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When you make your living on the Internet, you sometimes forget that the resources you use every day (and take for granted) might rate an incredible discovery to anyone who doesn't already know they exist. Whether they help you make money, save time, save money, or avoid frustration, these ecommerce tools and services rate my highest recommendation for anyone who conducts any form of ecommerce online.ClickBank.com - If you sell a downloadable product such as an ebook, report, or software, you can't beat ClickBank for processing credit card payments. Not only do they take the payments and send you a check twice a month, they also plug your product into an existing network with tens-of-thousands of affiliates who can sell it for you. Also, unlike a traditional merchant credit card processing account, ClickBank assumes all the fraud risk and prevents many of the "horror" stories you hear in connection with online credit card processing.MySiteSales.com - Since ClickBank only allows the sale of downloadable products, MySiteSales.com comes to the rescue for anyone selling a physical product or service. Offering a suite of integrated product catalogs, follow up autoresponders, advertising tracking, a secure server, and even limited-time coupon offers, this tool rates a "must have" for setting up and integrating a professional ecommerce solution on virtually any size website.Aweber.com - If you need an unlimited number of follow up autoresponders and the ability to send an email "broadcast" to all your contacts at one time, Aweber offers an excellent managed solution. Specializing in helping small to medium-sized Web businesses implement an effective email follow-up strategy without complicated software, Aweber gets our highest marks for service and dependability. GoDaddy.com - Cheap, reliable, easy-to-use domain name registrar that only charges $8.95 per year for each domain name you register. Godaddy rates cheaper and just as, if not more, reliable than any other domain registrar. They also offer a "private registration" option that allows you to keep your identity as the domain owner a secret from unscrupulous people who exploit domain name records to compile mailing lists, spam databases or worse.FrontierPowerHosting.com - Any successful ecommerce endeavor begins with a solid website hosting service. Nothing shuts you down faster than an unreliable web host because, the second they go offline, your business goes offline. I host one of my servers at FrontierPowerHosting.com because of great customer service and guaranteed up-time.ClipArt.com - Ever pulled your hair out searching for that perfect image, photo, or piece of clipart for your website? Once you exhaust the Microsoft collection on your computer, the next stop (if you want to find something fast) is Clipart.com. With thousands of images searchable by keyword, you can always find the perfect image in less time and without the worries of copyright infringement if you just pull something off the Web.Google.com/Adsense/ - Website got traffic but no making much money? Open a free account with Google AdSense and earn a commission any time someone clicks on any of the targeted ads. An excellent way to earn extra cash on virtually any website.About the author:Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by-step and click-by-click how to finally create your own money-making mini-sites... Get a FREE Copy of The "Mini-Site Secrets" Audio Right Now Click Here => http://www.MiniSiteCreator.com
Here is the bare bone - no hype information and a link to the website I built using these techniques. So I not going to lie to you about how much money you can make or how much I made. Simply put, people are making money with these kinds of sites, I just want a piece of the action. This article assumes you have a basic knowledge of HTML, Google Adsense, and Affiliate Advertising. We've all heard the phrases "Content is King" and "If content is King, then relevance is Queen!". So I'm going to share with you how to build a site based on these principles for profit! I built a 1000+ page content rich website in about 2 days. Check it out at http://articleupdates.com Website Building tools: I used DreamWeaver as my html editor. Any good html editor will work such as Frontpage. Go to download.com and search for "html editor". Coffeecup is a very popular free editor. Basically you need a good editor that will update links site wide automatically. Give you reports on broken links, and do search and replace site wide, file specific, and etc... Also very important is a good table building capability. For the content I pulled articles from various free content sites. As long as you adhere to the terms of fair use, you will have access to thousands of content rich articles that you can put in your own website. Get a simple clipart cd with 150,000 royalty free images from Bestpurchase for $20. Then plug in your affiliate codes for google adsense, clickbank, and commission junction. You don't have to be an html expert. Just having some basic programming knowlege is enough. For example, understanding head, body, and building tables. Inserting variables and doing global changes. Any good html editor will help with that. You really need to become an expert at building tables. They are fast loading and can really make an impact on a site. If you are into css, even better! Key Features for SEO: Keyword Rich and Relevant! Building with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind. Use these techniques when building your site! Niche Site: Pick a very specific topic. I chose "Making Money Online with Content Rich Sites" for this