Tips For Search Engine Optimization

Ranking high in search engines is every webmaster’s dream. If your website was to be ranked in the top 3 positions for a given keyword, your website will be flooded with highly targeted traffic for free.

In the world of search engine rankings, your ultimate goal is to land the first spot in search results using a targeted keyword. One way to do that is on-page optimization. Lets see how you can do this.

On-page optimization refers to the improvement of both content and structure of the website so you can have better a chance of improving your page rank. There are numerous techniques available, but it does not mean that everything is actually applicable.

There are unethical practices known as Black Hat strategies which are frowned upon. Using those techniques will hurt your website on the long run. Thus, if you do not want to hurt your rank and even your reputation, here are some excellent techniques in on-page optimization which I highly suggest you follow.

1. Keep relevancy in your content. One of the major reasons why other websites would want to link to your website which in turn brings you a massive amount of traffic is because of your content. Another way to do this is to use your articles, and use a number of high-ranking keywords. Their purpose is to allow your article to show up once Internet users utilize your keywords in searching for information. The idea is to get your articles to appear on the first page of search results for a set of keywords that are relevant to your website.

When writing articles and playing with keywords, keep in mind that they should be relevant to the articles that you are writing about. As much as possible, your content should appear natural. Place your keywords at the right places. Most of all, do not over-stuff them. Not only does it make your copies sound incomprehensible, but you will likely get punished by search engines because of such technique. Remember to use keywords sparingly.

2. Validate your HTML. There are a number of disadvantages when you do not double-check your HTML code. One of these is you will never rank well in search engine results. What’s more, your website appears disoriented in some of the Internet browsers. There are many tools on the internet that will check your website for HTML errors. AnyBrowser is one of them.

To validate your HTML, you can also utilize a W3C HTML validator. All you need to do is to place your URL in it and allow the application to analyze your HTML codes and your HTML structure. In the end, it can give you a list of errors that you may have done in your webpages. You can then come up with the best solution to your problems.

3. Use bold text in your heading tags. One of the most effective ways to rank well with a particular keyword is to place it in your heading.

If your website is about Cats then place the word “Cat” in the heading of your website before your first paragraph. This is because search engine spiders “read” your content from top to bottom. And thus if you use bold text at the top of your web page you will have a better chance of getting a higher rank. However, to further increase your chances, set the keyword in bold. Spiders will view your keyword as highly relevant to the theme of your website which in turn will help you rank better.

There you have it. Those 3 strategies will help you optimize your website

Making money with your food blog

As I mentioned in “How to start a food blog“, food blogging is a terrible way to make money if you enjoy living in the First World. This year, food blogging will pay my rent but not much else. Here is how to do at least that, without devoting your entire life to blogging:

Advertising for your food blog

Which ad network? Or which combination of ad networks?

There is no single ad network that is right for everybody. The most profitable blogs tend to use a mix of networks and play to each of the networks strengths. This list of networks is by no means exhaustive: there are hundreds of ad networks out there.

Google Adsense – Everyone has Google Ads; the number of people getting rich from them apart from Google shareholders is miniscule. Google’s biggest coup is that it has realised that most bloggers are happy to get paid nothing as long as a few dollars trickle through. The advantage of Google is ease of use: they’re dead simple to add to your site, customise in a bare bones fashion and earn a few cents a click. You can use them on every blog network. They’re the ultimate in low maintenance. The disadvantages are the low pay and the complete lack of control over which ads turn up on your site. Because the ads are geographically targeted, the ads that you see won’t be the ones that anyone else sees. This is fine if you don’t care.

Yahoo! – Just like Google but second best!

Text Link Ads – if you want to people to find your website by searching on Google, this network is dead in the water. Google penalises your “page rank” if you use it, but I use it over at Phnomenon because in most of the categories that I write in, I have no competition on the web. It pays very well, doesn’t rely on clicks (so you make money whether people click your ads or not), and if you place them judiciously, people won’t even notice that they’re being advertised at.

A similar network TNX.net has beaten Google for now. They’re still in the early stages of development (as the spelling mistakes on their beta site attests) but worth watching.

