ConnectContent One-Day Maddness Offer
If you’ve not taken advantage of ConnectContent yet, and you want SEO backlinks targeted to specific terms for your website and website pages, you really need to read this.
What is ConnectContent?
ConnectContent is a search engine community network comprised of individuals who are all looking for the same thing: Relevant links to their sites that contain relevant anchor terms.
It’s a network that exists so that members can tell other members what terms they want linked to their blogs and websites. Nothing more and nothing less.
The Offer
RT Cunningham, the founder of ConnectContent, is pushing hard to take the network to the next level with this offer. The normal way of becoming a member of ConnectContent is by subscribing ($12.00 per month or $120.00 per year).
But, for a very limited time until midnight February 14th (Pacific Time), he’s offering you a one-time deal that may never be repeated. It’s more than one day of madness, but he’s trying to cover all the time zones from California to the Philippines at the same time.
For a single payment of $30.00, you can become a lifetime member without any further obligations. You get the same service as any other member and you can get affiliate referrals the same as any other member.
This is one of the services I use to get relevant back links to my sites and it works! The search engines love the links because they are content driven and relevant to your site.
Here’s How To Take Advantage of the Offer
- Read the introduction pages at ConnectContent, but ignore the payment options. It gives you a good idea of what the network is all about.
- Send a PayPal payment to RT at his special email address set up just for this offer: ninong1@gmail.com. There is a place where you can leave a message. In that box, include your regular email address (not your PayPal email address since he will already have it when he receives the payment, unless your PayPal email address and regular email address is the same) as well as this special coupon code: WFYRVCC01
That’s all there is to it. Once RT receives the notification for payment from PayPal, he will send a message to your regular email address with your login details. Remeber, he’s in the Philippines so give him a chance to get some sleep if you don’t get an answer right away. Also remeber you need to make your Paypal payment to the special email address he listed above for this to work. If you make your payment to any other email address by mistake or due to misinformation by some scammer, use the PayPal dispute service to get your money back as quickly as possible.
You can also confirm this offer by contacting RT Cunningham directly. Just use the contact form at ConnectContent to verify anything and get all your questions answered.
Become-A-Blogger is Closing
Yaro Starak just notified me that he and Gideon Shalwick are closing the doors to new members for their Become A Blogger Premium video training program for a while. They opened the program in December 2008 and had well over 850 members join the program, which was a bit better than expected. They feel their capacity is about 1000 people and since they’re getting close to that number, they’re going to shut the doors so they can ensure the first group of students finish the program about the same time.
In case you don’t know what this program is all about, I invite you to head to the sales page and read the details:
If you haven’t already done so, grab their free report, The Roadmap To Become A Blogger, which has now surpassed 13,000 downloads. It’s a great report and a great introduction to what they are about as blog trainers. If you haven’t got your copy yet and you’re interested in succeeding as a blogger, make sure you grab the Roadmap report (it’s available in PDF and MP3 audio)
Also, be sure to read the second half about the X-Factor strategies, as that has proven to be the key learning lesson from the report, especially for those of you who are already experienced with blogs.
The 10 free Become A Blogger videos are always available if you haven’t set up your WordPress blog yet and have now been viewed by over 118,248 people.
The Deadline Is This Friday
They are closing the doors to the premium program on Friday the 6th of February at just before midnight Eastern USA time, so you’ve got a little over 5 days at the time I’m posting this article to join.
They set up a special blog post inside the membership site to collect feedback from members in order to improve the program, and as a tool to collect testimonials from members. Here are just a couple of the comments they’ve received:
Christine
Ken
Why Join Become A Blogger Premium
I’m not going to spend too much time selling the program as I think the sales page does a good enough job talking about what is inside the course. If you’re new to blogging, enjoy video training, are the type of person who prefers to learn how to do things yourself (or you can’t afford to hire people) and blogging is a part of your online strategy for 2009, I suggest you join their program. I did, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. There’s always something new to learn.
I was one of the first to join. I prefer to personally go through anything like this before I recommend it to anyone. I have to say this is one of the highest quality blogging training programs I’ve ever been through. The videos are professional, clear and easy to understand and complete. If you can only afford to purchase one blogging training program, this is the one I recommend over all others.
Yaro told me they won’t be re-opening the premium program until the second half of 2009, after the first group of students graduate, so if you don’t join now you may have quite a wait ahead of you.