example. Use a simple structure. Index page to "Index of Articles". Then "Index of Articles" to each individual article page. Two levels, easy to manage, easy to spider! Make your site surfer friendly: No hidden pages, re-directs, pop-ups, spyware, java, or scripts. Just use ".html" files with text links to full text content rich pages which are also easily spidered with useful relevant information for the visitor. Include lots of articles including a few unique pages that you have written yourself. Now start building your basic template for all the pages on your site. How you build your template will greatly depend on what editor and tools you'll be using. For example: most times you'll do something like Huge Content Rich Websites for Profit. When you go to build your 1000+ page site, the editor will replace the title tag with the appropriate text dynamically. Title Tag and Description Tags and all other meta tags should be relevant and keyword rich. Page Title - Use relevant keywords on each index page to the articles - Use the article title which will have additional relevant keywords for each article page. H1 Tags - Keyword rich and relevant ex: "Make Money Online", "Home Based Business" H2 Tags - Use the article title in the article pages. ex: "10 Ways To Make Money Online" robot.txt file for spiders - just a simple two line file in your root directory User-agent: * Disallow: Body text - Use content rich articles. Also use high color contrast between the text and the background so the search engine doesn't think your trying to hide anything and penalize you. Plus it's just plain easier to read. Use arial or verdana font. URLs, File Names, and Directories - use the article title ex: http://articleupdates.com/i-home-business/five-ways-to-increase-your-affiliate-sales.html Inbound links: Set up link partners. If you can, have them place the link to your site using a keyword instead of the domain name itself. ex: Make Money Online Click Here. Outbound links: Do the same for your link partners. Set up links using text that is relevant to their topic which should be relevant to your site but not competing if possible. If you sell computers, link to a company that sells computer desks. Make same site links with relevant text. ex: "make money at home" will link to a page within your own site. Make Image alt text use primary keywords. ex: "money online" Add HTML comment tags that use primary keywords. These are not seen purchase the surfer, but can be seen by search engine spiders. No one has proven this helps, but it doesn't hurt! Now add money making adsense and affiliate links on every page. Put them top center between the article title and article content. Adjust the colors so that is blends in with your web page content. Google adsense will pick up the page title, h1 and h2 tags to target the ad. When someone clicks on it, you get paid!. Once you have these basic things set up in your template, you need to use a powerful tool called Article Equalizer. With a little practice, you'll be able to build 1000+ page websites in just a day or two. The link to Article Equalizer is http://hop.clickbank.net/?mark6188/articleeq Another important thing you can do: Add dynamic RSS content by keyword. I'll follow up on this in my next article. Sincerely - Robert Rogers P.S. - If you make a site using the techniques above - I'd love to see it! Put your link at http://deja.us. I check it regularly. About the author:Robert Rogers is a writer in the Washington DC area and specializes in money making and money saving ideas. Visit http://articleupdates.com
Google is at least as interested as you are in having your ads perform well on your site. And they've gone to some work to provide the information you need to optimize your AdSense.What's fascinating to me is that apparently not everyone bothers to read their tips. And even some that do, fail to apply it.That said, you need to be aware that simply using their tips doesn't guarantee successful ads and decent CTR (Click Through Rate). How many times have you heard this? You have to test. You have to try alternatives and see what really works best for you, on your pages, with your content and your visitors. Test, test, test some more. Track your results, analyze them, try variations. Too many of us don't test. We hear the mantra, but we don't do the work.First, let's see if we can get an idea about location. (The graphic is included in the article on my site or you can take a look at it at the Google link included below) Generally, above the fold, at the top center of your content, below top navigation is the hottest location. Not immediately below which is good but not quite as hot. In a left sidebar, to the immediate left of primary content or below the primary content are also good. Most other locations are generally cooler.Again, you need to test and you need to consider your users behavior - and their behavior may vary on different pages with different kinds of content. Google suggests that in some cases, such as articles, the best location can be at the end of the article. To quote Google, "It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, What can I do next?" Well targeted relevant ads right there can provide the answer.Don't blindly assume that sticking a nice big rectangle in the center above the fold will do it. It may, but depending on your content, it may annoy or inconvenience your users.Users tend to focus on content, navigation and to a lesser extent graphics. Positioning your ads near these elements will often work well -- if those ads are targeted to your visitors needs.The top three performers among the Google ad formats are the 336X280 large rectangle, the 