Blog Ads – the specialist ad network for bloggers. They’re a handy way to make money when you have low traffic because they pay regardless. The downside of this network is that if you do receive big, unpredictable spikes in the number of people visiting your site, you won’t be getting an equally large spike in earnings. They’re invite-only which is a strategy that I still don’t understand.

Selling other people’s products

When people read your favorite cake recipe, it is unlikely that they’ll click on the ingredients to buy them online. When people read a digital camera review, the opposite is true. Selling other people’s products and making a commission is a popular way to make money for most bloggers but it is difficult for food bloggers to do well because of the nature of the subject. Most of society does not buy the bulk of their food online. The easiest way to sell products is via Amazon affiliates program or the lesser known Chitika (Probloggers swear by it, because unlike Amazon, it relies less on you making sales and more on click-throughs)

If you want to spend your time writing reviews of products then this is a possible way to make money and there are still a few niches where food bloggers could be making huge amounts of cash: major appliances and kitchenware. Most of the top food bloggers already use Amazon to link to cookbooks but most of the time it is just a half-hearted link rather than a ringing endorsement.

Selling your own ads

Selling your own ads is by far the most profitable way to make money for your blog because it is one of the few avenues by which you’ll firstly be in direct contact with the advertisers’ money and secondly, will be able to charge what your blog is worth. The only downside is that you have to do the selling. As much as I love marketing, marketing is not sales. The low effort way to sell your own ads is to put a banner where your ad would be and link to your rates page. How much should you charge? Here’s blog network Gawker Media’s rates for their network of professionally produced and edited blogs. That will at least give you a point for comparison.

Unconventional means

Merchandise

A few food blogs sell their own merchandise: Chubby Hubby was selling notecards for a time; Ideas in Food sell their photo book; I’m considering turning Phnomenon into a book. If you can find a niche this may be worthwhile.

Make money from every link

I was going to call this bit “monetize your food blog”, but I get a sharp stabbing sensation in the part of my brain that stores verbed nouns every time I write “monetize”. Whenever you can throw in a product link, make sure that you make money from it. For most bloggers, this means the occasional link to an Amazon product, but you’ll notice that practically every link on this page has my referrer code on it. If you sign up for anything then I make money from you! It doesn’t affect your income but I benefit.

Get hired by someone else as a food blogger

This isn’t as hard as you think it might be. B5 Media are always on the lookout for good bloggers. Problogger keeps a handy jobs board: at last check there were two paid food blogger positions. The biggest advantage of making money from your food blog in this way is that (generally) you need not worry about the technical side of the blog or selling ads as the blog network/business will do the design and marketing. The down side is that the pay is terrible and you have no control over design and marketing.

Sell your posts and photos

If you think that your posts and photos are magazine quality, try selling them to magazines. For me, selling a single article to an American newspaper earns just a little less than the income from my two sites for a month. Get over to mediabistro and to your local press to get started. Scoopt started a business selling blog posts to mainstream magazines as ScooptWords (e.g. these food bloggers in Olive Magazine) but have since seemed to have discontinued the blog side of their business to concentrate on cellphone snaps of celebrities.

As for photos, the online stock photo business is well on its way to destroying a valuable income earner for the bad professional photographers who take the photo of the guy climbing the mountain with a briefcase. Good pro photographers will always have a business. To sell your food photos online, see the links below.

Sell out entirely

Get paid to write reviews of other websites at somewhere like ReviewMe. If I no longer valued human decency, I’d make $60 every time that somebody wanted me to review whatever shit that they thrust in my direction.

Where should I place ads to make the most money?

Here.

Google published the above heat map to show which ads are clicked the most with the red areas being the most clicked. They have also produced one targeted at blogs which is a little more rudimentary and when I’ve tested it, doesn’t seem to work well.

Also useful are themes for your site designed with making money in mind. See below for links.

The easiest way to make money from blogging is writing about making money from blogging.

