Make Money Online Blogging - Recap

Ok so here is a recap on some of the things that has been going on with me lately.

I started affiliate marketing. I started about May 25th, and since then I have made $255. Not too bad. I only ran 2 campaigns for July so far, and only for three days. In those three days I made $75. I mostly advertise on Facebook, but have also used Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Which reminds me. My buddy Neil over at NeilsWeb posted a few Facebook coupon codes. He then dedicated a page of all the Facebook coupon codes he has to date. When he finds a new code, he will put it up there. I think the total was $250 in free Facebook coupons. This month I plan to break $200 in one month. My last month was $107, and before that was about $72.

A New Theme: Unique Blog Designs created a premium wordpress theme, and gave it away for free! Yes, free! Most of their themes are over 1k easily. You are seeing their theme live right here, right now, on my site. I must say, it is really nice, and hopefully will increase some revenue. If you are in the market for a new theme, and want it free, pick up the UBD Money Maker Theme Free!

SEO: Alongside with learning Affiliate Marketing, I have picked up some SEO tricks. I have created a few pages and ranked them. No I didn’t land first page, but my first goal was to get one ranked, and see what I needed to do to get on the first page. One, the amount of search results and their quality play a large factor. When picking keywords to rank for, you have to determine the competition and if you can beat them with keyword desnsity and such. While getting a good ranking is nice, you also have to consider the traffic. If you rank 1st for a keyword that gets 10 searches a month, you could be waiting a long time for your hits. The goal is to find a good keyword that gets a decent amount of searches, but little competition. Scale your landing page, and rank high. My next keyword I will target will have less pages in the search.

Advertising outside the US: I have read this many times, but really didn’t beleive it until I tested it myself. I just thought that for most ads, you have a larger audience in the US. While this is true, for somereason they just don’t convert as well. I have been targeting the United Kingdom and Canada. My impressions for both, along with clicks, soared way past the USA ad. Needless to say, I was running a simple offer with a 20% CTR from the United Kingdom. My USA ad had a whopping 0%CTR. Thats right, no clicks in three days.

Milking it out: I also found that running an offer for a few days works out better than just for one. I was running a dating campaign, and found that it became alive at night. There was also a few days that it ran wild, and a few days it was like a ghost town. So don’t just run a campaign for a day and decide to kill it. Instead, figure out a budget you can afford, and let it run for a few days or a week. Then if you want, you can pick the hot days (more conversions, higher ROI, ect), and only run the ad on those days, eliminating the days that gave poor results.

Tracking! This is a must. At first I was direct linking offers, and just hoping they converted. I was blind. I installed Prosper202 and started tracking everything. I was then able to catch the keywords that didn’t convert. IE: keyword with 42 clicks, 0 conversions, I hit the pause button. Even track your facebook campaigns. FB ads are easier, unless you are running an offer that has like 5 different options. I created a subid for every offer. like offer.php?subid=USAmale25 or offer.php?subid=UK18mf. Those subids tell me one offer was for the USA males 25 and over, the other was for the UK 18 and over male and females. Can you guess the campaign?? lol. I was running about 5 of them, and spent some cash. I then narrowed the campaigns down to two to cut losses, increasing my ROI. Now I wasn’t tracking keywords, but I was able to track what campaings actually converted since there are no keywords really for a facebook ad.

Contest: I held a contest with Not John Chow and Joliber. I hosted a bonus offer, and awarded Kush Money with free 1 month advertising. Can you spot his ad? Thats right it is all over the place. He has the option to pay for next month if he wants to continue. If he doesn’t, then the spot is available to anyone. Hit up the Advertise page to get in line. The spot that Kush Money is advertised on is named “Above Posts”. Who would have guessed? I also have sidebar ad space available. So buy yours now!