No Risk
Since this is a Clickbank product their mandatory 60 day refund period applies, so you can join now and try it for two whole months before you have to decide whether to continue or get a refund. The course goes for six months, but you can cancel at any time during that period.
You receive lifetime access to all resources that you pay for, so you shouldn’t feel pressured that the materials will be taken away from you if you don’t keep paying. There are six monthly payments and that’s it.
Deadline: Friday the 6th of February
Sign-up: http://www.BecomeABlogger.com
One Way Back Links, The Best Kind
In an earlier article I mentioned how getting links from other sites to yours is one of the best ways to get noticed by the Search Engines. Of all the types of links you can get, relevant one way back links are by far the best - especially if they’re anchored correctly from content-rich sites. The Search Engines place a high value on this type of link because they are the most difficult to get. I have several methods I use on my Workamping blog to get these types of links. Some work better than others, and I’ll share them with you in this article.
Properly Anchoring You Links
One of the most important points that need to be made here is your back links need to be properly anchored. Search Engines look at the anchor text of a hyperlink to determine how to index the page that’s being linked to. Many people don’t understand this, so they make the common mistake of linking to anchor terms like “click here” or “click this link to …”. These anchor terms don’t mean anything to the search engines and won’t do any good for you when you’re trying to get ranked higher for your keywords. Use your keywords as your anchor text in your link references.
For example, notice how I used the keyword “Workamping” in the very first paragraph of this article. I link that back to my site so that anyone reusing this article will link back to me with the keyword I want to target. A properly formed link for example is something like “Visit my <a href=”http://www.workfromyourrv.com”>Workamping</a> blog for all the latest on working from your RV.” An improperly formed link would look more like, “<a href=”http://www.workfromyourrv.com”>Click here</a> to visit my Workamping blog all about working from your RV.”
I also need to use the word Workamping several times in the article. Keyword density is important as well, but that’s the subject for a different time.
Syndication
If you haven’t set up RSS for your blog yet, do it. Syndicating your blog is a great way to get one way back links. By using RSS to make your blog articles available to others, you can get your blog articles on other sites. That alone won’t necessarily get you the links however. You need to properly anchor your link in the teaser area of your article to achieve that one way back link. The teaser area, as far as RSS is concerned, is the first paragraph. RSS uses only the title and first paragraph as a teaser, then usually includes a link to read the rest of the article. If someone uses RSS and subscribes to your blog to add content to their site, that’s usually the most that will be displayed unless the link is clicked. That’s why it’s important to get your link into the first paragraph.
Article Directories
Article directories are another way to get your content distributed out to other sites for republication. Post your articles to these directories. Many of them allow you to keep the links in the body, so your first paragraph link remains a valuable one way back link. Others don’t allow links in the body, or at least above the fold. In these cases you’ll have to remove the links from the body, but you can still add them into the author bio or signature block at the end. Just remember to anchor them properly as before.
Link Exchanges
I personally don’t do link exchanges any more. They have lost almost all their value as far as the search engines are concerned. The engines are putting more emphasis now on relevancy when valuing links. If the content of the page with the link isn’t relevant to the content of the site being linked to, the link has little to no value. Most link exchanges put links on a links directory page with no value-added content. This isn’t scored high with the search engines.
Link Associations
Link Associations are one of the fastest growing, and best ways to get high quality, relevant, and content-rich one way back links to your site. I use ConnectContent as my primary association. These are groups of site owners that agree to include relevant content one way back links to each other. Because you link to different site than link to you, the links aren’t seen by the search engines as being reciprocal. This is by far the most effective way to get high quality back links at the moment. You usually have to pay a small fee (ConnectContent is currently $12/month) for the service, but the value of the one way back links is well worth it.
Wordpress Plugins – Which Ones Do I Need?
We’ve already gone over a few of the Wordpress plugins you should have in your blog. In this article I’d like to give you a list of the ones I use as a base for all my blogs. Sometimes I have a few more than these, but each blog I do contains at least this base set. Workamping by blogging on the internet gets easier if you have the right tools. These are listed here in alphabetical order, each with a brief explanation.
All-In-One-SEO-Pack
This is one of the best SEO plugins I’ve found. It has just about all the Wordpress modification needed to optimize your blog and make it as SEO friendly as possible. It’s updated regularly and gives you serious control over what the search engines see.
