How We Tripled Our Blog Traffic

Some of you may not be aware that this isn’t our only blog. We actually have over 20 blogs and websites…way too many really. To make money online you don’t really need to work that hard and in fact if you are you really are spreading yourself too thin. We were doing just that for quite some time and it wasn’t getting us anywhere.

When we stopped to think about how hard we were working and the little return we were getting for that effort, we realised that we needed to do something about it. So we decided that we would take just a couple of our blogs and give them our absolute full attention.

We knew we needed to do something big to get these blogs to the next level. We were stagnating and not really making the income we wanted.

At about the same time, we read a blog post about two guys who were writing 20 blog posts a day for their blog and how well they were doing because of it. This kind of gave us the idea that maybe we could do the same, but 20 blog posts?!…this seemed like an enormous task.

We could have hired writers to do it but at 20 posts a day over 7 days at even $5 an article that would have been about $700 a week…yikes! So instead we decided on 10 articles a day…still quite high but something we could manage.

Was it Worth it?

Definitely!…within two months we had doubled our traffic and within three months we had effectively tripled our average monthly traffic – prior to this we were averaging around 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per month. It also became our best earning blog from that point on….and still is for that matter.

You can see the results in the image above. We started adding the posts at the beginning of October 2008.

It was the boost we needed and it paid off. Over time we reduced the number of blog posts – to continue with that many posts would have resulted in major burn out as we were writing them all ourselves.

Would this Work on All Blogs?

I don’t think so. The blog we chose was purely a product based blog which is quite different to the blog you are reading now. If I were to start adding 10 blog posts a day to this blog the information would be quickly lost and regular readers would get annoyed pretty quickly in their effort to keep up. However 2 or 3 blog posts a day could work and would still result in an increase in traffic.

How to Implement It

It’s pretty simple really…just keep adding content. This is particularly good if you have a brand new blog as it can get you traffic quite quickly.

The trick is providing lots of content but also content that has value. It’s all very well getting lots of traffic but if what you are providing is just garbage then the visitor is just going to hit the back button and never come back.

If you have some extra cash then consider getting a writer to do at least some of the work for you. You can hire a writer at Elance.

Just keep at it for at least 2 months but preferably 3. Once you hit the 3 month mark you can start reducing the number of posts to a more reasonable level but do it slowly over time. Although, if you are able to stick at it then keep going by all means.

And finally…

This method really illustrates the value of content – it got us to the next level in our affiliate business so it was definitely worth it! Give it a go…I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

How to Work from Home Writing Articles

Working from home is something that more and more people are trying to achieve. You get to work the hours that you want and can earn money in your pyjamas…right? Well, yes and no. If you’re considering earning a living by writing articles at home, read on…

How easy is it to find a job writing articles?

Actually, it’s harder than you might imagine. If you do a Google search for Work From Home Writing Articles you will get a huge number of hits so it would appear that there is a lot of work available. However, be very, very careful. There are many sites which look extremely professional and are easy to sign up to. But a lot of them are scams or very low paying at best.

Scam sites

Adsense Revenue Type Sites

These sites say that you can write about anything you like and post articles to their site as often as you like. They will then put your article onto a website that matches its content and you get paid a percentage of the advertising revenue from that site. You can build up a modest revenue over time. For example, if you had 150 articles up, you could expect to earn around $1 per article per month. To do well at this you would need to know a fair bit about SEO (search engine optimization) and be sure that your article contains the correct percentage of keywords. Too many and the search engines will boot out your article – too few and it won’t get found. Google offers a free keyword analyzer which is worth a look. The good news is that once your articles are written and submitted, the money just keeps coming in. The bad news is that it’s not great money.

Credit card scammers

As we said, be very, very careful what you sign up for. There are other sites that entice you to write articles for them and they are easy to sign up to – just your email address and name. Then when you click to register, a grey box pops up, offering you an amazing discount to join them and get the benefits of their membership club. This discount price is usually around $2.95. This obviously makes it very tempting to sign up to but please, don’t! There is a box to tick to say that you have read the Terms and Conditions and in those T’s and C’s you will read that if you give them your credit card details, they will take a substantial sum each month. We have seen amounts varying from $47 to $70. A quick trawl of forums shows that some people were able to cancel after the first amount was taken but many were still frantically trying to get through on the ‘helpline’ number.

So are there any real opportunities? Yes, there are. Here are a few of the better ones.

