The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the last few months. The indexing robot, Yahoo!Slurp, has become erratic. For some sites, the robot will view all pages, but only add a few to the Yahoo database. For other sites, sub-domain listings actually start disappearing! So, what’s the secret to getting indexed?

Pleasing Yahoo!Slurp

The secret to getting indexed in Yahoo involves constant updates to your site. The updates, however, have to be done on both the site and through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Here’s how you go about getting indexed.

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Establishing an Online Business Development Strategy

If you have any aspirations of earning an income online you will need to establish a business development strategy. The reasons are simple, your business venture will have to have a product or service, a way to promote it to the public and a plan to make improvements as needed. In this way your chances for online success will increase dramatically. When working online you will need to adapt to an ever changing environment by adopting new and improved strategies as you move forward, you must evolve!
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5 Steps to Discovering Online Success

Although there are many paths you can take to achieving online success one thing is always certain, the first steps are yours to take. Working online has allow many to realize riches they would have never thought possible otherwise due in part to much lower start up costs. However, starting an internet business is one thing, but growing it into a full time income to replace your day job is quite another.
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Increasing Productivity When Working Online

When you are working online increasing productivity should be an ongoing goal and one you have targeted from the very start. As an entrepreneur you will face many responsibilities and challenges that will test your skills and patience. By facing these challenges and meeting your responsibilities your skill sets will naturally evolve and your personal productivity will increase as well! Along the way one challenge you will continually face is how to maintain and increase your work productivity. Remember, in most cases you will be working alone, so encouragement and assistance from others is not something you will be able to rely upon.
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Starting an Internet Business - What to Expect

When starting an internet business it is common for your enthusiasm and energy levels both to be sky high. The excitement and anticipation of achieving financial independence with your new business venture is understandable and justified. In fact this energy will be needed, especially in the early stages being there will be much to do. On the other hand maintaining realistic expectations also plays a significant role in your online success as well. Expecting too much and too soon can set you up for disappointment and even failure if your expectations are not monitored and managed correctly.
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Earning Online By Not Doing Anything

Someone asked if it is possible to earn online through advertising by simply creating a website and then not really doing anything after that.

Don’t we all want that — to earn on autopilot without doing anything at all?

One of the first mistakes is thinking that you can create a website, leave it and not do anything yet continue to earn from advertising. I know of sites “abandoned” by their owners that continue to earn good advertising income, but these are sites where some great work was done early on (i.e. get optimized for the search engines and links developed).

I think it is possible if you have a page or a few pages of REALLY COMPELLING content that have legs — meaning without any work in terms of adding new content or promoting the page, you can still get constant stream of traffic and people are responding to the ads. This is possible if you have a viral website that attracts visitors like magnet who then share it to others. But that is not easy to pull off.

With millions of websites out there, your first work is to make people find your site. You cannot assume that you simply create a website, forget about it and people will find it — that’s not how the Web works. Without traffic, you won’t have visitors to view or click on the ads — which means no income.

When you create a site, you need to think of two major things:

• content creation
• traffic generation

If you don’t want work in terms of content (meaning you don’t write the articles or you don’t hire writers), then do something like MySpace or Digg or Craigslist where it is the users who actually generate the content. But even then, there’s a lot of work involved in terms of cleaning up the content and keeping the community in check and ensuring that the right technology can support the activities of the site.

If you want to earn online income, then you need to work on it. Maybe not “working hard” but more by “working smart.”

See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

What Should be the Topic of Your Website?

The topic and focus of your website is a result of a number of factors:

What is your objective for creating the website? A website for personal expression is vastly different from a website created to change the way people do things. A website where you are happy to communicate to others your thoughts is different from a website where you aim to earn a million dollars (or more). A website where you share your knowledge is different from a website where you want to see people connect to each other. Your focus and goal will dictate the topic of your website.

What are your interests? After defining your objectives, you can use your interests as a way to narrow and select the topic for your site. If you want to earn money on the Web and you have an interest in pets, you can start an online pet accessory store or advertising-based pet care information site. If you want to attract a huge number of users and you love networking, then you can create the next-generation social networking website.

What are your skills and resources? The level of complexity of your website will depend on your skills as well as the size of your pocket. If you want a social networking site that can earn millions for you, yet you have no tech skills to program and design the website, and you’ve got no money to hire programmers and designers, then your website will remain just a pipe dream. If you can’t do it yourself, you need to have creativity to find the resources to enlist the help of experts to create and design your website.

What is your business model? If your goal with your website is to earn money, then the topic needs to lend itself to earning money for you. If you plan to monetize your website via contextual advertising such as Google Adsense, then you need to choose a high paying topic that attracts users that are responsive to ads.

See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

Local Search Optimization Strategies

The Web may have no borders, but an increasing number of users are looking for products and services available in their local areas. Hence, it is important that you take time to ensure that local customers can find your business when they look at local resources.

