If you are in the landing page business you should always read the PPCHero. I found this older but still great landing page informational post today.

TOPIC 1: Keep It Above the Fold, Stupid!

If you read many PPC blogs, you’re undoubtedly heard this mantra before: “Keep your calls-to-action, headlines, forms, buttons, images and everything else above the fold!” Excessive? Yes. Let me explain: Keeping important elements above the fold is a common tactic thrown around for optimizing landing pages, but for the uninformed it’s the impossible mission. From one level-headed marketer to another, let me lay it out… you can’t fit everything above the fold! What does that mean for you? You have to play it smart. Take stock of the design elements of your landing page and create a list of importance. Consider your target audience, and seriously think about what is most important to them. Taking the time to go through that process will guide you to an intelligent testing process.

All of that being said, the number one priority for your landing page’s design/layout is to have your call-to-action above the fold. This is a must. Your landing page will fail if visitors do not know what their next step is. If you do nothing else, this should be a priority. For some, this is contained in the headline. Simple. For others, your call-to-action is hiding within a button – so the physical button should be above the fold. When selling a specific product, I would strongly urge you to place the image above the fold. When running a strictly lead-generation campaign, I would strongly encourage you to test placing the lead form above the fold. I’ve tested this in a few industries, and it can certainly be a contributing factor in increasing lead-gen conversion rates.

TOPIC 2: Limit Navigation and Limit Confusion

This is probably one of the more debatable tactics for optimizing a PPC landing page. From personal experience, I can say that removing typical website navigation has increased conversion rates on my PPC landing pages. The idea is relatively simple. By removing navigation, you are creating a “sterile” conversion environment. In other words, you are in complete control of what the visitor sees, interacts with and hopefully this will lead them directly to the conversion. If your PPC landing page is just another page on your website – navigation and all – the visitor can browse the website as a whole. Which, in my experience, decreases the likelihood of conversion.

Like I said, this is a debatable tactic. So, in all fairness, I’ll present some of the counter-arguments. Some marketers say that if the website is created in such a way, it won’t matter if they stray from your landing page. The entire website should be designed for conversion, and the visitor will find their way regardless. Another argument is that by stripping a page of navigation, this can act as a deterrent to some visitors – almost leaning towards SPAM. In my experience, this hasn’t been the case, but it is certainly something that you should test.

As an alternative to both, you could create a conversion path. A conversion path gives the visitor options for navigation – all of which are under control in a more complex “sterile” conversion environment. Conversion paths are great for segmenting visitors into much more targeted landing page experiences that can have a truly positive effect on conversion rates.

TOPIC 3: Un-Clutter and Place Value on Whitespace

More times than not when I arrive at a landing page, I’m blown away by the amount of stuff on the page. Stuff is not only ambiguous, it’s bad for conversions. Take stock of the cacophony of design elements on your landing page and ask yourself what is truly important for the user and for the conversion. Chances are you’ll be able to remove a lot of stuff. Clutter on a landing page is confusing for the user and can keep them from finding relevant details and your calls-to-action. Additionally, PPC visitors are often times in a rapid-fire state-of-mind. This means that they’ve been searching through several of your competitor’s PPC ads and landing pages and have come to you for a second opinion (maybe you were #1, but just work with me here). If your landing page is a cluttered mess, they will only give you a few seconds of their time – if they don’t find what they’re searching for, they’re gone. Off to the next landing page.

Users scan the text and take away only certain elements that they use to make a decision if the page is relevant to their goal or not. Clean use of space allows users to scan and absorb key messages.

The design of your landing page should lend itself to quick and simple recognition of the “key messages.” If you have the perfect flash animation that you MUST put on your landing page – ask yourself, “Does this deter from the key message of my landing page?” If you answer yes, remove it and place a little more value on your newfound whitespace.

Technically Speaking, the PPCHero rocks with good information, so I know you will want to read the rest of the tips located here.

Found this graphic design list here and thought I’d share it here:

Graphic Design

1stwebdesigner Blog by Dainis Graveris in Latvia covering all things design and freelance.

Abduzeedo Created by Fabio Sasso in Brazil and now one of the most popular design blogs. Includes tutorials, wallpapers, interviews and news. Strong participation from readers.

Andy Sowards Eponymous blog covers cool links from around the world of web design, development and technology.

Anidan Design Dani McDaniel’s blog covering design and development for the web and WordPress. Dani also set up JustTweetIt with Adelle Charles at Fuel.

Arbenting From Angie Bowen and Robert Bowen, Arbenting covers design tips, tutorials, news and inspiration.

Behance Magazine. Great blog from the folks at the Behance Network. Wide range of articles for creatives in all sectors. Really high quality content.

BittBox Great blog from Jay Hilgert focusing on freebies for web designers and developers.

BoagWorld Popular podcast on web design, development and management.

Booooooom Blog from Jeff Hamada in Vancouver. Covers a wide range of creative arts.

Brian Yerkes One of the true “rock star” designers out there (our words not his). Great work and deep insights into the world of design and marketing.

Cats Who Code Is a blog run by Jean-Baptiste Jung, a blogger/web developper/web designer from Belgium. Cats Who Code covers web development, web design, blogging tips and WordPress. Jean-Baptiste also runs WpRecipes.

Colorburned Great blog from Grant Friedman covering many aspects of graphic and web design.

Computer Arts Magazine One-stop shop for professional advice on creating digital art and illustrations.

Coudal Partners The blog from the superstar design outfit based in Chicacgo. Always great features and strong opinions.

Craig Baldwin Cool blog from a student at the Winchester School of Art in England. Gathers a great list of the “best of” from across teh web.

CrazyLeaf Big design blog covering graphic design, web design, Flash, Photoshop, vector graphics, design inspiration, programming, print design, design resources and photography.

Creative Curio Blog from Lauren Marie Krause with some really solid guides to design principles. One of the hidden gems in this list.

CreativeTechs Blog from the folks at Creative Techs who run an awesome set of courses for designers.

CreatticaDaily From teh team at Envato, Creattica provides a broad range of links to articles of interest for designers and creatives.

CSSstyle Edited submission site containing galleries of high quality CSS sites.

CSS Tricks Chris Coyier’s excellent community site covering website design, development, interviews with well known designers and developers and more.

Dacheboard Blog from David Pache, a Swiss designer running a design studio called Dache.

Darkmotion Blog from Pasquale D’Silva in Australia covering illustration and animation. Good humour throughout.

David Airey A well regarded designer and incisive commentator on the design world we live in. Always original. Also moderates LogoDesignLove.

DesignBump Community powered design news. Dig it?

DesignCreme Showcase of good design.

Design Cubicle Brian Hoff’s blog covering a range of great graphic design subjects and personal insights.

Designer Daily A blog for designers and web designers by Mirko Humbert, a Swiss graphic designer who shares his thoughts on design, ressources and tips.

DesignerSide Collation of links to the best graphic design posts.

Designers Who Blog A design blog by Catherine Wentworth for designers, photographers, writers, marketeers, etc., who blog. Lots of reader contributions.

DesignFeedr Portfolios, inspiration, features, news. A broad range of design resources.

DesignFlavr Design inspiration with daily updates of cool design from across the web. UGC, rating and resources. Run by Andrew Greig.

DesignM.ag A community-based website run by Steven Snell for web designers and developers. The site includes a popular blog, a user-submitted news section, a design gallery, and a design job board. Also runs Vandelay Design.

Design Meltdown Really well structured blog on trends in design by Patrick McNeil. Organised in a very innovative way by “chapters” making it a great resource.

Design O’Blog Niki Brown’s views on design, inspiration and tips.

Design Observer Pithy and witty observations on design and the people who do it.

Design Reviver Tutorials, free downloads, sources of inspiration, and articles covering a wide range of web design related topics

Design Shard A valuable resource for designers ranging from design tips, inspiration and free resources such as photoshop brushes or textures to be downloaded.

Desizn Tech Mostly a resource site with themes, wallpaper, icons and freebies.

Dezignus.com Blog with useful freebies such as vectors, PSD brushes and shapes, textures and backgrounds, icons etc.

The Dieline Design blog dedicated to the packaging design industry. Fantastic images and graphics of great packaging design.

Digital Arts Magazine The online version of Digital Arts Magazine. Covers a gamut of subjects including graphic design, 3D, animation, video, effects, web and interactive design, in print and online

DivineCSS CSS showcase. Best described in their own words, “We know the difference between s**t and Shinola and we’re pretty good at sniffing out a website worthy of the Divine CSS showcase gallery”.

Doodlage Unique and funny site dedicated to the art of the doodle. In their own words, “On a quest to elevate doodling to the status of an art form that it deserves!”

Doug Cloud Blog from Doug with tutorials and advice. Doesn’t post frequently, but very useful when he does.

Drawn A collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw.

Dwell The online version of Dwell Magazine. Architecture and interior design.

Dzine Yugendran’s blog on design tutorials, inspiration, freebies and more.

Elite By Design Brian Lovin’s blog on web design and Photoshop inspiration.

Elliot Jay Stocks A well known public speaker and personality in the design world. Oh, and cool design work too!

From The Couch Hosted by brothers Marc and David Perel, this online web TV show covers everything web orientated – design, development and more.

Fudge Graphics Blog from Franz Jeitz covering graphic design, sources of inspiration and freebies.

Fuel Your Creativity Awesome resource from the folks at the Fuel Brand Network. Great articles and links to inspirational design resources.

Giackop Blog from Giacomo Coppola, a web and graphic designer from Italy.

GoMediaZine Is a site dedicated to art and graphic design. Includes tutorials, freebies and advice. For example, this post on Thoughts on Design Integrity. Getting what you want from your client.

Graphic Design Blog High quality blog with features, interviews and design inspiration. Loved this article.

The Graphic Mac James Dempsey’s blog containing advice on all things Mac, especially for new Mac users and designers.

HelpDeveloper Simon North’s blog on web design techniques, inspiration and web design business. Simon also runs ReviewMyDesign.net.

Hongkiat A blog from Hongkiat Lim covering Photoshop, web design, WordPress and much more. Excellent resource.

How Magazine Online magazinefrom the folks at the How group.

I’m Just Creative Logo and brand identity blog from Graham Smith covering a wide range of design topics with an emphasis on logo design and identity. Includes his expanding portfolio.

I am Khayyam Completely original blog from Khayyam Wakil. Check out It took me 25 minutes to design my ultimate business card.

Inspiredology Great blog from Chad Mueller covering a huge range of things web and design related

IxDA The website and forum of the Interaction Design Association, an amazingly active member organisation for IX designers.

Janko At Warp Speed Janko Jovanovic is a solution architect, developer, designer and artist. His blog includes articles, resources and reviews. Check out his new ebook.

Joel on Software The blog from the fabulous Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and immensely respected entrepreneur – may we say “guru”?

Just Creative Design Blog from Jacob Cass, a designer & blogger with a fast-growing following and great design insight. Particularly strong on things logo-related.

Kathryn Corrick Thought provoking blog from Kathryn Corrick, a digital media consultant in the UK.

Larissa Meek Blog from Larissa Meek, creative director at AgencyNet and regular speaker on the conference circuit.

LifeDev Describes itself as “Empowering Creative People”. LiveDev is a genuinely original blog providing advice and ideas about creativity, art and design, for example, Four Reasons Why Fear is a Creative’s Friend.

Line25 Another blog from Chris Spooner of Spoongraphics. Line25 focuses more on web design.

Lines and Colors A blog from Charley Parker about drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, and much more. Charley created the fantastic Argon Zark web comic.

Loon Design Kailoon is from Malaysia and is one of the reviewers for ThemeForest. His blog covers drawing and design, especially Illustrator and Photoshop.

Marketing Fresh Peel Chris Wilson’s blog on marketing, branding and innovation.

MarketingSherpa One of the strongest marketing blogs out there. Not always directly design-related, but impacts design thinking none the less.

MarcoFolio Blog from Marco Kuiper in The Netherlands covering links, cool designs and the great monthly imagedump.

Method to the Mayhem Great blog about marketing, design, self-promotion and business from Calvin Lee at Mayhem Studios, who is also one of the most prolific designers on Twitter.

My Ink Blog Andrew Houle’s fantastic resource for all graphic and web designers. Also, beautifully designed IOHO.

Naldz Graphics Provides tutorials, tips, resources, inspirations, freebies and other interesting things.

Nerd Business Top of the list for innovative, thought provoking and original posts.

.Net Magazine Online version of the UK’s .Net Magazine.

Nettuts+ From the Envato team and aimed at web developers and designers. Offers tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques to improve how we design and build websites.

Noupe For designers and web-developers, Noupe provides news, articles and tutorials on all subjects of design, ranging from; CSS, Ajax, Javascript, web design, graphics, typography, advertising and more.

Observin Cool blog covering design related topics.