Craigs List

You could try Craigs List. This looks like a very basic site but has a wealth of job opportunities for anyone who wants to write from home. First, select your city from the list on the left of the page. When the page has refreshed, look under jobs and scroll down to writing / editing. Then simply browse the jobs by each area and when you find one that you like the look of, email the address at the top of the page. Clicking on it will take you to Outlook or you can copy and paste it into another email provider such as Hotmail etc. You still need to be careful as some of the scam sites do post on Craigs List which can be disappointing. But as long as you don’t sign up for them, that’s all it is. Look for jobs that don’t require you to be in a specific area and accept ‘telecommutes’ i.e. working from home. You can browse every city which is broken down into towns. This can be very time consuming but it is worth it as it won’t cost you anything to apply and you may get work from it.

Associated Content

AssociatedContent is free to sign up to and will pay an upfront payment ranging from $1 – $20 depending on the content of what you submit. The average payment is $5. They accept articles, as well as audio, slideshows and others. You can either write whatever you wish or look for assignments. These are articles which AssociatedContent wish to be written so it’s a good idea to go for these. They also offer Performance Payments which pay $1.50 for every 1,000 page views your content receives. It’s worth noting that if you’re not a resident of the United States, you can’t get upfront payments – you may only submit content for Performance Payments.

There is a lot to learn about how to get the best from this site so spend a good chunk of time reading their faq’s, their help pages and other people’s articles on what to do. There is money to be made but you need to put a lot of work in to get started.

Elance

Elance is a site for professional freelancers and writing is among the skills that buyers are looking for. You can signup for a basic free membership and get to work that way, although it can be slow to start with. If you’re really committed, shell out for an Individual or Business membership which will display you higher in the search ranks when Buyers are looking for a writer. You can also optimize your chances of success by filling out your Profile page and taking the free online tests that Elance provide to show Buyers your level of ability.

A Buyer will post a project. They describe the job, how long they wish you to spend on it and how much they are willing to pay. You then bid for the job, using a ‘connect’ to do so. Each level of membership awards you a certain number of connects. If you are awarded the job, it then goes into a ‘workroom’ where you and your buyer can Private Message each other if required.

Before bidding on a job, check out how many projects the Buyer has posted and how many they have accepted. If a Buyer has posted several and not accepted any, it’s a good idea to pass – however tempting the job may sound. You can also checkout the Buyer’s feedback and they can look at yours so make sure it’s good! Elance displays your 6 monthly earnings, lifetime earnings and feedback score when you bid. Payment is usually through Escrow and you can then transfer it into your bank account or PayPal. Don’t forget that Elance takes a cut so add that to the price that you bid. Be aware that there are many providers on Elance so the competition is fierce. However, stick with it and if you are lucky, you may find a Buyer who posts repeat projects and invites you to bid for them.

Other bid sites

The other main sites where you bid for writing jobs are GetAFreelancer, Guru, and iFreelance.

Advice

This will sound obvious but it is something that many Freelancers don’t pay attention too, surprisingly. Always remember that you are selling your writing, so first of all, make sure that your profile is filled in as comprehensively as possible. Check the spelling and then check it again. When you get a job, do it to the best of your ability, present it well and make sure it’s in on time. And enjoy! Good luck!

How to Automatically Add Your Blog Posts to Twitter Using Twitter Feed

Twitter has been something that I have had a hard time getting my head around. I dabbled with it in the past but never really got into it enough to see whether it had any real value. But lately I have been testing it out with one of my niche websites and have noticed quite a bit of traffic coming in from it.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on there however so what I did was just automate it so that the blog posts would automatically be posted to Twitter. This reduced the amount of time I needed to be on Twitter but also added regular content to it.

Now just adding blog posts is probably not going to be as successful as getting in there and being part of the Twitter community. But at the moment, for that particular niche blog, I don’t have much time to be socializing too much. I’d rather do that for the blog you are reading now.

I had created a Twitter account for Affiliate Blog Online some time ago but had not done much else. I thought that the time was right to get in there and so something with it. So today I logged into Twitter and updated the profile and also added the blog to Twitter Feed so that the posts would automatically be added.

So for those who want to do the same this is how it is done:

1. If you haven’t already done so, head over to Twitter and create an account.

2. The next step involves logging into Twitter Feed. If you already have an Open Id then you will be able to just log in but if not you will have to spend some time creating an id. This Open Id system is, my opinion, the worst system ever invented – they’ve taken a simple process of logging in and made it as long winded as possible. It takes three pages to actually login to Twitter Feed…but I digress!

3. Once logged in to Twitter Feed you’ll get a screen with a link to create a new Twitter feed. Just click on that to get to the Feeds page.