300X250 inline rectangle and the 160X600 wide skyscraper. Google reports that the wider formats tend to do better than the taller ones. One reason may be that these are, perhaps, easier to read since they have fewer line breaks and require less eye movement. But, you need to use formats that fit your pages well. Once again, you need to test, but redoing your pages to suit a particular ad format may not be a reasonable alternative and you may discover that a different format actually gets better results.Now we come to color. Conventional wisdom says that colors which tend to blend into your content do better. Some go so far as to suggest that colors which make the ads look like part of the content are best. Personally, I think anybody really believes those ads are anything but ads, but who knows. Google suggests that you may find that colors that standout from your content do better - or maybe the opposite. This is absolutely an area where you need to test alternative color schemes. Going with the conventional wisdom usually works fairly well, but without testing you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.Google allows you to have up to three ad units and one link unit on your pages. If you have long pages with lots of text, can only use small ad units or are in a niche with a large ad inventory, multiple units can pay off. Keep in mind that the way ad serving works is that the higher value ads are delivered to the first ad unit block encountered in your code. Always make sure that this first ad unit is displayed in the best location (yeah - test). You want the higher paying ads to be in the prime hot location on your page. Weaker locations can get the lower priced ads. And if none are available, then nothing will display unless you've included an alternate ad URL in your Google code. To maximize monetization you should be including alternate ad URLs, especially if you are putting multiple units on a page. The use of an alternate ad URL also eliminates the possibility of being served PSAs (Public Service Announcements). It's your real estate, maximize your returns.Nothing here is secret. Except for using the alternate ad URL, all of this information is available from Google's Optimization Tips page - http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html . You can purchase books and courses, visit a dozen forums and, in the end it comes down to what your visitors do on your site. The best you can get is general guidance. This means averaged outcomes over many sites, many types of content. If you are serious about doing whatever you can to really optimize your AdSense returns, there is only one thing to do - test. Whether it's AdSense, opt-ins, copy, headlines - anything with a measurable outcome that you can track - then the way to improve is to test and keep on testing.About the author:Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations and eCommerce related matters. For more information on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building visit http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com- and you can find more articles at http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com/articles.
If web surfers behaved all alike, if there were strict patterns in users' behaviour, wouldn't all publishers be on a sunny beach right now, with a fancy-colored cocktail, worring not about AdSense™ optimization matters? Web user's behaviour depends on two main groups of variables: the user-related one and the website-related one. A) User-related Behavior Variables Though people react very differently at various stimuli, we can identify some peculiarities specific to web surfers. The behaviour is much like yours. Have you considered watching your own actions while surfing on the web? This might help if you want to improve your site's appeal to readers, especially if you sell something or if you want your visitors to click on your ads. Several groups of variables that influence users' behaviour can be identified: * Components of the mental processes involved while searching and browsing on the Internet: attention, awareness, language, mental imagery etc. * The behavior of websurfers is influenced also by their subjective approach to matters, determined by temperamental characteristics, such as mood, patience and their purpose and degree of interest. * Also, users act differently varying with how used they are to web surfing. Let's see how we can tweak our websites to turn these to our advantage (and turn visitors into “clickers”): 1. Mental processes Attention - The web designer keeps the tools to direct readers' attention. A simple design, without unnecessary loading will prevent the reader from being distracted by unimportant elements. The ads placement must be done strategically, in a place impossible to overlook (recommended in the first paragraph, usually in the upper-left area). Pictures and graphics are considered attention-grabbers and will also be considered when choosing your ads' placement. Awareness - This is a very debated topic. Opinions differ on readers' ads awareness. Some sustain that the more blended into content, the better, others say that this formatting will induce the readers the feeling of being “tricked” into clicking on ads, which they resent. I incline to say that blend-in ads work only for very well targeted ads, coming naturally as if belonging to the content. Positioning ads outside the content area would be effective mostly with advertising that builds brand awareness, based on image impressions. Mental Imagery - Again, a pleasant, uncluttered design, a balanced look of the page contribute to a positive perception of the page from the part of the reader and to a more open state of mind. A professional layout is important. It inspires confidence, people don't want to purchase from a just any backyard business. 