Just because I’m making a Third World income from blogging doesn’t mean that you can’t earn more. Read Shoemoney or Problogger. They’re earning 6 figure amounts but they’re also devoting the entirety of their lives to doing it. Sadly, that is the bare minimum amount of time you’ll need to spend.

Maintaining your audience

How often should I write?

As often as you like.

The standard answer to this is that if you are looking to increase your audience, often is better. If you look at Technorati’s top blogs, most of these sites are updated multiple times a day. You’ll also notice that none of them are food blogs, unless you count icanhascheezburger.com which is substantively about cats perverting the English language.

I’d prefer to be reading blogs that update once a month and write 15,000 word articles rather than one that writes two 250 word posts a day. I’m not most people, but nonetheless, I’d encourage you to write for me. What seems to matter as much as frequency is consistency. If you plan to write once a week, stick to your schedule.

I’m burnt out and sick of blogging. What do I do?

Take a break.

What I tend to do is write articles that aren’t time dependent and change their post date to two weeks in advance (you can do this in Wordpress). If I have enough content in two weeks time, I push it forward another two weeks. This maintains the appearance that I’m equally motivated all of the time. I’m quite clearly not. The scary thing is that my blog will continue to run for a few months if I’m dead.

People don’t comment. How do you make them?

Ask a question at the end of your post. People are that easy to manipulate…or aren’t they?

Ways of Increasing Your Website Link Popularity

There are various ways of increasing your web site link popularity. I’m listing out some important tips which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don’t go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want and no where is available.
• Leverage your personal relastions with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Particiapte in Link Exchaneg Program. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG, and Slashdot etc. Before submitting please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references of your links with-in that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, news letters, blogs etc.

There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternative.

• Buy a place on high rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for google’s Adwords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site which will result in your site link popularity.

Top Money Making Ideas and Methods

Internet marketing is a great way to make a living. There are numerous ways to profit from the opportunities on the web. Here are some of the top money making ideas that predominate on the net. I’m going to briefly explain to you the 3 most common ways that you can profit from home and earn making money online.

Here goes!

[1] Affiliate Marketing.

This is hands down in my opinion one of the top money making ideas used online today. The concept is rather basic. You advertise a product and then divert that traffic to the merchant’s sales page. If the merchant converts that visitor, you receive a percentage of the sales price in the form of a commission.

You’re job is marketing and that’s it. You’re referring people and get rewarded accordingly. Commission percentages can range between 40% to 75%.

This can be a very lucrative way of doing business if done correctly. What’s makes this one of the best money making ideas is that you are just responsible for marketing and marketing only. The merchant takes care of all the rest of the business such as selling the product, all the follow-up, customer service, refunds etc.

The disadvantages are that although you are receiving the commission, you don’t retain a customer for repeat business. It’s a one-sale deal in most cases. You’re kind of like the middleman and if you’re okay with that, then this is a good way to go.

[2] Selling your own Information Product.

If you have the means and you want to go this route, this is one of the good ideas making money and you can make a lot of money for sure.

One suggestion is to really do your research and find what kind of information people are looking for. Find a market that wants a product and then make that product versus the other way around.

To many people spend all their time and resources developing an info product and then come to find no one wants to buy it. Swallow your pride and decide to produce a product for a ready market and you’ll be richly rewarded and earn making money online.

If you own and created your own product you have full control how you want to market it. You can decide to attach resell rights to it or set up your own affiliate program and use this leverage to spread the word and cash in on profits.

Just remember to do your research first and identify what solutions to problems people are looking for and provide it. This is really one of the top money making ideas for many and it’s not as hard as you may think.

Just remember that when you are selling your own products you also need to attend to all the other aspects of your business. It will take more of your time and you might want to hire someone else to help you, so you can concentrate on the money making end and not all the customer service issues.

[3] Start a subscriber and/or customer list.

Of all the top money making ideas, this one alone will ensure the long-term success of your business for years to come. Everyone that does business on the Internet needs to build a list (or multiple lists).

How do you get started to earn making money online with your own list. Well if your just starting out write a quality report on the subject your target market is looking for and give this away in exchange for a name and email address.

