms that would prove to be a challenge for websites with lesser authority. Creating a lense on Squidoo gives you 2 traffic opportunities:

• When people use search engines and search for keywords related to your lense it will sometimes show up in the top search results if it’s relevant enough to the search phrase. This means you can get drones of targeted traffic to your lense from search engines that you can funnel into your website.

• Squidoo has a huge community of active users that use Squidoo to find things they want to know more about. Squidoo currently gets over 9 million unique visitors a month and they’re still growing steadily. Look at Squidoo’s traffic growth over just the last year:

Creating a lense or two is one of my favorite ways to get laser targeted traffic without hours of work.

4. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to generate free traffic – all you have to invest is the time to write an article. Get in touch with the most popular blogs in your industry and ask if they’ll let you write a guest post. Most website owners will have no objections to having other people write free content for them. (ask Michael how I know…wink, wink) If you’re having trouble finding blogs to guest post on check out www.myblogguest.com – they have a full community of bloggers that are ready and waiting for your content.

5. Forum Posting

There are community forums setup online for virtually every niche, industry, or topic you can imagine. The internet is a prime place for like minded people to talk to each other. 9 times out of 10 you can find a forum for your industry just by typing in [your industry]forum.com or searching for “[Your Industry] Forum” on Google. Find the forums in your industry with the largest user base, start posting there and become an active community member. Most forums will allow you to leave a link to your website in your post signature, so the more you post the more traffic you get.

6. Twitter

Every time I write new content I post it to twitter. If you use the right keywords and make your tweet interesting enough you can get a lot of clickthroughs just from people searching. For example if I write an article about SEO and Google I can tag the end of the tweet with #SEO #Google and anyone that searches for those keywords on Twitter can see my tweet about the post that I wrote. Be sure to write creative headlines for your posts so people feel the urge to click on them.

7. Facebook

Creating a Facebook fan page takes about an entire 45 seconds and is a almost a necessity at this point for every business owner. Considering that 1 in 13 people on EARTH have a Facebook account there’s really no need to explain why you should be there. Pro tip: make sure you create a fan page and not a group. Groups messages don’t show up in news feeds making it hard to get in touch with members. Making a fan page will give you a lot more exposure to not only the current members but members friends as well.

8. Blog Commenting

Commenting on blog posts written by industry experts with lots of followers can bring your website a lot of traffic. When you post a comment (most) blogs allow you to leave a link back to your site for other readers to check out – as long as you leave an insightful comment you WILL get traffic from your blog comments. Make sure you comment as quickly as possible when new blog posts go up. The higher in the comments you are the more clicks you’ll get. I have Google Reader setup to alert me when new blog posts are made on the industry blogs I follow and I comment immediately to lock in my first place spot.

9. Article Marketing

Promoting your websites by publishing articles to various article directories is by no means a new idea but still an extremely effective way to drive traffic. If you write content and publish it to websites like Ezine Articles, Article Base, and Article Dashboard website owners will pick it up and post it. This idea is similar to guest blogging except that you only have to write one piece of content that can end up on hundreds of even thousands of blogs and websites. The same rule applies here: don’t be boring – be creative and interesting and use common keywords in your article and title so website owners can find it!

10. Link bait

The idea of “link bait” refers to creating content that is so extremely useful or entertaining it compels people to link to it. Put yourself in the shoes of your target demographic and figure out what they would enjoy or what would help them the most. Is there a tool you can make to automate some tedious process? Can you find enough data to make an interesting infographic? Is there a checklist or cheat sheet that would prove handy to your audience? The possibilities are nearly endless – survey your visitors and see what is missing or lacking in your industry and fill in the gaps.