Configurable-Tag-Cloud-Widget
Personally, I seldom use tags. I prefer to use categories instead. There’s a lot of discussion at the moment among SEO gurus (self-proclaimed and otherwise) as to whether tags are good or bad from an SEO standpoint. WorkFromYourRV.com uses tags. I’m doing it as an experiment to see the result compared to TheRVStargazer.com, the test site we started as a demonstration for this blog. Yes, that’s a real site I kept going and will continue to develop as time goes on. If you do use tags, this is a better widget than the one that comes packaged with Wordpress.
Gocodes
Gocodes is a handy plugin to let you occasionally generate those cute little short URLs needed by iPods and such. If you’ve ever used the TinyURL service to generate a short URL for someone, this is a great alternative. It lets you generate a URL like www.workfromyourrv.com/go/blogging so you can give it to someone over the phone or use it in a video. That’s much easier to communicate verbally than www.workfromyourrv.com/blogging-whats-it-all-about. Infact, if you try those 2 URLs you’ll see they lead to the same place. I use Gocodes in this blog.
Google-Sitemap-Generator
Clearly the best sitemap and submission plugin available in my opinion. It’s not limited to Google either. Any time you change your blog, it generates a new sitemap and submits it to Google, Yahoo, MAS and Ask.
Link-Cloaking-Plugin
This is a MUST HAVE if you are going to put affiliate ads in your blog posts. Google doesn’t like affiliate sites. One way they determine you are an affiliate site is by analyzing your outgoing links. If you have a lot of outgoing links that point to affiliates they’ll hurt you. This plugin cloaks those and makes them look like a link internally to your site so Google wont penalize you.
Si-Captcha-For-Wordpress
Another MUST HAVE for blog sites that encourage comments from unauthenticated readers. This makes sure human beings leave comments. There are several “black hat” SEO programs out there that automate garbage comments to blogs just to get the back links. This will at least make sure the commenter is a human being that can read those annoying captcha codes. Check out any of the comments block on my site to see what it looks like.
Sociable-Zyblog-Edition
This puts those cute little icons for the social networking sites at the bottom of your posts. These are great for back links if your readers use these services.
What-Would-Seth-Godin-Do
Strange name, but handy plugin. Named after Seth Godin, this adds a statement at the top of your posts reminding people to join your RSS feed.
Wp-Google-Analytics
If you haven’t set up a Google account for Analytics yet, do it. This plugin makes adding in your Analytics code easy. Google Analytics will give you a wealth of information about your traffic and search habits of your visitors.
Of course, there are hundreds more plugins available for Wordpress. That’s one of the things that makes it a great blogging platform. Many of these plugins are very useful for specific needs. We’ll cover some of the others I use occasionally as we finish up this series. These I’ve listed should be in every blog you set up.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 4
Last time we talked about Link Exchange programs and Blog Proliferation as tools for your workamping business. Before I continue with the next topics, let’s revisit those two briefly with a little expanded information.
I mentioned that cross exchanging links with other sites is not very effective, even when the other site is relevant to yours. You can make it a bit more effective if you can get the other sites to put your link somewhere besides a link directory page. The search engines, and especially Google, don’t seem to put much value in back links coming from a link directory page. Not that they don’t help at all, but they may not be worth the effort. The search engines grade a link on how hard it is to obtain and give you credit accordingly. Link directory pages are easy to get. One way links embedded in a legitimate page is much harder. Are you seeing the pattern now?
That’s why writing quality articles that will get picked up and used by other sites is so important. Whenever another relevant site “borrows” your article and puts it on their site it’s like they wrote about you on a page of their site. Your link is embedded in a page full of high quality content because you wrote it. Even better, it’s one way. You aren’t linking back. Are you seeing the pattern here as well? This, by the way, is one of the things that make blogging such a powerful weapon in your workamping arsenal. Because someone took the time to hand create the content of a blog post, the search engines value it highly.
The Magic Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is all the rage right now. Everyone is throwing that phrase around to describe everything from totally ugly sites to YouTube. Whenever a new innovation comes around, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and labels it Web 2.0, even when it isn’t. What is Web 2.0 anyway and how can it help us as workamping bloggers? We’ll spend another article, or maybe a whole series on Web 2.0 at another time. For now I just want to give you a quick overview of what you should be studying and using it for.