Outlaw Design Blog Fresh and inspiring design blog by Danny Outlaw. Great emphasis on passive income, which is an objective of many freelancers.

PointBrake Blog from Ann Edwards, a web designer and developer from the Midwest. Covers topics from web development to freelancing.

Positive Space Blog A great blog from Anthony Zinni with topics that range from the typical inspirational roundup to functional articles based around running a successful agency and working as a professional graphic designer.

Pro Blog Design A more technically focused blog covering many aspects of blog design, creation and development.

Reaction High quality blog from the folks at Etre.

Redswish Great blog from Nathan Beck, a designer working in Manchester, England.

Scene 360 Illusion The illusion project highlights artwork that is “unique”—amazing for its skills, level of creativity and vision.

sCommerce sCommerce is a self-hosted blog site for news and stories on Social Commerce and Social Sourcing.

Sharebrain Great site for web designers from Thomas in Germany. Covers front end web development as much as design.

SiteInspire Blog by Daniel Howells showcasing innovative and high quality website design. Well edited.

Sitepoint One of the biggest and broadest design resources on the web. One of the top 3 most popular ebusiness websites in the world.

Six Revisions Provides great resources for people who design AND code. Founded by Jacob Gube who also writes for Smashing Magazine.

Smashing Apps Describes itself as “Free and useful online resources for designers and developers”.

Smashing Magazine One of the biggest graphic and web design blogs out there. Awesomely original articles covering a huge range of subjects. Known for really in-depth and original pieces.

Snook.ca Blog of Jonathan Snook, well known designer, coder and man-about-web. More technically focused than some blogs on this list.

SpeckyBoy Mostly “top” lists, and very well put together/edited. How lists like this should be done.

SpoonFedDesign Blog from Matt with some genuinely original tutorials and design inspiratons.

Spoon Graphics The blog of Chris Spooner, a well respected designer and blogger, covering a range of design subjects, with an emphasis on vector work and graphic design. See also Line25.

Styl.eTi.me Blog from Roger Byrne, originally from England, now in Egypt. Posts his own tutorials, “best of” lists, etc.

SwissMiss A “must read” blog from Tina Roth Eisenberg, covering an eclectic mix of “design” that is quirky, cool, or simply inspiring. How she finds time to blog and run her design business beats me. Great resource.

That Indie Dude Alex Linebrink’s blog – really forthright views on how design and design blogging is becoming “me too”. Having looked at over 400 design blogs we truly buy into that!

The Design Superhero Blog from Aravind Ajith in Bangalore, the design superhero is a design blog which handles posts on design, CSS, usability, inspiration and tutorials. Also gives away a lot of design freebies.

The Everyday Web Expert Is a blog from The Everyday Web Expert, a full service web design company run by Kyle Reddoch.

ThinkDesign Blog by Nick Pagano of ThinkFour with design resources, freebies and inspiration.

Think Vitamin Great design resource from the folks at Carsonified.

Tianodesign Thought provoking blog from Stephen Tiano that includes design issues and a lot more. Very original thinking.

Tony Naccarato Cool blog with great viewpoints from designer Tony who runs 325studio.

Tracey Grady Design Great blog from Tracey who is based in Hobart, Tasmania (Australia).

Turbomilk Great blog from an icon design team in Samara, Russia. If you are into icon design, this is a must-read blog.

Typographica Awesome resource for typefaces, fonts and typographic design.

Unbeige Mediabistro’s blog about design, “Where designers read design”.

Under Consideration One we missed initially. Oops! Definitely worth including.

UsabilityPost Blog from Dmitry Fadeyev who also writes for Smashing Magazine. Covers tips and insights into good design practice including articles like 8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces.

UXMatters Online magazine about user experience design strategies.

Vandelay Design Blog covering a range of design topics, plus a showcase of design galleries.

Veerle’s Blog Top graphic design blog from Veerle Pieters.

We Are Just Creative UGC blog showcasing, well… anything creative. Run by Graham Smith who also runs I’m just Creative.

WebAppers Blog by Ray Cheung focusing on open source, high quality and free resources for web developers.

Webdesigner Depot A collaboration between leading designers around the world providing a wealth of expertise in all fields of design, such as coding, typography, Photoshop tutorial, etc.

Web Designer Mag Design focused online magazine from the UK.

Web Design Ledger Broad design blog covering design tutorials, resources, inspiration and freebies.

WebDesignerWall Design ideas and tutorials from Nick La of N.Design Studio and who also runs Best Web Gallery.

WebJackaloupe Blog from Glen Stansberry covering a range of web design and development topics such as Taking Back the Homepage: 12 Ways to Design For the Fickle Web User

WebResources Depot Free web resources for web designers and developers.

WebToolkit4Me A blog from Gerasimos based in Thessaloniki, Greece. Lists bookmarks to great resources covering design, frontend development, backend development, SEO and useful apps.

WeFunction The blog from the team at Function, containing interviews, tips, icons and more.

Well Medicated Great blog from Andrew Lindstrom with inspirational links, showcases and freebies.

YouTheDesigner Blog from Gino Orlandi featuring tips, freebies and jobs.

Freelance Life

Blog Perfume Bills itself as a WordPress related site, but covers a wider range of subjects for designers, writers and bloggers. Always useful.

Escape from Cubicle Nation Blog by Pamela Slim, a coach and writer who helps frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own business.

Freelance Folder A great collection of articles from an awesome group of writers, including

Freelance Switch This is one of the top blogs for freelancers. It is packed with advice, news and opinion pieces from top freelancers, plus the great Freelance Freedom cartoon series from NC Winters. A great example of the posts is this article on 50 Simple Marketing Ideas All Freelancers Can Use.

Fresh Thinking Ok, this is a product blog by the folks at Freshbooks, but it contains lots of useful information for budding freelancers.

Lifehacker Ever popular blog that features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently.

Men With Pens Great blog from the team at Men With Pens focusing on web business for writers, freelancers and online entrepreneurs.

Paul Graham Not really a design blog, but a great inspiration to anyone working as an entrepreneur.

Ronnie Lebow Blog from one of Canada’s leading creative directors. If you are freelancing, this is a MUST.

Photoshop & Illustrator Sites

10Steps.sg Photoshop tutorials, resources and freebies from Johnson Koh in Singapore.

AiBURN Is a site from Sean Hodge who is also a writer for PSDTUTS, Smashing Magazine and GoMediaZine. Centres on vector graphics, but covers a lot more.

BrushKing Brushes and tutorials.What more can we say?

High Resolution Textures Close-up photographs of surfaces such as wood, stone, metal or fabric.

Layers Magazine Magazine for everything Adobe

Lost and Taken Caleb Kimbrough’s fantastic resource of free textures.

Photoshop Creative Provides Photoshop users with lashings of practical advice and inspiration.

PSDFan PSD tutorial site from Tom Ross.

PSDtuts+ From the Envato team and aimed at web developers and designers. Showcases some of the best Photoshop tutorials around.

QBrushes A Photoshop resource site showcasing quality Photoshop brushes from different talented designers.

QVectors Showcase site for free quality vector images from around the net.

RasterVector Wonderful resource for all things Mac and Adobe.

Tutorial9 A group authored site run by David Leggett with tutorials on Photoshop, photography, web design, blogging and more.

TutorialKing A collection of high quality Photoshop tutorials.

Tutzor Photoshop tutorials from Walter.

Vector Diary Vectordiary is a blog on vector illustration. It was created by Tony Soh who is an exclusive vector art contributor to iStockphoto.

Vectips Site by Ryan Putnam (Rype) dedicated to Adobe Illustrator® tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Vector Diary Vectordiary is a blog on vector illustration. It was created by Tony Soh who is an exclusive vector art contributor to iStockphoto.

VectorTuts+ From the Envato team.

Vector Vault Huge collection of vector art and related articles. Includes free downloads, content and tips.

Wake Up Later Blog from Samuel Ryan writing about freelancing and entrepreneurship.

We are not Freelancers Not about freelancers, but about a web design firm in South Africa.Nice approach dubunking the myth that all web designers are freelance.

Web Worker Daily Practical tips and advice for anyone who uses the web for work. Excellent resource for freelance designers.

Advertising Sites

Adrants Round-up of ads and marketing news from around the world, edited by Steve Hall and Angela Natividada.

Ads of the World Community site for people in advertising. Includes a huge archive of ads from around the world, news, a forum and much more.

AdGoodness Advertising showcase created by Frederik Samuel who describes the site as “The best and sometimes the worst around the globe”.

Technically Speaking, let me know if this list was at all useful to you!

Yesterday we had the Top 7 Tips, now we have the 5 worst ways to make money with Amazon Associates:

1. Do not use Amazon.com banner ads: 5% of total 2009 earnings

Even though I made 5% of my total earnings from Amazon banner ads (which is the same amount as the Buy Now buttons I implemented on my websites) it’s important to recognize just how much screen real estate I devoted to their use (most times a 468 x 60 ad and a 300 x 250 rotating ad unit with Google Adsense both above the fold). The reason why I believe these ads perform so poorly is two fold:

a. Web visitors avoid clicking advertisements in general, but I’ve found the Amazon ads especially tend to convert very poorly (all varieties)
b. The ads Amazon does offer are far too general and don’t work well for niche specific websites. i.e. if I was running a site focused on just LED HDTV‘s the closest ad I could use is one for electronics.

The most effective Amazon ads I did run were carousel widgets and even those performed poorly when compared to the tactics I know work. One unknown trick is to simply create your own ads for products on Amazon; however, you must email the customer service team to get approval before running them (if you want to play it safe that is, which I always tend to do). The ads I did go through the hassle of creating and getting approval for were even more effective than the carousel widgets, but again none of these solutions were as effective as linking to content within posts my most effective means of earning money from Amazon. In fact, as you can see from the last post I earned over 80% of my total income share based on in content related tactics.

More terrible ways to make money with Amazon Associates are continued after the break

2. Do not use an Amazon store: 1.2% of total 2009 earnings

I used Amazon stores for almost every one of my websites in 2009 and linked to the store via the navigation bar on each respective website. I would also link to the store from time to time when new products were made available for purchase. In the store I’d include products that were related to the niche and include both low priced items and high priced items. I’d also customize the color scheme to match the site in an attempt to make the appearance look seamless. So what I’m trying to get across is that I did everything right that Amazon describes for the best results and I still couldn’t any money. I wouldn’t even waste your effort building a store and instead use the space freed up in the navigation bar to link to “money articles” or categories.

3. Do not display ads unrelated to your niche

This is an obvious tip in my mind, but I’ve seen new and experienced bloggers alike use Amazon consumer electronic banner ads on their blog about puppies (as an example). At the very least display ads related to dog toys and even then that’s not going to make you much money as you can see from my results above. It’s all about staying within the confines of your niche if you want to get the best results. Remember, people came to your blog, website, forum etc. for the topic you’re covering – that’s it! So your readers will respond best to content related to your niche.

Technically Speaking, the rest of course is a task where you need to read more …

Remember, this is kind of old information, so some of the data may be dated. Also, it says 28 ways to make money with you website:

Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network.

The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. Enjoy!

Direct Methods

1. PPC Advertising Networks

Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

List of popular CPC advertising networks:

• Google Adsense
• Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)
• BidVertiser
• Chitika
• Clicksor

2. CPM Advertising Networks

CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.

A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.

CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.

You can get as low as $0,10 and as high as $10 per 1,000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).

List of popular CPM advertising networks:

• Casale Media
• Burst Media
• Value Click
• Advertising.com
• Tribal Fusion
• Right Media

3. Direct Banner Advertising

Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremost because it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.

The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.

Related links:

• How to Find Advertisers for Your Website
• Finding Advertisers for Your Blog
• Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners
• Openads Ad Server
• OIO Publisher Ad Platform

4. Text Link Ads

After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular.

Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not.

The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process.

Text link marketplaces and networks:

• DigitalPoint Link Sales Forum
• Text-Link-Ads
• Text-Link-Brokers
• TNX
• LinkWorth

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

• Commission Junction
• ClickBank
• Azoogle Ads
• Link Share

6. Monetization Widgets

The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links.

Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.

List of companies that provide monetization widgets:

• WidgetBucks
• ScratchBack
• SmartLinks

7. Sponsored Reviews

PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy on the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model.

Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics. Not all bloggers are willing to get paid to write about a specific product or website (because it might compromise the editorial credibility), but the ones who do are making good money out of it.

If your blog has a big audience you could also offer sponsored reviews directly, cutting off the commissions of the middleman.

List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:

• PayPerPost
• Sponsored Reviews
• ReviewMe
• BlogVertise
• Smorty

8. RSS Feed Ads

With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel.

Feedburber already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.

Finally, some blogs are also opting to sell banners or sponsored messages on their feed directly. John Chow and Marketing Pilgrim are two examples.

