7 Powerful Ways To Drive Targeted Traffic And Build Opt-In Lists For Internet Marketing

Internet marketing success requires two main skills more than any other - the ability to drive targeted traffic to your sites, blogs, squeeze pages and affiliate links and the knowledge of how to build huge opt-in lists fast. These two skills are intertwined, because list-building requires you to drive traffic to your squeeze pages and opt-in forms, and your list, in turn, is the fastest way to direct traffic to your links. As such, it's always best to deal with both subjects at once at you strategize your Internet marketing attack.
Lets look at 7 powerful ways to drive targeted traffic and build opt-in lists...

• Article Marketing - Writing and submitting articles is one of the easiest free ways to start driving targeted prospects to your links - especially when that link leads to a squeeze page with a free PDF, audio or video with more information on the same topic. Stay within the guidelines of the article directory, provide great content and offer more information on the topic through the link in your Author's Resource Box.
• Using Blogs - The first of the interactive web 2.0 technologies to gain wide appeal was blogging - and it remains one of the most powerful methods to drive traffic and build lists. Be sure your opt-in form appears on the blog itself, and use the articles you have at the directories as the bulk of your blog content. Be sure to use the appropriate blog plugins to maximize your SEO benefits, and to hook you up to traffic sources like Twitter, MyBlogLog and Technorati.
• Using Podcasts - A podcast is simply information presented in audio format, usually as an MP3. Since you already have those articles and your blog, now record an audio version of them and place them with the article on your blog using an audio plugin. Be sure to mention your URL in each recording, and check to see if the plugin you're using is building a separate RSS feed for your podcasts - if it isn't, create one manually and submit the RSS feed to iTunes, PodcastReady, Podcast Alley, etc. These directories are accessed by millions of users, and they don't index articles or blogs, so audio is the only way to get your message to their users.
• Video Marketing - Like podcasts, videos are just one more media to present your information in. Whether you use live-action video or create screen-capture videos, you can repurpose the same info you have for your articles and podcasts by making them into videos and getting them out to YouTube, Viddler, etc. Make sure you have the link to your site within the video along with a call to action, and spell out your link in the description area that accompanies each video.
• Using Free Downloads - One of the most powerful ways to get people onto your opt-in list is through a squeeze page - a page offering an incentive to those who sign up. That incentive is usually a PDF report, an audio or a video that contain helpful information on the topic at hand - the topic targeted by your marketing efforts. And you already have the raw materials for the gift - your articles, podcasts and/or videos. Once again, compile the articles, audios or videos into a single download and build a page giving them away to those who opt to join your list. Use the social media sites like Twitter & Facebook, your blog, etc. to drive traffic to that gift and build your list.
• Using Teleseminars and Interviews - Are you an expert in your niche? If so, set up a teleseminar and spend an hour giving out valuable information to your audience. Require a signup to your list for entry to the call, and be sure to include a Q&A session at the end so people get the most from it. If you're not an expert, arrange to interview someone who is and use that as your live call. Be sure to record the call either way, and offer the replay and/or download from a squeeze page for ongoing list-building from it. If a live teleseminar isn't possible, do the interview by phone or Skype and record it, then offer the replay from the squeeze page. Another method is to grab an expert and ask a series of 5-10 questions, then break each question and answer down into a series of podcasts to use sequentially.
• Using Affiliate Programs - Do you have products of your own for sale online? If so, set up an affiliate program and spend some time each week recruiting new affiliates and joint venture partners to promote your products. Set up 'affiliate funnels' - automatic e-courses that go to the prospects your affiliates refer. The e-course should deliver strong content while pre-selling your product and be designed to lead the prospect to buy your product - and hopefully more than one. Be careful not to use affiliate links in your e-course, as you don't want to overwrite the cookies for the referring affiliate. The better the e-course converts prospects to buyers the greater the affiliate commissions you'll be paying out, and the harder your affiliates will be working to drive traffic to your squeeze page, thus making you more money and building your list that much faster.

These are the 7 most popular ways to drive traffic and build your lists, and you should be using and refining all seven on an ongoing basis to build your traffic, your lists and your branding all at once. The results mean more profits for you and an ever-expanding online business that can help you achieve your dream lifestyle!

About the Author

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor & speaker and the creator of the PowerStart Marketing 4-week Internet Marketing Crash Course. To learn more about Doug or to book him to speak at your next event, contact him through his blog at http://DougChampigny.com.

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Generate More Blog Traffic with a Comment Parade

Blog Marketing Strategy Generate More Traffic with a Comment Parade

by guest Author: Linus Ruzicka

When I first started blogging, I thought those nice little blog comments that you got from folks were nothing more than just that - nice little comments.

I thought they were a way for your readers tell you what they thought of your blog posts and really nothing more. And frankly, I felt as though it was a way for people to spam you with their own agenda by blasting your posts with their comments.

It wasn't until about a month ago that I realized saw the FULL power and spectrum of why these sweet little comments were actually Powerful and Mighty beasts that you should be utilizing extensively in your blog marketing tactics.

And it's probably not what you're thinking either.

Some people feel as though it's just interacting with the people leaving comments on your blog posts. But that really only the tip of the iceberg.