2. Subjectiveness Patience - A golden rule: don't abuse your readers' patience (for they usually don't have one)! Web pages must load quickly, ads must not be placed in readers' way and should be kept to a reasonable number. Purpose and Mood - Are more related to the topic of your site and the type of content you publish. The idea is that users' purpose and mood can be influenced by copy. Degree of Interest - Besides relevant, good content, that answers questions, the reader's interest is influenced by involvement and interaction. Keep your reader involved, integrate your ads into an interaction environment: these will work wonders on your CTR. 3. User's Degree of Acquaintace with Web Surfing Net savvy users have developed certain immunities, such as ad-blindness. These are less likely to click on any ads. Customizing ads for this type of readers means harder work; the result must be ads of high relevance (and remarkable ad texts!), with an aspect as close to the rest of the page as possible, as if they were a natural continuation of your ideas. Important! avoid default formats. B) Site-related Variables The type of the site and the topic attract visitors with different interests with different behavioral patterns. 1. Site Type — Readers vs Browsers Whether the visitor is a “reader” or a “scanner/browser” depends also on the site type — content and topic. Generally, readers are regular visitors while “scanners” are the ones who look for information and will not spend too much time on the same site. Site topic and content are most times factors in bringing more “uniques” or more regular visitors. Though not as a rule, these apply to many sites: Sites Attracting Unique Visitors - These are mostly commercial sites, content sites. Statistics say that unique visitors are more likely to be your clickers, for regular readers are more used to your pages' look and your ads. Contextual advertising works well with these sites. If you're headed for unique visitors, make your site “SE-friendly”. They come mostly from search engines and are said to be “pre-qualified” clickers. So, your efforts should be directed towards keywords and keyword phrases optimization. The ideal would be to go beyond the technicalities, that is finding out what are the most searched for keywords in your area of preoccupations and try to find out why these are popular, try to find a behavioral pattern. This can be achieved by statistics and analysis. Find out some niches in your area and the users' behaviour within them — that is, lists of searches and then see what is it customers want. This will solve your puzzle and give you exact hints towards what works best for your site. Keep in mind: unique visitors are mostly "browsers". Use ad placement and ad customization techniques that apply best for this type of users. Sites with Regular Visitors - These are mostly forums, blogs and news sections (though news are somewhere in between). If you own sites with many bookmarks, that attract especially repeat visitors, then either you will be very imaginative in customizing your ads and finding new ways to interest your readers into clicking or if not the case, better use CPM based advertising. Brand bulding/reinforcement advertising works better in this case. 2. Site Theme Relates to Visitor's Mood and Purpose Commercial Sites - Sites selling and promoting products are more suitable for CPC advertising. By their specific, this type of site will attract visitors looking for a specific product/service/business opportunity. Thus, users are more in a purchaseing mood, are looking for a way to spend their money profitably. These are clickers. Content Sites, Blogs, Forums - Unless you market specific products, your readers will land on your page without the express purpose of purchaseing something. However, you can influence your reader's mood and needs thru witty, sales-directed copywriting. You just need to know some basic things that sell. One is that people are more likely to purchase from persons they know, like and trust. So, what will help you build these? Good content and structure. Especially with content sites, these are fundamental issues to focus on (unlike commercial sites that focus more on products). Good content, profesionally written and formatted for the web, containing information that is of high interest and relevance for the reader, within an easily manageable structure and good targeting on a specific theme are imperatives. On one hand these mean bulding confidence, the first step in selling. On the other hand they will attract well-targeted ads, more likely to interest your reader. Great content will give you credit to your reader. Once you've gained trust, it's easy to direct your readers: you just give recommendations and the results will appear. (Avoid being too explicit in recommendations, though — for example, directing readers towards clicking on ads is against AdSense™ Program Policies.) With blogs and forums, it is a different story. Not all forums and blogs are accepted for AdSense™ (or even if accepted, they must be also profitable). Only genuine, specifically-themed blogs and forums, with highly interesting content are suitable. These conditions being fulfilled, forums and blogs are perfect as a source of advertising money — they have what is very difficult for others to achieve: reader's trust, liking and involvement. About the author:Laura Ciocan writes for http://www.adsensehowtos.comwhere you can find how to guides and practical advice on Google Adsense.