Related links:

• Feedburner
• BidVertiser
• Pheedo

9. Sponsors for Single Columns or Events

If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.

This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”

Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.

10.Premium Content

Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools.

SEOMoz is a good example. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members. It costs $48 monthly and it grants them access to guides, tools and other exclusive material.

11. Private Forums

While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.

SEO Blackhat charges $100 monthly from its members, and they have thousands of them. Obviously in order to charge such a price for a forum membership you need to provide real value for the members (e.g., secret techniques, tools, and so on).

Performancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. It is called The Hive, and the monthly cost is $10.

These are just two examples. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.

List of popular forum software:

• vBulletin
• Simple Machines Forum
• phpBB
• Vanilla

12. Job Boards

All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy Kawasaki, ReadWriteWeb, Problogger… you name it.

Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.

The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.

List of popular job board software:

• JobThread
• Web Scribe Job Board
• SimplyHired Job-o-matic
• Jobbex

13. Marketplaces

Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.

Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.

The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

You can see an example of a marketplaces being used on EasyWordpress and on Mashable.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls

There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.

Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages

Million Dollar Wiki made this concept popular, but it was being used on the web for a long time around (check Pagerank10.co.uk for instance).

These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way.

Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

Techmeme probably pioneered this idea, but somehow it has not spread to other websites. The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”

On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way. Considering that the monthly cost for one spot is $5000 and that they have around 6 sponsors at any given time, it must be working well.

17. Donations

Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).

A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin. This WordPress plugin enables you to insert a customized message at the bottom of each article, asking the readers to chip in for a beer or coffee.

18. In-text Adverting

In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.

Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

19. Pop-ups and Pop-unders

Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.

If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.

Ad networks that use pop-ups:

• Tribal Fusion
• PayPopup
• PopupAd
• Adversal

20. Audio Ads

Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

The company is still rolling tests, but some users are reporting to get from a $4 to a $6 CPM. Regardless of the pay rate, though, this is a very intrusive form of advertising, so think twice before using it.

21. Selling the Website

Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.

Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they most used parameter to determine the value of a website is the monthly revenue that it generates, multiplied by a certain number (the multiplier can be anything from 5 to 30, depending on the expectations of the seller, on the quality of the site, on the niche and other factors).

Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.

Related links:

Technically Speaking, there are still more ways obviously, and you need to go read more …

These tips might work, an remember there are 52 ways to make extra money:

1. Delivering Pizzas – If you have a car and a decent driving record then you qualify for this easy extra money maker. You’re likely to get some free pizzas too.
2. Waiting Tables – This is the perfect job for nights and weekends. That’s when all the big tips are made anyway. Pick the nicest place in town.
3. Bar Tending – Even better, I think, than waiting tables is tending the bar at nights in a busy bar. Typically at least $1 for every drink you serve.
4. Teaching Swimming Lessons - If you’re a good swimmer you might be able to pick up a weekend swim teacher gig at your local recreation center. Keep in mind that some places may require a special certification or that you be a lifeguard.
5. Car Valet – If you hook up with a for-hire car parking service (the type hired out for fancy neighborhood parties) you can make some nice cash tips in just a few hours at night and on the weekend, when parties are held.
6. Create Websites – Businesses will pay you to take them online.
7. Blogging – This isn’t quick money, but you can make decent money with a little luck and a few months of solid, consistent effort. Believe me, it can be tough and a bit time consuming, but it can be done. Get started with a nice domain and cheap hosting plan from the provider I use Bluehost.com. Or consider the services of a more notable provider like GoDaddy.com.
8. Write an eBook - I hesitate to put this one in here because an eBook by itself usually doesn’t make money unless you’re an excellent marketer. What a great eBook can do though is act as a sales lead to one of your other online businesses.
9. Design Web Logos – If you’re good with Photoshop and can work quick, you might could make some decent cash with this online business.
10. Re-write Poorly Written Ads - Search the ad listings at Ebay.com and Craigslist.org for big items like cars. Email the seller and offer to re-write their ad for a 1% commission.
11. Write Reviews - There are many websites that will pay you a little cash to write product reviews. If you’re knowledgeable and can write fast, this may work for you.
12. CashCrate – There’s some money to be made with CashCrate.com completing the free offers, but the real cash comes from the referral program.
13. Freebie Trading – Freebie trading is a real money maker. But it takes a special person to master the techniques and be consistent with the process. See how The Freebie Guy made over $28K in his First Year
14. Freelance Writer – Right now on Elance.com they are looking for more writers. Set up an ad and start offering up your fast writing skills.
15. Sell Digital Photos – (Digital Photography School) – Take nice pictures. Get them up on the web at a broker, or microstock site. Make some money. It’s not as easy as that, but those are the basics. If you need a better guide, check out Photo Nuts and Bolts: Know Your Camera and Take Better Photos
16. Sell Yourself Online – Get creative and sell you and your time online in a fresh, new way.
17. Sell Micro Ad Space Online – Start a website and sell tiny ads. Can this be duplicated? Or can you take the concept and make it fresh?
18. Start an Online Store – Setting up an online store is extremely easy with sites like Amazon, Ebay, and CafePress. Once you learn how to market that site you can begin making some cash.
19. Focus Group Participant – Researchers need people to help them develop their results. Become a member of a focus group in your area and get your share of their research funding. Call your local university, museum, or look in your local paper for opportunities.
20. Sell Bottled Water – Buy bottled water in bulk and sell it for a dollar where there are a ton of people: parks, festivals, concerts, etc.
21. Sell Your Body – Not talking about the oldest profession here. I’m talking about your plasma, hair, eggs, and sperm.
22. Have a Car Wash – Find a business that’s willing to loan you their parking lot and gather up a few friends to wash some cars. Take donations or ask for very little. People usually do this to raise fund for an organization, but there’s no reason you couldn’t do it for the You Foundation.
23. Cleaning Houses – This is a job with flexible hours, but requires a bit of elbow grease. Some homes would provide their own cleaning supplies and tools.
24. Get a 2010 Census Job - Work opportunities begin in the Spring.
25. Sell Your Baked Goods – Are you skilled at a few special recipes? Contract your items out for parties, meetings, etc.
26. Rent Out Your Truck or Van – If I had a truck and needed extra money this is one of the ways I would do it. Nothing seems much easier to me.
27. Drive People to the Airport - Another good gig for someone with a reliable car and the ability to be on-time all the time. Once you have a few happy clients and word gets out, you’ll find you have to turn business away.
28. Lawn Care – I grew up doing this job on the side and loved it. But it’s not just a teenager gig. Obviously better for warmer climates.
29. Be a Mystery Shopper – Get paid to shop and share your experience.
30. Become a Ticket Broker – No special permit required. If you know sports or entertainment enough to pick the right events, and have access to purchase the tickets at face or below, then you can use a service like Stubhub.com or Craigslist.org to re-sell the tickets for a profit. I’ve done this both out of necessity and just to make some extra money.
31. Paper Route - This job will likely take up only your early morning hours. You can also search for a paper that only comes out once a week.
32. Walk Dogs – If you love animals and live in an urban area then consider this job.
33. Pet Sitting – Take dog walking a step further and actually be paid to watch someone’s pet for a few hours or days. This may just entail checking in on the pet a few times a day.
34. Baby Sitting – If you enjoy kids and are good with them, this can be a fun and easy way to make a little cash. Advertise your baby sitting services for free online with Sittercity.com. In need of a baby sitter, browse their website for free.
35. Tutor – Have a knack for a certain subject and live near a college? Consider offering up your brain power and teaching skills for some quick cash. Grade school kids need help too, and parents pay better than college students.
36. Play Music in Church or at Weddings - Some churches don’t have volunteers for their music. A talented pianist can make pretty good money doing this on the weekends.
37. Teach English to Adults - Go through your local schools and colleges to find classes where teachers of English are needed.

Technically Speaking, you will want to go read more …

Didn’t know there was a FAQ written about making money online, but apparently someone wrote one:

These are the frequently asked questions (FAQs) on how to make money online. Making money online is also known as working at home. This is suited for beginners or newbies who want to learn how to make money online, and even for veterans who failed to make big money on the net. This could make a big difference into your life.

How do people make money online?

There are many ways people making money online. Many are blogging and maintaining web site and sell their products and services. Some are selling other people’s stuff. Some are selling web site or blog space for advertising. Some people are just playing online games, reading emails, filling up surveys and even by socializing.

What is the best way to start making money online?

The best way to start making money online, for me, is to have your own blog or web site by sharing your expertise, knowledge, experiences, and ideas to help other people solve their problems or make them happy in some way. With your own blog or site, you may sell whatever products or services you have. You may also sell other people’s products and services for commission. You may also offer your web page as ad space. Having your own blog or site, you can control almost everything. And another great thing, you will learn a lot of things. From here, we will talk about making money by making a blog or site, without having your own products or services to sell.

How much is the minimum and maximum income online?

Well, the minimum is zero or nothing but the maximum income is unlimited or open-ended. The highest possible income online depends on your determination, desire, and actions. Your maximum income could reach more than $10,000 per month.

Do I need to learn computer programming to start making money online?

You don’t need to learn computer programming. But it will be helpful if you learn the basics of HTML programming. With HTML knowledge, you may enhance or modify the design of your blog or web site as you desire. Good layout may increase your web site revenue.

Do I need to invest money to make money online?

If you already have an internet connection, then you may not spend additional money. You can have your own blog for free using WordPress or Blogger. But, you can only have your own subdomain name under the domain name “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com”. To have your own domain name, you have to register your own domain name and lease a web space. Approximately, this will cost you $10 for domain name and $60 for hosting annually.

How long does it take to start making money online?

It depends on how fast you setup your blog or site and how quick you put original and interesting content in it. Also, how well-optimized your content for search engines and for humans as well. Original and interesting content attracts both visitors and search engines and will create a buzz in the internet world. Search engine optimization will make it easy for search engines to index your blog or site and will be happy to show it to its users. The more the search engines show your blog or site to its users, the more traffic it will have. The more traffic it gets, the more chances it will make money from your sales promotions and/or advertising programs such Google ads.

Now, if you stop asking questions and start making your blog or site, you will make money online earlier. Just kidding. Actually, the more knowledge you have, the more effective you can start making money online. It is really better to clear all your questions during planning a web or blog design.

How do I start to effectively make money online?

First, list down all a not-so-broad topics that you know and you love to learn. From the list, select the topic you love best and would love to share to other online users. That would be the topic for your blog or site.

Second, learn search engine optimization to give you an idea on how to optimize your would-be articles or content. You may start with the quality guidelines of Google.

Third, plan the flow of information or content of your would-be blog or site. It is recommended that you start from main topic to sub-topics and then articles regarding the sub-topics. It is also recommended that each page focuses in one topic.

Fourth, choose the path of having your own blog or site for free or with paid domain name and web hosting. Choose web design layout from free templates in free blog sites, especially WordPress and Blogger. In paid hosting, you normally have free templates and format in C Panel Fantastico.

Fifth, apply for Google Adsense and other affiliate programs and deploy its codes within your pages that will not annoy your readers. Your first objective, must be to help your online readers understand the information you are sharing to them. Making money online must be your secondary goal only. Visitors will normally help you make money if your blog or site helps them in some way.

Technically Speaking, you should read more …

Chris Guthrie’s blog has so many making money online tips, and here is another great article with 7 tips on how he made $41,438.42 in ’09 with Amazon Associates:

1. Use multiple Amazon tracking ID’s

If you are using only one Amazon tracking ID for each website you’re running, you’re still making a huge mistake and this is a mistake I’ve seen perpetrated across a vast array of websites. You absolutely need to use multiple tracking ID’s for every single website you run so that you know what is working and what isn’t. Part of why I believe so strongly that this list will be a valuable resource for you is simply because of the fact that I used so many tracking codes during the course of 2009 that I was able to determine exactly what tactics pays out the best and what pays out the worst. In fact, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing an Amazon tips list without showing proof that my tips do in fact work. The tips I’m sharing may work better for me than they will for you which is precisely why you should not only try what I’m suggesting, but you should also test it with multiple tracking ID’s too (Once inside your Amazon account you can create additional tracking ids here).

Please click the continue reading button for more tips after the break.

2. Bestseller Lists: 15% of total earnings

The bestseller list post has been one of the top posts I run on a monthly basis for almost all of my various blogs and forums. I simply write about the bestselling products within the niche of the blogs I run. I only do it once per month so it doesn’t upset users looking for unique content. Bestseller lists are a form of social proof and they are incredibly strong at convincing people what to buy, which is precisely why Amazon uses them so extensively on their own website. People on the fence of a purchase decision use what others are buying to help make their decision. If you can’t find a bestseller category for the niche your website is focused on, then it’s time to expand your niche. See all bestseller list categories here and yes of course that is an Amazon affiliate link. You’ll see several opportunities throughout this post to thank me for sharing my knowledge by purchasing something on Amazon.com through one of my links that you already planned on doing. Besides, I wouldn’t be practicing what I teach if I didn’t link to Amazon.com with several affiliate links while I’m discussing how to make more money with them right? This leads me onto my next point and most profitable tip.