If you stay in touch with your subscribers on a regular bases and have an interest in helping them, they will become very responsive loyal customers or subscribers. You can do this by always giving them great information on the particular niche theme. Let them know you care and know what you are talking about and they will trust your advice.

Then you can send them offers from time to time mixed in with your good ideas making money in a newsletter or weekly tips. If your offers are targeted towards your list they will be very responsive to what you have to offer. When you build up a highly responsive list it can really be like printing your own money.

Well I hope these top money making ideas gave you some direction to go in your online efforts. Again these are not all of the best money making ideas but just 3 of the many, many options you have to make money online.

And I could have gone into way more detail with each of these methods but there’s simply not enough space. I wish you the best and with determination and the right information you can do it too.

Get a head start with one of the best online marketing courses on the Internet. Knowledge is power and this will get you on the fast track to success.

6 Small Steps to Promoting Your New Business

In order to get more money, you have to get people to give it to you, yes? It sounds simple, but that’s the part that people tend to forget. It is so easy to focus on what you will use it for, what bills you will pay off and what new goodies you could afford, that you forget the exchange of money is all about persuading someone else to give you theirs.

Baby steps in self-promotion

• Figure out your niche
• Find people you know who operate in the niche
• Offer them a freebie for recommendations
• Print up some business promotional materials
• Leave your promotional materials everywhere
• Answer phone calls promptly and professionally. Write a script beforehand if necessary.

I’m not interested in cheating anyone, so I’m never going to be covering pyramid selling or mail stuffing scams. What I am interested in is coming up with a viable business concept, costing it out and implementing it. You don’t have to be Donald Trump or Alan Sugar to come up with an idea for a small enterprise - it doesn’t have to be about replacing the day job, there is nothing wrong with earning a little bit of pin money with a hobby, for example.

So, you’ve decided that you have a fair few spare evenings, you like kids and you like watching tv. Maybe you’ll set up a babysitting business! It’s going to be difficult to market yourself, as an unknown adult to parents. However, I’ll bet that you have some friends who are parents, don’t you? The key is to find a way in to your circle of clients. Offer a free night’s babysitting to some friends in return for recommendations to the other parents they know. Networking is king in this situation. Get some cards made, print some brochures out, and give them to your friends who had the freebie. The key here is that people in a niche (parents, classic car owners, teddy bear collectors etc.) usually know other people in the same niche, and their recommendations carry a lot of weight. Ask them to hand them out to some of the other parents at the school gate.

Personally, I’d be thrilled if another parent handed me a babysitting service flier, and I’d be on the phone in seconds.

The key to this sort of business is finding that way into the niche. Often friends are a great way in - they understand your drive, and are usually more than pleased to be able to help you out. Don’t take advantage of them, but make really sure that they know how much you appreciate their help. It’s always nice to help out

I’m going to do a bit of a shameless plug here as I’ve just had this service recommended to me:

Vistaprint do very cheap business stationery, including lots of free opening offers - business cards, fridge magnets, rubber stamps etc. All you pay for is the postage. A friend who runs a music company recommended them to me as a way of getting very cheap business cards for several different companies at the same time without having to pay origination costs for all of them. I’ve followed his advice, and have been very pleased with how easy the website is to use. (Full disclosure: I get a £1 off my next order if someone clicks the link! But this recommendation isn’t about the quid so much as finding an easy to use and free service!).

Once you’ve got business cards (the absolute minimum), carry them with you everywhere. Every time you stop somewhere, leave a card on a table/shop counter/pub bench, whatever. Vistaprint will get you 250 nice quality cards for about £3 postage, which means that you can afford to scatter them about like confetti. Remember that people need to know about you to give your their money. The more pro-active you are with that promotion, the better the response from your customer base.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Make very sure that whatever telephone number you put on the cards/leaflets is one where you can be reached as often as possible. If necessary, put an answering message on your home phone, or redirect to your mobile. You usually only get one chance at a first impression. People will ring ONCE, and if you don’t pickup, or don’t sound confident they won’t ring again. Once the fish slips off the hook, it tends to swim away - you should be aiming at reeling it in!