The Missing Link To More Blog Traffic

I first met David back in 2009 at Ryan Lee’s continuity summit. He was just starting out and if you had asked me then if I thought he would play such a powerful and required part in my business in 2011, I would of not believed you. In March, he took over my SEO and has increased the daily traffic from search engines by 500 visitors a day in 3 short months. If you need to buy one eBook EVER, it’s this one. Traffic means money! Check it out, click here.
Over to you Dave…
My name is Dave Sinick and I run an SEO company out in San Diego, California. My company has helped Michael with his blog’s SEO – so Michael wanted me to write a post today to talk to you guys about the “missing link” when it comes to getting more traffic from your site (from your already existing content, and from all future content).
If you’ve been struggling to get search engine traffic to your blog, then this post might just be the “missing link” to getting more visitors.
Here’s the deal. When it comes to getting traffic to your site, content is king, right?
Well, not completely.
To me, content is more like the foundation on which you build your house. Without good content, like a house without a foundation, your blog will collapse (and fail).
And Google loves good content. Google WANTS to give you free traffic to your content. They WANT their users to find good content when they search for it, because when they find your good content – they are like “man, Google really did a good job here, I will use them again for all of my searches” which allows Google to retain a customer, and generate more advertising revenue.
The thing is, if you set up your content improperly, Google won’t understand what keywords you’re trying to rank your site for — and you won’t get the search engine traffic that they want to give you.
You could have the best content in the world that would bring people back to your blog over and over again, but no one would ever see it.
So we understand that A) Content is important and B) Google wants it’s users to find your best content — and funnel traffic to you.
However…this is where most people mess up. They take the “if you build it, they will come” approach to getting traffic – and forget about On-site SEO.
“On-Site SEO, you say? Isn’t that completely worthless now? Doesn’t google not care about that stuff anymore?”
Well, random guy who I just made up to make a point, in fact, Google still very much cares about your on-site SEO. Proper on-site SEO is the foundation to any real SEO campaign — and without it, you will find yourself stonewalled when you try to rank for keywords. Without proper on-site SEO, you make ranking for keywords 10 times harder than it should be.
It’s like buying a car without an engine. You’ll push your foot as hard as you can on the gas pedal, but no matter what, your car is not going anywhere. All the links in the world won’t make your site rank without certain proper on-page factors.
In fact, it’s crazy to think that you would write ANY content online and then not optimize it properly for the search engines. That’s like Google handing you a check for thousands of dollars and you saying “nah, I’m good.”
Now when I talk about on-page SEO, I’m not referring to stuffing your blog posts with keywords, or making spammy content, or anything along those lines. I’m not talking about stuff that takes a lot of time, either.
The truth is, On-page SEO is something that:

• Doesn’t take a lot of time to setup
• Doesn’t require any real technical knowledge
• Can be used inside of your content without appearing spammy
• Google WANTS you to do properly
• Can be systemized for all future content, and
• It’s benefits will last as long as your site is up

And plain and simply: it works.
Just look at some of the keywords that we’ve helped Michael rank for (In just 30 days):
Optimize Press:

Make Money Blogging:

James Schramko:

And that’s just a sampling of the keywords we’re helping him with. Most of these rankings occurred just from changing parts of Michael’s content (his on-site SEO), and they allowed our linkbuilding efforts to be infinitely more effective. It literally took us 30 days to get him on the first page for “Make Money Blogging” — a keyword that gets 10,000 EXACT searches a month.
And we’ve replicated these results on some of our own sites as well:

(That’s us at #1, #4, and #5, dominating our competition)

So you can see that these on-site SEO techniques can dramatically help increase your rankings, and increase the effect of linkbuilding.

“So, where can I learn more?”
Well, we actually just released a program called The WordPress SEO Blueprint in which my business partner (Tom Lambert) and myself go through everything we do and have done to get our WordPress sites ranking at the top of the search engines. And to sweeten the deal, we’re also offering the first 50 people who order a free on-site SEO report in which we go through your site and tell you everything that you need to fix to get your blog ranking as soon as possible.
So check it out – and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section!

8 Easy Ways To Get Backlinks

David run’s all SEO for IncomeDiary. In the past three months he has increased the traffic from search engines by over 500 visitors a day. Want to learn how you can copy his success? Check out his SEO eBook here now!
As I talked about last week, with proper on-site SEO, you massively increase the effect of your linkbuilding campaigns. So I figured a good follow-up post would be about getting more backlinks — enjoy!
You may have heard that backlinks are “CRUCIAL” to SEO and ranking in search engines. It’s true — they are. If you really want to maximize your search engine traffic you need a solid backlink strategy that works for you.