3. Focus on in content affiliate linking: 45% of total earnings

The biggest chunk of money I earned was by linking to products inside the actual blog posts I was writing about. Say for example I was discussing a new product that was now available to pre-order. First I would link to it because it was available for pre-order with no mention of the price. Then I’d show an image and use an affiliate link for that (more on images in the later tips). Then after the image I’d share a few of the products specs but then use an affiliate link titled something like “see full specs” and then if there were other colors I’d link to each one of those individually. Finally, I would end the post with a statement to pre-order it and at what price it was available to purchase at. This is just an example of what I would do for a hot product that finally became available to pre-order, but as you can tell I’ve created several opportunities that have hopefully piqued the interest of a potential buyer to click the link and find out more about the product. By leaving out less information about the product in the first place it creates a feeling that the user should just click now to see more about the product rather than finish reading the article. If you get them onto Amazon’s website then you’re in a very good position because now you get a commission on ANY product that they purchase on the website – not just the one they clicked through on your website.

4. Simply get visitors onto Amazon.com:

Yes the cookie length for Amazon.com is fairly short at only 24 hours, but Amazon spends incredible amounts of money on testing their website and improving their ability to converting people browsing for products into customers. It’s worth mentioning that I exported my chart of affiliate earnings by product category and only 1,367 of the 3,953 items that shipped through my affiliate links during 2009 were from product categories within the main niches for each of the blogs and websites that I run. Granted, the dollar sum of these items amounted to most of the earnings to the tune of 75%, but by getting people onto Amazon.com and shipping an extra 2,000+ items over the course of the year helped to put me into higher earnings tiers which in turn gave me more money overall.

Once a higher referral fee is achieved within the calendar month, the higher referral fee rate will apply to all Qualifying Revenues earned from Qualifying Product units sold by us during sessions initiated through Special Links on your site during that calendar month, including units sold before the new tier was reached.”

- Amazon Associates Operating Agreement

In other words, every time you hit a new referral tier it should be accompanied by a resounding boo yah because you just made an extra .5% (or .25% if you’re up near the top tier) on all of the products you’ve already sold during the month. It’s safe to assume 20% of the income I generated came from items people simply bought because they were about to buy them anyway and I was the guy that got them onto Amazon’s website.

Technically Speaking, if you want them all – you need to go read more …

Found this five tip article today:

Are you as sick as I am of blogs, ebooks and gurus all promising to teach you how to “make money online”? In many cases, they’re people flogging a product that they swear any idiot could use to make a fortune … overnight … on the beach … in just two hours a day…

Let’s get real about this. Making money online, just like making money offline, takes real work. However much you might wish you could just press a button and get a steady income stream going, that’s not how it works. Scams, pyramid schemes, dodgy traders and fly-by-night sites abound: none of these are going to get you closer to paying off your debts or quitting your day job.

However, it is perfectly possible for you to make money online. I’m going to outline five straightforward, no-nonsense, spam-and-scam-free ways to do so. I’ve had experience – i.e. dollars coming in – with each of these areas, and I’ll share some of my best tips.

(Hint: I’m also linking to some useful sources, so you may want to bookmark this post for handy referral.)

In almost all cases, you’ll want to get set up with PayPal so that you can get paid.

1. Freelancing
   First up, freelancing. This is how I got started with my business, Aliventures. Freelancing means selling a particular service, getting paid by clients either by the hour or by the project.

   You can do all sorts of things as a freelancer, but some of the most common freelancing areas online are:

   • Writing: including copywriting, blogging, newsletters, ebooks, articles
   • Designing: including illustration, graphic design, logo design
   • Programming: including web coding, custom software
   • Administration: including accounts, personal assistants

   To get started with freelancing, pick a particular skill that you have, and put together an online portfolio showcasing your work. Tell your family, friends, and Twitter followers that you’re looking for clients.

   Freelancing is becoming much more common as people look for flexible patterns of working (and multiple clients to provide job security) – so there’s a lot of advice, support and help around, often including grants and loans when you’re getting started. Your local Chamber of Commerce – or a similar organization – may be a good source of advice.

   Insider Tips:

   • Specialize. It might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s better to concentrate on one area than try to cover all the bases. For example, writers might choose to specialize in copywriting (and ignore blogging, editing and so on).
   • Approach potential clients directly. Most of the freelance blogging jobs that I have weren’t from applying for advertised jobs – they came through making contact with editors. You wouldn’t be reading this blog post if I hadn’t sent Jay (DLM’s editor) a guest post ( and several hopeful emails) back in 2008!

   
   

   Resources:
   Freelance Switch and Freelance Folder are both blogs aimed at freelancers, and well worth subscribing to by RSS.

   Skellie’s post 30 Days to Become a Freelancer is a great step-by-step plan for new freelancers.

   On Dumb Little Man, there’s some freelance-related advice in:

   • An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Setting Service Rates
   • 8 Important Money Saving Tips for Web Workers
   • 10 Great Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity




2. Selling electronic products
   Freelancers sell a service. Even when that service results in a product, like a logo, a website or an ebook, it’s custom-made at the request of a particular client. That works well for some people, but what if you want to make money without having to work by the hour or by the project?

   A tried-and-tested way of making money online is to sell electronic, usually downloadable, products. I’m sure you’ve come across a few sites selling ebooks – if you have a particular area of expertise, you can write an ebook (which doesn’t need to be anything like as long as a paper book), and you’ll find buyers. Time-sensitive information does particularly well in ebook format.

   There are also plenty of options if you’re not a writer. You can pay someone to write an ebook for you: then you can market and sell it. Alternatively, you can sell audio or video files, graphical content, software.

   Insider tips:

   • Start with something small, like a $5 or $10 product; the learning curve is usually steep.
   • Either build up an online audience of your own (via a blog or e-newsletter), or partner up with people who have a big audience – offer them commission as an affiliate for your product.

   Resources:

   • Create Ebooks That Sell – article on Copyblogger
   • The Comprehensive Paint-by-Numbers Guide to Writing and Publishing Your Ebook – article on ProBlogger that’s pretty much described by the title!

   Sites where you can sell (and indeed buy!) electronic products include:

   • e-junkie – mainly used for ebooks
   • iStockphoto and fotolia – for graphics and illustrations
   • Theme Forest – for website and blog themes
   • Envato Marketplaces – other sites from the makers of Theme Forest
3. Selling physical products
   If virtual products don’t interest you, how about selling physical ones? You may well have done this already if you’ve ever offloaded some second-hand books on Amazon.com, or if you’ve gotten rid of those wrong-size-wrong-color clothes on eBay.

   You don’t necessarily have to have a large amount of storage space to sell physical products, and you don’t need to spend hours standing in line at your local post office; you can use drop-shipping to outsource warehousing and shipping.

   Many small businesses are run entirely on ebay, often buying stock in job lots (at discount warehouses, for instance) and splitting it up for sale, thus turning a profit per item.

   Artists and crafters can sell handmade products on sites like etsy, where customers are often willing to pay a premium price for uniqueness and quality.

   If you have a site or concept which you could produce merchandise for (online comics often do well with this, and humor blogs), try CafePress.

   Insider tips:

   • Take the time to get a great photo of what you’re selling. Make the photo as large as possible too. (Many new ebay sellers make the mistake of not using good photos.)
   • Use testimonials, especially if you’re selling items which customers would normally want to examine and touch before buying – such as clothes or craft materials.
   • Stick with one site – at least to begin with – so that you can build up feedback from buyers: I found that selling on ebay and Amazon was much easier once I had a good rating.

   Resources:

   • Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere.
   • News article “Doc makes more money selling clothes on eBay” – which gives an encouraging indication of what’s possible, just working part-time!
   • Starting an eBay business – article from startupnation
4. Owning websites
   If you own a website, you’ve got a potentially money-making asset. You can run adverts on the site. A good place to start is Google Adsense. Once your site starts getting a reasonable level of traffic and/or a reasonable Google rank, you can sell advertising directly. (Warning: Google sometimes penalizes sites which sell text links.)

   For an example of Adsense and private ad sales in action, see my site www.theofficediet.com. You’ll notice that:

   • There is a 125×125 banner, as well as a number of links under the headings “Adverts”. These are private ad sales.
   • I’m also running Google Adsense

   I don’t make a living from this site by any means, but I do make several hundred dollars each month from advertising.

   Another method is simply to sell the site, which is often known as “flipping” it. If you have a site that makes regular income (such as through advertising or affiliate sales), then there’ll be interested buyers. A good rule of thumb is that you can sell a site for around 12-18 times the monthly income. You may be able to sell a site which has strong potential – perhaps a good domain name and some high-quality content – even if it isn’t yet generating income.

   You can sell sites – and even great domain names (which should cost under $10 to register) – on the SitePoint marketplace.

   Insider tips:

   • Once you have a large site that’s easily found on Google, advertisers will often come to you. Be prepared for this: decide what you charge for different types of ads, and have a simple means of accepting payment.
   • You may have to decide between advertising income and maintaining the quality of your website. I run text ads and Adsense on www.theofficediet.com because I’m not too attached to that site – I’m much pickier about the ads on my “home” site, www.aliventures.com!

   Resources:

   • My Adsense Tips on the Official Adsense Blog – videos from Darren Rowse (aka Problogger)
   • ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income – by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett has good information about advertising and about flipping blogs.
   • Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses) – article from the New York Times which is a good introduction to the area – and financial possibilities – of flipping websites.

Technically Speaking, don’t forget to read the complete article here …

Found this article about the 8 Steps to Improve your Bounce Rate:

1. Include Clear Call-to-Actions

If you want a visitor to click on links and dig further into your site, why not ask them? Many websites fail to offer targeted options for visitors. Here is an extreme case.

Notice that this website, samanzerin.com, includes NO links. Even the email address has no hyperlink. The designers might argue that the site is simply a calling-card for their magician client, but don’t you think it would be helpful to a visitor to view pages about the magician, where they can see him perform, what people have to say about his magic, links to videos of past performances?

The best sites include clear, targeted links to compel the visitor to read more. RELATED ARTICLE or RELATED TAG sections at the bottom of your articles are helpful.  ‘Popular article’ and ‘most commented’ widgets like the one you see in the top-right of this page can also be a plus.

Why not include the call-to-action text right at the bottom of the article? For example, most blog posts (including many of mine) simply ask the read to comment in the box below. Why not include specific links asking them to read something related? Look at the bottom of this post for an example of this.

2. Make Sure the Content of Your Articles and Posts Meet Visitor Expectations

When visitors come to your site do they find what they are looking for? Here is a page from Regards.com, a free greeting card site which I am involved with.

Most first-time visitors find this page via a Google search for ‘free greeting cards’ or ‘free birthday ecards.’ Regards ranks on the first page of most of these terms and we don’t disappoint them.Visitors are clearly presented with exactly what they were looking for and our Bounce Rate, which is as low as 20% on many of these pages, reflects our ability to meet their expectations. Do your pages meet visitor expectations?

If you’re promising visitors something for free either in your pay-per-click ads or in the descriptions that come up in organic search results, do your landing pages deliver on this promise?  Pay careful attention to meeting visitor expectation with every incoming link (which isn’t always easy to control) and PPC ad (which is completely under your full control).

3. Include Well Designed Navigation with Targeted Options

Take a look at this page from the newyorktimes.com.

Notice the well-designed navigation throughout the page.  Above the article is a toolbar which offers search, tools and article categories related to the current topic.  To the right of the article are links to content related to the article.  The NY Times pages offer plenty of targeted links, but they do so without overwhelming  you with choices.  The page includes plenty of white space and clever, concise design elements.   Contrast this page to the one in the next section.

4. Less is More

While you might be tempted to provide your visitors with many link options to choose from, you run the risk of overwhelming them with choices.  Take a look at the following page:

A bit busy, would you agree? Better to provide visitors with fewer, well targeted links including clear call-to-action text that meets their needs and expectations.

5. A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

Don’t be shy when it comes to including pictures in addition to text links.  If the pictures happen to be provocative, great.  It’s always best to use images which are targeted towards your likely visitors’ interest.  Pictures that ask a question and leave the visitor wanting more are even better.  Take a look at a typical article page from the Huffington Post.  Huffpost is never shy about its use of provacative images to entice the visitor to dig deeper into the site.   Hey, sex sells!

6. Fix Your Crappy Design

Maybe visitors are leaving your site because your site design sucks. Be honest with yourself. Does your site design stack up with other websites in your market? What do your customers and co-workers think of your website?  Take a look at this website design for the thecreationmuseum.org.   It looks like the site was built in 1997 and hasn’t been updated since.  Would you want to continue on with this site?