First off, lets look at the bigger picture with your blog and look at the bigger picture rather than just simply showing you some blog marketing strategies.

As internet network marketers, one of our goals should be figuring out how to get our blog in front of as many people as possible. That's accomplished by marketing your blog and therefore generating traffic to your blog.

The more traffic your blog gets, the greater your ranking on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. And in turn the higher your ranking, the more traffic you get. (Want to see how you're ranking compared to the big boys?, you can download the Free Alexa toolbar to your web browser here - http://www.alexa.com/toolbar. For example sake, at the time of writing this post, it has been 10 days since I started HEAVILY implementing these comment tactics. Over those 10 days, my Alexa score has increased from #1,084,687 to #632,114 worldwide).

Beginning to see the cycle of what's happening here?

This is where our comment strategies start to take effect.

Here's another way of thinking about it. When someone stops by your site and leaves a comment on one of your posts, you then obivously have a visitor to your blog. It's safe to say that the more people that leave comments = more traffic. It's kind of a spring board effect that just starts to build on itself.

As this is happening, you will begin to see your site ranking increase. As your site ranking increases, your traffic from the search engines will increase. If a site is getting more web traffic, the web crawlers will notice that, and deem your site more attractive than the next guy who has a lower ranking.

Make sense? (If not, go out an do a Google search on the basics of Search Engine Optimization - SEO).

So, what can you do to start to drive comments to your blog posts and site?

What can you do to create that comment parade

Here are some of the blog marketing tactics that I use to create more comments, and therefore traffic, to my blog. They are not all inclusive. Nor am I taking credit for all of these tactics. The idea is that these are proven strategies to increase traffic to your blog. In my opinion, you should be using one or more of these techniques in your own blog marketing tactics:

1. E-MAIL YOUR LIST - This is a favorite of mine. This is the strategy and VERY first step I do after I create a new blog post. Simply e-mail your list everytime you post, and give only a snippet of what you're teaching, and then end it with something like "To learn more about this strategy, go to my blog at www.LinusRuzicka.com to read the entire post." OR do what I do in Step Two...

2. ASK! - Simply ask for comments. There is no law saying that you can't ask for comments. It's not socially unacceptable. Within your post, ask your readers to leave you a comment. (If you have the Onlywire or TweetMeMe plug-ins on your wordpress blog, ask them to Retweet or bookmark the post.)

3. LEAVE A QUESTION - With this tactic, all you will have do do is ask your readers a question at the end of your individual blog post, and ask them to answer it..

4. REPLY TO YOUR COMMENTS - It's kind of like a party, if no one sees others at a party, they leave because they don't want to be the only ones there. But if people are there, people will stick around and have fun. Replying to comments on your blog is sort of the same thing. If readers see you interacting with others that have commented, they will stick around and leave comments as well.

5. THANK YOU'S - This may sound silly or stupid even, but consider this. Your readers are spending time with you and posting comments instead of the many other things they could be doing. Why not thank them for commenting?

6. FACEBOOK IT - This runs together with #1 above, but all you do is take that strategy and use it with your Facebook group instead. Remember to use the Snippet of the post to simply entice them to read further and leave a link directly to your blog post.

Really, that's it. Those are the simple 6 tactics I use to increase comments to my blog posts - and as a result, I get more overall traffic to my blog.

Remember, the more you interact with your list, the more they trust you!

I can only assume that you've learned something valuable out of this article. I am not a PRO at blogging - yet! But I have used these tactics in the past, and they have worked well for me and I have noticed increasing success to my blog because of it.

If you have your own creative idea, leave me a comment here on this blog post. I'll make sure that others will benefit from it as well.

If you like what you read, be sure to leave me a comment at my blog. Even take the time to Retweet it. I thank you in advance!


Is That All There Is? No! Before You Go Anywhere

Else, Go Access More of My

Tips, Strategies, and Tactics at My Blog,

Article Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_1319184_13.html

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Make Money with your blog with Adsense

What is AdSense?

Google.com earns most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search result pages. All this is managed through a program they call AdWords.
Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense and AdWords

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by displaying these same text ads on your site. In other words, you're helping Google advertise and they pay you a percentage of what they earn.

This program is called AdSense.


Every website owner should at least consider the program. Even if your site is just for informational purposes, you can still participate and make decent money with AdSense -- or at least enough to fund your website.

 So if you are one of those people that doesn't like the idea of paying for a site, this is an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.



How AdSense Works

 Adsense works by putting the Adsense code into your web pages and allowing these Adwords ads to show. Google will split the money it receives from the publisher of the ad with you when a visitor to your site clicks on one of these ads. It is a well guarded secret what the actual percentage of the split is.

So if the creator of the ad is willing to pay .60 cents per click, then the you might expect to see about .30 cents every time someone clicks on that ad. The other .30 cents is kept by Google of course. So basically how Adsense works is that it is a partnership between Google and webmasters.

Another important factor of how Adsense Works is that it will only show ads relevant to the theme of your webpage. What does this mean? Well, for example, lets say that Mary has a site about sewing and wants to make money from his site using Google Adsense ads.  By placing the Adsense code on his site the ads that would be shown would all be related to sewing,

Are you understanding the awesome power of how Adsense works now?

