Don’t be surprised if you aren’t making any money from your blog

My headline may be sacrilegious in Internet marketing (IM) but there’s plenty of real-world proof to backup that statement. The road to online riches is littered with many starving and/or broke bloggers.

For a long time, many IM gurus have taught their students that all they needed to do was put up a blog, add fresh content regularly to attract loads of traffic and voila, the blogger would be able to stuff cash into your bank accounts from AdSense ads. That business model is dead.

Don’t believe me? Probably one of the best examples of this blogging model is Daniel Lyons, a talented blogger and the creator of “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.”

He created a fake persona and posted 10 or 20 items a day without much success until The New York Times ran a story revealing his identity. On that day, more than 500,000 people hit his site, by far his biggest day and earned him about a hundred bucks.

Over the course of that entire month, in which 1.5 million people visited his site, he earned a whopping total of $1,039.81.

Today, Daniel has a very different take on making money from blogging as he recently wrote in Newsweek, “I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.”
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How to Monetize and Profit from Social Media

Probably the biggest question most entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and work-at-home people have about social media is how to make money from it. Everyone is aware of the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn to name some, but very few know how to convert that into more traffic, leads or sales. The thing is that people are spending thousands of hours in social media, but aren’t making thousands of dollars from it.

These days you can’t escape hearing about how wonderful and cheap social media is. That’s great – I use it regularly. As a businessperson, I’m always looking for the best possible return on my investment of time and money. Most people understand the key role of social media but don’t know how to monetize it. Unless you have a good handle on that, investing more in social media isn’t a wise long-term strategy.

I have something that might help. [Read more]

Link Building and Social Bookmarking – a Powerful 1-2 Punch for SEO

Link building plays a vital role in every organic SEO strategy. And as things stand today, off-page SEO tactics carry the bulk of the weight as compared to on-page optimization techniques of the past. Link building is the primary weapon used in outranking your competition in search engines.

However, not all backlinks or inbound links are created equal. Google and other major search engines no longer consider simple reciprocal links valuable. As a matter of fact, the relevance and quality can significantly affect your page rank. Hang around bad backlink neighborhoods and you could be penalized. Focusing on high-quality and relevant one-way links is the name of the game now.

Link building strategies

There are several methods for one-way link building, they are:

• Directory submissions
• Article marketing and syndication
• Forum posting
• Guest blogging
• Press releases
• Paid links (see my recommendation at the end)
• Social bookmarking

This post focuses on the powerful technique of social bookmarking for link building. [Read more]

Off-Site SEO Tips for Getting Your Site Indexed Quickly

There are two components to optimizing your site for search engines. On-site SEO tactics like the proper use of Title and Description MetaTags, using keywords with appropriate density, adding key phrases in H1, H2 tags and in bulleted text and a whole host of other techniques. The second being off-site SEO tactics. More on this later.

As most people know, on-site SEO takes time to take effect. If you rely solely on these tactics, you may be waiting months before Google and other search engines index your site or blog.

Is there a way faster way to get Google to index your site? You betcha! Using some proven off-site SEO tactics can get your site indexed in a matter of days or less than two weeks. There are documented success stories out there where Google indexed a new site in as little as a few hours after launch.

Let’s define off-site SEO first. It pretty much revolves around building in-coming links to your site. Gone are the days when you could just buy thousands of links from link farms. Search engines have become too smart for that. You need to get high-quality backlinks in order move up in the search engine ranks. That usually means getting links to your site from other sites that have a high PageRank, or sites that are updated often and are crawled frequently by search engine spiders.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to get these types of quality links to your site without paying a penny. Here are seven off-site SEO tips you can implement today at no cost: [Read more]

7 Ways for Making Your Business Blog Be All It Can Be

Remember the U.S. army’s “Be All You Can Be” campaign? It was an incredibly popular recruiting slogan that was used for over 20 years until it was retired in 2006. How about your business blog, is it all it can be for your online venture?

I’m assuming you want your business blog to be more than just a personal journal. One way or another, you want to make money with your business blog. Be it directly with AdSense ads, affiliate ads or promoting your own information products. You want your blog to become the hub that attracts traffic, establishes your credibility and ultimately, converts into more sales.

How do you turn your business blog into a powerful sales tool? I’ve listed 7 business blogging tips here just to get you started. [Read more]

Business Blogs Can Humanize Your Online Venture

The Internet is a very impersonal medium of communication. Anyone can put up a website and make outrageous claims. In order to build credibility for your online business or yourself, you have to assure your readers, prospects and customers that a real person is behind that site. A business blog does exactly that.

Well-known corporations like Cisco, Dow and Chevron spend millions of dollars in advertising to humanize themselves. Here’s one of Cisco’s popular TV commercials, “Welcome to the Human Network.”

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3 Strategies to Grow Your Business Blog

Most coaches, consultants and work-at-home entrepreneurs take the first step of creating their online presence by starting a business blog. Unfortunately, for many, the initial enthusiasm is short-lived because they suffer from what I call  “launch and hope syndrome.”

That’s when you wait with baited breath for the world to discover your blog and beat a path to your home page. However, weeks later, you are still waiting for the traffic to roll in. What happened? Nothing, zip, nada, all you’ve got are stray visitors who have spent very little time on your blog.

How do you overcome this problem? Chalk out a strategic plan to grow your business blog and stick to it. Fine-tune your strategies if necessary but don’t abandon your game plan because of a few set backs.

