No matter what the nature of your business is, you need to advertise in order to make the public aware of your product or service. An advertising campaign can also help to establish a brand for your company. If yours is a startup, this is especially important, and you may be asking yourself “what is an effective, yet low cost way to begin?”

The only question is - how? If you’re new to the world of online marketing, it can be confusing. It’s not exactly apparent how it’s done, is it? You can breathe a little easier. I’m going to tell you how to use an article writing campaign to build your new business into a success - or if yours is an established concern, how to use article writing to propel your business to the next level. More importantly, I’m going to tell you how it’s done.

It’s becoming easier and easier to make money using your blog.

Great bloggers just keep coming up with ways to score a few bucks—or a lot—and it really adds up.

The secret to making money with your blog is that some of the methods will earn you large amounts of money, and some will earn you only pennies at a time, but it all adds up.

Keeping up with all of the strategies gives you an opportunity to add up considerable amounts of dough.

1. Advertising

This is probably the easiest and most common way for bloggers to make money online. Using a program like Google Adsense, relevant ads are placed on your site, and you get paid anywhere from a few cents to a few bucks for every time a visitor clicks through.

2. Affiliate Programs

Joining affiliate programs allows you to promote someone else’s product and then receive a commission when you encourage them to buy. Having a link on your site that a visitor clicks through uses a cookie to track whether they return for a purchase or not.

If so, you just made some cash—some affiliates pay up to 15% commission.

3. Ask for Donations

You’d probably be surprised how much money you can get just by asking for it. Asking for a small donation to keep your very informative site running smoothly will land you a sizable nest egg.

Set it up using PayPal, and watch the voluntary contributions pour in.

4. Sell Something

Actually selling a product or service is an obvious way for you to make money using your blog. Some choose to peddle ebooks, others may sell tshirts or buttons. Still others may market themselves as blog advisors. Whatever you can think of, there’s likely to be a market for it.

5. Hire Yourself Out

If you’re a good writer, and you’re keeping up a decent blog, people will take notice. Chances are you will be asked at some point to contribute to other blogs, either by using your own name or selling your posts ghostwritten.

Writing a blog is a time-consuming process that not everyone is good at. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

Take a look at Bloggers For Hire if you think you’d like this sort of work.

Non-blogging writing opportunities are just as common, as bloggers have become a much-sought-out bunch of business people in today’s world. Contributing to magazines or newspapers from a blogger’s perspective can be another opportunity.

6. Consulting

Maintaining a successful blog that is making money is a talent.

If you are able to do so, then you are the type of entrepreneur (a leader in your niche) that novices will turn to for advice.

7. Teach Others

Develop an online training or video with some advice or write an ebook with tips and tricks.

Good advice is worth money to a lot of people!

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Although this amazing site is still in private beta, its worth a look. Aviary is a truly intriguing and comprehensive suite of online media editing apps.

These tools are based right in your browser (or as downloadable AIR applications) and all “relate” to each other.

To illustrate, Aviary provides this example:

“You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.”

Once you’ve decided on your particular online niche, you should quickly get started researching exactly what others in your niche (and other related niches) are doing in terms of content, keywords, tag categories, and more.

Check the page rankings of your competitors, and figure out how those ahead of you got there.

Here are some ways that the others have gotten their good page rankings.

1. Content is king when it comes to online niches.

Frequent posts of relevant information are essential to keeping your site alive in this Web 2.0 world we have today. Well-written content is important—not just having content, but actually having it be readable?

We’ve all been to those horrible websites with nothing but spam keeping them open. If anyone is actually looking for information in your niche and stumbles upon your website, is that what you want them to see? I doubt it.

According to the Authority Black Book, the best content includes good, useful, controversial, valuable, unique, thought-provoking, poetic and sarcastic posts. And, these folks know what they’re talking about—they literally wrote the book on online marketing success……follow these strategies and get your niche website running professionally and profitably in no time flat.

Choosing the Right Blog Platform

Here’s a newsflash for you:

Not all blog platforms are created equal! There are really many right ways to blog.

How can you be sure you’ve picked the right one with so many solutions available? Each type of blog service has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each type of business has its own distinct needs.

In short, there are three basic types of blog platforms; hosted weblog providers (e.g., WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad), stand-alone weblog software (e.g., WordPress, Moveable Type, Grey Matter), and remote-hosted weblog software (e.g., Blogger).

Here are some helpful suggestions to get you started with choosing the right blog platform for you:

Hosted Blogs

Generally speaking, these are the easiest types of blog platform services to handle when you’re starting up your own blog.