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Getting traffic to your blog and trackbacks

56 Ways to get traffic to your blog - this is a great entry by Seth Godin.

Some of my favorite points are these:

Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
Be timeless... write posts that will be readable in a year.
Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
(but he also says this :) Don't include comments, people will cross post their responses.
Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
--- this one made me go research trackbacks

TRACKBACKS

• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A's blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A's blog
• Person A's blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B's post 

and finally Seth says: don't be boring :)

Seth I hope I trackbacked correctly. If not here is a link to his website seth

50 Free Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Blog And Bring Visitors Now: Easy No Cost Ways To Market, Advertise, and Promote Your Blog (Volume 1)

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Make Bigger Blog Earnings

This is a great little ebook to get you making bigger profits with your blog.  Here is a small exercpt:

"What this means is that I see making money through blogs moving into the third phase of its development, where you have to do something more than featuring AdSense on your site or pushing products as an affiliate.

This is not to suggest that the ‘old fashioned’ methods of making money are something that you should completely ignore. As you will see later in this report, they both form a necessary part of the integrated approach to making money, which is going to become more common as this third phase of moneymaking blogs develops."

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Your First Money Making Blog

Without going overboard, the internet offers anyone who has a
computer and a net connection the opportunity to change their
situation-a way of making money that did not exist years ago. As long
as you are willing to learn and put in the work, there is no reason why
you cannot start your own successful online business. One of the ways
of doing so is by creating a monetized blog site.

The way that you need to create that blog has changed and is still
changing, with new ideas replacing older concepts that used to be the
‘norm’ for making money from your blog.

The recognition and explanation of what these changes are and how
you can make your blog different from the other blogs are the reasons
why this e-book is different from the others that you may have read.

Before getting into how you can build your blog to generate bigger
blogging profits, let us start at the very beginning by considering what
you need to do to get your first blog site off the ground.


A brief blogging history and some things you must understand:

The word blog is an abbreviation of ‘weblog’, which hints at the genesis
of this type of site as being online journals. In the early days, these
were almost exclusively personal online journals. People would create a
site telling the world about themselves and what they were doing by
typing information into a ready-made page format, before publishing
that information for the world to see in a matter of minutes.

The beauty of blogs was that previously you would have needed some
level of HTML skills to create a webpage, but using a blogging platform
meant that all you need to do was type and then hit the button to
publish.

Since those early days, blogs have moved on and now a significant
percentage of them are business focused. The majority of these
business-based blogs are focused in a particular way.

The majority provide information rather than products or services for
sale, which is something I will examine in greater detail later in this
report. On any blog site you create, it is necessary to provide valuable
free information that will keep your visitors coming back time after
time, irrespective of how you plan to make money from your site.

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How I replaced my day-job with earnings from this blog

How I replaced my day-job with earnings from this blog

by Bob on March 30, 2009 http://www.christianpf.com/

In less than 2 years I went from not knowing what a blog was to making more with one than my corporate desk job.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to make money with a blog. I suspect most people won’t stick with it long enough to make a full-time income, but even making an extra few hundred dollars a month isn’t bad either. This article is extremely long (more like 10 articles), but I wanted it to be a thorough and helpful resource for those wanting to start a blog or make some more money from the one they already have.
For the sake of convenience, I added links to different sections of this article, so you can easily skip ahead to the section you want…

• How it all started for me
• Blogging basics
• How to get a self-hosted blog
• The importance of a customizable theme
• How I make money with this blog
• How long does it take to make money from a blog
• How to get traffic to your blog
• SEO tips for blogs
• How I increased Adsense income by $1500 in under 3 months
• 11 Tools that have helped me succeed
• Warnings for those just starting out

I should also mention that I really haven’t written about blogging or making money from blogs on ChristianPF yet, because I wanted to make sure that it was a viable option for making some cash. Now that I have found that it is, I decided to pour out everything I learned the last two years about it…

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How it all started for me

About 2 years ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the idea of building websites full of free information to help people. After brainstorming a bit, I got a couple ideas of topics that I was passionate about: Proverbs and Personal Finance. My first idea was to post a Proverb each day and comment on it. As I explained my idea further to him, he informed me that I would basically have a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was, but I thought, “oh, ok, sure.”
So, over the next few weeks I read as much as I could find about blogging and ultimately decided on creating a blog about Personal Finance from a Christian perspective. I had been very interested in helping people with their money, so blogging seemed like a great way to reach people all over the world. Over the next couple months, I started writing articles and officially launched ChristianPF in June of 2007.
At this point I had thought about making money from the site, but had no idea how and honestly didn’t really think it was possible to make a living at it. I threw up an Adsense ad just to see what would happen and I still remember how excited I was when I saw that I had made my first 7 cents! From there, I set a goal to make $100 by the end of 2007 which was pretty easy to accomplish – even without knowing anything. I should also mention that from June 2007 to June 2008 I spent about 4-6 hours each weekend writing articles and averaged about 4 new articles each week. And I spent a few more hours each week on site maintenance, emails, social media, etc. So in total I probably was spending about 10 hours each week working on the site.