Here are some tips on how to ensure that your business is visible in local search:

• Make sure that your business is included in your local phone directories listing.
• Many local directories use content from any of these three content aggregators: InfoUSA, Acxiom and Amacai. Check and update your business listing on these companies.
• Submit your listings to local directories of search engines such as Yahoo Local
• Include your listing in map search such as Google Maps Local Business Center
• Update and check your listing in the top yellow pages and vertical directories. Use Local Search Guide to see listings of yellow pages and vertical directories
• Optimize your pages to rank high in your main keywords as well as in your local area. A well optimized title could include your business name, keyword and location
• Reach out to local bloggers who talk about your area and businesses in your area. Let them know about your business, and if possible, give them a sample of your products and services. Hopefully, they’ll like it enough to write a positive review about your business.
• Find Web sites about your area (e.g. city guide and tourist information area). Check if there’s a way to have your site listed, even featured in the site. Consider advertising as well.

See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

5 Essential Principles to Make Money Online

How to Make Money Online? Whether it is because of the flagging economy or the lure of being able to produce some extra cash to augment their income, more and more people are trying to find ways to make money online.

Many will undoubtedly succeed, but the fact is that the majority of Internet marketing newbies who have no real clue as to what they are doing will give up before they have even begun to do the work required to generate a decent online income.

Which is a shame, really, since there are so many money making opportunities available on the Internet.  The main reason why most newcomers to the arena of online marketing fail to meet the expectations they have set for their businesses is that they have the wrong ideas on how online marketing is supposed to work.

If there is anything that I have learned while plodding through this business as a newbie myself, it is that I will never achieve anything if I stick to certain misconceptions and don’t make the effort to try out ideas that are supposed to work.  The online marketing arena is a huge jungle and if you don’t have the right mindset to make things work for you, then you will only meet failure in the end.

There are five lessons that I have learned the painful way as a newbie in this arena, and these are what I shall impart to you right now.

1. Start with the Right Mindset

The biggest mistake that newcomers to the business typically make is thinking that it doesn’t take a lot of work to make money online.  Sure, the sales page of the online marketing e-book you just bought says generating wealth with an Internet business is very simple.  However, you should never let yourself believe that it is not going to take a lot of work at all.  In fact, you’d be amazed at just how much time and effort you need to spend just to get things up and running.

The thing is that if you want to earn some serious income with an online business, you had better be prepared to work for it.  The first six months will be the most crucial for the long-term survival of your business, and the amount of effort you put into it will determine just how successful your business will be in the long run.

2. Never Work Alone

Working online sometimes gives you that sense that you’re all alone in this game.  It may certainly feel like it, but that is one trap that you must avoid at all costs.  With all the work that you need to do to establish your online business, you will not be able to get much done if you work on your own.

First, you need to find a mentor.  If the Internet marketing guru from whom you bought the system that you are using offers one-on-one mentoring, you should make a beeline for it.  You will never know what gems you can pick up from that kind of personalized mentoring.  But if you cannot avail of that one, you should scour the Internet for other learning resources as well as connect with other Internet marketers like you.  You can profit a lot from the exchange of ideas you will get from these interactions.

Second, you should hire people to do some of the work you need to do.  For example, if writing is one of your weaker points, then you should hire a freelance writer to do your writing for you.  With all the work that you need to do to get your business going, you should learn to leverage your time by using other people’s time to get those tasks done.  Focus on what you can do and delegate the other tasks to the people you hired.

3. Don’t Expect to Earn Something Out of Nothing

All businesses require some sort of capital.  This is a business we are talking about, after all, and so you will need capital to get your business running.  If you are really serious about your business, do not hesitate to shell out some cash for the essential stuff.  At the very least, you should invest some $10 on a website domain and some more on the fees and salaries of the freelancers you will hire.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.  I don’t deny that the idea of being a bum marketer, where you can earn money online without spending a lot as business capital, does work from time to time.  But the money that you will earn from being a bum marketer will come in trickles, not serious enough to make you wealthy but enough to get you some extra change from time to time.  If you’re only after some extra cash, then you can be a bum marketer.  However, if you want to generate a really decent income, prepare to make an investment in return.

4. Don’t Spend for What You Can Get for Free

Having said that you have to spend some to make some, you should also know that there is also some stuff that you can benefit from for free.  It is up to you to find out what these things that you need for your business that you can get without spending a dime.

For example, if you want to make money online through blogging, you do not have to pay for a webhost provider for your blog if you cannot afford it.  You do not have to hire a web designer to make you a blog template, either.  Instead, you can try out free hosting services like Google’s Blogger and download some free templates.  Just buy a unique domain name for your blog and then point it to your Blogger account.

5. Always Deliver Quality

The most important lesson that you must bear in mind is that at all times, you should deliver quality – to your customers, to your team, and even to yourself.  Needless to say, you have to make sure that the products you have to offer your customers are impeccable in quality.  They should be worth the money you are asking as payment for them.  In addition to that, you should treat your team with fairness as well.  Pay them according to the effort they have given the work you assigned them; also, a little kindness goes a long way.