To use a hosted blog, it’s really just as easy as setting up an email account, which you’ve surely done several times by now. Just enter your information and click on “submit.” It’s that simple.

You don’t need to download or install any special software, and the services are typically free.

While this is a quick, easy way to get started, you may eventually require more services and flexibility as you gain technical knowledge and know-how and you may need to switch your host.

Some consider that point to be one possible downside to this platform.

Anyone who knows anything about social media knows that there is a nearly endless supply of tools available (both good and bad) to assist you as you make your way through the Internet marketing world.

Choosing the right tool for the job can make all the difference.

After all, you wouldn’t put a new roof on your house using a butter knife, or use a screwdriver to spread peanut butter……..you get the point.

Choosing that perfect tool can be pretty daunting if you’re new to the game. If you are considering downloading any kind of social media software tools, then reviewing them first is critical. Tons of money is wasted on bum programs.

Tons of time is wasted finding out that it’s a bum program. Make sure that the person promoting the social media tool is a fellow blogger who can attest to and prove some level of success using the particular tool you are considering.

Three tools that are currently very popular:

TrackBoost

This tool will search for other blogs when you enter a keyword. Finding other blogs in your niche just became a whole lot easier.

Making competing with them a whole lot easier! Connect much more easily with other bloggers, trackback to any blogs that have posts matching your niche or area of interest.

Make the blogosphere a little smaller and more manageable with TrackBoost. Some have said that this tool has revolutionized the blogging world!

Utility Poster

This is a tool designed to make coming up with new content quickly and regularly less of a chore. In no time at all, you can drag and drop content hits from other blogs right onto your blog.

No need to re-invent the wheel every day, use material you find in other places to keep your site fresh! Easily find and capture the content you need.

Web2Submitter

Save tons of time and get an endless supply of deep backlinks to your site by using this program. Submitting your posts to individual sites takes a tremendous amount of time; Web2Submitter makes it more automatic and streamlines the whole process for you.

Spend the time you have in more important places, and use this program to get your site and posts out there more quickly. You will have a lot more time to focus on your other marketing strategies and come up with more content, more ideas, and more profit!

The importance of using the right tools for mastering the social media world just cannot be stressed enough. You’ll learn, maybe the hard way, how to select and use the right tools for the job.

The blogosphere is very overwhelming to any newcomers (and sometimes to the veterans, too!) so make sure you consider your choice carefully. Saving time and money means more profit more quickly!

That’s why we’re all in this, right? Share your feedback and experiences with TrackBoost, Utility Poster, and Web2Submitter here! We want to know what you think!

Popularity: 2% [?

In a recent Zogby Interactive online survey of nearly 2,000 people, some interesting stats made me think it is time to stop blogging.

According to the survey a whopping 86% of Americans said websites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) viewing these sites as very important. However, fewer than 38% say the same about blogs.

What’s even more interesting… 87% feel that professional journalism plays a vital role in journalism’s future, along with citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) but only 1% of consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news.

1% ?!

Am I busting my blogging butt to impress 1%? What about that 86% who think that “websites” are an important source of news?

Is it time to retire Wordpress, find those old html pages and ftp the “old site” back up to the server?

Not exactly!

If the experience I have gained working with “newbie” clients at NetSmart Media serves me correctly, I have a feeling that most people know not what a blog is. In fact, I would be confident in saying that the sites that people come to trust the most (outside of CNN.com) are indeed professional “blogs” that are perceived as “websites”.

So, I still say it is time to quit blogging but only in the traditional sense.

Traditionally, most blogs have served up some pretty lame content. Little thought and effort goes into most posts I see as I scour the blogowogosphere.

Crusty Internet marketers, aggressive adsense portalists, and straight up spammers have jumped on Wordpress platform like it was a golden chariot leading to fame and fortune.

This has tarnished the reputation of blogs with the Internet public and so, when asked, the “public” expresses their reluctance to trust “blog content”.

We Won’t Be Blogging Anymore

Actually we stopped “blogging” a while back. Instead, we started sharing social marketing strategies and tips on our new magazine-style website.

What, you thought this was a Wordpress blog?

Well, it used to be, but, in case didn’t notice, we installed a new Wordpress theme that retired the old chronological post-after-post blog look. In fact, we are about to upgrade again to a custom Wordpress theme that carries that magazine-style look a step further… that’s coming soon (or may have already been installed if you are reading this at a later date).