Getting laid off

In July 2008 things got interesting. The large brokerage firm that I had worked 5 years for was bought out by a larger firm. I was told that my department would no longer be needed, so they handed me a severance check and I was on my way. By this point I was making some money from the blog, but not enough to even pay the rent each month.
After much prayer I decided against looking for another “day job” and decided to work full time on building the blog. Thankfully we had paid off most of our debt, and had my wife’s income as a support to buy us some time. I figured I would give it a shot for a few months and if it didn’t work out I would find another 9-5.
From that point, the income generated from this website has increased each month and in February 2009 it exceeded my monthly income from my old day job. I am still a little bit in awe and can’t believe that I am actually paying the bills from this website!. But, I thank God everyday that I get to do this – I really did not like working in Corporate America and am so thankful! It is hard work, but it doesn’t really seem like it when you are doing something that you are passionate about and love doing it.

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Blogging basics

I am going to try to boil this down to the essentials. There are whole books written on this subject, so I am not going to try to cover everything here. If you are looking for a good book about blogging for beginners, I suggest reading Darren Rowse’s Problogger. But for a quick, bottom-line version keep reading…

What is a blog?

A blog is short for “weblog”. Basically, it is just a website that has entries listed in reverse chronological order. The original idea behind it was to be a online journal or diary that was updated daily (or as frequently as the writer chose). Over the last decade many software programs and blogging platforms have been created to make the process VERY EASY.
As the blog writer, depending on which platform you use, you can just type your entry, press submit and it shows up on your blog for the world to see. Most bloggers don’t know any programming languages and are not “techies.” Starting a blog is one of the easiest ways out there to start a website. If you haven’t started one yet, why not try it? It can be very quick to set up and can be completely free.

Is it easy to start a blog?

It is very easy. Even if there are steps along the way that are confusing, there are plenty of resources to get the help you need. There are over 20 million blogs in existence, so it can’t be that difficult.

How much does it cost to blog?

There are many services that allow you to start a blog for free (see below). I suggest using one of the free services to get a basic feel for blogging and “get your feet wet.” Once you decide you want to stick with it and that you want to make money with your blog, I suggest moving up to a self-hosted blog (see below). Anyone who is really trying to make money with a blog will probably be more successful with a self-hosted blog. Getting a self-hosted blog may not be free, but still can be VERY inexpensive. You will need to pay for nothing more than a domain name ($10) and web-hosting (as cheap as a few bucks a month).

Getting a blogging platform

All 4 of the options listed are free. The first 3 options are the easiest, but the are also limited on features. If you are just trying to make an extra few hundred dollars from your blog, these options could work. But if you are really serious about trying to make good money from your blog, I recommend self-hosting your blog (which we talk about in the next section…).
Tumblr.com – This is probably the simplest blogging platform to use, but it also is the probably the least customizeable. So, it might be something good to start with, but it would be more difficult to build an income-generating website with it.
Blogger.com – Blogger is also very good, easy to set up, owned by Google, you can customize the theme, and the domain name includes “.blogspot.com” (in some people’s opinion a little less professional). Blogger continues to become more customizeable and currently has a lot more options than they did a few years ago.
Wordpress.com – I like wordpress.com they are completely free, easy to set up, you can customize the theme, but other customizations are limited, domain name includes “.wordpress.com”.

Wordpress.org – Wait, what is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org? To put it simply Wordpress.com is where you will go to set up a basic, easy blog with limited features. Wordpress.org is where you will go to get a self-hosted blog. If you get to the point where you are serious about blogging and really want to make some money with it, you need to self-host your blog.

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How to setup a self-hosted blog

If you are going to be using one of the first three options above, you can skip this section.
If you are serious about blogging and are looking for the best way to customize your blog’s look and other features, then getting a self-hosted blog from Wordpress.org is probably the best way to go. It is currently the top choice for most bloggers. It does require more work up front and does have small costs associated with it: buying a domain name ($10/year) and hosting your blog ($10/month).
One of the big advantages is that you can use your own domain name (i.e. yourblog.com). While this might not seem like a big deal, it is a lot easier for people to remember yourblog.com rather than yourblog.blogspot.com which is what you will be given if you use Blogger.
I will warn you, being a non-techie myself, this took me some time figuring out how to get my self-hosted site set up. Wordpress.org has a great step-by-step guide for getting you set up. While it is more work on the front end, I am really glad I got good advice and did this at the beginning, than having to do it now.

Pick a Domain Name

1. You should start by purchasing a domain name. Psychicwhois.com is a great tool to see what names are still available. I would suggest going to for a .com rather than a .info or .us or anything else for that matter. It is just too easy for people to get confused. A .com is always going to hold more value than any other extension.
2. Once you get it picked out, you need to find somewhere to purchase it. I bought my first few domains at GoDaddy.com and have bought the remaining ones from Dreamhost. While GoDaddy is about one of the biggest names out there, I can’t say that I recommend them because of some of their advertising campaigns that they run. But the good news is that there are thousands of options of places where you can purchase a domain name.