Tip on Answering Phones

I operate a number of businesses from one phone line - two seperate building businesses, a holiday rental, web design & upkeep, The In-Debt Net, and …err… about 5 or 6 bands (last count) as well as all my personal calls. It is impossible to answer the phone correctly for each business, as I never know what sort of call it will be. My promotional material is very upfront about my name and connection with each business (see my “About Me” box above right…), so I answer the phone with “Hello, Annie Walker speaking!” This solves the problem of not knowing whether someone wants to book a tribute band or have a conservatory built - most people calling are doing so from some form of promotional material, so are *expecting* to speak to me…

Making Money From Hobbies

I talk a lot about taking a hobby and viewing it as a business. Life is just too short to spend it doing something that you don’t actually like. Why should we spend our entire lives working at something that makes us miserable, only to do our actual *living* at the end of our time? What happens if we get hit by a bus the day after we retire? Isn’t that a waste?

However, it often isn’t realistic to give up your job as a merchant banker and expect to make the same amount of money as a professional stamp collector. The key is to start small and start looking at, and treating your hobby as a source of money which you enjoy earning. It can be a revelation to realise that you don’t have to be guilty about doing things you love, and that if you are good at it, often people will pay you for it!

For me, the thing that I love to do more than anything is making music. I love impromptu music and music made with friends, just for the love of it. I adore the sound of my voice rising from a group in harmony and the feeling of strings under my fingers. The bits that I don’t like *quite* so much are the bits that involve promoting myself and phoning around for gigs. which is where busking comes in. I sat down and looked at what I liked and didn’t like about making music:

Liked

• Singing, particularly harmony
• Making people smile
• Improvisation
• Playing with friends
• Being to stop and start whenever I want
• Laughing
• Being able to swap between instruments and voices

Disliked

• Hostile audiences (the “go on, entertain me then!” attitude)
• Phoning around for gigs
• Schmoozing before and after gigs
• Gigging when I feel ill, depressed or simply not in the mood
• Having to find babysitters constantly
• Losing weekend evenings.

When I looked at my hobby like this, I realised that busking was a way of bringing in money that I would really enjoy. It took advantage of all the things that I loved, but minimised all the things that I didn’t.

Why not look at your hobbies/existing job in the same way? Look at the things that you love and the things that you don’t, and start to work on maximising the first whilst minimising the second. It isn’t always going to be possible to make your fortune straight away with a hobby, but the way I look at extra earning is this: if I do something I enjoy, I don’t begrudge the time spent. If I earn a small amount of money, I ask myself whether, if I found that amount of money lying in the street, would I bother to pick it up and then consider myself lucky? If the answer is “yes”, then it’s been time well spent. And with busking (as with almost all other hobby businesses) every time I go out, I learn something different that allows me to make a little more money. Last time I went out, my partner and I tried a different position. It worked brilliantly, and earned us more money. Every time is an improvement, and enables us to work more efficiently and earn more effectively.

Social Bookmarking Helps in Driving Traffic

Using Social Bookmarking sites are a really great way to promote your website or Blog. They are becoming one of the best marketing tools today, especially since they have very useful tools and features that users can utilize to improve their search engine optimization.What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking allows users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. This enables Internet users to access and add their favorite bookmarks from any computer. Personalized, informal tags are used to organize bookmarks instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders. These sites measure the popularity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. So you can see what bookmarks are favorites to a lot of people. Learning new things is easy and effortless with social bookmarking sites. Everything on these sites is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it, so all you have to do is look! Some common bookmarking websites are Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati, Blinklist, Reddit, and Spurl.

Why would I want/need to be Socially Bookmarked?

There are lots of uses to social bookmarking- such as sharing your favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else. Groups can create a shared account to collect and organize bookmarks that are useful to the entire group. For example, if you’re planning a group vacation, you all can collect bookmarks and review what everyone else finds. Creating wish lists on social bookmarking sites is also a great idea to get the word out to people you know. Make a birthday list by shopping online, saving your “wishes” as a bookmark and tell your friends/family to check it out from their computers!! Whatever the use for sharing information, social bookmarking can save a lot of your time. And today, time is so precious!