SO WHAT NOW? Well tonight I decided to work a little more at my site. I just got the new theme, and I really wan’t to put it to use. I am going to incorporate some affiliate stuff into my site, push selling advertising, and get as much traffic as possible. In order to do this you have to set a checklist. It could be as follows:

Linkbacks:

Your sites traffic will increase a lot with the right linkbacks. Not only do you gain free advertising for your site, but you are helping your Google Page Rank. You can increase your linkback various ways. I suggest picking the top 10 blogs in your niche. I say blogs because they allow you to comment and slip in your website address. Each blog post will give you a link back (that is unless the site uses nofollow tags). I suggest viewing the source on the links for the other comments on the site. If you see “rel=nofollow” then you don’t want to post on that site to gain linkbacks. So pick 10 blogs in your niche that get decent to high traffic. You don’t want to waste your time on the small guys for this. Bookmark these 10 sites so you can easily comment on them daily. I suggest at the bottom of your post you add a little SEO strategy. I have a signiture that I add to every post I make on other people blogs. You can find an example easily at JohnChow or UberAffiliate’s web site. Yes, I am making you work for my little secret.

Another way to gain LinkBacks is using a tool like CommentKahuna. Basically this software allows you to store your Name, email, URL, and message. Then you do a search with CommentKahuna, and it finds tons of blogs and gives you their page rank. Then you just go through the blogs like a slideshow. Make sure you read the post and comments to make a decent reply. Don’t just say, nice post or great site. Don’t spam. Also don’t include more then one link in your message. Affiliate links will probably get deleted. I usually use my little signiture trick to add a easy to see link to my site. I suggest using CommentKahuna at least once a week, and mix up your keywords that you search for. Hit tons of sites, but don’t spam! You can get CommentKahuna from DealDotCom, upon signing in there is usually a link on the left nav menu talking about boosting traffic with whitehat back links.

Social Networks:

Social networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and more, can be some nice extra traffic. I use the ShareThis plugin to allow my users to easily add my post to their favorite Social Networks. I also add some of my own posts. I strongly discourage adding all of your posts, but I feel it is okay to add some of your good posts yourself to give them a kick start. You could also contact some of the people on there that are popular and ask them to submit your posts. Some of these people are popular and have tons of people viewing their profile to see what they like. It is weird, but it happens. If you have a large Facebook friends list, you can get some traffic off of them too. Post on their wall and mention your site. Create a new group for your site, and ask all of your friends to join. Then some of their friends will see it, and it can grow from there. I am not going to cover too much more on Social Networks because it is self explanatory, but often over looked.

Entrecard and SiteHoppin: Throw an Entrecard and SiteHoppin widget on your site, and get active in the network. Earn or buy tons of Entrecard points and advertise your site on other people’s sites. I suggest reviewing their sites for traffic, ect. If the site looks realy popular, it may be worth spending 256 entrecard points. I mean you can earn 300 credits a day with some quick drop sites, so it really shouldn’t be too difficult. SiteHoppin is neat too. I have seen about 20-30 visits a day using sitehoppin when I was using the service. If you don’t use SiteHoppin, you dont get any traffic though. You can use my Site Hoppin Hack to rack up the hops and get some good traffic. This is great for after you make a good post including an affiliate offer and want to get a decent spurt of traffic to it really quick.

Rank well for your post titles:

While it probably isn’t going to be easy to get every one of your post pages to rank well, it is possible to get some of them. I rank on the first page for “Site Hoppin Hack” and Free Xbox Stuff”. I really did not even mean to, I just saw the pages getting traffic from google and did the search myself. So what I learned by that is to do a litle research and pick better titles for your blog posts. Think of a few different titles including a keyword phrase, and check google for it. Take into consideration the competition and amount of pages. A few hundred thousand will be easier than 1 million plus results. If you picked the right keyword phrase in your title, you may find that post on the front page. Now whether that keyword gets searched a lot is a different story. At least you are making the best of your post titles that you can.

The End:

Well it is getting late, and I am extremely tired. I plan to start posting more often and give you guys some good information. While writing this post, I have thought of my next few posts. I am jotting those ideas into notepad now. I would love to hear some of your thoughts.