Pick a host for your blog

The webhost is the company that you pay to store all of your files for your blog. There are also a million web hosting companies out there. I don’t suggest just looking for the cheapest one, because a lot of these companies are not very reliable and your site might be down quite a bit.
I like to go with the bigger companies who have a longer track record and are more established. They may cost a dollar or two more a month when you are starting out and it is well worth it.
I have hosted my websites with Dreamhost from the beginning, mostly because I knew a lot of people using them and I got a hosting package for about $7.00 a month. I did find hosting cheaper, but with hosting you often get what you pay for – so keep that in mind.
COUPON: Also if you do use Dreamhost – I have a 25% off coupon you can use, just enter “Christianblog” as the promo code.
I still host most of my websites at Dreamhost, but have moved ChristianPF.com to MediaTemple. The main reason was that since my livelihood now depended on the website I wanted a higher level of service from my hosting company. MediaTemple has been great in that regard, but as always it comes with a price. I am currently paying $50 a month for hosting with them.
(Added 01-05-10 – I am currently in the process of buying a website that is hosted on BlueHost, and after digging around the backend quite a bit, I am starting to think they are a better choice than Dreamhost. Their prices are slightly lower than Dreamhost, but they seem to have things a little better organized and create an easier experience for new users. I haven’t dealt with their customer service yet, so I can’t comment on that yet, but my overall experience so far leads me to like them a bit more than Dreamhost. For what it’s worth.)

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Get a customizable theme

After I took the step the self-host this site, the next step that greatly helped me increase earnings was choosing a highly-customizable theme. I don’t necessarily recommend doing this at the beginning, since it does cost money to get a good theme, but once you are committed to blogging and are willing to invest a few bucks, putting that money towards a good theme is a good investment. For this site, I purchased Semiologic, which is a fantastic theme that gives you a lot of control. It costs $300 for the full version, but I quickly made that money back because the theme allowed me optimize my ad placement in ways that no other themes did.
If you are a programmer, you really don’t need to buy a theme because you can make the all the customizations yourself to any basic theme. Since starting to blog a couple years ago, I have learned some HTML codes, but I am still about the furthest thing from a programmer! So for people like me, a customizable theme allows me to control things and areas of the site that I would never be able to change with out the help of a programmer.

My Themes

At the time of this writing, I am still using Semiologic for the theme on this site, but since I had been hearing so much buzz about the Thesis Theme, I decided to buy it and try it out on another one of my sites. I have to admit, I never thought it would be able to compete with Semiologic, but I am finding out how wrong I was. After testing it out, I really am very impressed with it. Right out of the box, it provides you with a very pretty looking site that is very easy to customize. It is SEO optimized very well, has a ton of support for it, and once you figure out how to use the hooks you can customize it to oblivion if you want. The kicker is that you can buy it and get lifetime updates for $87.
I still really like Semiologic and think it is a great theme, but for the price, if I were shopping right now, I would go with Thesis. I am going to get to know and learn Thesis on my other site for a while and make sure that it really is everything that I think it is and eventually I will convert this site to Thesis.
Update: I have now switched this site over to Thesis and I couldn’t be more happy with it. If you do get Thesis, I highly recommend the OpenHook Plugin – you will be able to easily do just about any customization that you can imagine.

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How I make money with this blog

When I go to family functions or social events I often get a blank stare when I explain what I do for a living. I think people understand the part that I write articles and put them on a website, but when it comes to making money from it, they don’t get it. In this section I will lay it out and hopefully it will help bring some clarity…

CPC Ad Networks

There are a few different ad networks that I use on CPF. The most successful one has been Google’s Adsense program. Basically what they do is read the article that I write and find ads that are relevant to it and display them next to the article. The great thing about it is that by having extremely relevant ads, it actually can be quite beneficial to the readers as well. For example, if I write an article explaining what an IRA was, but didn’t mention where you could open one, Adsense would likely be displaying ads of places to open an IRA. So as a reader, if I read that article and decided that I did want to open an IRA, the ads would be providing options that the article did not.
I am currently doing a few tests with another CPC network called Chitika. Apparently, you can use it in conjunction with Adsense. The jury is still out, but I am interested to see how it compares to Adsense. All things considered, I have found that if optimized correctly, Adsense really can work well. I will explain more about how to optimize it in sections below.

CPM Ad Networks

While Adsense pays on a click basis (CPC), I use other ad networks that pay by the total # of impressions (CPM). At the beginning, these networks didn’t produce much income, but as the traffic grows CPM networks seem to work well in conjunction with Adsense. I use (or have used) Adsdaq, Casale Media, Adbrite, Adify, Veremedia, and BuzzLogic. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses and may be suitable for one kind of a site and not another.

Affiliate Product Sales

Basically an example of an affiliate sale would be if you sold lawn mowers and I referred a customer to you, if they purchased you would pay me back a % of the sale for referring them. There are a million options for this on the internet now. The main programs I use are Amazon’s Affiliate program, LinkConnector, Commission Junction, Shareasale, E-Junkie, and LinkShare. There are many others, but these are a few of the more popular ones available.
I have a very strong policy about honest recommendations. I give my honest opinions about products that I find regardless of how it will affect affiliate sales. This is probably why I don’t really make too much with affiliate products. For example, I wrote about Cash Crate and updated the article to show what I didn’t like about them. Because Cash Crate has such a generous referral program, I know some people making lots of money from it, but I just don’t feel comfortable recommending it since I had a bad experience using it.
On the other hand there are products like ING Direct, Ebates, Amazon Prime, Ebay, Sharebuilder, and Quicken Online that I recommend and also have some sort of affiliate or referral program as well. These are what I love because I can help readers by pointing them to good resources and tools that have helped me and get paid in the process. I know some people don’t have a problem promoting anything that will pay them, but I just can’t, in good conscience, recommend something to someone that I don’t genuinely believe will help them.