Technically Speaking, I know you now want to read more …

This should be a good post for a quick read and learn:

By the way, today the number of backlinks is 7790.

In this post I share 11 methods I use but first…what is a backlink:

Simply put, a backlink is a link on a website (including blogs) that leads back to your website / blog.

In search engine optimization (SEO), page rank is at least partially determined by the number of sites that link to yours. It’s important to gain backlinks honestly, and if a lot of other sites link back to you, you will naturally get more traffic to your page.

There is a lot of argument around the quality of backlinks.

We are to believe that a backlink from a website that is in the same niche as yours carries more weight. That would make sense.

Also, we are to believe the higher the Page Rank of the website you are getting backlinks also carries more weight.

So, ideally we want backlinks from websites in our niche and with a Page Rank of 10!

There are not many of those around unfortunately.

My approach is to mix it up and not get too hung up about whether the backlinks are in my niche or coming from very high Page Rank websites. Personally, I have too many other aspects of my on-line business that I want to keep running.

One more thing to mention…

When back-linking try and use the anchor text of your targeted keyword phrase. Read my post on anchor text here: How to use anchor text to your advantage

1. Blog Commenting

An easy way to get backlinks is to target Blogs that ‘Do-Follow’. If you want to follow do-follow blogs (i.e. the ones that provide you with a backlink), here’s a great list: http://followlist.com/

When you comment try and include your name AND your anchor text. Something like: Terry @ Tips for horse lovers

In this example the anchor text is “Tips for horse lovers”.

Aim to make 10 valuable comments per day.

2. Article Directories

Submitting your articles is a straightforward process.

You simply copy your blog post, add a bio with a link or two back to your site in the resource box. Then you submit these articles to article directories.

Some popular Article Directories for you to try out are:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://thewhir.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.buzzle.com

http://articlealley.com

http://www.searchwarp.com

http://www.ehow.com

You can just copy and paste your blog articles – you will still get a backlink but if you want to improve your overall SEO and traffic you may wish to use a tool I recently came across and now use: The Best Spinner

The Best Spinner creates unique articles for you to publish on the article directories.

And ArticleBot automatically submits your articles (spun or not) to over 400 different Article Directories.

3. RSS Directories

I mention this technique over and over again but there are so many people who just don’t use it and it is one of the easiest ways to get automatic backlinks.

Check out this post and submit your blog feed (and others) to the RSS Directories:

How you make your blog index quicker, build back-links and increase your traffic with a task that takes 2 minutes and you only have to do it once

4. Web Directories

Only a couple of years ago, submitting your blog to the web directories was a must. Nowadays, Google, it is believed, doesn’t put so much importance on the free Web Directory listings.

However, I still do submit the sites to the Free Web Directories. As far as I am concerned, the effort it takes is quite minimal, it only has to be completed once and you still get more backlinks and some of them are high Page Ranking.

So I recommend you submit your domain to various Web Directories.

Please note: there can be a waiting period involved, sometimes as much as a few months.

Technically Speaking, it’s a longer read than I thought, but worth it – so go read more …

You will want to read about these 5 out of date SEO strategies:

A long time ago it was easy to achieve a great search engine results position (SERP) with questionable, if not scandalous, SEO tactics. However, over the last decade, search engines have become much smarter spawning algorithms such as Google’s PageRank system and many popular SEO practices have been marked useless. But searching through SEO blogs and forums, you will find many of the outdated strategies are still being hailed as useful techniques. I have put together a list of five SEO strategies that no longer work and offer their useful counterpart.

Meta Tag Optimizing

Meta tags used to reign supreme when it came to search engine optimization and held the key to great results with searches. That boat has sailed. The meta keywords tag was strongly believed to offering valuable information regarding topics and terms used throughout a site. However, malicious site owners abused this tag by flooding it with misleading terms irrelevant to their content.

Useful Counterpart

Google has official stated that they no longer pay any attention to the meta tags for keywords. If you wish to build your pages and posts to rank for more keywords, use category and tagging systems to better label and organize your content. Tagging your content is one of the most effective ways to enhance the overall “searchability” of your site. Carefully structuring your site using categories helps your visitors find exactly what they are looking for and search engines are the same way. You should be able to reach anywhere on your from within three clicks.

Keyword Stuffing

I just told you how the meta keywords tag has been hacked out of the picture in terms of SEO and suggested tagging as the optimum alternative for ranking using keywords. Keyword stuffing is second on the list of dead strategies. A site was ranked by how frequent keywords appeared in a page’s content. Stuffing keywords into a post no longer works and can have a drastically negative effect on your overall ranking.

Useful Counterpart

Write your content the way it is meant to be read, by humans. Too many keywords used so closely together can seem unnatural and difficult to read or understand. Choose wisely where you use them by making sure your keywords are in prominent regions of your web page, like headers, titles, and descriptive text. Be sure to order your header tags (h1 – h6) in the proper order with your keywords and phrases.

Link Exchanges

No need to run around deleting your outbound or inbound links. We are here to improve the web, not unbind it. Exchanging links has always been a great way to funnel traffic into your site from external relevant websites and like other SEO strategies, it has been spoiled by the bad apples. Link exchanging schemes developed and tried to influence how search engines measured the value of site linking.

Useful Counterpart

If you are looking for a solution to build inbound links that point to your website or blog, try offering valuable content or testimonials in exchange for a link back to your site. This adds value to the external website when you give them a testimonial raving about their product or service. You can also offer to guest author on their blog by writing valuable relevant content that will interest their visitors. In return, you will be given a back link to your site.

Search Engine Submission

Have you submitted your site to Google to be crawled? I have. And I have since realized that it was a complete waste of my time. I am still amazed with how many people , including web developers and bloggers, still submit their websites and RSS feeds to search engines to be crawled. Stop it.

Useful Counterpart

Technically Speaking, there is more to read…

With the economy we are in, don’t think this advice on the Best Jobs for Seniors in 2010 and 2011 is only for seniors:

There is more demand for jobs for seniors now than ever before. Part of this is because the baby boomer generation is aging and more and more of them are reaching retirement age every year. That, coupled with the stock market plunge and bad jobs situation, means a larger percentage of seniors need work.

It is sad that I had to use the word “need” rather than “want” but that is the predicament many are in. It is safe to say that most seniors would rather find some way to make money from home rather than go out in the workplace. Likewise, doing anything that requires manual labor is most likely something they would prefer to avoid.

The good news is that because of the Internet, there are more opportunities for money making than there have been for people in the past. Via the computer, you can communicate and sell your services to people all over the world. All you have to have is some computer knowledge and the ability to market yourself online. Wait a minute, that could be a real challenge for some seniors

Consulting and Freelancing

The number one way I would think the Internet could benefit a senior is that it can afford them the ability to make a side income through consulting or freelancing. Any skills you have might be transferable to the Internet and you could make money selling your knowledge. The best way would be to set up your own website and get started from there. However, I know that is intimidating and too hard for many people to consider no matter what age group you are.

oDesk is an online site that is one of the biggest outsourcing websites on the Web and you can find all sorts of work there. They have jobs available in areas such as writing and translation, administrative support, business services, sales and marketing, support and many other categories. As I looked through some of the jobs, the pay that is offered is on the low side for many areas. Writing is one of the better paying selections as people always need native English speakers. Please see the quick video below for a quick overview of oDesk.

Technically Speaking, it does help to read more …

Another one from here -  Starting An Online Business – More Targeted Clicks Equals More Business!

It is important to know that a good E-mail marketing campaign is one of the best and most effective forms of direct marketing. Emails can reach the highest number of people in the least amount of time –for little to no extra money invested. They are great for telling new customers about the services and products you provide and they keep your current customers updated about your latest offers. Emails also provide the perfect opportunity for affiliate marketing links. And what is even better about email marketing is that their success rates are very easy to track – as a matter of fact, you can start monitoring your results instantly. Marketing simply does not get any better than that!

If you are starting an online business, here are a few simple but very important guidelines that you should follow if you are going to be a successful email marketer.

Remember that your emails to customers are your ad-copy. Treat them exactly as you would any other advertisement. Don’t obscure your marketing message in a sea of rigmarole and gimmicks. People will spot that in a heartbeat! Email marketing campaigns should be clever and concise and should immediately attract your readers – otherwise you risk losing them in the first few seconds. Make sure that you have relevant, eye-captivating content in your email – content that makes your audience want to keep reading and want go to your website. Make it immediately clear what you have to offer and why they should visit your site.

Make your links obvious. You don’t want people to have to search for them. Put them in several different places. Experiment with their placement and find out what works best. Sometimes it is just a matter of trial and error before you get it right. Don’t be discouraged by the process! Eventually you will learn what works. Links are also a great way to use affiliate marketing. Remember – every click can earn you money.

Monitor your click-through rate.Your email marketing campaign’s success is very easy to track via your click-through rate. Your click-through rate measures how many people see your email, how many respond to it by clicking through the links that you provide, and how many of those who responded actually purchase something. Being able to see this is one of the best aspects of Internet marketing. Click-through rates help you adapt your marketing strategy in the moment – something that is unique to Internet marketing. Take advantage of this benefit by monitoring your click-through rates and adjusting your strategy accordingly.

Don’t let online benchmarks get you down. These benchmarks will tell you where could be. Pay attention to benchmark estimates only so that you can adjust your marketing strategy. Don’t use them as a measure of your company’s value. Eventually, you will find your marketing niche and create your own benchmarks.

Technically Speaking, always go and read more …

One more from this blog that is loaded with some good info like the 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website:

Here are 5 ways I’ve used to launch a website and get the first users to my site.

1. Target Your Niche On StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon has a tech savvy base of people who are looking for cool websites just like yours.  When they are bored, they check Stumbleupon to see what cool new stuff has just been launched.

What’s great is that you can target the exact group who might be interested in your site.  For example, with BuyersVote.com I knew people into consumer info and possibly bargains would like the site, and I was able to target those groups.

Pros: Only $0.05 per visitor (way less than Adwords).  Can target people with relevant interests.  Can see a feedback report afterwards with what percent of people liked/disliked it.

Cons: Stumbleupon users are pretty click happy and are just trying to prevent boredom, so they tend to have a high bounce rate.  But then again, aren’t most web users?  This is a good test to see if your homepage is grabbing people’s attention.

2. Tell people your competition sucks

If you’re making a cheaper/better/faster alternative to an existing product, why not tell people that your competitor sucks?  Use their name right in the headline.  These ads tend to have a high click through rate, and your ideal early adopter is someone who is currently using the competition and is fed up.

Facebook ads work well for this, and their ad targeting is outstanding, but it can work elsewhere also like in Adwords or blog posts.  You may recall I launched FeedmailPro.com because I was fed up with Aweber and thought they sucked.

Pros: Works best when going against an established competitor.  Usually gets a high click through rate.

Cons: Sometimes you’ll run into problems using a trademark in your ad headline and Facebook or whoever will take it down.  But if it happens no biggie, you just take it down or reword it.  Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

3. Try to rank for long tail keywords

Traffic from organic search results is free, and 98% of people don’t click the ads when doing a Google search – they use the organic search results.  So obviously, ranking in search engines is great.  The problem is it’s very difficult for a brand new website.

The solution?  Target long tail keywords first – keywords which are more specific, have more words, are more obscure, etc.  One good way to make a long tail keyword is to add a city name or regional keyword on the end.

For UniversityTutor.com this is exactly what I did.  I had a couple dozen subjects (algebra, chemistry, Spanish, etc) and a bunch of cities (Austin, Boston, San Jose, etc) with tutors signed up.  So I combined the subject and the city name (and added ‘tutor’ in the middle) to auto-generate a bunch of long tail keywords, such as “calculus tutor Austin, TX”.  Then I auto-generated pages on the site that targeted those.  Within a few weeks I was getting 500 visitors per day (for free) from organic search results.

Even a brand new site can rank for long tail keywords with just on-page SEO.  If you can start getting traffic for long tail results, then you have early adopters who will eventually give you links, and you’ll eventually rank for more competitive keywords too (although this takes a while).  Oh yeah, and don’t forget to create a sitemap after you do this so Google actually finds the new pages.

Pros: Free!  Brings lots of traffic.

Cons: You need at least SOME good content on the pages for this to work.  It can be user-generated if your users are submitting content (this is best), otherwise you’ll have to generate it yourself.

Technically Speaking, this is a great blog to bookmark and read more …

Another great blog post about the 46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money:

Start With The Easy Stuff: Eliminate Expenses

1. Don’t rent an office! – work from home. Or better yet work from the best free office with locations everywhere: Starbucks. If you need to meet with a client and are worried about seeming small time without an office, don’t be. Just meet them at a restaurant for a lunch meeting. This is what people with the nicest offices do anyway.

