I spent last week retooling most of my web properties to include ads. It paid off! I’m quite pleased with my first week earnings, and now I’m thirsty for more. I’m going to start focusing on building my traffic more quickly.

Paul Stamatiou has taken the time to write up his tips to boost blog traffic, and I’m going to be implementing and testing them across the board on all my sites. In summary, they are:

• Usability
  
  The site should have style, according to Paul. This article suggests otherwise, that fast-loading ugly sites sell equally as well. I’m going to have to split-test this. I do plan to make sure that every site has an easy way to contact me and to find out more about me.
• Content
  
  Stay away from reblogging, have a strong sense of your site focus. This article notwithstanding, I think I do a very good job with this already. It is just so boring to add a “me too” voice to every thing, just for the sake of adding posts. Every site of mine is focused on something that interests me. In fact, I think the focus makes it easier to come up with topics, not harder.
• Technorati
  
  Use Technorati to tag posts. I do this on every blog, and it nets a fair number of hits, especially for current hot-button items.
• Blog Rings & Networks
  
  I’ve written about this on my article 5 one time site promotion tips that pay off big. I try to make my sites as easy as possible to find when you are searching for things I’ve written about. Adding myself to such sites as IceRocket makes this ever more straightforward.
• Use FeedBurner
  
  Make it easier for people to subscribe to your feed, and for you to track how many are subscribed.
• Use a dedicated domain name
  
  I already do. I’ve never been tempted by the free services. I’m just too addicted to control. It is so easy to set up a hosting account! Use the signup code “ZEFAMILY25″ and get $25 off any subscription to Dreamhost. Last time I looked that makes the minimum price about $30 per year for the basic fully hosted acount. Dreamhost will even install Wordpress for you.
• Learn about your readers
  
  Use stat tracking packages to do this. Paul likes Mint for this, but I just use AWStats, which I think may be more accurate, since it is server-side. You need a fully-hosted environment for that, of course.
• Try to get linked on popular sites
  
  He suggest trying to get linked on sites like del.icio.us or Digg. Really any a-list link will help immeasurably.

Technorati Tags: blogging, traffic boosting, advice

My top five favorite forum sites for marketing and such:

• Warrior Forum - A marketing based forum, refreshingly likely to give real help and examples instead of constantly telling people to learn it for themselves. It has a couple innovative features, including “buy a warrior a beer”, and “Special Offers Forum” where you find discounts “especially for warriors”.
• Digital Point Forums - Huge and active. This site is a daily read for me. It covers SEO, Adsense, Marketing, General Business, and has a funny underground section.
• Abestweb - “Where the affiliate community comes together”. Focused on affiliates, with great threads such as which affiliate programs actually pay out what they owe, and which ones have “problems”.
• WebHostingTalk - Talks about hosting and all the issues around that. Excellent thoughts and breaking information from people who’ve been around a long while, and who know what they are talking about.
• Fat Wallet - This is a “deal site”, where people who get a kick out of marginal deals come to play. If you are fast and lucky, you can find some incredible deals from this site. I use it more to see which was the deals are falling right now. New stuff shows up here very fast.

There’s great thread at Digital Point about profits to be made online.

The nice thing about this thread is that all the participants (or most of them anyway) are being unusually open about how much they make online, and from what sources. These are some of the more experienced webmasters around, so it provides a welcome dose of reality for me. Better yet, some of the numbers are tantalizingly high.

Technorati Tags: digitalpoint

If you do more than market, and actually have to fulfill orders, you know what a pain it is to do shipping. I’m super pleased with the Endicia online postage/software system, and I’ve reviewed it on this blog’s sister site.

Excellent quote from one of my daily reads, talking about blogs.

If you think this is just a game of bubbles, bandwagons, favoritism and knowing the right people, as opposed to having good ideas and plain old hard work- Fine, go ahead and believe it. Nobody cares. Just don’t be surprised when you get left behind, same as you did every other time the world changed.

Sometimes I think that what drives the nay-sayers is simple “fear of looking dumb”. They seem to be afraid they’ll start doing something just when it stops being popular, and so they’ll look dumb. Sometimes I think that it is just a driving need to fill column inches with text, even if it doesn’t mean much.

For what it is worth, I don’t care if “Blogs as a business model” has “peaked”. If it has, then some of the heart-not-in-it folks will drop off and clear the air a bit. You can’t force a good blog, and it is painful to see some people try, convinced that it will be profitable if they can just force it long enough.