Get The Point

So, to make it all clear, those stats are telling us it’s time to get serious about your web presence. It’s time to consider a custom WP or blog theme.

Retire the traditional “blog-style” blog themes and come up with something that impresses, engages and intrigues your visitors.

You don’t need to look like CNN.com, but you do need to differentiate yourself from the millions of me-too bloggers posting miserable content to one of the hundreds of free blog hosts with lame templates.

Your readers won’t trust you until you do.

Popularity: 35% [?]

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If you know those acronyms, you have no doubt wondered if and/or how they fit together. Let me explain… But first, a quick nod to the noobs:

PPC

Pay-per-click essentially refers to Google AdWords. Although Yahoo and Microsoft both have version of this marketing technique, AdWords is KING. Google AdWords allows for quick and easy search engine marketing. You create a short message, this gets displayed on a search engine results page with all the other results and, theoretically, you get “clicks”… visitors to your site. You pay for each click… pay - per - click… got it?

SEO

Search engine optimization is the art of making a web site “friendly” to the search engines. This involves adding “behind-the-scenes” code, structuring the content in specific ways or creating hyperlinks to/from particular pages to make the collection of pages comprising the web site more “valuable” to the robots that rank each page of content on the Internet.

SMM

Social Media Marketing (or Social Marketing) is the latest addition to the world of online marketing but is, in many ways, the easiest to understand. Social marketing can be simply described as “online word of mouth”. Wherever you find a relevant conversation about your niche/product or service, you join the conversation. Don’t let the simple definition fool you however, this easier said than done. There is even more of an art to social marketing. That said, the question most people have is how do these 3 pillars of online marketing fit together? As the title suggests, start with PPC.

Why Start With PPC?

To answer this question, let me ask you a series of questions… Try to answer these with quick direct answers.

1. What is your web site’s (blog’s) purpose?

2. What are you selling? (which will fund the hours you will spend working on your web site)

3. What do you tell your visitors to get them to buy?

The first question is easy, right? In fact, some, if not most, of you reading this post have been blogging or online marketing for a while and assumed the purpose of you blog was to sell your product(s). Sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it anymore. The purpose of any website, especially a blog, should be to create a rapport with potential clients, customer and buyers. So, question #2, was it simple to answer? Probably, but is your offer (what you are selling) actually, well… selling? If not, then it may be time to sell something else. If you are like most bloggers, you are working for free. And, when someone asks you why you work for free, you say something like “because I enjoy giving, I enjoy sharing, I love my niche, I have a passion for…”. if that is true, that’s great! But my experience with online marketing clients tells me that you would be thrilled to make sales too and will stop “sharing” pretty quickly if you don’t. I am guessing that question #3 is almost impossible for you to answer. I know this because, without some serious research, it is. There is no way to know what words (in text, audio or video format) will persuade your visitors to buy. You may be in tune with your niche but your frequency might be very different than the majority. Finding the “message that makes money” requires testing & tracking.

Good News…

There is a simple and cheap way to find the (almost) perfect answer to all 3 questions above… It is called PPC. With a few simple pay-per-click campaigns you can learn enough about your potential visitors to foster a quick rapport, create an offer/product they actually want, and compile the words they want you to use to sell it to them.

Bad News…

Most people will completely ignore this advice because a good PPC campaign will cost $20 - 50 and some thinking. 99% will plow ahead with this foundational step and “hope” to figure out what their market wants later. I know this because I did it too, and now my clients do it. We all naturally think everyone else is like us. We assume we know what people want and how they want it but this is simply not true, trust me.

What To Do First

Regardless of whether you have a blog that is brand new or months, even years old, you probably need to begin the process of identifying & creating strong relationships with your buyers. In Part II you’ll get a sneak peek into a PPC campaign I recently conducted to see if, where and how much interest there is in a product I’m developing. This info is unique in that what I discovered basically showed that there is NOT significant interest to move forward and that my product needed to be adjusted. It is a screen capture video inside my AdWords account with tips and pointers on how to conduct a quick, cheap and easy PPC “research” campaign. Now, you may be wondering when the SEO and SMM stuff is coming… I assure you, we will get to that but, more importantly, the next article builds on the this PPC “research” campaign and explains how to get your customers to teach you the message that would mesmerize the wallets from their pockets. A link to Part II of “PPC, SEO and SMM - In That Order” will be posted here when its ready…

 

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PPC or SEO? You Tell Us

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How to ruin a PPC Campaign

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