So what is a backlink and why are they so important? Backlinks are a simple concept: when another website links to you that link is considered a backlink. Search engines look at backlinks to evaluate how popular a website is and rank them accordingly.
Each backlink is given a certain amount of “juice” based on it’s own reputation, history, and authority in the niche. Backlinks from established and legitimate websites are more effective than low-quality backlinks from websites with no credibility.
With all that said, if you want to rank for competitive keywords, you need backlinks.
Here are 8 ways to get easy backlinks to help rank your website for your target keywords:

Testimonials

You can easily leverage testimonials into backlinking opportunities online. Whenever you buy a new product, service, membership, or anything else online, leave a testimonial. Testimonials will commonly have a link to your website within them to prove the testmonial is real. This will give you a free backlink if the company likes your testimonial and uses it on their website. And — it doesn’t hurt to ask them to put a live link in the testimonial!
Pro Tip: Leave honest and real testimonials (they’ll get used more).

Social Bookmarks

How about some free backlinks from high PageRank sites? Social Bookmarking allows you to save your favorite bookmarks online to read later and share with others. (Lucky for us that also gives us a free backlink.)
Pro Tip: We use SocialMonkee.com for social bookmarks. It automatically bookmarks your URL to 25 social bookmarking sites for free.

Press Releases

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a public relations expert to run a successful press release.  You can have a press release written and distributed to thousands of different news sites and publications without doing any ‘real’ work. I love press releases because you get HIGH quality backlinks and your business gets put in front of readers, not a bad deal! Websites like the New York Times and USA Today can pick up your press release giving you a gem of a backlink (and a ton of free traffic). Though we will say that your press release better be high quality if you want to get on one of those sites!
Submitting a press release to all of these news sites manually would be a HUGE hassle. To avoid wasting our time we use a distribution service called PRWeb. PRWeb has an extremely strong track record and come highly recommended from most search engine optimizers.

RSS Directories

All over the Internet there are “RSS Directories” which serve the purpose of letting people explore different blogs/websites on a particular topic. By submitting your RSS feed to these directories your website gets a link back to it.
To submit your website to RSS directories automatically we use a program called Fast RSS Submitter. Fast RSS Submitter will submit your RSS feeds to over 100 RSS directories automatically, saving you a lot of time.

Joint Ventures/Partnerships/Co-Branding

If you have any partners or JVs ask them if they will link back to your website. If you think they might be hesitant, just ask if you can do a guest post with a link, it’s hard to turn down free content. And as a double bonus, you get extra traffic back to your site.
Wait a sec…a guest post about guest posting? How meta…

Link Bait

Link bait is content that is so useful, high quality, or powerful that people are compelled to share it naturally. If you put up content that people enjoy so much they tweet, like, blog, and comment you can rank for A LOT of keywords. Utilize link bait and structure your content towards your audience, always. If you can do that consistently your fans and readers will do a big chunk of your link building for you.
Some examples of great link bait are: top 10 lists/roundups, hot topics, breaking news, and infographics. Honestly, if you’re looking for great examples of linkbait, you don’t need to go much further than IncomeDiary.com. Michael is great at it!

Article Submissions

There’s a myth that goes something like this: “Article marketing is dead.” It really isn’t, but if you want to pass up on great backlinks you can believe that.  Article marketing is one of the most effective forms of link building I use every single day. I have websites ranked in the #1 position for their primary keywords JUST from article marketing, so don’t try to tell me it doesn’t work!
The key to article marketing is VOLUME. The main argument I hear against article marketing is that only xx% of the links get indexed/counted/etc…which is why you have to do big numbers.  (We’re talking about thousands of submissions) Submitting 2 articles isn’t going to rank your website overnight like some miracle cure. Do lots of submissions and see where you’re at – if you didn’t hit number 1 keep going.
Submitting articles is another time sucker, so we use syndication software that does it automatically. For article submissions we use nothing but Article Marketing Robot. This software is amazing and automates the entire submission process for you, all you have to do is put in the information and let it run.