Lastly, you should expect quality for yourself.  Remember that the success of your business lies in your own hands.  Give your business your all if you expect to get a lot out of it.  Never settle for less.

See more: www.quickonlinetips.com

5 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

The majority of Web site owners have fewer than 10 incoming links to their sites. The search engines view incoming links as verification that your site has quality content. The more related links your site has from other sites (with the underlined clickable text that includes your targeted keywords), the higher your ranking in the search engines will be. Here is a step-by-step overview of this entire SEO process:

1. Select your keywords.

Use tools such as the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, Google's Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Word tracker to determine which related keywords or key phrases it would be best to optimize your site for. Once you have a list of potential keywords, go to Google and type in those keywords. Then see how many incoming links the top few sites have. You can determine this number by typing in "link:http://www.competitordomain.com." Take a look at whether the first few sites have the targeted keyword in the domain name or in the title, or whether they appear often on their page. Use this information to estimate what it would take to get your site above the current sites in the rankings.

2. Ensure that your site has those keywords on it.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are on your home page at least five times. Having a 5 percent to 15 percent keyword density for your targeted search term on your home page is optimal. Also ensure that your title tag and image alt tags contain your targeted keyword. Add your targeted term to an H1 header tag for added prominence.

3. Build good-quality content on your site.

I call this phase the "content campaign." Either write articles yourself for the site or go through the search engines to find related content. If you find an article on another site that you'd like to publish on your site, send an e-mail to the author, site owner, and/or publisher to request permission to syndicate the article on your site. Present it as a win/win quid pro quo in which you receive good-quality content and the author/publisher receives free exposure and a link to his or her Web site in the byline of the article. I'd suggest having at least 25 quality articles on your site before going forward. Optimize your home page for the two or three most competitive target terms. Optimize your in-site pages for the more unique and less competitive terms. You can also outsource the creation of this content to copywriters, using a service such as elance.com, for about $30 per 400-word article.

4. Build links to your Web site.

Without incoming links to your site, it will never have a chance at being at the top of the search engines for competitive terms. Use the research you did earlier on the number of links the sites at the top of the listings have or your targeted keywords to set a goal for how many related incoming links you want to build to your own site.

To obtain links, go through the search engines and find related Web sites, then contact the owners of those sites and offer to exchange links. Add their links to your Web site and e-mail them to let them know that you've linked to their sites and would appreciate a reciprocal link.

I'd suggest contacting them first via e-mail and then via phone if necessary. In your initial e-mail to site owners, include the URL and description of your site, as well as the location of where their links are and which sites of theirs you are referring to. I'd suggest creating a resources section on your site and placing your link partners in the appropriate category within.

You can also build links naturally through press releases or by having great content, a useful tool, a viral video, or an interesting blog. If you have more money than time, you can also purchase relevant links from quality Web sites through a service called LinkExperts or purchase reviews with links from sites such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Blogvertise. Ensure that whatever links you build to your Web site have your target key phrase in the anchor text, the words that are clickable and underlined. Finally, text links are much more valuable than image links, as the search engines can follow text links and associate the link text with your Web site, but they cannot do this for image links.

5. Continue building your site's reputation.

Once you have built a few related incoming links, the search engines
will find and index your site. If your site is new, it can take up to nine months for Google to allow it to show up for competitive search terms. During this time, continue building good-quality related content and work to build as many incoming links from related Web sites as you can.

Author Ryan P. Allis is CEO of iContact Corp., a venture-backed marketing and online communications firm that has grown from nothing to over $10 million in annual sales and 80 employees. He is also the Chairman of the web marketing firm Virante, Inc. For more information on Ryan Allis and Zero to One Million, visit www.zeromillion.com. See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

12 Ways to Create an Effective Facebook Page

Facebook is one of the most popular web destinations today with 500 million users from around the world. As such, businesses have taken note of how Facebook can be used to reach customers. Facebook presence is now considered an important marketing tool for big and small businesses alike.

Facebook offers the Fan Page where businesses can create a page and interact with Facebook users. The more engaged your fans are on your Facebook Page, the more successful your Facebook presence will be and the more likely future fans will be to join your Page.

But how do you create an effective Facebook page? Here are some tips we’ve compiled on how to create a Facebook page that works for you:

1. Study how your competitors are doing their Facebook page. It is important to know your niche and what makes FB users tick. Study what your competitors are posting. Take time to find the FB pages of businesses in your niche to see what the users are following. Look at the types of posts that get the most comments, the most likes – and consider using those types of content in your FB page to use as bait while you build your fan base. Also look at the tabs your competitors are using as well as the applications on their FB page.

2. Provide interesting content in your FB page. What you post in your FB page must be engaging and informative enough so users will like your page. More importantly, you want your fans to return to your page and even visit your website and the links that you post in your FB page.