Why is Social Bookmarking good for SEO?

Due to the immense popularity of social bookmarking websites, being on their front-page, you are increasing your traffic to your website. In the long run, the numerous inbound links to your site will increase and regard you as a link reference, thus you have increased your link popularity and efficiently increased your rank. Between your high traffic and increased link popularity, social bookmarking websites use this method as their media platform with a viral marketing campaign to their advantage by doubling it with link baits. You win in more than one way!

Overall, social bookmarking is a great way to increase traffic and potential customers to your website. Just keep in mind, in order to be successful in social bookmarking, you must provide content that has value and worth bookmarking!

Money Making in the Google Way

If you are not familiar with Google Adsense you should consider looking into the many features that it offers. Google Adsense is relatively new to the internet world, but it has proven to be a very effective tool that may even be able to make you some money. There are people who make a decent chunk of change every month from using Google Adsense.

Making money from adsense is not very difficult. The first thing that you will need to do is open an account. You can do this by accessing the Google Adsense website. You will then have to supply your contact information as well as the website that you want to have your ads placed on. After you are approved you will be able to get started. Google will send targeted ads to your site. So for example, if you are running a site on how to make money on line, they will send ads that correspond with that subject.

Making money from adsense is not a difficult concept either. The main thing to remember is that you will make money on how many times your visitors click on the ads that are displayed on your site. Making money from adsense is much easier if you have a lot of traffic. Because obviously, if nobody is visiting your site nobody can click on your ads.

Adsense for blog users has become very popular over the past few months. Blog owners have found that they can make a lot of money by placing these ads on their site. This is especially true for blogs that get a lot of traffic.

If you are skeptical about making money from adsense you are not alone. There are many people that feel that this program is too good to be true. But in all actuality there is not much to it at all. You never have to pay to use the service, and you will be sent payment every month. Many people feel that making money from adsense will be difficult because they do not have enough traffic; and these people are right. If making money from adsense is what you are after you will need to have a good marketing campaign in place. This way as your site begins to get more hits, you will also begin to make more money through adsense.

Making money from adsense is a viable opportunity if you put your mind to it. There are many people who have used this system to their advantage, and are cashing in on it. Making sure you increase your overall traffic is the best way to ensure that you give yourself the best chance of making money from adsense.

Tips for Money Making Online

Who wouldn’t want to make money online? You choose your hours, you can work from any location in the world and you can leverage your time in a way that makes having a job seem like the biggest waste of time imaginable!

However, it’s only easy to make money online if you do your homework first. The best way to make easy money online is surely to follow what other successful internet entrepreneurs do, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. You could waste a ton of money and a lot of time trying to make money with, for instance, Google Adwords, or on eBay or with affiliate marketing and so on, if you simply log onto the website, create an account and start trading. There are proven techniques, tricks of the trade and short cuts to enable you to make money online quickly and successfully. There are also a lot of mistakes to be made and a lot of money to be wasted if you don’t know what you are doing.

Tip One is to study first, make money second.

So many people want everything for free and feel that if they have to buy information, they are somehow being ripped off. I bought a stack of information when I started out, and don’t feel that any of my money was wasted – yes, some information helped me more than others, but it was all a learning curve, and saved me wasting a fortune making mistakes. I learnt from the mistakes others had made instead. Think of it this way – if, in one year from now you are earning enough to walk away from the day job, would it be worth ‘going back to school’ and studying your new career path before you get started?

Tip Two is to have a variety of online businesses – some you will take to more than others, some will pay out sooner than others, but at the end of the day why put all your hopes on one business stream when you can have several?

Tip Three. Be patient. Give yourself a year or 18 months to really give your online career a chance. If you don’t see results as soon as you want them, don’t give up only to try something else that you may not stick at either. It takes time, for instance, for new websites to get ranked in the search engines, and although you can learn how to create a website that will rank well, you cannot cheat the system. What you can do, is learn search engine optimisation techniques and put them all into practice, which will reap you big rewards further down the line. (There’s a free e-book on my website about this).