Awards

Holding some type of annual awards can generate a lot of buzz and backlinks for your website. To do this (successfully) you do need SOME level of credibility in your industry, though. Create awards for the best in your industry and give them to the ones that are crushing it. These are usually the most popular and followed people, so you can really leverage their popularity to grow your website. I’ve seen this used very effectively in the fitness industry — people can’t resist sharing with their friends that they have won an award — even if you just made it up on the spot
This can do a couple things for you:

• Bring in new readers, fans, and followers (because its fun & different)
• Attract those ‘big name’ winners and potentially get links, tweets, or mentions from them
• Build rapport for your brand/company/website

These 8 methods alone can rank your website for competitive terms if used correctly, so use them! Experiment to find out what works best for your website and keep doing more of it. You should always be testing new and creative link building methods to keep things fresh and organic for the search engines.
Are there any cool link building strategies you use that I didn’t mention here? Tell me about em below!
Want to learn more about getting traffic to your website through search engines? How to get more people to link to your site? Check out David’s SEO eBook here now! David’s influence on IncomeDiary has been the most important investment to my online business this year. Make sure you do the same!

Monetization Strategies – What I’m Doing !

This year I will earn a lot more money from all of my websites! 2010 was my best year to date by a very long way, it may surprise you that it was also the year I worked the least due to health “issues”. I tried a lot of new ideas because I knew I couldn’t work as much as I was, which wasn’t much in the first place. I basically had to work smarter, not harder. I had three different blog designs last year which all taught me a lot about how people use my site, some ideas worked really well and some concepts just flopped. I think this April will be my best month ever with blogging, I’m just getting round to finally finishing a few last ideas and from early results and testing, I’m quietly confident about the changes. (how is it quietly if I blog about is :S)

How I Make Money From My Blog

1. Header Banner

This is a new idea I had when we rolled out version 3 design, it pushed all my site down further below the fold, however I think It’s going to pay off. I have already noticed that every time I publish new content and email my readers that I make sales for Site Profit Domination which I advertise in that slot. Recently while at underground I was speaking at Lunch with Dusty who has a JailBreak Blog and he told me how he has adverts in the same place as my large banner and that they get 10 x the clicks as the sidebar, which is massive right?
People know when I’m onto a winner, check these guys out who have already followed up with similar banners.

2. Email Marketing Concept Change

Most marketers will email promotions daily, some email more then once a day, I’ve been told I should do it because it makes them money but to be honest it’s just not me, besides I struggle to find good enough products to promote once a month, daily I would say would be impossible. Here’s my new idea: Like I just said in section 1, every time I email my list, I sell more and more of my own products, I’m better of working harder on my blog monetization and publish more content so every time I email my list about a new blog post, I earn the same as I would if I was promoting a product. This may seem impossible but I really believe I’m onto something here and it really motivates me to publish more content which in turn grows my blog and makes you guys more happy.

3. Banner Advertising

I haven’t touched banner advertising in quite a while, I think it was mainly down to the reason that I was making so much more money from other things and I got fed up with always looking for new advertisers and working with them. This time I expect things to be different, currently I’m using BuySellAds, which is a banner advertising marketplace, I expect quite quickly to negotiate long term ad placements with other marketers I know which will end up being around 20% of my total earnings which would end up being quite a considerable amount of money.

Personally, I’m aiming to get 5 advertisers, paying a high price each, deliver them results, encourage them to agree to long term placements with 2 month warning of cancellation. Ultimately as long as I deliver, they will stay. I have decided to remove a few hundred links through out my blog to affiliate products which aren’t converting as well, which will mean banner conversions will go up. If you know that you have a set amount of money coming in every month via PayPal, then you can plan ahead a lot better and it makes business a lot less stressful.

4. Reviewing Products

Last year I did two reviews, one brought in over $7000 and the other nearly $9000. Why were these so successful? Firstly, product choice, I choose amazing products and ones that had pages that would convert. A big lesson for affiliate marketers here, don’t promote something if they don’t have a good sales page, you will be shooting yourself in the foot. It also tells you something about the person who created the product, often they are not taking it to seriously or because there one of those people who believe “I’m so great, I don’t need a sales page, people will be begging me for it” – that is never true.
Creating a review is pretty simple, find a product your using, it can be anything, software, sports equipment, cooking utensils, electronics, gadgets, the list is endless. What you want to do is share your own personal experiences, I like to add lot’s of images of me using it, this firstly backs me up as I’ve actually used the product as well as show them how it can be used. Every time they may be convinced to buy, make sure you have an affiliate link, so for example, under a video, under images, at the beginning and end of the post. Another great idea is to show other people actively using it, so for example if you have a car blog, show a picture of Eminem driving the particular car your reviewing. Once your site gets big enough, you can really easily get products for free to review, some company’s will automatically send you invitations and products as they release them as they need people like us to support them.
IDEA: Although not quite ethical, as long as you like the product your using, most product owners will be happy to write the review for you if you ask.