Web 2.0 basically describes the newer innovations in dynamic web sites. Web site technology, like everything else technological has gone through an evolution. Early web sites were little more than online letters consisting almost entirely of simple text on a page. Graphics really helped and are probably responsible for the first explosion of the web phenomenon. Web 2.0 is the term applied to the next big leap in that evolution. It mainly applies to interactive web sites – sites that incorporate interactive media like dynamic graphics, audio or video, customized or adaptive user experiences, etc.
This is important to us because the search engines recognize the popularity of these sites and rank them higher because of it. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc. can be useful in getting your site noticed by the search engines. They don’t do you much good as far as monetization goes, but that’s another article. For the purposes of this article, we like them because they can be used to link back to your site. MySpace, for example is ranked 9/10 by Google. So it is beneficial to get a MySpace page and add a link to your web site to it. The search engines will pick that up and credit you for it. Better yet, get all your friends to do the same. When many people on a social networking site like MySpace or FaceBook have these links to your site, your credit goes up. To that end, make videos and put them on YouTube, Google Video or Amazon as well. Then you can link back to them from your site and let YouTube provide the bandwidth. Also, you can enclose these videos or podcasts into your articles and make them more desirable. Producing these videos and uploading them is an entire article series in itself as well. Keep reading, we’ll cover all of this in more detail as fast as we can.
Get Socially Networked
One of the easiest ways to get your blog onto the social networking sites is to start your own accounts and link to your site from it. While I recommend you do this from several of the more popular sites, having others do it too is even better. You can make it easy for your readers to do this by including social networking quick links at the bottom of your posts. Fortunately, Wordpress makes this easy for us as well.
I use The Sociable plug-in from the Wordpress.org site and I prefer the Sociable Zyblog Edition. The easiest way to locate it is to do a Google search for Sociable Zyblog Edition. The Wordpress.org plug-in page should come up at or near #1 on Google for that key phrase. Download it, install it, activate it and configure it to include your favorite social networking sites. The instructions are good and the plug-in is easy to follow. Once that’s done your readers can easily click their favorite icon and share your site.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 3
One of the most important things you need to make your web site enticing to the major search engines is high quality back links. Back links are links from other web sites to yours. They’re best if they come from high page-ranked sites, contain your targeted keywords in the alt tags and are one way. Reciprocal links, links where they link to you and you reciprocate by linking back to them are okay, but one way links are better.
So, how do you get back links to your web site. There are dozens of methods. There are also dozens of Internet Marketers out there that claim their system or product can do it for you “automatically” or “while you sleep” or whatever. While it is true that some tools are helpful, and even a few are worth paying for, most are just over-hyped reworks of tools that are already available to your free. In the next few articles I’ll try to briefly cover a few of the methods I use and why. We’ll expand on each of these with more detail in upcoming articles.
Link Exchange Services
Link Exchange Services are online services that you join to make exchanging links with other site managers easier. A quick Google search on “Link Exchange” will reveal hundreds of these services, many of them free or at a very small cost. How do you choose? What you want is quality and relevancy above all else. The search engines give you the most credit if the back links to your site are from high quality sites that contain content relevant to your own. If you’re blogging about fishing in the upper Midwest, it won’t do you a lot of good to have back links from gambling sites or sites that sell Chinese pseudo-Viagra. In fact, it may even hurt your ranking. But having back links from sites that have something to do with fishing or other outdoor sports will help tremendously because they’re viewed as relevant by the search engines.
Personally, I’ve used a couple of the pay services in the past. They’ve helped and did boost my rankings, but I’m not sure it was helpful enough over the free sites to make much of a difference. I’m experimenting this time with WorkFromYourRV.com. I’m not using any of the paid services. Instead I’m using all free link exchanges and relying on blog proliferation to get it done for me. In that respect, we’re on this journey together and we’ll see how it works.
Bottom line … link exchanges are a small part that can be beneficial to your overall effort to rank high with the search engines. However, it is only a small part.
Blog Proliferation
The entire point of a blog is to attract readers. Duh! That is also an excellent way to get back links to your site. Many of you are probably reading this article from somewhere other than WorkFromYourRV.com. That’s because I make my blog articles available to the public at large in a variety of ways. I have an RSS feed that syndicates my articles, not only to many of my readers, but to other services that attach my blog entries to other peoples sites. In addition, I upload my blog articles to article services where they’re made available for search and download.
