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Oct
18
Making Money with Your Blog
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
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There is a lot of buzz these days around blogging for money. In truth, it is more difficult to make money this way than some may lead you to believe. However, if approached properly, blogging can become a very profitable exercise. Let’s discuss some easy, practical steps you can take towards creating an online blogging presence that will make money for you.
First and foremost, a personal little blog is not going to do it. Some people believe they can blog about their daily lives and make money. I hate to burst your bubble, but your life isn’t that interesting. Don’t take offense – nobody’s life is that interesting! If you want to pull traffic, you are going to need to offer a topic or topics that interest people, and in many cases answer questions that people have. For instance, an Internet Marketing blog might have all general IM posts, or may be divided into sections for PPC posts, article marketing posts, affiliate marketing posts, and product creation posts. Such a blog offers a subject many people are interested in, many subdivisions of that subject that people want more information about, and the posts can give great tips, advice, or share experience that can help others.
After beginning a blog focused around your niche, sprinkle a little Adsense around it. Try to keep your Adsense in places that receive the most focus – the top of your blog (specifically top left if you can), between paragraphs in the text, or at the bottom right after the text ends, for people who are looking for more information after reading your post. These locations seem to do well. However, making money with an Adsense-only blog can be very difficult. There is one more thing you should do to make your blog more profitable.
Once you have established yourself a little and built some rapport with your readers, you want to begin sprinkling affiliate products into your posts. Don’t overdo this or you will run your readership away! However, in a post describing a particular problem, you may post a link to a product that solves that problem. That link would be your affiliate link, and any sales resulting from your blog post’s link would pay commissions to you. You might even want to place one or two graphical or text affiliate links to useful, relative products in the sidebar or sidebars of your blog. Be sure you don’t make it difficult to search your blog for all the ads and affiliate links! You want your users to feel that you are blogging for them first and foremost, and your affiliate links are merely helpful suggestions you are making.
By establishing yourself in a niche, offering useful information to your readers, and sprinkling your blog with tastefully-positioned ads and affiliate links, you will begin to see an income coming through your blog. Congratulations, you have succeeded! Now continue to tweak and test what works well and what doesn’t so that you can continue to make your blog more and more profitable for yourself, while becoming more and more appealing to your target audience.
Oct
10
Save Money on Your PPC Campaign
Filed Under Pay-Per-Click Tips | Leave a Comment
One of the biggest problems for new internet marketers is learning how to advertise using PPC without spending a fortune. Luckily, there are several great ways to go about this, some can help you to lower the costs of your PPC campaigns while others require no investment at all. Let’s take a look at some of these methods.
PPC Ad Campaigns
Poorly constructed ad campaigns can drain your money faster than almost any other form of online marketing, and if you are a beginner, chances are you are making some crucial mistakes that are costing you big time! The best thing you can do is find some books that focus on writing effective ads for ppc campaigns, study and keep tweaking your ads until you see the results you’re aiming for.
Keyword-Targeted Campaigns
Keyword-targeted campaigns are the most commonly used campaigns, so keywords are either your best friends or your worst enemies. Many sources of internet marketing “knowledge” seem to state that giant lists of general keywords are the best route for pulling traffic. While this does pull lots of traffic, short, general keywords are more often than not the downfall of an otherwise good campaign. Lots of traffic equates into lots of per-click costs. General keywords, however, do not generally bring converting traffic. The thing to remember about traffic is this – one highly-targeted potential buyer is worth thousands of non-targeted non-buyers.
Trim your keywords and remove general, slightly-related terms that are only meant to pull more people in. These keywords, in almost every case, will not convert. They will also cost you quite a bit more per click. Go for the long-tail keywords and the highly-targeted keywords. Allow me to explain.
Long tail keywords
These are keywords that consist of four or more words. Let’s say you’re selling a product to teach people to make money online. “Make money online”, “make money”, “earn money”, and similar search terms are some of the most awful keywords you could possibly use, as these are some of the most over-used and therefore over-priced keywords possible! Use some keyword programs and sites to get some long-tail keywords however, and you may end up with a list with keywords such as “earn more money online today”, “make money as an internet marketer”, “how do I make more money online”, etc. These terms are going to pull less traffic, but if you put together a good number of long-tails, you will still pull a substantial number of hits. The great part is that long-tail keywords are going to cost you substantially less than the general keywords, and therefore you get twice the traffic for half the price.
Highly-Targeted keywords
These are keywords such as “Buy product”, “Purchase product”, and “Order product”. These terms are very specific, and will bring in those searchers who are ready to purchase a product right now. This is some of the best traffic your site will see!
Site-Targeted Campaigns
Site-Targeted campaigns in Google are an often overlooked but highly profitable way of running a campaign. Find the sites at the top of an organic search for your keywords, put them into your site-targeted campaign, and watch those sites’ traffic filter into yours for a fraction of the cost of PPC.
Hopefully these ideas will help you save some money on your PPC campaigns. Once you master PPC technques you can use them over and over for every product you sell.
Oct
4
As the most popular PPC engine available, Google Adwords is a must when using PPC to pull traffic to your sites. However, because it’s the most popular PPC engine, keywords are often expensive, and a short-run campaign can cost a fortune. Luckily, there are a few ways to get more traffic yet still spend less money using Adwords. Here’s three amazing Adwords tips you can try…
Tip One: Use Hyper-Targeted Keywords
Hyper-Targeted keywords are the actual keywords that sell – the ones that indicate your surfer is sitting there, credit card in hand, ready to make the purchase. In general, I use the following three phrases when selling a “product”:
Buy Product
Purchase Product
Order Product
And of course, use each of them with all of Google’s features – in quotations and in brackets, for each type of matching. So for instance, instead of just Buy Product, you would use: Buy Product, “Buy Product”, and [Buy Product]. Depending on how hot an item you have chosen, these three primary power words – Buy, Purchase, and Order – can bring you more targeted traffic than you know what to do with, and these are people who are ready to purchase right now!
Tip Two: Use Site-Targeting
Another feature of Adwords that most users completely ignore is the site-targeting option. Campaigns can be keyword-targeted or site-targeted. The beauty of site targeting is that you can target sites at the top of the organic Google searches. This works better in some cases than others, obviously, but when it works, you end up paying a fraction of the cost for clicks that you would for keyword-targeted campaigns.
For best results, choose a few top keyword phrases and enter them into Google. Look at the first 5 results for each one (or more if you like) and notice whether or not those sites use Adsense. Also notice the Adsense placement – is it near the top of the screen? The top left position is best, but as long as the ads are visible without scrolling the page, that site is a great candidate. When you paste that site’s root into Adwords, it may or may not be approved. If it is an approved site-targeted ads site, you’re in business. Now edit the campaign and change the site’s root out with the direct link you got from your Google search – now only that page will show your ad! Your CPM will be much lower than if the entire site was showing your ads, and you know your traffic is coming from people who searched for the term you entered.
Tip Three: Show the item’s price in your ad
This one may sound simple, but it can really go a long way towards weeding out expensive clicks that had no intention of converting. In my experience, showing the item’s price in the ad has weeded out approximately 80% of non-buyer clicks. It reduces the total number of clicks, of course, but those clicks are higher quality traffic. This is especially effective if your price is lower than most other prices on the same product elsewhere.
These three little Adwords (PPC) tips will give you an advantage in the Adwords game.