3. Run Facebook ads. Big brands and well-known websites and businesses can easily attract thousands of Facebook fans immediately. But not many small businesses. You may need a little help getting the word out about your FB page and an effective way is to run FB ads if you have the budget for it. FB ads allow you to target potential audiences and can provide you with the beginning traffic for your page. Target your competitors FB pages or friends, or other specific demographics) and bring them over to your page. Run one or two ad campaigns until you’ve reached a predetermined number, or your page becomes viral on its own.

Note, though, that you can control what tab users will land on your FB Page. So you can create specific landing tabs for each of the campaigns that you run.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of the page image. This icon will represent your brand on FB. It is important to create an eye grabbing, sharp and clean logo or icon for your FB page. It’s a 200 pixel wide box and make sure that your image fits into that box. It will appear as the icon beside all your posts in your FB page as well as in the newsfeeds of all your fans.

5. Think of ways you can tag users in photos and videos. When you tag a user on FB, their network of friends sees it. If they even check out the photos, which reside in your Page’s album, then you get more users to check out your page. The challenge though, is finding out ways you can ask users to submit photos and videos to you so you can tag them from your page. Tagging is an effective method for spreading the word about your fan page, though not the easiest to implement.

6. Keep your Wall interesting. The “wall” is the first thing users will see when they come to your site. It is the front door to your FB page; and in many cases, the only page users will look at. Keep it full of relevant information and keep it interesting.

7. Experiment on the optimal patterns of posting. Some businesses try to limit their posts a day (some even post only once) as posting too often – and hijacking the news feed of followers – is one of the fastest way of losing fans. Check also what time is best in terms of posting where you get the most interaction to your posting. Some users find 11am – 3pm EDT as the best time period for their postings, but it differs based on your type of business and audiences.

8. Use apps to increase engagement. Your goal in your FB page is to keep the fans coming back and share the content on your page. Oftentimes, posting on the Wall is not enough. You need to use various applications to keep the engagement level high. There are more than 55,000 applications on the Facebook platform, and a huge number of them can be integrated into your fan page. Some of these apps can help you expand the functionality of your FB page, such as Static FBML which allows you to put in interactive elements to your Page, such as clickable images, anchor text and interactive content.

9. Consider separating your business account with your personal account. Just announce to your personal friends your Facebook page and keep a link to it in your personal profile. Your personal friends may be annoyed to constantly see you posting links about your business. They are not your target audiences: remember, they friend you on FB because they want to interact with you, not with your business.

10. Watch out for spammers. There will be Facebook users who will try to spam your FB page and put their business opportunity or other non-relevant postings in your Wall. Have a strategy on what types of postings you will allow in your Wall, what you will consider irrelevant and what types of postings need to be deleted.

11. Constantly review what your audiences look for in your page. Know what interests your audience. Monitor the postings that get the most response on your Facebook wall. Find out the topics that generate the most discussions. Then be sure to provide those content or information to them.

12. Be persistent. Facebook marketing is not a one-day thing, and for most, does not happen overnight. It is important to keep engaging your fans regularly. Continue posting interesting content, constantly looking for ways how your Facebook presence can fit with your overall business goals (e.g. increased sales, more site traffic).

If you’re not yet on board with Facebook, why are you passing up what is, essentially, free advertising?

See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

How to Earn Advertising for Your Small Website or Blog

I attended today an event sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for long tail publishers, a fancy ad-speak for small publishers. For all of the participants in the event, the most popular way to earn income from the site is through advertising, with Google Adsense often as the ad network of choice.

Inspired by the discussions during the event, I realized that it is important to constantly ask the following questions when you are trying to earn advertising for your website or blog:

• With the ad networks you are using, are you maximizing the earnings potential of your site?
• Should you use Adsense exclusively, or should you use other ad networks as well?
• What other ad networks can you use with Adsense to maximize your earnings?
• How can you use Adsense together with other ad networks to generate the best income potential of your site?
• Do you know how to skip the middlemen (ad networks) and go straight to the advertisers? Do you plan to sell ads yourself?
• Do you want to win the ad business of big companies — which often work with media agencies? Do you want the hassle and all the requirements (request for proposal, special ad codes, impression audit, etc.) that often comes with working with media agencies?