There is another complete segment of the “make money online” market out there that will teach you to set up blog sites in which you don’t have to write a single article. Instead, you scrape relevant, on-topic articles from other sources and include them in your blog. That’s a perfectly legitimate business niche and someday I’ll run a series of articles on how to do this as well. I don’t feel it’s as effective as writing your own material, but then again, it’s easy and you can maintain many more sites using this method.
Those types of sites have to get their material from somewhere and that’s where you come in. Publish your articles through RSS and to the article directories. Make them available for free use and they’ll get picked up and spread over the internet in no time – especially if you write substantive articles.
The reason this benefits you is because all these article services allow you to put a byline at the bottom where you put links back to your site. These links become quality one-way links to your site from other sites. The best kind!
I’ve had my best luck with EzineArticles.com. They are the most restrictive, but seem to get the most attention because of it. Every article you submit to them must follow strict guidelines and is reviewed by a human being. That makes them more difficult to use, but highly respected. About 75% of my articles that I receive back links from come from EzineArticles.com. If you’re only going to bother with 1 article submission site, go with them.
A couple more sites just in case you want more. I also use ArticleAlley.com and GoArticles.com. GoArticles.com will even let you put links directly in the body, so if you embedded an affiliate link, as I sometimes do if it’s relevant, they’ll even let that pass. EzineArticles.com won’t. There are many more, but these are the ones I use most. You can experiment with some of the others, but just watch your traffic sources to see how they’re helping, if at all. We’ll cover how to tell where your traffic is coming from in another article series.
That’s enough to keep you busy for now. We’ll continue with this subject next time.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 2
In the last part I promised to explain what Real Simple Syndication, or RSS is and why it’s important. Let’s do that now before we go further.
RSS is an Internet protocol used to publish frequently updated content. Actually, it a family of competing protocols, but more on that later. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to, or “syndicate” content on the internet such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video, etc. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you use an RSS reader to get that content automatically whenever new items are published. In some ways, it’s like being on an emailing list. RSS documents (which are called a “feeds”, “web feeds”, or “channels”) includes full or summarized text, plus information such as publish dates and authors.
RSS feeds are great for bloggers because they allow us to syndicate and deliver our content automatically. They benefit our readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from our websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software usually referred to as an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”. These readers can be web-based or desktop-based. By using an RSS reader, it isn’t necessary to actually visit the web site to read it’s latest content. I personally use Google’s RSS Reader because I can make it a widget in my iGoogle page.
How to Put RSS to Work For You
You can use RSS for many things, but the 2 most important for a blogger are building a reader base and providing additional dynamic content on your web site.
First, building a reader base. Notice the subscribe box at the top right corner of my web page? That’s my invitation to syndicate my content and read it in either your favorite RSS reader or in your email. When visitors click that link they can subscribe to my feed and get all my blog entries as soon as they are published. Building a strong reader base is important. I personally use FeedBurner for all my RSS feeds. It’s a great service and it’s free. Remember I mentioned there really wasn’t a single RSS standard? That’s one of FeedBurner’s strong points. It can syndicate your feed in such a way that almost anyone can read it regardless of the RSS reader they use or its protocol. I don’t have to worry about it, FeedBurner handles it. I highly recommend you get a FeedBurner account, play with it, learn how to use it and syndicate with it. Once you’ve done that, add a subscribe block to your site similar to what I have and start building that reader base. FeedBurner has tools to help and there are several free Wordpress modules and widgets that can help you build that block.
Second, you can use RSS to add additional dynamic content to your site. This not only makes the search engines like you more, but it can be a beneficial service to your readers. A great example of this is the CONTRIBUTORS CORNER section of my web site at CoolRVToyz.com. If you go there and look you’ll see blog articles that relate to RV’s and the RV lifestyle. These are written by a variety of other bloggers that syndicate their blogs via RSS. I use a module to subscribe to their blogs and display them on my site. My members get a great service by being able to read a variety of RV-related articles, the bloggers benefit because I’m providing them additional exposure on my site and I benefit by having additional, constantly changing content on my website. Win-Win-Win.