Making money online can give you total financial freedom – you have to want it enough to work hard initially, so that you can then sit back and enjoy it. Follow the leaders, don’t imagine you don’t need anyone’s help, be a ‘sponge’ and learn all you can and kiss the day job ‘goodbye’.

Link Building Machine

Social media, linkbaiting, link building, blogging and building an audience are hugely time consuming tasks that require a lot of skill, some great ideas and most importantly a long term vision.

Intelligent online publishers have been creating Link Building Machines for years but others try to rely on short term fixes. The short term fix (as you might have guessed) isn’t a good long term business strategy.

Put simply a Link Building Machine is a site that attracts thousands of links every month and hundreds of links to each one of their recent stories or blog posts without any direct marketing being carried out to create those links.

The BBC is a Link Building Machine, so is Wikipedia, so is Engadget, so is the New York Times. They are all sites that have the following key components making up their Machine.

• A large number of fans who love to read their content
• A fanbase that likes sharing content across social networks
• Fans & readers who publish content on blogs & other websites - the linkerati
• Good search engine rankings

Any website that has these elements is a Link Building Machine. Take a site like Wikipedia for example, it doesn’t have any RSS subscribers but Wikipedia ranks highly for so many informational queries that the articles are used as citations and reference links thousands of times every single day.

A site like the BBC can release a news story and find it being shared across thousands of blogs and social networks without the BBC having to do any marketing whatsoever.

One of my favourite examples of a Link Building Machine is a site that has thousands of well optimised images attracting millions of visitors from Google Images every single year. This site cleverly uses this script (this one is good too) to build thousands of new links every month with zero effort.

Creating your machine

Publishing one off linkbait articles is great for traffic and links but it isn’t a particularly effective long term strategy - unless carried out as part of the Link Building Machine development process.

Publish one linkbait article and it might get thousands of readers and hundreds of links but if you can replicate that success and publish similarly high quality articles every day for 6 months you might just end up creating a Link Building Machine.

Forget about building links to your site today - concentrate on your long term goal of finding thousands of people who love your website enough to tell the world whenever you write a new post.

Make Money Online

              Good advertising is the key to making any business successful. Without it, a business would have to rely solely on word of mouth to become successful. They would have to start out small and please customers who in turn will tell others that they know about the business. Word of mouth is some of the best advertising. However, a business will grow too slowly if this is the only means of advertising. Placing advertisements is one of the best ways to make money online.

              One of the best ways to make money online is to offer customers free information. You may think that it is counterproductive to offer people something for free. However, many people perceive anything that asks for money upfront to be a scam. They are less likely to pay for information if they do not know what they are getting into. Therefore, if you offer them basic information for free, they are more likely to become interested and be willing to spend some money to learn more. The more people you have requesting information, the more prospective customers you will acquire.

            Many people do not understand that making money online will likely require paying out some money of their own to start. There are many people who want to be able to make money without spending any of their own. They are essentially looking for that get rich quick scheme. There is no such thing, however. The old saying, “it takes money to make money” still rings true today. One of the most important ways in which a new entrepreneur can make money online is to spend some money in advertising. There are ways in which a person can advertise for free but these methods are not always as effective. Purchasing advertisement space in magazines and newspapers can be a little more expensive but they will reach more people which will mean more money for you.

           It is important for a new business owner who is trying to make money online to find an avenue that will create the largest interest in their company. It is important to find advertising space that fits what you are offering. For instance, you would not want to advertise in a home improvement magazine if you are offering pet related services. You want to find advertising space that directly correlates to what your business is offering. In addition, you will also need to find advertising space that fits within your budget. You can always expand your advertising once the business gets going so do not be afraid to start small.

             There are many tricks and tips to making money online. Knowing the right way to advertise to maximize your earning potential is very important to creating a successful business venture. There is a little bit of trial and error that is involved with advertising. Different things are more successful with different businesses. It is important to try various different things to find out what works best for your business.