If you are planning on earning from advertising for your website or blog, here are some items to consider:

• Believe that you can do something to increase your revenues. Do not buy into the notion that you can’t do anything with Adsense (or any other ad network) to increase your income. You control the site, and there’s always a way to increase the income it generates. The answer may be finding ways to increase your traffic. Or changing your site design to make your ads stand out without cheapening the content. Or it can be to find and use other ad networks in conjunction with Adsense. Whatever you do, do not fall into the trap of thinking that there’s nothing you can do to improve your site’s advertising revenues.
• Shop around to find the right ad programs for you. There are a number of ad programs out there that you can check out. Some examples would be Kontera http://www.kontera.com  and Chitika http://www.chitika.com  – and determine how you can make them work together on your site. Study the effective cost per thousand impression (eCPM) that you get for each of the ad networks you are using, and give priority to those that give you better eCPM and revenues.
• Carefully examine the type of visitors your site is attracting. Do they tend to click on ads? Or do they basically ignore your ads? Your Adsense income mostly depends on the responsiveness of your visitors to your ads. If your visitors do not tend to click on the ads, then you may be better off to go with a cost per impression ad monetization model, instead of Adsense’s cost per click model. Try ad networks such as BurstMedia http://www.burstmedia.com  or TribalFusion http://www.tribalfusion.com
• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It is hard to rely only on one income source. Imagine the worst case scenario: If Adsense is your only way to earn money from your site, what will you do if Google kicks you out of the program for whatever reason? All of a sudden, you lost the only income source of your website! That is scary; sort of like losing your job especially if your website is your main source of livelihood.
• Study carefully how your ad networks (such as Google Adsense) are performing in your site. Use channels to analyze what pages bring in the most Adsense income: ad format that performs the best, placement of the ads, and pages in your site that does well (or not). You may not want to mess with the pages where Adsense really performs well, but you may want to totally remove or use other ad networks on pages that Adsense is not doing well.
• Test, test and test. Determine the best ad format, the best placement of the ads, and the best ad network to use. If you are daisy chaining your ad network – e.g. 5 ad networks in a medium rectangle rotating – try experimenting and use only one network and see how it affects your ad revenue.
• In preparing to sell ads yourself, get as much data as you can about your website. If you are planning to start approaching advertisers directly, be prepared to show to them data about your site. They will want to know about your traffic and your demographics (don’t confuse the two!). In some cases, work with your advertisers to get data and information on the results of spending ad dollars in your site. You can use this information as testimonials to convince future advertisers, or as a case studies that you can include in your media kit.
• To target big advertisers, bring loads of patience.  Big advertisers will very rarely work with you directly, and instead refer you to their media buying agency. However, working with agencies is not easy. They will demand request for proposals to see if your site is worthy of their client’s advertising dollars. After dedicating precious hours working on the RFP, don’t be surprised to hear that your site didn’t make the cut. In fact, for many small publishers, the hassle of dealing with the demands of big advertiser and their overworked media agencies are simply not worth it.

See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

How to Earn Money from Blogging

If you are looking for a way to earn money from the Web and love to write, then consider starting a blog. Blogs have become an important online medium, with some bloggers attaining huge success and earning good money from their online writings.

There are a number of ways you can earn money from a blog. Note though that earning money will not be easy and will not come quick, as you will have to first build an audience, establish your credibility and prove that your blog is worth reading.

The video covers primarily the advertising route to earning money from your blog. You can post ads – whether by impression, per click or per action – in your blog and you get paid accordingly. Some advertisers will compensate you for every 1,000 views of their ad. Some are cost per click, where you earn money when a visitor clicks on an ad. Others will pay you only when you give them a sale or a lead. Watch the video to learn how you can earn money for your blog through advertising and read the articles “How to Earn from Your Blog”  and “How to Make Money from Blogs and Blogging”

However, here are other ways you can earn from your blog:

1. Get paid to write.

One way to earn money by blogging is through pay per post programs, where you write about a company’s products or services and you get paid for the post. For some programs, you can set the price you are willing to accept per post, even set a price per word as well as a price per link. Depending on your traffic and topic, some pay per posts can earn you as little as $10 per post or as high as $1,000.

Examples of pay per post programs include

• PayPerPost http://www.payperpost.com
• Smorty http://www.smorty.com
• Blogitive http://my.blogitive.com/pages/howto
• Loud Launch http://www.loudlaunch.com
• Blogging Ads http://www.bloggingads.com
• SponsoredReviews http://www.sponsoredreviews.com
• Blogvertise http://www.blogsvertise.com

Check the requirements of these pay per post programs. Some will require you to disclose that the blog post is a paid post. Others will allow you to freely write whatever you want as long as you include the advertiser’s link in your post. Others will require you to write a post based on the advertiser’s press release or marketing materials.

Be careful though. While pay per post can be very profitable – it is not uncommon for some bloggers to earn $100 a day — many frown on pay per post programs. Your own visitors may be turned off when you sing praises for a product or service because they paid you to write favorably for them. Search engines also frown on these programs, with the possibility that your blog may be penalized and page rank stripped.

2. Become a Freelance Blogger.
There are companies, including non-profit organizations, which want to start a blog but have limited manpower to maintain the blog, write its content and even market the blog. Hence, they look for freelance bloggers who can write for them.

You will need to prove that you are adept at blogging with a creative writing style and solid grammar. You will be asked to submit samples of your blog posts to see if it matches the style and tone of the blog.