Ever wonder how the thousands of "under the radar" web businesses that earn well over $100,000/year (many with much higher sales) out of their own home do it? Over the last year I've had the great fortune to speak with many of these true, hidden entrepreneurs at conferences, seminars, e.t.c. What I'm about to share with you also came true for me, and is outlined in more detail in my Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Success Package Here's an example of their business model: 1. Information Products. Without a doubt, each one of the successes I know market their own infoproducts. For some, it's an ebook. Others have special reports. Still others run online coaching programs, membership sites, paid newsletters, teleseminars, or produce digital audio or video products. It's not their only source of income, but is a MAJOR source of income, and more important, brands them an expert in their field leading to success with 2 and 3 below. 2. Market related Affiliate Products. Again, in almost every case, these online success stories become experts at finding and creating joint venture deals with partners. But, they work differently than most affiliates. They start by ALWAYS reviewing the product they will market. Second, they look for a different way to present the product or service - a more beneficial way to show users the real benefit in the affiliate product. Third, they use the branding from 1 to negotiate higher commissions and focus on high commission programs only. 3. They monetize their traffic using Adsense or selling advertising on their sites. For high traffic pages where adding paid ads or Google's Adsense will not impact their own sales, they will run ads to further monetize their sites. 4. Sell their time. You will find that truly successful people online LOVE to help people succeed. But...for every person who is really dedicated to succeeding there are 10 "tire kickers" who want someone to hand them success on a silver platter. It doesn't work that way, nothing works that way. So, in order to leave time to help those who really want it, coaching programs are formed. Yes - you have to pay big money, but you should easily be able to get 10X the value for money spent. So as you can see, there is no ONE single way to build your wealth online. Instead, you build a diversified, rich and healthy business by focusing on these 4 pillars. Not only will you earn more money, but your business will be stronger and build momentum faster when you do.
About the author:Barry Gilbert "Write Your Own Income-Generating How-To Books Today! It's INSANE...5 Experts Share How Writing Books Changed Their Lives Forever! "Discover Where The Money Is With Writing Books...And How YOU Can Get It! Click Here==> http://tinyurl.com/bm5qw
No, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United States, but many other countries...most notably Japan...have an even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the Internet. One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet and hence the term "pay per click baby boom". Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads are spread widely across thousands of locations (websites) all over the Internet. Actually, this distributed processing or propagation technique is not limited to pay per click advertising. For example, Amazon uses a similar arrangement (called Amazon Associates) to sell the products it carries on amazon.com and ClickBank has a sales program called CBAdwords which operates in a similar fashion. According my trusty Ouija board, it seems likely that most commercial hubs on the Internet will be shifting to this propagation concept as time progresses...all of those individual partner websites that carry the message/proposition will constitute the vast army of worker ants that keep the queen ant alive and healthy. From a pay per click marketing perspective, these programs make brilliant use of leverage while providing highly targeted prospects for the paying advertiser. There are, of course, some interesting things that occur as a result of all of this stuff. For example, consider what I call the "cross fertilization effect": Suppose a person goes to yahoo.com and performs a search that leads them to one of my websites that happens carry Google AdSense ads and that visitor then clicks on one of those ads...the net result is that Yahoo natural search provided Google pay per click with some revenue! Aren't these fun times that we're living in? As these programs continue to proliferate, the individual webmaster needs to exercise a little restraint and avoid the temptation to go overboard by plastering these ads all over your website and thereby diluting your own primary message/proposition and confusing your hard earned visitor. When properly used, these ads are just ancillary or complementary content that you are providing to enhance the information and opportunities that you are providing to your visitor...if something happens to strike a responsive chord with your visitor, you might make