5. Internal Product Launches

One thing you will notice is I always partner up on products, look at Popup Domination and Blog Creation Domination, I partnered with web developers for both these projects because it spread my risk, it didn’t rely on much of my time and allowed me to launch things a lot sooner then if I did it on my own. I recently listened to Craig Ballantyne speak to his mastermind group about how he makes money online and he mentioned the you want a whole line of products, the more you have, the more you will earn. Although this may appear common sense, not really many people do it. There are really quick ways to product products, such as:

• 90 minute video/webinar presentations
• 37 Things Report
• Interview Series

Ultimately you will make a lot more money promoting your own range of products instead of other peoples, your readers trust you more and if every product is good, readers will be desperate for next. Someone I know has a site about basketball, his first product was about running faster, his readers then wanted to know how to jump higher so that ended up being his next.

My header banner will be a rotating advert for each of my products, instead of showing just an advert for Site Profit Domination, which some readers may of already published or not interested in purchasing, they can now see many offers, increasing my chances of a conversion.
In CLOSING ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If your not monetizing, your not making money.
If you want to learn more about making money from a website, I highly recommend my course, Site Profit Domination.

Submit to Search Engines to Boost Blog Traffic

Help Search Engines Find Your Blog by Letting Them Know Where It Is

An easy way to give your blog a traffic boost is by letting the popular search engines know your blog exists. Of course, many of them will find your blog eventually, but why not help them along by taking the time to submit your blog's URL to some of the most popular search engines?
Follow the links below to submit your blog's URL to some of the web's most popular search engines:
Google
Yahoo!
The Open Directory
MSN's Live Search
Remember, submitting your URL to search engines won't suddenly bring an overwhelming amount of traffic. However, it does mean your blog is on the search engines' radar screens and has a chance of being picked up by keyword searches.

 

15 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic

The blogosphere is a big and busy world with over 100 million blogs and growing. How do you attract visitors to your blog? Follow these simple tips to drive traffic to your blog.

1. Write Well and Write Often

Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal.
Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati.

2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results.
It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine.

3. Use and Update Your Blogroll

By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers.

4. Harness the Power of Comments

Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty.
Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more.

5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed

Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content.

6. Use Links and Trackbacks

Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs.
You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links!

7. Tag Your Posts

It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati.

8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites

Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog.

9. Remember Search Engine Optimization

When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely.

10. Don't Forget Images

Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.

11. Consider Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be done when you write a guest post on another blogger's blog or when another blogger writes a guest post on your blog. Both methods are likely to increase traffic as your blog will be exposed to the other blogger's audience. Many of the other blogger's readers will visit your blog to see what you have to say.

12. Join Forums, Web Rings or Online Groups

Find online forums, web rings, groups or social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn where you can share ideas and ask questions of like-minded individuals. Add a link to your blog in your signature line or profile, so each time you post on a forum or participate in another online network, you're indirectly promoting your blog. Chances are many people will click on that link to learn more about you.

13. Promote Outside Your Blog

Promoting your blog shouldn't stop when you step outside the blogosphere. Add your blog's URL to your email signature and business cards. Talk about it in offline conversations. It's important to get your name and your blog's URL noticed offline, too.

14. Nominate Yourself and Other Blogs for Blog Awards

There are a number of blog awards given out throughout the year. Nominating yourself and other blogs and bloggers can draw attention to your blog and drive traffic to it.

15. Don't Be Shy

The most important part of the blogosphere is its community and much of your success as a blogger will be tied to your willingness to network with that community. Don't be afraid to ask questions, join conversations or just say hi and introduce yourself. Don't sit back and hope the online world will find you. Speak out and get yourself noticed. Let the blogosphere know you've arrived and have something to say!