2. Don’t hire any employees! – do it all yourself until you have some $ coming in the door.

3. Don’t hire lawyers, technical people, graphic designers, or assistants (see below)

Legal Stuff and Incorporating

4. Get a free lawyer and legal advice from the mentors at Score.org

5. Find a website with a similar legal document and modify it to your needs

6. An LLC is probably the best business structure, but don’t worry about incorporating until you’re earning money, just do a sole proprietorship, you can always incorporate later (you can get it setup with the IRS in just a few minutes by calling them at 800-829-4933)

7. Learn how to do your own financial statements for your business in Excel instead of hiring a CPA or bookkeeper (again you can do this after you’re making money)

8. Take a Quickbooks class at your local community college

Make a website for your business

9. Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left

10. Test out your ideas by writing to a blog, you’ll get feedback on what people like and don’t like

11. Get a free business website at www.wordpress.com. It won’t be your own domain (it will be something like yourbusiness.wordpress.com) but…

12. When you’re ready to have your own domain, get a hosting plan (new domain included) at 1and1 for $4.99/month, and install wordpress on your own server (instructions)

13. Get a professional website design for free with a wordpress theme that you can install with a few clicks (no programming knowledge needed)

Getting a Logo

14. Don’t hire a fancy graphic designer. At least not yet. Use LogoYes to create your own logo (or at least get ideas that you can recreate on your own for free)

Accepting Credit Cards

15. Don’t bother with a full merchant account to start off with, they are complicated, come with monthly feeds, and require programming expertise. Instead try a simpler (and much cheaper) solution like Google Checkout or Paypal

16. For a more professional look and a complete shopping cart for only $5/month use E-Junkie, its great and I use it on this site

17. If you have lots of physical products, try a Yahoo Store

Starting a service business where you consult, coach, teach, etc

18. Create several pages on your wordpress site: one for your experience, testimonials, rates, availability, etc

19. Pick a domain name with your #1 keyword in it! (Assuming it isn’t a very competitive keyword you’ll rank on the first page of google within a month or two for that keyword which means customers!) here’s some more info and an example

Creating Info Products

20. Use an ebook template like these from Eben Pagan

21. For print books, self publish it at www.lulu.com and use print on demand (they don’t print a single book until someone buys it which means you have zero up front cost for inventory!)

22. Use a $20 webcam or digital camera to create educational video products

23. Use camtasia ( $200 for PC) or iShowU ($20 for Mac) to record your screen and make great videos like this one. Or record powerpoints and do the voiceover to make great educational products. Update: even cheaper use ScreenToaster.

24. Use a mac to edit your videos (iMovie is free) and you can even produce DVD’s

Technically Speaking, always – always read more

Since it is the 4th of July, I figured this list of Free Patriotic Wallpaper might interest the reader here:

As the summer season approaches, in the U.S. another major 4th of July celebration quickly approaches this July. Cities and towns across the country start gearing up as early as May for the local festivals, fireworks and events. One of the most popular things that many geeky Americans do is loading free patriotic wallpaper themes on their desktops.  MakeUseOf features some pretty cool articles on wallpapers, such as Tina’s resources to pimp your wallpaper , or the review of WallpaperStock’s high resolution desktop wallpapers, so I wanted to add to that list by providing a resource for some of the top Patriotic wallpaper sites on the web.

Whenever I’ve searched for wallpaper themes, I’m always shocked at how inundated the Internet has become with poorly made, amateur websites covered with Google Adsense ads and cheesy content. This seems especially prevalent within the category of wallpapers. So, at the risk of coming across as a bit ethnocentric, I would like to offer you geeky U.S. patriots a list of high-quality free patriotic wallpaper themes that they can use this year as part of their Fourth of July celebration.

American Greetings Offers Free Patriotic Wallpaper Themes

Apparently American Greetings isn’t just all about selling greeting cards. For those who travel to their web page , American Greetings offers a small collection of free wallpapers. One of those wallpaper categories is “military & patriotic wallpapers,” which include some pretty impressive images.

Free images here include things like fireworks on a backdrop of the American flag, the words “Courage and Compassion” on a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty, and a pretty cool “Support our Troops” wallpaper featuring an Army helicopter and other military imagery.

FunUtilities.com – But You Have to Download Crawler?

One of my favorite collections of free wallpaper is FunUtilities.com . When you search for “patriotic,” you’ll uncover a huge assortment of stunning backgrounds for your desktop. But when you click on “Download,” there’s one drawback. The site forces you to download and install the Crawler toolbar before you’re allowed to download free wallpapers from the site. Now, for a lot of people this isn’t a big deal, but for a lot of people, being forced down download and install anything isn’t very cool.

However, the five pages of amazing artwork sure is tempting enough to go ahead and install crawler just to download a few of these. They are easily some of the best patriotic wallpapers you’ll find on the Internet.

This Nation – Cheesy or Not?

This Nation is one website where I really like the free wallpapers one minute, and then I can’t stand them the next. The biggest problem is that I can’t decide whether they’re cheesy, or just extremely emotional and inspiring. Some of them work very well, but other ones look like one of those Sunday morning gospel shows where the clear biblical text scrolls across the backdrop of some inspiring nature scene.

However, this site does deserve mention because some of the text-on-image wallpapers do look pretty good. You’ll find four pages of them to choose from at this site, and they’re all free for personal use.

Visual Xtreme – For Patriotic Gamers

Reviewing the patriotic category of wallpapers over at Visual Xtreme , it’s pretty obvious what demographic these images target.

Technically Speaking, be sure to always read more … and Happy 4th of July!

Found this good article on boosting your YouTube video to viral status:

YouTube can be an absolute goldmine for tapping into viral traffic. It is the third most popular website online, consistently featured in the media for its ability to expose hidden talent (from teen hit star Justin Bieber to ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’) and create at-home businesses for people. These days, video marketing should be included in any internet marketing campaign; if done correctly, it can produce a huge viral following. In this article I am going to discuss a strategy which made two videos of mine viral within days.

I recall the first time I tried video marketing to produce traffic for a website. My client and I had filmed ten quality videos for her niche. I uploaded them to YouTube and filled them with great descriptions and keywords. Thinking this was all I needed, I then left them to sit and accumulate all that traffic. A couple of months later I checked in on their progress and to my surprise, the videos had barely been visited at all. It was as if they had been buried beneath the multifaceted wealth of content held inside YouTube. Making money for her website through YouTube had failed, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. We filmed another 2 videos. I then contacted two well-known and successful blogs in our niche and recommended they use the videos for an article we wrote to accompany the videos.

What I noticed in the weeks after posting the videos to the external websites was a huge leap in traffic, video search results and video results through YouTube. The videos had gone viral and we were receiving a fair amount of traffic back to our website. It has now been two years and to this day, those videos still send a flood of visitors to my client’s website.

What we can take from this story as internet marketers is that there is a lot more to generating a boost in traffic through YouTube for our internet marketing businesses. In order to succeed over YouTube in taking your new video viral you need to have established methods of distribution on external and related websites. What this does is gives the video a traffic boost early while at the same time boosting the backlinks to the video. Google and YouTube take both of these factors into account when ranking your video so the more reason you can give them to rank you higher the better.

Technically Speaking, there is always time to read more …

If done properly, affiliate marketing is big money:

How would you like to earn a little extra cash each month? Or even replace your income, working less to make more money… Think its a pipe dream? well, think again.

Most people know that there are millions of dollars being spent every single day purchasing products and services online. But did you know that you could be earning a % on every sale made by simply referring and recommending the products that you like to people.

It’s one of the best ways to get started making money online – you don’t need a website, you don’t need a blog, you don’t even need any cash to get started, although these things can help, you can certainly start without them. By helping consumers research and choose products they already want to buy, which could be as simple as writing a 500 word article (just like this one) you could be earning a nice little second income.

Or if you want to take it a little more seriously, you can earn a full income, even more than most “real world” jobs pay.

If you are serious about learning how to make money online, be it for a little extra cash, or to replace your income, the best place to start is with Steve Peirce’s Income Elite Coaching program.

I personally make a full time living through affiliate marketing, and have been doing it now for about 5 years. Working from home, choosing the hours to suit my lifestyle, and making a lot more than I ever made working 60 hours a week in a job I hated.

But if you really want to achieve some success with affiliate marketing you need a plan that will get you the level of income you want. A lot of people I speak too love the “Idea” of making money online, they usually ask me a million questions, and tell me how serious they are, how they are going to go home and get stuck into it, read all the stuff I recommend and get started asap.

Technically Speaking, go read more …

A ton of resources here and didn’t feel I’d do it justice by cutting and running, but feel free to visit the original source:

How I replaced my day-job with earnings from this blog

In less than 2 years I went from not knowing what a blog was to making more with one than my corporate desk job.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. The good news is that even if you don’t make as much money blogging as you’d hoped, you can always sell your blog.

This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have. For the sake of convenience, I added links to different sections of this article, so you can easily skip ahead to the section you want…

• How it all started for me
• Blogging basics
• How to get a self-hosted blog
• The importance of a customizable theme
• How I make money with this blog
• How long does it take to make money from a blog
• How to get traffic to your blog
• SEO tips for blogs
• How I increased Adsense income by $1500 in under 3 months
• 11 Tools that have helped me succeed
• Warnings for those just starting out

Sign up to find out about additional tips, tricks, and tools that I use to increase earnings with my blogs.

I should also mention that I really haven’t written about blogging or making money from blogs on ChristianPF yet, because I wanted to make sure that it was a viable option for making some cash. Now that I have found that it is, I decided to pour out everything I learned the last two years about it…

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How it all started for me

About 2 years ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the idea of building websites full of free information to help people. After brainstorming a bit, I got a couple ideas of topics that I was passionate about: Proverbs and Personal Finance. My first idea was to post a Proverb each day and comment on it. As I explained my idea further to him, he informed me that I would basically have a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was, but I thought, “oh, ok, sure.” So, over the next few weeks I read as much as I could find about blogging and ultimately decided on creating a blog about Personal Finance from a Christian perspective. I had been very interested in helping people with their money, so blogging seemed like a great way to reach people all over the world. Over the next couple months, I started writing articles and officially launched ChristianPF in June of 2007.

At this point I had thought about making money from the site, but had no idea how and honestly didn’t really think it was possible to make a living at it. I threw up an Adsense ad just to see what would happen and I still remember how excited I was when I saw that I had made my first 7 cents! From there, I set a goal to make $100 by the end of 2007 which was pretty easy to accomplish – even without knowing anything. I should also mention that from June 2007 to June 2008 I spent about 4-6 hours each weekend writing articles and averaged about 4 new articles each week. And I spent a few more hours each week on site maintenance, emails, social media, etc. So in total I probably was spending about 10 hours each week working on the site.

Getting laid off

In July 2008 things got interesting. The large brokerage firm that I had worked 5 years for was bought out by a larger firm. I was told that my department would no longer be needed, so they handed me a severance check and I was on my way. By this point I was making some money from the blog, but not enough to even pay the rent each month. After much prayer I decided against looking for another “day job” and decided to work full time on building the blog. Thankfully we had paid off most of our debt, and had my wife’s income as a support to buy us some time. I figured I would give it a shot for a few months and if it didn’t work out I would find another 9-5.

From that point, the income generated from this website has increased each month and in February 2009 it exceeded my monthly income from my old day job. I am still a little bit in awe and can’t believe that I am actually paying the bills from this website!. But, I thank God everyday that I get to do this – I really did not like working in Corporate America and am so thankful! It is hard work, but it doesn’t really seem like it when you are doing something that you are passionate about and love doing it.

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Blogging basics

I am going to try to boil this down to the essentials. There are whole books written on this subject, so I am not going to try to cover everything here. If you are looking for a good book about blogging for beginners, I suggest reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger. But for a quick, bottom-line version keep reading…

What is a blog?

A blog is short for “weblog”. Basically, it is just a website that has entries listed in reverse chronological order. The original idea behind it was to be a online journal or diary that was updated daily (or as frequently as the writer chose). Over the last decade many software programs and blogging platforms have been created to make the process VERY EASY. As the blog writer, depending on which platform you use, you can just type your entry, press submit and it shows up on your blog for the world to see. Most bloggers don’t know any programming languages and are not “techies.” Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways out there to start a website. If you haven’t started one yet, why not try it? It can be very quick to set up and can be completely free.

Is it easy to start a blog?

It is very easy. Even if there are steps along the way that are confusing, there are plenty of resources to get the help you need. There are over 20 million blogs in existence, so it can’t be that difficult.

How much does it cost to blog?