One of your goals should be to get other bloggers to pick up your feed and put your blog articles on their site. This gets you that additional exposure and also gets you additional backlinks from their site to yours. Back links are another very important part of SEO, but that’s a subject for another article.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we have our blog monetized, we need to make it palatable to the search engines. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a huge subject. There are people that make a very good living specializing in being a search engine expert. So obviously, this blog isn’t going to even scratch the surface. But I can get you started and point you at some great products and materials that have helped my tremendously.
Here is a checklist you can use to cover the main points you’ll need to cover in your blog. These aren’t all-inclusive of course, but they’re a great start.
Optimize Your Web Site for the Search Engines.
This is a complete study all in it’s own. This is a great place to start however because you usually only need to do it once. Here you can get a lot of information on the Wordpress website and in the documentation to the various SEO modules available for Wordpress. These have a lot of great tips on making sure your title tags, descriptions, keywords, etc. are all set up correctly. Of course, if you’re willing to spend a little money and don’t want to go through it all yourself, there are a few commercial themes and blogging systems that I’ve tried in the past and have had great luck with. One is Blogging to the Bank 3.0 by Rob Benwell. He has some free themes and a great ebook that is a lot of help. I learned a lot from his product and system and it was a relatively cheap education. You can read a review on my Pure411.com site here.
Another great product is Carl Ocab’s Ultimate Blogging Theme. I recently bought his product and liked it so much I’ve switched this site over to it. I haven’t even had time to write a review yet, but I will be. Carl got started at 13 years old and now makes a great living purely as a blogger. Part of it is his theme. His site consistently ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword he’s targeted.
Regardless of whether you choose to do it yourself and set up a free theme to be SEO friendly, or if you purchase a proven theme, you need to make sure you make all the correct changed to it. This takes education. The best place I’ve found so far for that is Gideon Shalwick and Yaro Starak’s new site. This is probably the best place I know of to learn exactly how to get it done right so you can maximize your income from your blog. I personally rely on it and have purchased a lifetime premium membership. They have a wealth of professionally produced videos, audios and articles that are concise and easy to understand. If you can only afford 1 training product, get this one.
Focus, Focus, Focus.
Know your keywords and focus on a singe keyword with each article you write or upload. Writing scattered articles doesn’t get you noticed by the search engines. Pick the top 5 or so keywords that you want people to locate you by and focus all your blog articles on one of them at a time.
Post, Post, Post.
This is advice I haven’t been to good at taking myself sometimes. The search engines like dynamic sites. A dynamic site is one that changes regularly. You don’t want to post multiple times per day necessarily, but you should post at least a couple of times per week. There are tricks to help make your site more dynamic, like using RSS feeds. We’ll cover those in a later article.
Don’t be Mediocre.
Write good articles. Don’t just throw something on line to keep the site dynamic. Your readers will appreciate getting REAL and accurate information. After all, your free information is your service to your readers. If they don’t take time to stay on your site and read your articles, they won’t come back, and they certainly won’t visit your affiliate links. Remember: Quality, not just quality.
In the next few posts we’ll continue this theme and present even more ways to get your blog noticed by the search engines and everyone else. For now, this should keep you busy.
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles that I’ve always had my best results from affiliate ads. Since that’s the subject of this article, let me clarify that a bit. The last thing I want to do is leave you with a false impression that PPC ads aren’t valuable. Quite the opposite.
PPC ads have one distinct advantage over most other forms of online advertising – they start making money immediately. That’s important whenever you start a new web site in an attempt to add to your online income. We’re all prone to discouragement. If we put in a lot of work and get our blog going, then nothing happens, our first reaction is to abandon the effort and write it off as a failure.
The truth is, making money online usually isn’t as “instant” as most would have you believe. While many people do make large amounts of online income, and many of them rather quickly; most make it more slowly. PPC ads give us that instant encouragement that something really is happening and we really are making money online – even if it’s just a small trickle at first.
Affiliate ads will make larger amounts of money in the long run – at least they do for me. I have friends in the internet marketing business that make an impressive living off nothing but PPC web sites, but I have more friends who, like me, take a more balanced approach. I look at like I look at my investment portfolio – diversify!
If you’ve been following this entire series, then you’ve already set up one or more affiliate relationships, either directly with the vendors you plan to use, or with affiliate clearing sites like ShareASale or Commission Junction. Placing the ads into your blog is the next step.