4. Click on the Create New Feed link. You should now be on the Create New Twitter Feed page.

5. Complete the fields on this page as per the following:

• Username – Enter your Twitter username
• Password - Enter your Twitter password
• RSS Feed URL – Enter the RSS Feed URL for your blog. If you’re not sure what that is just head over to your blog and look for an RSS image. It will look something like this . Just click on that and you will be taken to your RSS feed. Just copy the URL for that page and paste it into this field. (To test it just click on the ‘test rss feed’ link next to the field.)
• Update Frequency – This depends on how often you update your blog. One of our blogs is updated every 7 hours so I just leave it at every hour. If you update your blog once a day then you might select every 24 hours.
• Include Item Link – I leave this one checked.
• Shorten Link Through – I leave this one as TinyURL.
• Post New Items Based On – I have this one set at pubDate.
• Prefix Each Tweet With – I haven’t tried this but assume it means you can add some text that will automatically be inserted at the beginning of each Tweet. This might be useful if you want to let your readers know that this is a blog post so you might add “Today’s Blog Post” to the beginning of each Tweet.
• Filter by Keywords – This is handy if you only want specific posts to go up on Twitter. So you can add keywords that will ensure that only posts with those keywords will be displayed.
• Active – Obviously you will want to leave this one checked.

6. Once you have completed each of the fields click the CREATE button and you are done. Your blog posts should automatically start posting to Twitter.

How to Write and Make Money From an eBook Without Actually Selling It

An eBook is a great way of making money on the internet and you don’t need to have a website to do it. Nor do you need to actually sell the eBook to make money from it. So how do you do it…well in a nutshell, it involves you writing a short ebook preferably about a topic you know about and distributing it for free around the internet. It doesn’t have to be long – 10-15 pages is enough. In order to make money from it, you add multiple affiliate links to different products within the ebook.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1: Choose a topic that you have an interest in

The best eBooks are written by those who know what they are talking about. It will also make it easier to write if you have an interest in the topic. Having said that however, there is no rule that says that you need to know the subject to write about it but it will take longer because you will need to do the research for it first.

Step 2: Find products to promote in your ebook

There is no point spending hours writing an eBook only to find that there are no products to add to it. So before you start writing, you need to find products that you can ’sell’ in your eBook that relate to your topic. You can choose products from Clickbank, CJ.com, Linkshare.com, ShareaSale.com, Amazon.com or any of the other affiliate networks. These companies are all free to join and offer thousands of different products and services that you can promote. Clickbank is a good one to start with as they don’t care whether you have a website or not.

Once you know that there are plenty of products you can start writing.

Step 3: Start Writing

This is not as scary as it sounds. If you have a flair for writing then you will probably have no problem getting started but if the last thing you wrote was a report in high school then you might find it hard to get going.

The easiest way to write an ebook is to break it up into sections first. For instance, say we decide to write an eBook on dog training. We might break it up into the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. How to train your dog to sit
3. How to train your dog to come when called
4. How to train your dog to shake hands
5. etc, etc

Once you have the main sections you can then provide the content. Always leave the introduction till last as it will be a lot easier to write.

Here is a really good tip. Start out with dot points. Don’t worry about making it read right at this point. Just jot down as many things as you can think of for each of the sections of your ebook.

Once you have the dot points then just expand on each dot point with sub-dot points. Before you know it you will have lots of content.

Now you just need to structure those dot points into coherent sentences.

If you really don’t want to write it yourself then pay a professional. Elance is a great place for this – it is full of writers willing to work on your projects and you would be surprised at how little it costs.

Step 4: Add Affiliate Links

Once you have completed your ebook you will need to add affiliate links. You can add them within the content itself where appropriate or add them at the end as a list of recommended products – or both if you like.

Step 5: Convert to PDF

Before you distribute your eBook you will need to convert it to PDF. There are a number of free versions available on the internet that are simple and easy to use. Ensure that once the document has been converted that you check to ensure that it has formatted the content correctly and that any links within the document work correctly. Some converters work better than others but we recommend one of the following:

• http://www.freepdfconvert.com/default.asp
• http://www.doc2pdf.net/

Step 6: Proofread Your eBook

There is nothing worse than reading a document with multiple spelling errors or bad grammar. Make sure you run a spell checker over it and read it through thoroughly yourself. Better yet, get someone else to do it for you. The more people that look at it the better so get your family or friends to help out.

Step 7: Distribute Your eBook

The next step is to distribute your ebook. Here are some ideas:

- email websites that relate to your ebook topic and tell them they can send out your ebook to their email list if they have one or they can use it as a free giveaway to encourage people to sign up to their newsletter.
– submit your ebook to ebook directories – there are plenty of them…just do a search in Google
– create a Squidoo lens, Hubpage (hubpage.com) and attach your ebook to the page so people can download it.
– submit to forums

And if you found that your ebook turns out better than you expected and you might just be able to sell it rather than distribute it free them sign up with Clickbank.