There are many services that allow you to start a blog for free (see below). I suggest using one of the free services to get a basic feel for blogging and “get your feet wet.” Once you decide you want to stick with it and that you want to make money with your blog, I suggest moving up to a self-hosted blog (see below). Anyone who is really trying to make money with a blog will probably be more successful with a self-hosted blog. Getting a self-hosted blog may not be free, but still can be VERY inexpensive. You will need to pay for nothing more than a domain name ($10) and web-hosting (as cheap as a few bucks a month).

Getting a blogging platform

All 4 of the options listed are free. The first 3 options are the easiest, but the are also limited on features. If you are just trying to make an extra few hundred dollars from your blog, these options could work. But if you are really serious about trying to make good money from your blog, I recommend self-hosting your blog (which we talk about in the next section…).

Tumblr.com – This is probably the simplest blogging platform to use, but it also is the probably the least customizeable. So, it might be something good to start with, but it would be more difficult to build an income-generating website with it.

Blogger.com – Blogger is also very good, easy to set up, owned by Google, you can customize the theme, and the domain name includes “.blogspot.com” (in some people’s opinion a little less professional). Blogger continues to become more customizeable and currently has a lot more options than they did a few years ago.

WordPress.com – I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

WordPress.org – Wait, what is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org? To put it simply WordPress.com is where you will go to set up a basic, easy blog with limited features. WordPress.org is where you will go to get a self-hosted blog. If you get to the point where you are serious about blogging and really want to make some money with it, you need to self-host your blog.

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How to setup a self-hosted blog

If you are going to be using one of the first three options above, you can skip this section. If you are serious about blogging and are looking for the best way to customize your blog’s look and other features, then getting a self-hosted blog from WordPress.org is probably the best way to go. It is currently the top choice for most bloggers. It does require more work up front and does have small costs associated with it: buying a domain name ($10/year) and hosting your blog ($10/month).

One of the big advantages is that you can use your own domain name (i.e. yourblog.com). While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a lot easier for people to remember yourblog.com rather than yourblog.blogspot.com which is what you will be given if you use Blogger. I will warn you, being a non-techie myself, this took me some time figuring out how to get my self-hosted site set up. WordPress.org has a great step-by-step guide for getting you set up. While it is more work on the front end, I am really glad I got good advice and did this at the beginning, than having to do it now.

Pick a Domain Name

1. You should start by purchasing a domain name. Psychicwhois.com is a great tool to see what names are still available. I would suggest going to for a .com rather than a .info or .us or anything else for that matter. It is just too easy for people to get confused. A .com is always going to hold more value than any other extension.

2. Once you get it picked out, you need to find somewhere to purchase it. I bought my first few domains at GoDaddy.com and have bought the remaining ones from Dreamhost (and now BlueHost as well). While GoDaddy is about one of the biggest names out there, I can’t say that I recommend them because of some of their advertising campaigns that they run. But the good news is that there are thousands of options of places where you can purchase a domain name.

Pick a host for your blog

The webhost is the company that you pay to store all of your files for your blog. There are also a million web hosting companies out there. I don’t suggest just looking for the cheapest one, because a lot of these companies are not very reliable and your site might be down quite a bit. I like to go with the bigger companies who have a longer track record and are more established. They may cost a dollar or two more a month when you are starting out and it is well worth it.

I have hosted my websites with Dreamhost from the beginning, mostly because I knew a lot of people using them and I got a hosting package for about $7.00 a month. I did find hosting cheaper, but with hosting you often get what you pay for – so keep that in mind.

I still host most of my websites at Dreamhost, but have moved ChristianPF.com to MediaTemple. The main reason was that since my livelihood now depended on the website I wanted a higher level of service from my hosting company. MediaTemple has been great in that regard, but as always it comes with a price. I am currently paying $50 a month for hosting with them.

(Added 01-05-10 – I am currently in the process of buying a website that is hosted on BlueHost, and after digging around the backend quite a bit, I am starting to think they are a better choice than Dreamhost. Their prices are slightly lower than Dreamhost, but they seem to have things a little better organized and create an easier experience for new users. I haven’t dealt with their customer service yet, so I can’t comment on that yet, but my overall experience so far leads me to like them a bit more than Dreamhost. For what it’s worth.

Added 05-04-10 – After using Bluehost a bit more and calling their customer service reps, I can safely say that I definitely like them more than Dreamhost. Just the fact that they have phone support gives them a leg up – but the rep I spoke with was very helpful. So Bluehost gets my recommendation for beginner hosting.)

Company	Cost	Support	Notes
Bluehost	$6.95/month	24/7 phone and email support	I host a few of my sites with Bluehost and they are currently my favorite and who I am recommending to newbies. Their site is easier to navigate than others I’ve used, they have a simple and cheap pricing plan, and have great customer support.
MediaTemple	$20/month	24/7 phone support	I currently host this site with MediaTemple. Starting at $20/m they aren’t cheap, but I have had a great experience with them so far.
iPage	$3.50/month (current special)	24×7 Phone, Chat and Email Support	I haven’t used iPage. They appear to be geared towards beginners by simplifying the web-hosting process. They offer a money-back guarantee.
Host Gator	$6.95-$9.95/month	24/7 phone and chat support	Hostgator is another one of the well-known hosting companies. I haven’t tried them out either. They offer a 45-day money-back guarantee as well as a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
JustHost	$3.45/month (current special)	24/7 phone and chat support	JustHost is one I recently heard about, but have no experience with. They offer a money-back guarantee and a free domain for life.
Dreamhost	$8.95/month	Only email ticket-support or pay extra to get a callback	I started with Dreamhost and still have a few sites hosted there. I was happy with them for the price, but I always longed for phone support and they don’t really offer it. If you decide to use them, I have a coupon code you can use for 25% off… just enter “Christianblog” as the promo code.

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Get a customizable theme

After I took the step the self-host this site, the next step that greatly helped me increase earnings was choosing a highly-customizable theme. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this at the beginning, since it does cost money to get a good theme, but once you are committed to blogging and are willing to invest a few bucks, putting that money towards a good theme is a good investment. For this site, I purchased Semiologic, which is a fantastic theme that gives you a lot of control. It costs $300 for the full version, but I quickly made that money back because the theme allowed me optimize my ad placement in ways that no other themes did.

If you are a programmer, you really don’t need to buy a theme because you can make the all the customizations yourself to any basic theme. Since starting to blog a couple years ago, I have learned some HTML codes, but I am still about the furthest thing from a programmer! So for people like me, a customizable theme allows me to control things and areas of the site that I would never be able to change with out the help of a programmer.

My Themes

At the time of this writing, I am still using Semiologic for the theme on this site, but since I had been hearing so much buzz about the Thesis Theme, I decided to buy it and try it out on another one of my sites. I have to admit, I never thought it would be able to compete with Semiologic, but I am finding out how wrong I was. After testing it out, I really am very impressed with it. Right out of the box, it provides you with a very pretty looking site that is very easy to customize. It is SEO optimized very well, has a ton of support for it, and once you figure out how to use the hooks you can customize it to oblivion if you want. The kicker is that you can buy it and get lifetime updates for $87. I still really like Semiologic and think it is a great theme, but for the price, if I were shopping right now, I would go with Thesis. I am going to get to know and learn Thesis on my other site for a while and make sure that it really is everything that I think it is and eventually I will convert this site to Thesis.

Update: I have now switched this site over to Thesis and I couldn’t be more happy with it. If you do get Thesis, I highly recommend the OpenHook Plugin – you will be able to easily do just about any customization that you can imagine.

If you are shopping for WordPress themes, the Frugal theme and Socrates are two more that might be worth looking into.

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How I make money with this blog

When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…

CPC Ad Networks

There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google’s Adsense program. Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA.

So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not. I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.

CPM Ad Networks

While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) Adsdaq, AdClickMedia, Adbrite, Adify, BuzzLogic, and Casale Media. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.

Affiliate Product Sales

Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, FlexOffers, LinkConnector, Commission Junction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.

I have a very strong policy about honest recommendations. I give my honest opinions about products that I find regardless of how it will affect affiliate sales. This is probably why I don’t really make too much with affiliate products. For example, I wrote about Cash Crate and updated the article to show what I didn’t like about them. Because Cash Crate has such a generous referral program, I know some people making lots of money from it, but I just don’t feel comfortable recommending it since I had a bad experience using it. On the other hand there are products like ING Direct, Ebates, Amazon Prime, Ebay, and Sharebuilder that I recommend and also have some sort of affiliate or referral program as well. These are what I love because I can help readers by pointing them to good resources and tools that have helped me and get paid in the process. I know some people don’t have a problem promoting anything that will pay them, but I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend something to someone that I don’t genuinely believe will help them.

Direct Ad Sales

I also sell ad space directly to advertisers. This hasn’t provided much income for me yet and may or may not even be worth my time. I know that in certain niche markets direct ad sales can work out very well, but thus far it hasn’t been a big money maker on CPF.

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How long does it take to make money from a blog

The second question that people normally ask after, “how do I make money with a blog?” is, “how long is it going to take?”. Well just like most things in life, there is no legitimate quick and easy way. It takes time and hard work. As you can see from the chart below it took me a long time before the trend started moving upward. But, for more than a year I was working at it about 10 hours a week. And don’t forget I didn’t know anything about blogging, advertising, getting traffic, etc when I started. So, if you know that ChristianPF is a blog, then you have a head start on me. Also, you have the wonderful privilege of reading this article where I am going explain most of the things that I did to help create that upward trend seen below – that I didn’t know the first year.

Blog earnings visualized

From other people I know who make a decent amount from their blogs, this curve seems to be typical. While the first year didn’t yield much income, it was crucial for the second year to be able to. While I wish I could tell you that you could jump right ahead to where the income starts increasing quicker, but I just don’t think it is likely. There are some tips in this article that I wish I would have known at the beginning and I think they will make things go a lot quicker, but there is no getting around the fact that it is going to take time to get there. But just like anything, the more you put in, the more you get out. The two keys are consistency and a willingness to learn. Without them, I would say that it will be very difficult to make money with your blog.

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How to get traffic to your blog

So now are getting to the point of this article where I start sharing everything I have learned over the last couple years about blogging. So, if you are like most, you want to create a blog so that others can read what you have to say. Sadly, people will not find your blog (in the beginning anyway) unless you do a little legwork. These are some of the things I did to get traffic and some that I still do. The first thing I suggest doing is writing a few great articles about your topic and feature them in your sidebar. Then I would start working on generating traffic, because you not only want traffic, but you want returning traffic as well.

Guest Posting!!

I think this is one of the best ways to start getting some quick traffic. Almost every blog I know allows guest posts (even this one) – and almost every one of those does not discriminate. What I mean is that most bloggers (that I know anyway) will accept or reject a guest post based on it’s quality, not on whether they know the person or not. This provides a great opportunity for a newbie to write an article that could be seen by 20,000 readers.

I don’t know of any other method that could bring traffic as quick. I must admit, I could still do more guest posting myself. I have been pleased with the results in the past. The key is to write a great article – don’t hold back your best stuff. I have seen people grow their blogs very quickly by giving some of their best articles away as guest posts. Also, only submit unpublished content as a guest post. If it has already been published, then the blog that is allowing you to guest post won’t get any search engine traffic for that article. But there are places to republish your articles you have already published – we will get to that in a minute…

Sign up for blog community sites

Just a few off the top of my head are mybloglog.com, technorati.com, and blogcatalog.com. Look for other blogs in your niche and join their networks and ask to become their friends. Networking with some of your fellow bloggers here will send a few visitors your way and is a good way to get started.

Submit to Blogcarnivals

One of the best things beginning bloggers can do is to sign up for blogcarnivals. At this site you can submit articles that you wrote on your blog to be included in a list of articles by the hosting blog. It is kind of like “open mic night.” If you have a good article with a good title, you can get some good traffic from blogcarnivals, not to mention incoming links from other related sites.

Join Directories

If I were starting a blog today, one of the first things I would do is Google “whatever topic I want to blog about” + “directory” This should return a list of web directories about your topic. Getting added to these directories will only help. You may not get a lot of traffic from them, but ultimately they will help you get more traffic from the search engines. A few of the more valuable ones to get you started…

• Yahoo Directory
• BOTW.org
• DMOZ.org
• Blogged.com
• JoeAnt.com
• Greenstalk.com
• Familyfriendlysites.com

Blog Commenting

One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way. The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it.

Forum Commenting

Becoming involved in forums related to your topic and having a link to your blog in the signature line can send a few visitors. Google “your topic” and “forums” and you are sure to find a few. Just don’t be annoying and go in just to promote yourself. People can see that from a mile away. The new age of the internet (aka Web 2.0) is very much a “give and you shall receive” environment. If you seek to give and be a benefit before seeking your own rewards, you will be much better off. Why not get started at the Christian PF Forums?

Linking to other blogs

I don’t know what it is, but everyone wants to know when someone is talking about them. So it is with blogs. When people link to my site, I get a notification and often go check out who linked to me and what the context was. I have had some good relationships form just from this.