Todd gives 21 Tips for Improved Website Credibility on his StuntDubl blog. Since I am in the process of launching a new store, these tips were very helpful for me and well timed.

In particular, I liked:

• About Page
• Pictures of REAL people
• References
• Link to good people
• No 404’s
• Write like a real person
• Have a freakin’ sense of humor

Technorati Tags: Credibility, popularity, trustworthiness

Most writers want more readership for their sites, yet throw their hands up in despair over the “Google Sandbox”, and assume that no one will find them for a few months. That’s just not true if you put a little effort into your site promotion efforts. Here I present 5 tips which will only cost you a few moments of time, once, but which will pay off over the long term.

#1 Add your site to Opinmind

Opinmind is a unique service that searches sites for opinions, rendering an “opinmind” scale for any topic. For example:


It does this by searching the content of sites, looking for opinions about the topic. You can get your site included in its searches, and linked on detail pane of their opinion search results by manually adding your site to their search engine.

Submit your site from the form at the bottom of any search results page.

#2 Add your site to IceRocket

IceRocket is a dedicated blog search engine. It has a number of interesting features, such as keyword term comparison graphs, where you can see how up to three terms have changed in popularity over time. Adding your blog to their searches will net you readers who are looking for blogs, which is a more valuable class of reader to many of us than the general reader referred from Google.

Submit your site on their Add Your Blog page.

#3 Add your site to TailRank

TailRank is an interesting site I first learned about on TechCrunch. They attempt to be a “newspaper of the blogosphere”, by aggregating hot conversations into groups, and highlighting blogs talking about or initiating hot topics. Most interestingly, they get their blogs to include from members’ subscription lists. You can get yours listed by importing an OPML feed list.

First, make an OPML feed list. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your sites are in your preferred RSS reader. I like Bloglines. Then, export the list as OPML. Most readers will do this for you.

Once you have the list, create an account at TailRank, and then import your feeds to TailRank.

#4 Submit your site to BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another dedicated blog search engine. It has a different focus than the others listed in this article, seemingly more interested in the “top sites” and “top searches”. Getting your site added to its search engine is a snap, though finding where to do it is less easy.

I found their blog submit page here.

#5 Add your sitemap to Google

Google will be able to crawl your site more efficiently if you give them a sitemap. This is especially easy to do if you are using WordPress, which has the excellent Google Sitemap plugin. If you aren’t using Wordpress, you can use Google’s own sitemap generator.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google and confirm that you own the site you are attempting to add. This will pay off in better-targeted searching at Google, as well as visibility into your crawl stats, errors and your pagerank. Nice payoff for a small amount of hoop-jumping!

Manage your sites and their sitemaps using the Google sitemap page.

Technorati Tags: SEO, icerocket, opinmind, blogpulse, google, tailrank, sitemap, site promotion

Everyone says to focus on a niche, at least at first. But how do you find a niche that isn’t suffocated by well-established companies with legions of affiliates?

You look for niches which are just going by default to the top sites. At least that’s the strategy recommended in this article. The author points out that many sites don’t even really try for good search ranking for some niche products. But no one else is either, so the big guys win by default.

How to use this information

You can take advantage of that, and drive those non-targeted searchers to the site of your choosing. First, identify likely niche.

In my own keyword research I have found many keyword phrases that tens of thousands of Internet users are searching for every month by considering the following question…

Did the top ten websites purposely optimize their pages for this keyword phrase or did they get there simply because no one else is actively COMPETING for search engine placement?

Then, apply these tests from the article:

1. Is the keyword phrase in the title of the listing?
2. Is the keyword phrase used in the Domain Name of the listing?
3. Is the keyword phrase used anywhere in the URL at all?
4. How many backward links are pointing at the URL?
5. Are the backward links pointing at the page mostly internal links or do the come from other quality websites?
6. Is the URL a top level domain or some obscure page buried deep within a larger website.?

Technorati Tags: keywords, adwords, seo, niches

Need advice and discussion about income streams that you can take “offline”? I just finished listening to the four part series “Establishing your first income stream”, by Internet Business Mastery

These podcasts are packed with useful information and ideas. In particular, I got a lot out of the discussion about how to tell how seriously to take a competitor. For example, one thing they mention is “does the person have an ‘about me’ page?”. If not, they are less established and less a threat.

Conclusion

My only real complaint is that they are overly focused on eBay, which is not where I am currently putting my energies. That made these ‘casts marginally less useful to me than they could have been. Regardless, they are well worth a listen by any startup net marketer.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Technorati Tags: podcasting, podcasts, ebay, reviews