How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site

You've probably heard before a lot of hype about how much money you can make with affiliate programs. Maybe you've even set up a site yourself, only to find that after buying the domain, a few bucks a month in hosting, software or a web designer to design your site, etc., that the piddly affiliate fees hardly even covered your cost. Well, here's the hype-free way to really make money with an Amazon.com affiliate site. And it'll only take a day to make the site. The secret? Low cost, low effort.

Difficulty: Hard
Time Required: One day

          
Here's How:

1. If you don't already know it, learn some basic HTML. You have to do this to keep your costs down and still get what you want. Even if the site is basically laid out for you, you're going to need to know how to insert images, create hyperlinks, and do some basic text formatting. Our HTML Guide offers a free 10-week HTML class and a great collection of beginning HTML tutorials. Get over any anxiety you have about this. Just do it. You'll thank me for it later.
2. Decide on your topic. You're going to be doing product reviews and recommendations, so pick a topic that you enjoy and know something about. If you can't stay passionate about the topic, that will show, and it also won't hold your interest. Choose a narrow enough niche to be distinctive, e.g., bands from your city, left-handed guitarists, music for a certain kind of dancing, authors of a certain religion, books about arts & crafts, etc.
3. Choose your domain name. Make it keyword-rich, not clever. Think how people will find your site in the search engines. Here are some ideas (all available when I first wrote this, though a cfew have been snatched up):
   Music: BandsFromTexas.com, BandOutOfBoston.com, SouthpawGuitarists.com, ClassicPsychedelia.com, Non-Stop-Hip-Hop.com, Merengue-Music.com
   Books: Mormon-Authors.com, Arts-and-Crafts-Books.com, Books-by-Stephen-King.com, ClassicBusinessBooks.com
   Others: Best-Baby-Toys.com, MomsMags.com, FelliniMovies.com
4. Register your domain name. If you're not technically inclined at all, register your domain wherever you set up your hosting in step 5. Otherwise, you can save a few bucks by choosing a lower-cost provider. Not a big deal for one or two sites, but it can be for ten or twenty. I use GoDaddy, who have great domain management tools and are less than $10 a year. The least expensive I've found from a reputable source is 1&1, whose price is around $7 a year last I checked.
5. Set up your web hosting. This is where most people get burned. For this kind of site, you do not need $10 a month web hosting! Our Online Business Guide has a list of Cheap Web Hosting for Under $10. Some are as little as $4 a month, with unlimited domains, i.e., you can run several sites like this on the same hosting package.
6. Install blog software. "Blog, you say?" Yes. It will give your site all the structure you need, plus make it easy to quickly post new content. My pick is WordPress, which is open source (i.e., free), easy to install and use, and yet very powerful. Many hosts have a one-step installation process for it, or you can download it and follow their installation instructions.
7. Make it pretty. One of the great things about WordPress is the huge variety of templates available for it -- they can completely change the look-and-feel. Our Weblogs Guide has a list of 5 Sites for Free Wordpress Themes, where you can find hundreds of free WordPress themes.
8. Set up categories. Most blog software allows you to create sub-categories to help organize your entries. This will help visitors narrow in even more specifically on their interests. For example, BandsFromTexas.com might have one group of categories for genre — rock, country, blues, etc. — and another for city of origin — Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, etc.
9. Sign up as an Amazon Associate. It's simple and free. Just visit Amazon and click on the Join Associates link at the bottom of the page (here's a direct link for your convenience). Your site should already have at least the basic setup done, even if you don't have any content there yet, as they'll review the site manually before approval.
10. Create your blog posting bookmarks/links. There are two links that are going to be essential for you to make this easy. First is the blog posting link. In your blog software, on the posting page (see their instructions), at the bottom of the page there should be a "bookmarklet". Click on the link (and hold the mouse) and drag it up to your Links toolbar in your browser (assuming Internet Explorer), or your Favorites menu. This will allow you to blog a product with one mouse click.
11. Create your Amazon Build-A-Link bookmark/link. This will make it easy to build the link with your affiliate ID built in. Log in to Associates Central, look in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and under Static Links, find Individual Items. Click and drag this onto your Links toolbar or Favorites menu.
12. Build your first link. Go to Amazon and log in with your Associates account. Find the product you want to review and use the Site Stripe (gray stripe at the top of the screen that you'll see when logged in as an Associate) to get your personalized link to the item. They also offer a variety of other options for creating links and banners.
13. Blog your review. Now click on your blog posting link (Press It! by default in WordPress). If you're using WordPress, you should now see two pieces of link code in your posting form, the first one ending with "Associates Build-A-Link >< /a >". Delete through that point. The second part is a link to the product with your Amazon Associate ID built in. Now just write your product review, choose the appropriate categories for it, and hit Publish.
14. Build out your site. Before you promote your site, you want to have some substantial content there. Write several product reviews. Have at least 2-3 in each category you've created. You may also want to make a categories for articles, news, and commentary about your topic. The more content your site has, the better. And the great thing is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are getting notified automatically, assuming you turned on the notifications mentioned in step 6.
15. Promote your site. The best free way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers writing about similar topics, and to participate in online communities where your topic is discussed. See the Online Business Networking category for ideas, as well as the Internet Marketing category.