Go to sites such as eLance.com http://www.elance.com  to look for jobs hiring freelance bloggers. On eLance.com, for example, there are about 15,000 jobs listings for a blogger in the last 15 days.

How to Make Money from Blogs

Webopedia defines a blog as “a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author.”

Blogs have become a popular tool for both businesses and individuals to share their voice, thoughts and musings to the world. Some blogs are created to give a more “humane” face to a business, allow interaction with customers, even as a tool to generate traffic. Others write blogs to share their passions and attract like-minded individuals.

Whatever the reason for creating a blog, the next question is: What can you do to make money from your blog?

Here are steps to starting a blog and earning money from your writings:

1. Set up your blog. You can have the option of using their URL (e.g. http://widgetsblog.blogger.com) or use the blog software in your own domain name (http://www.widgetsblog.com). Some of these are free, while some has monthly/annual subscription

Here are some places that will allow you to create your own blog

• Blogger http://www.blogger.com
• Typepad http://www.typepad.com/
• Moveable Type http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/
• Wordpress http://www.wordpress.org/

However, if you are thinking of using your blog to earn money, you need to check first with the blog platform whether they allow ads to be put on the blogs. Some blog platforms have strict policies and will delete your blog if you put ads on them. Blogger.com, being owned by Google which also runs the contextual advertising program Adsense, is one of the ads-friendly blog platforms around.

2. Create great content. Everything starts with content. With great content, you can attract more traffic and more engaged visitors, which gives you higher likelihood of monetizing your blog.

Why will they want to read your blog? Why will they want to spend their time in your blog? Provide value, useful information and other benefits to the readers. Your blog can contain up-to-the-minute news and analysis; or it could be a witty and amusing look at pop culture. Give a reason why visitors will frequent your blog.

3. Get traffic to your blog.
You can't earn from your blog if the blog does not have traffic. Many make the mistake of believing that once they create a blog, people will immediately flock to it. There are millions out there so why would they visit your blog?

Getting traffic is going to be your biggest challenge. Here is a comprehensive list of places where you can list your blogs and syndicate its content - Resources for Marketing Your Blogs and RSS Feeds

One useful technique for getting traffic to your blog is to use carnivals. Carnivals are a technique for showcasing your blog. Carnivals occur once a week to once a month, and you need to submit your blog post to the carnival moderator. Find blog carnivals that fit your topic at BlogCarnival.com http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

4. Think of how to monetize your blog. One of the most common ways of earning money from blogs is through advertising and donations. Here are some ways you can earn money from your blog:

Contextual advertising programs

• Google Adsense  = Adsense is one of the easiest to join and best way to make money from blogs, and Google’s ownership of Blogger.com makes it easy to start earning from blogs
• Yahoo Publisher Network  = in addition to their contextual advertising program, also offers RSS advertising
• Chitika eMinimalls   = contextual advertising that pays per click and focuses on product-based advertisers

Blog-specific ad networks

• Federated Media Publishing   = ad network that represents high traffic and most influential blogs offering mostly through CPM and flat rate advertising
• AdGridwork   = an advertising network offering text ads; as well as a traffic exchange network

RSS Advertising

• Feedburner   = text link ads in RSS feeds are offered by CPM basis
• Moreover’s Feed Direct   = advertising program which inserts contextual ads in the RSS feeds (in partnership with Kanoodle)
• Pheedo  = RSS ads are both CPM and CPC basis, and appear at the end of each post
• BidVertiser Ads For Feed   = the contextual ad agency now offers an advertising program for RSS feeds
• Feedvertising  = run text link ads in RSS feeds via flat rate pricing (not CPM or CPC)

Other sources of income

• Text link ads - you can sell for fixed price for a fixed period of time
• Donations (yes, you can beg)
• Affiliate programs such as Commission Junction http://www.cj.com  and the Amazon Associates program

 See more: www.powerhomebiz.com

How to Earn from Your Blog

Everyone wants to jump in on the blogging bandwagon.

Blogs are the cheapest and most inexpensive way of getting an online presence. With a number of free and easy to use services available, you can create a blog in minutes. Because the blog creation process is simplier than website creation, blogs enable many individuals and businesses to easily publish a stream of constantly updated journals and commentaries.

More than just a display of their wit and knowledge, bloggers are now taking their blogs to the next step: blogs as a source of revenue. Many even turn their blogs into their main business! However, creating a blog is easy; turning it into a money making machine is a different story.

Business 2.0 Magazine recently had a very interesting article “Blogging for Dollars,”  mainly through advertising. You’d be surprised to know that some of the top bloggers nowadays are raking in huge income from their blogs! Boing Boing, PaidContent.org and Fark.com are among those likely to earn a million dollars in ad revenues this year. TechCrunch, a one-person blog ranked by Technorati as the 6th most popular blog, earns $60,000 a month in ad revenues. Just by posting a few paragraphs everyday, these bloggers are earning big time.