a little pay per click money. If properly used, these propagation programs can result in the classical "win-win" situation. However, if you over do it, this can quickly turn into a loss for you (the individual webmaster) and a win for your pay per click partners that are distributing the ads. As in many things, moderation is important. The dynamic search engine marketing industry continues to evolve as users began to take advantage of the steady stream of new features, tools and innovations provided by the ever increasing number of search engines offering quality search results (it's not all about Google anymore). The evolutionary time line for Internet marketing continues to run at warp speed. An example of previous evolutionary periods (which by now may almost seem prehistoric) would be the emergence of pay-per-click advertising and the cooresponding rise of search-marketing firms specializing in AdWords and Overture. As long as there are methods for finding and retrieving information in digital databases by using keywords or similar attributes, there will be a search-marketing industry. How that industry operates in the future depends on how the search engines operate and how consumer tendencies evolve. It's a constant sea of change, but the good things just keep on getting better! Stay alert, and light on your feet, and the opportunities will just keep on coming your way. The above are just some observations from "the peanut gallery", but I don't think I'm far off the mark about where things are heading. With that, I'm off the soapbox and wishing you success in whatever you do online! About the author:Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based business. For more information visit his website at http://www.home-based-business-team.com
The opportunity to quickly and easily implement and harness the power of RSS is quite real and new programs become available every week that allow non-technical marketers and webmasters to capitalize on the effective use of RSS.Jim Edwards spoke of this trend in the recent "For a Greater Cause" teleseminar. Media-rich blogs and content sites are stickier and keep visitors on site longer.Consider delivering audio content via the internet by setting up a blog and incorporating streaming audio. By doing so, your media-rich message creates a relationship with visitors that cannot be achieved with text alone.If you'd like to take this one step further, start using video content. It's the difference between reading a flyer versus listening to the radio versus watching television. Why do people gravitate to the TV when every home has a radio? When presented with the option, we prefer the satisfaction of both the auditory and visual senses.The real power of blogs, audio and video is that you can invite your visitors to participate and interact with you by allowing them to post comments. Your blog becomes a community event and we all love a party.If you'll be using the strategy of blogging with audio and video, there are three things that you should do.First, as mentioned above, allow your visitors to post comments to your blog.Second, always give visitors the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or ezine directly from your blog.Third, for those who prefer to receive news via RSS feeds, post your RSS feed on every page of your blog.Recorded interviews with industry experts fed via podcast can raise your credibility simply by association. Arrange for a phone interview with an expert in your market area, get permission to record the call and post it to your blog. If you're offering publicity and exposure for the interviewee, it should be simple to find willing and eager parties.RSS offers you the ability to provide high frequency content updates. It can be daily or hourly. Deliver important messages, news and other content on demand rather that waiting for your regularly scheduled e-zine.What's next?...Here's where things get fun for the online marketer and webmaster. One area in particular where you can really start to take advantage of RSS technology is to build sticky content on your sites and monetize it with programs like Google's Adsense.RSS feeds are available in abundance that provide product news, press releases and updates. Sites such as PRWeb (http://www.prweb.com) want you to use their news feeds on your site. So why not? Build your site's content with news and information feeds that deliver steady streams of traffic.Do a bit of searching and you'll find programs and scripts that make the addition of RSS feeds to your website very simple and fast.RSS gives you an edge over your competition by allowing you to create a sense of community, offer interaction and provide the latest news and information nearly on autopilot.About the author:Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. To watch a free video tutorial on how RSS was used in one little experiment to generate an extra $100 in Adsense income in 2 weeks (10 days actually), go here now...http://www.gothrive.com/auto-news-video.htm