Create Squidoo pages

Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com and a handful of others are sites that allow you to build a simple page about a topic. You can do it very quick and the pages often rank well in the search engines. If you build a page that gets a little bit of traffic and have links coming back to your site, you will catch some of those visitors.

Article submissions

Submit articles to article submission sites. These sites collect articles and most allow a bio-section that can include a link back to your blog. Here are a few that are worth looking into…

• ezinearticles.com
• goarticles.com
• articledashboard.com
• buzzle.com
• articlecity.com

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SEO tips for blogs

It will take a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. The search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, hence proving that they are reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other web sites that have a good reputation in the search engines’ eyes is very important. As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links the search engines will begin to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing!! But, as I mentioned earlier, they are very wary of new websites – so time will be your ally when it comes to the search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google’s results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part about it is that it is FREE TRAFFIC!!!

I am not going to get deep into SEO much here, there are far more thorough books about it (i.e. SEOBook) but as your blog grows you should try to learn more about it, as it will only help you by knowing more. Just like most of the things you will learn while blogging, you don’t need to be an expert at it – just having a working knowledge will provide great results. The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they are trying to create a perfect system where any searcher can find exactly what they want. Google wants to display the most relevant websites to their searchers. They will never have a perfect system, but they probably won’t stop trying. If you can keep this in mind, it will be very helpful when you are trying to optimize your blog. Don’t waste your time trying to trick them, they will figure it out and will punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear to them what your site is all about and writing great content for your reader and the rest will take care of itself.

So, let’s get to some SEO. These are some of the most important (in my opinion) pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you will be much better off than most people who don’t know anything about SEO.

1. Title Tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of your browser window. It is also one of the most important determining factors that the search engines use to determine what your site is about.

In the above picture you can see that the title tag is “Christian Personal Finance – Financial help, debt help…” You WILL want to make sure that your title tags contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. If your site is about rock climbing, you will not want to have “welcome to Bill’s blog” in the title tags. Something better would be “Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text – the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine you can see that the link will go to Google. “great search engine” is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google really places a lot of importance on what words are in the anchor text. Obviously, you will not be able to control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, you should use your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals, and your signature line in forums all may be good places to make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text.

3. Keyword Research

If you are trying to get traffic from search engines, it is always a good idea to know what people are searching for before you start writing. I often use Aaron Wall’s keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4. Get links

We already lightly discussed the importance of links coming into your blog. Other that the great benefit they play in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It is an obvious benefit, but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot of visitors, you could see a huge traffic spike from it. If you get links from lots of blogs, you could and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more and more links, you will see more visitors coming. The bottom line about link-building is that you have to create something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

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How I increased Adsense earnings $1500 in less than 3 months

This section is going to be a little bit beyond the basics and I will provide details of how I dramatically improved earnings from Adsense. Just to clarify, at the time of this increase I was already making some money with Adsense, but I had no idea how much difference a few tweaks could make. In my case I increased earnings over $1500 in a short amount of time. The thing you have to understand about Adsense is that no two sites are alike. Every blog has a different audience and different articles and most likely a different layout, all these things affect Adsense earnings. Knowing that, testing and trying new things is critical to find the winners!

1. Added a Privacy Policy

This is such a simple thing to do. I never realized that is a “requirement” for Adsense publishers, but when I added a link in my footer to my Privacy Policy there was a noticeable increase in earnings. I assume that Google rewards those who have a privacy policy and punishes those that don’t by trimming their earnings. In a perfect world you would want your lawyer to draft your privacy policy, but here is a sample template of a privacy policy to make your life a bit easier.

2. Put ads where people’s eyeballs went…

For me there is an eternal struggle between usability and profitability with ads. While I want need to make money to pay my bills, I still want to make this site as user friendly as possible. So, I have made some sacrifices with this site in order to maintain certain levels of usability, but one of the main keys to making money with Adsense is ad placement. Like I mentioned before, this needs to be experimented with. But for the first year or more of this site I just kinda threw the ads where ever I had extra room. Once I changed the location of my ads, my earnings tripled overnight. It really freaked me out. I had no idea that just moving an ad a couple inches would have such a dramatic effect. The diagram to the right (from Google) provides some good starting point for what locations work and don’t.

3. Section Targeting

This was another tweak I made that made a noticeable difference in earnings. Basically “section targeting” is telling Google what text on your site to look at when deciding what ads to show. Google is pretty good at figuring this out if you don’t do this, but if you have a lot of stuff going on in your sidebars and footer sections, it is probably worth experimenting with. It is very easy to implement. You only need to use this tag… to tell Google to start, and this tag… …to tell them to stop. I just added a text widget at the top of my post for the start tag and after the content for the end tag.

4. Who Sees Ads Plugin

This is a great plugin that allows you (as the name suggests) choose which visitors see which ads. There are lots of criteria that you can select, so you can specify that Search Engine users see a particular Adsense unit when regular readers see something else. I have found that search engine visitors click Adsense ads a lot more than regular readers. I still show some Adsense to regular readers, but I focus my energy on the visitors from search engines – this plugin makes this very easy.

5. Changed the colors

When Adsense first came out, people said to make the colors as loud and ugly as possible to draw attention to them. Next I heard that the best thing to do was to blend them into the site. Of the two methods I think that blending works a little better, and definitely looks a lot better! But, I have a slight variation of that has worked even better for me. Currently I have have most of my links set to a lighter blue color. I used to have many of my Adsense ads match that, but I saw a nice increase when I changed the Ad titles to the old standard Link Blue. I feel that visually it is a complement rather than a match. It stands out a little bit more, but doesn’t look bad either – IMO…

6. Wrote articles people are searching for

This might seem unrelated, but it is very important. If you are like most bloggers, you have a regular readership and you have readers from the search engines. For some reason, a lot of bloggers just don’t give much respect to search engine readers and don’t really try to reach out to them other than trying to “convert” them to a regular reader. I approach things a little bit differently, rather than getting frustrated at the fact that so many search engine visitors don’t come back, I started to embrace it. I realized that my main goal of this site was to help people, so why should I care if they only visit once or on a daily basis if they are getting helped? So while I very much appreciate and value my regular readers, I also understand that I can help those who find the site via a search engine. I started doing keyword research to see what people were looking for in the search engines. If there are people searching to find out how to sell stuff on Ebay, I want to help them find out! What happened for me as I started to become more conscious of what people were searching for was that I started getting more search engine traffic – which of course leads to higher earnings from Adsense.

7. Added a Google search bar

This is a no-brainer. Google is the master of search, so you can bet that their search capability on your site is going to be better than the default WordPress search tool. By installing this, you will help your visitors find the information that they are looking for on your site and make some extra cash in the process. When the search results (from the websites you choose) are displayed they have the standard Google ads present, just like normal Google search results.

8. Hooked Google Analytics up with Adsense

A few months ago, Analytics started allowing the option to integrate your Adsense data. This has been so helpful for me. It provides webmasters with a wealth of information about earnings. It is simple to see which articles are making the most money, which keywords are yielding the most, what sites send the most valuable traffic, and a whole lot more. If you use Adsense, don’t pass this one up.

9. Tested, re-tested, and tested again…

When running Adsense tests, I typically let them run for a month in order to make sure they are very thorough. I have a calendar that I use to mark down when I make changes and what changes I make. Then when the test is complete I compare CPM and eCPM rates to see what performed better. A/B split testing is a better method when possible, but for certain tests is just isn’t possible or practical. But either way, if you want to make more money with Adsense, experimenting and testing is a must!

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11 tools that have helped make it all possible…

Not all of these tools directly contribute to the bottom line, but each one of them have been very helpful over the last couple years.

1. Google Analytics – which is a wonderful (and free) statistics tool that will help you keep track of your visitors and analyze a lot of data about them. As I mentioned before it now integrates with Adsense to give even more valuable data.
2. Semiologic WP Theme – This is the theme I used to use for most of my WordPress sites. It costs about $300 for the full version, but I started with the free version, which I think is far more customizable than the vast majority of WP themes out there already. So if you are just starting out your probably don’t need the full version yet, but eventually it is probably worth considering. For what it has allowed me to do I know that it has paid for itself many times over.
3. Google webmaster tools – This will help you see how Google views your blog. They will also let you know if there are any problems with it that you may not be aware of. For me I had some issues that were really hurting my search rankings, but I found out about them and fixed them and voila! All better.
4. Aweber Email Marketing Service – I haven’t been using this too long, but if you read anything about internet marketing, you will certainly hear about the incredible value in having an email list. I have been happy with Aweber thus far.
5. Google’s Keyword Tool – This is a great tool to get ideas about popular keywords as well.
6. SEObook Keyword Tool – I use this to get a ballpark estimate of how many people are searching for particular key phrases.
7. SocialPoster – This tool allows you to submit articles to multiple social sites. I used to use it to submit to about the top 5-10 social sites.
8. Hittail.com – This one provides ideas for articles based on what you have previously written about and could probably rank for. I just noticed that the free version is gone. If you have a blog that is established it might be worth paying $10 a month for it – I suggest doing the free-trial and see how much it helps you.
9. Stock.xchng – The best free stock photography site I have found.
10. iStockPhoto – The best cheap stock photography site I have found. They have lots of images that you can get for just a few bucks.
11. Feedburner – If you have a blog, you will want to burn a feed. Feedburner makes this fun, organized, and easy…

A few more tools that may be worth checking out…

• Scribe SEO Tool for WordPress – I wrote a more thorough review of this tool that the blogging tips subscribers received (you can sign up for free below if interested). But basically, I tried it out and decided not to continue to use it because I thought it was priced a little to high for what I got from it. It can make the SEO process a bit easier, but I just wasn’t sure about spending $27 on it. If they lower the price, I might recommend it a bit more.
• Frugal Theme for WordPress – This is another premium theme like Thesis and I haven’t tried it out yet, but it seems to be gaining popularity.
• Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Training Course – I haven’t tried this, but have heard good things about it. Yaro is an extremely successful internet marketer and I have learned a whole lot from him. If I were starting out today and could afford the program, I would do it. Since it has a hefty price tag, it would probably be a good idea to wait until you are actually making a little money from your blog before signing up.

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Warnings for those starting out…

Don’t quit your day-job

Even if you know a lot about making money with a blog (which just be reading this article, you have a tremendous advantage over me when I started) it is going to take a while. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it is more of a work-for-free-for-a-long-time-and-then-reap-your-reward type plan. The beautiful thing is that I can now say that it does work if you are diligent and open to learning from your mistakes. But either way, convention wisdom says, build your blog part-time and when you start making more from it than your day-job consider making it a full-time deal. My situation is a unique one and I don’t recommend doing what I did unless it really is God calling you to do so. In my case I am now thankful that I got laid off – if I hadn’t I would probably still be doing a job I didn’t like!

Learn everything you can

One of the advantages I have is that I love to learn and don’t stop when I make a mistake. I work really hard to learn from my mistakes and figure out what the better course of action would be for the next time. You are going to do things wrong, but you just have to keep going and keep learning. Learning how to use Google search is very important. If you do, you will be able to find an answer to just about every problem you encounter on the web.

Avoid time-wasters

Checking your stats every hour, reading 500 blogs in your RSS, playing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or Youtube all day will kill your productivity. Focus on what yields results and stay disciplined to stick with that. Social media is an important part of building traffic, but you have to keep it in check.

Have fun

While I wrote this article as a guide to help those who want to make money with a blog, I understand that many people don’t really care about that. Either way, life is too short not to be enjoying it. So whether you want to be a full-time blogger or just communicate with friends – have fun!!

Technically Speaking, you may want to still read more …

Found this one on freelance writing gigs:

Most freelance writers have several sources of writing work where they can get paid to write articles. Some are ongoing, some are one-off, and some are gap-fillers. All can be good. Read on for a bit about each of the above categories and how to go about getting those types of writing jobs.
1. Ongoing

Finding regular writing clients can be a good thing. Do a good job and you might get ongoing writing work.

1. One-Off Jobs

By marketing yourself, you can find writing jobs
that are one-off scenarios. Someone might need a press release written, might decide that they want to write a new sales letter, want help re-vamping their website content, or want another freelance writing service. Marketing can help these clients find you.

1. Gap fillers.

There are content companies and busy clients that may offer you an all-you-can-write buffet. Having a few of these eggs can be a good thing because you can make fast money writing when you need to up your earnings or when you have a gap in your schedule. You an also spend some of your gaps working at upping your passive income streams through writing for revenue sharing sites, such as InfoBarrel and HubPages, or through developing content for your own sites and blogs.

How to find Writing Gigs:

Find ongoing and one-off clients by marketing on an ongoing basis. Freelance writers who market can get found by clients and some of those clients could provide you with regular work.

Technically Speaking, read more …