Adsense Hidden Tips And Guide December 2009

Hello everyone,

I am Elva Ya, an adsense big fan. This article is about google adsense using tips and placement guide, all from my Experience and tests in the past several months. I don’t think any others will tell you about this for it’s top secret and really less known.

First question, what are you real purpose for working with adsense?

I don’t think adsense will bring you any other things more than real money, that’s mean we are not great enough to aim at promoting for the advertisers for free. Both of the advertisers and publishers seeking for the highest profits from adsense, google too.

Then, how to get more revenues perhaps the most important thing that publishers care about. There are 4 tips must be Noted:

1.Do not put multiple ad networks similar to adsense on same site.

It is allowed to put different networks ads on the same site according to policies such as google adsense, adbrite, bidvertise etc, however, we don’t recommend you to do this.

My personal Experience: I was using adsense for about 5 months, the average CPC is about $0.7 while the highest one earning me $3.55/click. After i put adbite onto my site, the adsense average CPC reduced to $0.05/click and the hghest $0.37. My monthly revenues from adsense decreased $300+ while adbrite just earned me $80.

2. Do not put same ad slot on many sites.

Many ppl may really ignored this points, and of course, we do not have the Official proof. But however, it really do some Negative effects on adsense revenue .

For Example:

You have 3 sites, site A, site B and site C and the same/similar template(s). So the same ad slot many good for all the 3 sites, but we recommend you to generate 3 different slots with the same setting and put them separately.

Our testing: We put same ad slot on 5 sites compared with putting 5 ad slots with same setting on the same sites, when we got same click counts -100 clicks, the incomes of different ad slots always higher than the same one.

3. Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V were not Omnipotent.

A site with unique contents always get better click price than the Piracy ones. Our sites which with all original contents always get more earnings than the one which was re-write or reproduced. Both of our sites that are talking about personal finance and, the adsense ads are similar, both 50 percent U.S. visitors but the average CPC is $0.3-0.5 disparity.

4. Do not put your adsense code on Auto-Acquisition sites.

It really do harmful to your revenues and associated with your other sites.

The 4 points above are our first release, if you have any questions or any other opinions, please leave a comment and let’s talking together.

My FAVORITE Way to Get 1st Page Google Rankings Overnight! (A Blogging Trick You Will Love!)

Who else wants to know how to create content for your blogs super fast? And no....I'm not talking about using RSS feeds, or article aggregation or other controversial methods that some people find a bit gray hat, or shady. I'm talking about content that your readers will love, that Google gobbles up and LOVES to index and rank almost immediately and that literally only takes me about 5 minutes per post to do. (and contrary to lots of those "guru" tips you've got to pay for, this is dead simple and free to boot!)

Filed Under: Collaborative Clipping

All I really do is this: I write down a series of 15 premium and valuable 3 word keyword phrases I want to rank for on a sheet of paper, and place it next to my computer. Take the first phrase and Google it. Take a look at the top 5 results and find the most interesting one. (these are sites Google already has determined are "authorities" on this particular phrase and this is an important part of this strategy)

Now, you are going to want to "clip" some content from this site and post it on YOUR blog. I find the browser "Flock" works amazingly well for this -it's free and very similar to Firefox but with TONS of built in social networking advantages for this sort of stuff. (but there are lots of services that will do this if you prefer a different browser) All you really have to do is drag your mouse over the text you want, right click and choose "blog this" from the browser menu.

The content you clipped? It will go into a little poster window, and is ready to be remotely posted to whatever blog you want. (and have set up to work with the browser - don't sweat this part if it sounds complicated, it's not, I promise.....as you'll see when you try it)

Change the TITLE in the poster window to include the keyword phrase that you were targeting above, and then add something cool, unique or interesting in the title. (I like to ask a question, or say something provocative because it helps CTR in the search engines later)

Add an introductory paragraph ABOVE the clipped text, describing the content of the post you "borrowed" and then tell the reader they can check out the full post by clicking on the link below. (which Flock will auto magically hard code for you BACK to the original blog you are mentioning)

Hit post....and that's it! You will now have a blog post on YOUR blog, with your introductory paragraph, the clipped text, AND your own keyword rich title. And you'll have a link back to the original author, which they will really appreciate as well. Plus you'll most likely have a TRACKBACK link on the original blog post as well...giving you an extra link from their blog to yours!

I like to "ping" a few directories and blog search tools as an extra little bonus.....but by and large that's all there is to it! (you can do 8 or 10 of these an hour for different blogs, and it's amazing how well this works for content creation AND for creating real access to real resources that your readers will love to boot!)