Direct Ad Sales

I also sell ad space directly to advertisers. This hasn’t provided much income for me yet and may or may not even be worth my time. I know that in certain niche markets direct ad sales can work out very well, but thus far it hasn’t been a big money maker on CPF.

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How long does it take to make money from a blog

The second question that people normally ask after, “how do I make money with a blog?” is, “how long is it going to take?”. Well just like most things in life, there is no legitimate quick and easy way. It takes time and hard work.
As you can see from the chart below it took me a long time before the trend started moving upward. But, for more than a year I was working at it about 10 hours a week. And don’t forget I didn’t know anything about blogging, advertising, getting traffic, etc when I started. So, if you know that ChristianPF is a blog, then you have a head start on me.
Also, you have the wonderful privilege of reading this article where I am going explain most of the things that I did to help create that upward trend seen below – that I didn’t know the first year.

Blog earnings visualized

From other people I know who make a decent amount from their blogs, this curve seems to be typical. While the first year didn’t yield much income, it was crucial for the second year to be able to. While I wish I could tell you that you could jump right ahead to where the income starts increasing quicker, but I just don’t think it is likely. There are some tips in this article that I wish I would have known at the beginning and I think they will make things go a lot quicker, but there is no getting around the fact that it is going to take time to get there.
But just like anything, the more you put in, the more you get out. The two keys are consistency and a willingness to learn. Without them, I would say that it will be very difficult to make money with your blog.

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How to get traffic to your blog

So now are getting to the point of this article where I start sharing everything I have learned over the last couple years about blogging. So, if you are like most, you want to create a blog so that others can read what you have to say. Sadly, people will not find your blog (in the beginning anyway) unless you do a little legwork. These are some of the things I did to get traffic and some that I still do.
The first thing I suggest doing is writing a few great articles about your topic and feature them in your sidebar. Then I would start working on generating traffic, because you not only want traffic, but you want returning traffic as well.

Guest Posting!!

I think this is one of the best ways to start getting some quick traffic. Almost every blog I know allows guest posts (even this one) – and almost every one of those does not discriminate. What I mean is that most bloggers (that I know anyway) will accept or reject a guest post based on it’s quality, not on whether they know the person or not. This provides a great opportunity for a newbie to write an article that could be seen by 20,000 readers. I don’t know of any other method that could bring traffic as quick.
I must admit, I could still do more guest posting myself. I have been pleased with the results in the past. The key is to write a great article – don’t hold back your best stuff. I have seen people grow their blogs very quickly by giving some of their best articles away as guest posts. Also, only submit unpublished content as a guest post. If it has already been published, then the blog that is allowing you to guest post won’t get any search engine traffic for that article. But there are places to republish your articles you have already published – we will get to that in a minute…

Sign up for blog community sites

Just a few off the top of my head are mybloglog.com, technorati.com, and blogcatalog.com. Look for other blogs in your niche and join their networks and ask to become their friends. Networking with some of your fellow bloggers here will send a few visitors your way and is a good way to get started.

Submit to Blogcarnivals

One of the best things beginning bloggers can do is to sign up for blogcarnivals. At this site you can submit articles that you wrote on your blog to be included in a list of articles by the hosting blog. It is kind of like “open mic night.” If you have a good article with a good title, you can get some good traffic from blogcarnivals, not to mention incoming links from other related sites.

Join Directories

If I were starting a blog today, one of the first things I would do is Google “whatever topic I want to blog about” + “directory” This should return a list of web directories about your topic. Getting added to these directories will only help. You may not get a lot of traffic from them, but ultimately they will help you get more traffic from the search engines. A few to get you started…

• Blogs.com
• Blogged.com
• Blogflux.com
• BOTW.org
• DMOZ.org
• Yahoo Directory

Blog Commenting

One of the absolute best ways for new blogs to get traffic is just to comment on other blogs. Commenting with a thoughtful and provocative response will often send a few visitors your way. The blogging community is generally a very social community and those who are active in the community often reap the rewards of it.

Forum Commenting

Becoming involved in forums related to your topic and having a link to your blog in the signature line can send a few visitors. Google “your topic” and “forums” and you are sure to find a few. Just don’t be annoying and go in just to promote yourself. People can see that from a mile away. The new age of the internet (aka Web 2.0) is very much a “give and you shall receive” environment. If you seek to give and be a benefit before seeking your own rewards, you will be much better off. Why not get started at the Christian PF Forums?

Linking to other blogs

I don’t know what it is, but everyone wants to know when someone is talking about them. So it is with blogs. When people link to my site, I get a notification and often go check out who linked to me and what the context was. I have had some good relationships form just from this.

Create Squidoo pages

Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com and a handful of others are sites that allow you to build a simple page about a topic. You can do it very quick and the pages often rank well in the search engines. If you build a page that gets a little bit of traffic and have links coming back to your site, you will catch some of those visitors.