Tips:

1. You have to learn some basic HTML and basic concepts about running a web site. It's just not that hard. If you have to rely on purchased software, you won't be able to get exactly what you want, you won't know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll end up spending money you don't need to. Spend the time to learn it. It will be well worth the investment.
2. I slightly recommend music over books and other products, mainly because you can listen to the clips of an entire album in about 10 minutes and get a good enough feel for it (without buying it) to do a short review. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, great, but make sure you have a unique angle on the topic. People can get reviews about a lot of those consumer products anywhere. You need to give them a reason to come to your site.
3. To pick up some extra pennies, sign up for Google AdSense. It probably won't generate a lot of revenue, but it's free to sign up and completely effortless to maintain.
4. Set reasonable expectations for earnings. You've only invested $20. You're going to make 5% on most products. That means that you need to sell $400 worth of stuff to make back your investment. To make $20 an hour, what you write must generate $400 worth of purchases. You get credit for other purchases customers you send make while at Amazon besides just the product you linked to, so it's not as hard as it may sound. It won't make you rich, but it's not hard to be profitable, and it builds over time.

What You Need:

A credit card with about $20 available

Methods for Making Money on the Internet

Making money on the Internet sounds like the pot 

of gold at the end of the rainbow. For some, it 

promises a care-free life where they have 

enough free time to do what they want. However

, making money on the Internet is a job and just

like any other job you'll have to put effort into it

. Some people might heavily disregard physical

activity as an activity they'd prefer to 

do while working. Nonetheless, the mental and 

psychological weight brought in by trying to make money on the Internet can be just as bad. But you can join the ranks of those who successfully earn a living from Internet activities.

1. Freelancing

   • Freelancing is the most reliable and rewarding way to make money on the Internet. It has no hidden gimmicks or tricks. Freelancing allows you to put your skills to good use and make a living on the Internet. You can design websites, write computer code or articles, work as an administrator or personal assistant. The options are growing every day. Some of these positions require you to have experience in a particular area. But there is plenty of room for newcomers to make a buck. As a freelancer, you can work on your own time and schedule as much as you want. It's not a lifestyle for everyone, but it can provide you with a steady income.

   Ad-Sponsored Community Content

   • YouTube and many other similar websites have created genuine stars. You can share your personal life, hobbies and passions, strategies and ideas or simply entertain people via community websites. If your content becomes popular enough, you can start generating revenue by placing advertisements on it. Companies like Google offer ad solutions for small and big publishers which have been booming over the years. You can also approach a certain company that has products targeted at your audience to receive sponsorships for popularizing their products. While this way of making money on the Internet isn't as safe as freelancing, you have the possibility to expand and make more than you could ever imagine on a conventional job.

   Design and Sell your Products

   • Online auction sites offer individuals to sell their products without having a business or a company. They can simply receive the money online and send the products through the post office. You can also sell t-shirts or other types of clothing that are inscribed to unique, occasionally funny logos or text. There are entire websites revolving around selling t-shirts over the Internet.

   Promote Affiliate Companies

   • You can make money on the Internet by promoting and selling other people's merchandise and taking a commission for every sale you referred. Several merchandising sites offer their affiliates a percentage of every sale that they refer. Affiliates usually work by posting the products on their websites, forums or other types of Internet media.