I use a 2-stage approach. First, I have a sidebar panel that I put a group of ads in that are related to my blog. Second, I place appropriate affiliate ads in some of my blog entries. If you’re reading this entry on WorkFromYourRV.com, you can see the ad panel to the right. These are all affiliate ads that have relevance to my blog’s subject and, when clicked, take you to the vendor’s website where you might possibly purchase their product. If you do, I get a small commission. Same with the ads in the blog entries. These are usually more focused and are relevant to the specific blog entry in which they appear. This type of sales is as old as sales itself. My Father-in-law spent most of his early career as a shoe salesman in the days when his entire income was commission from each pair of shoes he sold. This is no different, just adapted to the Internet.
One note of caution here. If you’re in this for the long term, choose your affiliations wisely. Nothing will kill a blog, or even an entire online business faster than recommending disreputable companies. Your readers are YOUR customers – always remember that. They took your advice when deciding to purchase a product, and will likely blame you if the experience goes bad. Personally, I BUY EVERYTHING I RECOMMEND. I realize that can get expensive, and may be out of your budget, but it is the only way I know of to insure the product is legitimate and has value. All of my friends in this business that are successful have the same attitude. You can’t please everybody, but you certainly can make your best effort to get close.
To put affiliate ads in the sidebar of your blog, look for plugins or widgets on Wordpress.org and follow their instructions. Most are reasonably simple and will present your ads in a clear way on your site. For example, if you signed up as an affiliate for Amazon, you can take a look at the AmazonSimpleAdmin widget. It allows you to embed Amazon ads almost anywhere in your blog. If it’s appropriate to display related eBay ads in your blog, then you may want to check out the WP Tag Ads widget or the eBay Sales Lister widget. These scan your blog tags or content and select appropriate eBay ads to display. If you are interested in a Zazzle store, there’s even a widget (Zazzle Store Gallery) that will display products from your Zazzle store.
To embed other affiliate ads into your post you can simply ad an image to your post, or you can use a plugin. I personally like to just insert the images using the Wordpress post editor while I’m writing the post. That way I get full control over where in the text the affiliate ad appears. Just insert the image, then replace the image code generated by Wordpress with the code given to you by your affiliate. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, try a plugin like the WP-Affiliate plugin and see if that matches your needs better.
In the next few articles we’ll cover more about the layout of your blog and how to start driving traffic to your blog. After all, if you don’t have readers, you can’t have customers. Watch for new videos as well.
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now it’s time to start adding Google Adsense and other ads for affiliate sales into your blog. This is known as “monetizing” your web site – getting it to make money online for you. Google Adsense is a great place to start. Personally, I’ve made more money from affiliate sales than from Adsense ads, but I don’t dismiss Adsense. It has made me plenty of money online as well.
Adding Adsense into your blog can take one or more of three forms. You can put ads into your header, put ads onto your side bar, or put ads into your blog posts themselves. Personally, I steer clear of the last one, but that’s really only a personal preference. I prefer to only include appropriate affiliate ads in my blog posts, when I advertise in them at all. Many times I don’t even put ads in the posts themselves. If you decide to place Adsense ads into your blog post there are several freely available Wordpress plugins that will do it for you automatically. My favorite is the All-In-One Adsense And YPN plugin. Search the plugins available on Wordpress.org for other Adsense plugins if you’d like different options.
Putting Adsense ads into your header can be a little more problematic. It usually requires editing the style sheet (style.css) and the header.php file for your selected theme. Since each theme is potentially different, it’s difficult to explain exactly how to do that in a blog article. Some theme make that easier than others. If you not a PHP programmer, and want Adsense ads in your header, look for a theme that has that capability built in.
Adding Adsense ads to your sidebar is easier than adding them to your header. There are several plugins and widgets available on Workpress.org that will do this for you. Widgets are a bit like plugins, but with more capabilities. One good plugin that allows Adsense ads to be added to your sidebar is WP Simple Adsense Insertion. It can be used along with, or even in place of All-In-One Adsense And YPN mentioned above.
My first choice for places to put Adsense ads is in the header. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had much better results with affiliate ads than I have with PPC ads, but I still recommend using PPC. Usually, putting them in the header is enough, although I do sometimes add them to the sidebar – usually below everything else.
In the next few articles we’ll talk about using affiliate ads and talk more about how to incluse Adsense and affiliate ads in your blog.