Article submissions

Submit articles to article submission sites. These sites collect articles and most allow a bio-section that can include a link back to your blog. Here are a few that are worth looking into…

• ezinearticles.com
• goarticles.com
• articledashboard.com
• buzzle.com
• articlecity.com

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SEO tips for blogs

It will take a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. The search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, hence proving that they are reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other web sites that have a good reputation in the search engines’ eyes is very important.
As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links the search engines will begin to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing!! But, as I mentioned earlier, they are very wary of new websites – so time will be your ally when it comes to the search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google’s results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part about it is that it is FREE TRAFFIC!!!
I am not going to get deep into SEO much here, there are far more thorough books about it (i.e. SEOBook) but as your blog grows you should try to learn more about it, as it will only help you by knowing more. Just like most of the things you will learn while blogging, you don’t need to be an expert at it – just having a working knowledge will provide great results.
The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they are trying to create a perfect system where any searcher can find exactly what they want. Google wants to display the most relevant websites to their searchers. They will never have a perfect system, but they probably won’t stop trying.
If you can keep this in mind, it will be very helpful when you are trying to optimize your blog. Don’t waste your time trying to trick them, they will figure it out and will punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear to them what your site is all about and writing great content for your reader and the rest will take care of itself.
So, let’s get to some SEO. These are some of the most important (in my opinion) pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you will be much better off than most people who don’t know anything about SEO.

1. Title Tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of your browser window. It is also one of the most important determining factors that the search engines use to determine what your site is about.

In the above picture you can see that the title tag is “Christian Personal Finance – Financial help, debt help…” You WILL want to make sure that your title tags contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines. If your site is about rock climbing, you will not want to have “welcome to Bill’s blog” in the title tags. Something better would be “Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text – the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine you can see that the link will go to Google. “great search engine” is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google really places a lot of importance on what words are in the anchor text.
Obviously, you will not be able to control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, you should use your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals, and your signature line in forums all may be good places to make sure you get your keywords in your anchor text.

3. Keyword Research

If you are trying to get traffic from search engines, it is always a good idea to know what people are searching for before you start writing. I often use Aaron Wall’s keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4. Get links

We already lightly discussed the importance of links coming into your blog. Other that the great benefit they play in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It is an obvious benefit, but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot of visitors, you could see a huge traffic spike from it. If you get links from lots of blogs, you could and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more and more links, you will see more visitors coming.
The bottom line about link-building is that you have to create something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

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How I increased Adsense earnings $1500 in less than 3 months

This section is going to be a little bit beyond the basics and I will provide details of how I dramatically improved earnings from Adsense. Just to clarify, at the time of this increase I was already making some money with Adsense, but I had no idea how much difference a few tweaks could make. In my case I increased earnings over $1500 in a short amount of time.
The thing you have to understand about Adsense is that no two sites are alike. Every blog has a different audience and different articles and most likely a different layout, all these things affect Adsense earnings. Knowing that, testing and trying new things is critical to find the winners!

1. Added a Privacy Policy

This is such a simple thing to do. I never realized that is a “requirement” for Adsense publishers, but when I added a link in my footer to my Privacy Policy there was a noticeable increase in earnings. I assume that Google rewards those who have a privacy policy and punishes those that don’t by trimming their earnings. In a perfect world you would want your lawyer to draft your privacy policy, but here is a sample template of a privacy policy to make your life a bit easier.

2. Put ads where people’s eyeballs went…

For me there is an eternal struggle between usability and profitability with ads. While I want need to make money to pay my bills, I still want to make this site as user friendly as possible. So, I have made some sacrifices with this site in order to maintain certain levels of usability, but one of the main keys to making money with Adsense is ad placement.
Like I mentioned before, this needs to be experimented with. But for the first year or more of this site I just kinda threw the ads where ever I had extra room. Once I changed the location of my ads, my earnings tripled overnight. It really freaked me out. I had no idea that just moving an ad a couple inches would have such a dramatic effect.
The diagram to the right (from Google) provides some good starting point for what locations work and don’t.

3. Section Targeting

This was another tweak I made that made a noticeable difference in earnings. Basically “section targeting” is telling Google what text on your site to look at when deciding what ads to show. Google is pretty good at figuring this out if you don’t do this, but if you have a lot of stuff going on in your sidebars and footer sections, it is probably worth experimenting with.
It is very easy to implement. You only need to use this tag…

to tell Google to start, and this tag…

…to tell them to stop. I just added a text widget at the top of my post for the start tag and after the content for the end tag.

4. Who Sees Ads Plugin

This is a great plugin that allows you (as the name suggests) choose which visitors see which ads. There are lots of criteria that you can select, so you can specify that Search Engine users see a particular Adsense unit when regular readers see something else. I have found that search engine visitors click Adsense ads a lot more than regular readers. I still show some Adsense to regular readers, but I focus my energy on the visitors from search engines – this plugin makes this very easy.