So how do you turn your blog into money making online business? Here are the steps you need to take to earn millions from your blog:

Adopt the Right Strategy. Many bloggers start their blogs to share and talk about their passion. Sometimes their blog catches on and generates huge followers, while some lay in a dusty alley in cyberspace.

If you are thinking of starting a blog or using your existing blog to earn money, you need to be more strategic in your approach. Here are several factors to consider:

• Does this blog -- given its type and subject matter – has the potential to attract a huge audience?
• Is this a blog that advertisers would want to be seen?
• Do I know enough about the subject matter to engage the readers?
• Am I using the right venues to generate income for the blog?

Select the Right Income Generating Approach. There are various ways and avenues to earn advertising income from a blog, and the right partner or approach can spell the difference in earning $100 or $10,000 per month.

In terms of advertising models, consider if you will use cost per impression (CPM) advertising where you earn per thousand-ad impression. Or you can go through the cost per click (CPC) approach where you earn every time someone clicks on the adverts you show. Another approach is cost per action (CPA) where you can get paid every time a visitor follows through with the action desired by the advertiser, such as qualified lead, purchase or subscription. Or you can decide to use all three advertising models in your blog (making sure that your blog is not too cluttered with ads).

There are several ways you can proceed to start earning through advertising:

• Join an advertising network. Advertising networks are organizations that aggregate Web sites that offer advertising space, and sell banner ads (and other advertising options) across them. Traffic requirement is often a minimum of 5,000 monthly impressions and they accept sites hosted on its top-level domain (e.g. no free Blogger or Yahoo 360 hosted blogs). Check if they accept blog sites. Examples are:

          -  Burst Media http://www.burstmedia.com
          -  Fastclick (ValueClick). http://www.fastclick.com
          -  Advertising.com. http://www.advertising.com
          -  Tribal Fusion http://www.tribalfusion.com

• Participate in contextual advertising networks. Contextual adverts are text ads delivered based on the content of the web page using an automated system. They are mostly cost per clicks, but some such as Adsense incorporates both CPM and CPA advertising revenue models

          -  Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/
          -  Yahoo! Publishing Network http://publisher.yahoo.com/
          -  Intellixt http://vibrantmedia.com/site/web_01a5.htm
          -  Quigo Adsonar http://www.quigo.com/adsonarexchange.htm
          -  IndustryBrains http://www.industrybrains.com
          -  Commission Junction Evolution http://www.cj.com
          -  Kanoodle Brightads http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.html
          -  Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com/affiliate_programs.php
          -  Contextweb http://www.contextweb.com/
          -  Bidclix http://www.bidclix.com/

• Use advertising networks that cater specifically to bloggers. This is a very new segment and very few companies are selling ads specifically for blogs. They typically work with high-traffic and high profile blogs. Examples are

     -  An up-and-coming company funded by the New York Times Co. and eBay founder Pierre Omudyar called Federated Media http://fmpub.net is at the forefront of serving as the advertising broker for bloggers. They represent some of the most popular blogs today. Their advertisers include big names such as Absolut, Adobe, Apple, Budget Rental Car, Citibank, Dreamworks, GM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, among others.
    -  FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) http://www.feedburner.com is an invitation-only ad network for bloggers. They consider those blogs using FeedBurner services such as feed management, size of your blog’s readership and consistency, and frequency of content publication.
    -  RSS advertising where you can put ads on your RSS feeds. Google Adsense offers the capability to put ads in RSS feeds (provided that the feed has at least 100 subscribers).

• Sponsorships. Sell advertising for your blog directly. This is admittedly a more difficult route for a small business site wanting to earn advertising revenues. But hey, as they say: "no pain, no gain!"

Target the Right Audience. If you are thinking of starting a blog to earn money, you first need to have the “right kind” of blog. The “right” kind of blog is a blog that appeals to advertisers because it attracts the audience they want.

For example, a blog that caters to techies will attract more advertisers compared to a blog for squirrel enthusiasts. Advertisers prefer blogs whose audience includes those who have the penchant to buy high-end products compared to blogs whose main audiences are families and friends of the author. The more attractive the blog is to advertisers, the higher the income of the blog.

Think of the audience you want to read your blog, and whether you can pitch this audience to an advertiser.

Generate Tons of Traffic. Building a larger audience for your blog is the surest way to succeed with an advertising revenue model. It is important to build a strong and wide readership base for your blog. Whether you are running cost per impression or cost per click advertising revenue model, the amount of traffic can significantly affect the level of income. To increase traffic to your blog, here are some steps to take

• Create great content – everything starts with great content.
• Update the content regularly – make your visitors come back again and again to your blog by providing daily updates (even multiple posts per day!)
• Submit your blog to blog directories – use Resources for Marketing Blogs
• Network with other bloggers – comment on their blogs, read and link to other blogs and request them to link back to you
• Email other bloggers – pitch your post to other bloggers and hope that they will link or mention your blog
• Use techniques to showcase your blog – examples include meme games such as the Daily Meme http://thedailymeme.com/ or carnival such as the Carnival of Entrepreneurship hosted by About.com

A Nielsen Buzz Metrics Blog Pulse report that there are 32.9 million blogs on the Internet today with 850,000 new posts a day. It’s high time to think of how you can make money from your blog.