Here are three strategies for profitable business blogging:

1. Post content regularly and often – your readers and search engines love fresh content. At the early stages of your business blog, I recommend you post at least 2 times a week, three to four would be even better.

Set up a posting schedule that you can follow given everything else you need to get done in your busy day.

If writing is not one of your strong suits, outsource this task and/or join a PLR (Private Label Rights) membership site in your niche. Make sure you do some basic editing to your PLR materials in order to stand out from the rest.
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Content + Social Marketing = High Quality Sales Leads

Two valuable currencies that you can use in your online business are content and social marketing or networking. If you combine them, you get a powerful one-two punch for generating high quality sales leads. Let’s take a closer at each part of this Internet marketing strategy.

Content: Article marketing is probably the most popular mode of content marketing. However, this strategy is so overused and saturated that it has lost some of its effectiveness. I’m not suggesting that you ignore article marketing, just don’t count on it being your primary source of traffic.

Too often, marketers will use Google’s Keyword Tool to find “hot” keywords or phrases, slap together an article using these keywords and post it on hundreds of article directories. Sure, you may get a temporary surge of traffic using this method but it makes it very hard for you to stand out if all you do is follow the herd.

What can you do differently? Uncover your inner brilliance instead. I read a great article by Vickie Sullivan who is internationally recognized as the top market strategist for experts and a popular speaker. In her article, “Uncover Your Brilliance: How to Write So That People Take Notice,” she discusses two techniques to get you out of your mental rut.

I suggest that you add your own take on popular issues to differentiate yourself. Here are a few ways to do that.
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How to Use Twitter to Market Your eBook Without Spending a Penny

Everyone knows that Twitter and other social media sites are great for virtual networking. But what about using them for marketing your eBook? Social networking sites are a great way to market and promote your eBook without spending any money and doing it in low-key manner.

In this post, I want to focus solely on using Twitter to promote your eBook or perhaps a physical book and your online business.

First, let’s talk about how Twitter can be so effective. Think of it as a virtual coffee shop where you like to hang out and meet people. You interact, exchange thoughts and ideas with others from around the globe who otherwise would be inaccessible to you.

Of course, you may not always agree with everyone’s opinions but that’s okay. As long as you stay away from blatant self-promotion about your eBook or business, you’ll begin to build a community of trusting relationships. (See my post, “Golden Rule of Twitter”).

You need to grasp the true power of these virtual relationships and leverage them to generate a large following for your eBook. Don’t make it into a popularity contest just to see the number of your followers increasing everyday, that won’t do you any good.

You need to work hard at building real relationships even though you may never meet each other face-to-face. Take a look at this short video by Seth Godin and you’ll understand this critical difference.
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Plan to Get the Most Out of Social Media Marketing

Social media can provide a huge boost to your online business marketing strategy. However, it’s important to know what exactly it is you’re trying to achieve before you get started.

Make a plan to help you measure and track your success. It is not possible to tweak the myriad of social methods available if you don’t know what is working for you.

Social media marketing can help your marketing in a variety of ways. You must decide your goals and prioritize them. Don’t fall into the trap of saying all of the above otherwise you risk seeing very little results for all your efforts.

Some of the common goals of social media marketing are:

• Drive traffic to your site
• Generate referrals and sales
• Communicate with both current and prospective clients
• Find joint venture partners and affiliates
• Build business and personal relationships

No matter what your goals are, social media marketing will make it easier to accomplish.

Keep in mind that just accumulating connections through social media outlets is not going to do much for the success of your business. Having thousands of “followers” or “friends” in various social media platforms may feel nice but unless you form meaningful relationships with them, it is just idle chatter that’s a huge drain on your time. (See Are You Getting Sucked Into The Twitter Time-Sink?)

You want to create a plan for not only obtaining these followers, but also converting them into paying customers or JV partners or affiliates to promote your business.

However, in social media marketing you need to walk a fine line between blatant self-promotion and being an active participant in the community. You are sure to quickly lose your “fan following” if all you do is send out one sales pitch after another. Try to find your own voice that’s a happy medium between marketing and providing useful information.

5 Ways to Become a Better Blogger

Blogging is a simple process but is a lot of work. While it is not hard to post to your blog, getting the traffic or leads and/or revenue from your blog is much tougher. Maybe you’ve been blogging for a while and still aren’t seeing the volume of traffic you’d like. Here are five ways that you can improve your blogging skills.

1. Keep up with the times. No one wants to read last month’s news. Some important issues stay in the headlines for months but your audience will want fresh updates on those topics. Knowing what is going on around you and what will interest others will make your blog content worth reading.
2. Change your content often. There is nothing worse than losing traffic you’ve worked hard to attract because you don’t update your posts regularly.  Readers like fresh content and they will go where they can get it.
3. Network with others. Register with search engines and join social bookmarking sites like Technorati and Digg so people can see what you are doing. Share your blog address with followers on Twitter and on your profile on Facebook.
4. Pay attention to your readers. When people comment, they would like you to answer them back. Take the time to talk to them. After all, they took the time to visit and post a comment. Their comments can drive the direction your blog takes in the future if you want to keep them as readers and increase your traffic.
5. Keep self-promotion to a minimum. It is not all about you; it should be about what you can do for your readership. Keep promotional copy about your products, services and yourself to a minimum. You want your content to be the main attraction. If the ads coordinate with your blog niche, that’s good but show only a few and at the top of the page if you want them to be clicked regularly by visitors.

Blogging is an art. Creating interesting content and keeping readers coming back is a job. If you already blog, use these five tips to enhance your value to the blogosphere.

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