5. Changed the colors

When Adsense first came out, people said to make the colors as loud and ugly as possible to draw attention to them. Next I heard that the best thing to do was to blend them into the site. Of the two methods I think that blending works a little better, and definitely looks a lot better! But, I have a slight variation of that has worked even better for me. Currently I have have most of my links set to a lighter blue color. I used to have many of my Adsense ads match that, but I saw a nice increase when I changed the Ad titles to the old standard Link Blue. I feel that visually it is a complement rather than a match. It stands out a little bit more, but doesn’t look bad either – IMO…

6. Wrote articles people are searching for

This might seem unrelated, but it is very important. If you are like most bloggers, you have a regular readership and you have readers from the search engines. For some reason, a lot of bloggers just don’t give much respect to search engine readers and don’t really try to reach out to them other than trying to “convert” them to a regular reader. I approach things a little bit differently, rather than getting frustrated at the fact that so many search engine visitors don’t come back, I started to embrace it. I realized that my main goal of this site was to help people, so why should I care if they only visit once or on a daily basis if they are getting helped? So while I very much appreciate and value my regular readers, I also understand that I can help those who find the site via a search engine.
I started doing keyword research to see what people were looking for in the search engines. If there are people searching to find out how to sell stuff on Ebay, I want to help them find out! What happened for me as I started to become more conscious of what people were searching for was that I started getting more search engine traffic – which of course leads to higher earnings from Adsense.

7. Added a Google search bar

This is a no-brainer. Google is the master of search, so you can bet that their search capability on your site is going to be better than the default Wordpress search tool. By installing this, you will help your visitors find the information that they are looking for on your site and make some extra cash in the process. When the search results (from the websites you choose) are displayed they have the standard Google ads present, just like normal Google search results.

8. Hooked Google Analytics up with Adsense

TA few months ago, Analytics started allowing the option to integrate your Adsense data. This has been so helpful for me. It provides webmasters with a wealth of information about earnings. It is simple to see which articles are making the most money, which keywords are yielding the most, what sites send the most valuable traffic, and a whole lot more. If you use Adsense, don’t pass this one up.

9. Tested, re-tested, and tested again…

When running Adsense tests, I typically let them run for a month in order to make sure they are very thorough. I have a calendar that I use to mark down when I make changes and what changes I make. Then when the test is complete I compare CPM and eCPM rates to see what performed better. A/B split testing is a better method when possible, but for certain tests is just isn’t possible or practical. But either way, if you want to make more money with Adsense, experimenting and testing is a must!

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10 tools that have helped make it all possible…

Not all of these tools directly contribute to the bottom line, but each one of them have been very helpful over the last couple years.

1. Google Analytics – which is a wonderful (and free) statistics tool that will help you keep track of your visitors and analyze a lot of data about them. As I mentioned before it now integrates with Adsense to give even more valuable data.
2. Semiologic WP Theme – This is the theme I use for most of my Wordpress sites. It costs about $300 for the full version, but I started with the free version, which I think is far more customizable than the vast majority of WP themes out there already. So if you are just starting out your probably don’t need the full version yet, but eventually it is probably worth considering. For what it has allowed me to do I know that it has paid for itself many times over.
3. Google webmaster tools – This will help you see how Google views your blog. They will also let you know if there are any problems with it that you may not be aware of. For me I had some issues that were really hurting my search rankings, but I found out about them and fixed them and voila! All better.
4. Google’s Keyword Tool – This is a great tool to get ideas about popular keywords as well.
5. SEObook Keyword Tool – I use this to get a ballpark estimate of how many people are searching for particular key phrases.
6. SocialPoster – This tool allows you to submit articles to multiple social sites. I use it to submit to about the top 5-10 social sites.
7. Hittail.com – This one provides ideas for articles based on what you have previously written about and could probably rank for. I just noticed that the free version is gone. If you have a blog that is established it might be worth paying $10 a month for it – I suggest doing the free-trial and see how much it helps you.
8. Stock.xchng – The best free stock photography site I have found.
9. iStockPhoto – The best cheap stock photography site I have found. They have lots of images that you can get for just a few bucks.
10. Feedburner – If you have a blog, you will want to burn a feed. Feedburner makes this fun, organized, and easy…

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Warnings for those starting out…

Don’t quit your day-job

Even if you know a lot about making money with a blog (which just be reading this article, you have a tremendous advantage over me when I started) it is going to take a while. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it is more of a work-for-free-for-a-long-time-and-then-reap-your-reward type plan. The beautiful thing is that I can now say that it does work if you are diligent and open to learning from your mistakes. But either way, convention wisdom says, build your blog part-time and when you start making more from it than your day-job consider making it a full-time deal. My situation is a unique one and I don’t recommend doing what I did unless it really is God calling you to do so. In my case I am now thankful that I got laid off – if I hadn’t I would probably still be doing a job I didn’t like!

Learn everything you can

One of the advantages I have is that I love to learn and don’t stop when I make a mistake. I work really hard to learn from my mistakes and figure out what the better course of action would be for the next time. You are going to do things wrong, but you just have to keep going and keep learning. Learning how to use Google search is very important. If you do, you will be able to find an answer to just about every problem you encounter on the web.

Avoid time-wasters

Checking your stats every hour, reading 500 blogs in your RSS, playing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or Youtube all day will kill your productivity. Focus on what yields results and stay disciplined to stick with that. Social media is an important part of building traffic, but you have to keep it in check.

Have fun

While I wrote this article as a guide to help those who want to make money with a blog, I understand that many people don’t really care about that. Either way, life is too short not to be enjoying it. So whether you want to be a full-time blogger or just communicate with friends – have fun!!

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