About The Author:

Nach Maravilla is the Publisher and CEO of PowerHomeBiz.com. For information on starting a home business , visit PowerHomeBiz.com

Why Work Online: How to Start an Online Home Business

With the ongoing recession you may have lost the ‘comfort zone’ feeling which you always maintain in relation to your job. ‘Working online’ is perhaps not a phrase included in most past edition dictionaries and it is only until recently that the words have become familiar to us. When searching for work at home opportunities, try searching for the magic keywords “Online based home business” or “work online”.

What if it is your turn to exit next? Downsizing, Re-Sizing, Re-Organizing… whatever they want to call it is happening right now, it’s real, it’s current and it’s coming to a company near you. Perhaps it’s the organization that you work in that has to fold, or merge, or restructure or whatever corporate speak is currently used. What is your plan B? Searching for another job is tough. Really tough. And employers call the shots. Today, people talk a lot about the global crisis and its adverse effects in your economic life. Cybernet has come to the rescue by providing opportunities in easing economic crisis.

What Does Working Online Mean?
Fundamentally nothing more than having a computer… and an internet connection. Working online is a job or employment done at home.

What are the Advantages in Online Employment?

Being a online employee, you are given the choice of working part-time or full-time as with any ‘normal’ job – minus the commuting. Also, you can choose to be paid bi-weekly, monthly or get paid on a per project basis with online job employment.

For those coming from developing countries, working at home payments are tax-free since the dollars you earned are changed into the currency of your country.

The online employment work can be easy and relatively quick if you manage to get a job that matches your skills. If you are efficient and can keep deadlines in submitting your assignments, you are guaranteed continuous work from home.

The advantages of online employment are, you are working from home and therefore there’s no need to commute, you eliminate the everyday hassle of dressing up and the preparation of leaving the house and now you can spend more quality time with your family.

What Online Work is Available?

There are hundreds of jobs you can do online – too numerous to mention all here, but some of the more popular are:

Typing – You will be typing papers for professionals, especially for doctors (medical transcription) and lawyers (legal transcription). Transcriptionists are much on demand and able to earn high income. Professionals have always a bulk of papers to be typed which their office cannot do on time. A good grasp of legal or medical terms are essential.

Network marketing – You will be selling products and services and at the same time. You will also need to organize your own sales force and for every sales of your member, you get extra commission. This is a low risk type of occupation and only need your sales charisma. Telemarketing – Your only activity is to sell a product or service on line. This is an amazing way to earn and it gives you rich potentials.

Online advertising – You will be posting the company’s ads, banners and short texts online. No prior skills are needed as you will be provided with a step-by-step video guide.

Online Tutoring – If you have teaching skills and qualifications, you can work for an internet based training and schooling company. You will be tutoring students of all ages in several subject areas. Working hours are flexible depending upon the student’s schedule.

How Can You Tell if This Home Job is a Scam or Legitimate?
Hang on to your money, do not send any for home directories or start up kits for work at home jobs. Testimonials and photos are not even reliable security of a legitimate any more when searching for online work. Check out the job listing. Do your research. Ask questions via email, and call up the numbers the sites publish. Speak to the people involved and gauge if this is the right company to work with.

Start an Online Business
Learning more information about starting a online business will guarantee your success. Starting an online business can be easy to begin and you can do it even if you have a full time job. Many success stories come from people starting and being successful with an online home based business.

Fast Facts About Running an Online Business:
There is no perfect business and there will always be short comings, learn to live by them. Persistence, consistency, taking the initiative to try new methods, as well as the willingness to give wholehearted efforts is crucial to your success. This is not a quick-rich opportunity and does not promise an immediate large income. A detailed plan for execution and how to go about organizing your business are provided. These positive attitudes are your bridges to success.

What are the Disadvantages of Working Online?

One thing many people find is that can they can feel isolated doing an online home business. After all there is little interaction with others as compared to a typical job such as working in an office or factory. To remedy this problem, change your life style and plan your days with social interaction in place. Your social and outside contacts are limited when working from home but only to the extent you let it.

As you can see, there are many ways to make money on the internet. Here we have outlined only a few of them. As with everything else worth doing, you will need to be persistent, consistent and a never give up attitude to succeed.

About the Author:

George Vlismas is an online business mentor and entrepreneur who specializes in helping you, and other serious-minded entrepreneurs, use internet marketing to start, build, promote and expand your home based online businesses and create multiple, passive income streams. How To Build Your $100,000 a year Online Business – Get My ‘6 Pages to 6 Figures’ Free Report here: http://www.TotalOnlineProfits.com