Make Money Online

Search Engine Marketing is vital to the success of your online business.  There are many activities that you can undertake on your own — such as writing good quality content on a consistent & frequent basis — but if you have a number of sites and are wanting to make real money with your online business, at some point you may need to retain the services of an online marketing firm.

DiscountClicks.com is an online marketing firm that provides a wide range of services ranging from Link Building to Search Engine Optimization services.  Prices may be a bit much for new businesses just starting out, but for established businesses or those wanting a rapid (but consistant) growth in traffic, the pricing is reasonable - from $500/month to $2,000/month.

I would recommend spreading your budget out over a 3 or 6 month period instead of blowing it all in the first month or two.  This will lead to a more sustained growth for your site, allow you to judge the marketing activities over a longer period of time, and most likely won’t alert the search engines to any sudden spikes in inbound links or content.

There are a number of online resources that will give you ideas and approaches about how you can increase your blog’s exposure and visibility.  But before you start pro-actively attracting readers, make sure that your blog has a properly-laid foundation so that your readers don’t visit once, never to be heard or seen again.

I consider these six approaches vital to my future blog(s) success:

1. Post frequently with original content about topics related to your blog’s focus.
   This one seems like a no-brainer, but it can be very difficult to actually do.  I’m not saying that you need to make daily posts, but try to publish at least 3 to 4 posts each week as you are starting out.  This will help make your blogging efforts a habit, will improve your writing, and will increase the total amount of related content on your blog.  Frequency of site updates and the total amount of related content are two key measures to Search Engine Visibility and Page Rank.
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2. Keep each of your posts focused on one major topic.
   Don’t go off on a tangent on your individual posts unless it is truly warranted.  Your readers will appreciate you staying on-topic to your post’s headline, and the Search Engines will be better able to categorize and rank your entry.
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3. Find other related blogs and start interacting with their creators.
   Spend some time on Technorati searching about your blog’s content.  Chances are you’ll find a number of blogs that already exist in your niche.  Don’t worry though!  Each blog is the expression of it’s author, and there is always room for new, good resources.  Take the time to read other blogs to get ideas, see how other author’s interact with their readers, and what types of stories generate the most interaction (comments) with their audience. 

   When you find a post on a topic that interests you or is related to your blog, take the time to post a comment.  You may also take it a step further, and write a post on your blog about the same subject, but with your own unique take.  Be sure to give original blog some link love by including a direct link to their post in yours, and also be sure to post a trackback to their original post. 
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4. Get the word out about your blog among your friends & family.
   Send an email out to your entire group of friends and family with the link to your blog, and be sure to include a description of what your blog is about.  Ask them to check it out from time to time, to give you constructive feedback and to forward it to any of their friends who they think might be interested.  Depending on the web-savvy of your family, it also wouldn’t hurt to request a reciprocal link in the blogroll for any family members who might have their own blog.
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5. Include your blog address in the signature of your personal email.
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6. Submit your site to Yahoo, Google and dmoz.org to get the Search Engine love going.
   There are also a large number of Internet Directories you can submit to for free. Yahoo and DMoz.org are notoriously slow about posting sites to their directory, so by the time your site is accepted, your foundation should be ready for the visitors.

There are certainly many more activities that you can (and should!) undertake for your blog(s), but by taking care of these six core activities, you’ll lay a solid foundation for the future of your blog.

In an earlier post, I reviewed three of the major blogging platforms availalable on the market today - Blogger (free), WordPress (free), and TypePad ($4.95/m).  I was most impressed with the full features and functionality incorporated into WordPress, but was put off by the limitations put on their free account. I landed on TypePad’s Pro account ($14.95/m, unlimited domains, etc.), but am today deciding to leave their platform for a hosted WordPress Solution.

The major reason is in how TypePad handles your blog posts. There are four primary limitations that I see, and in two hours of cruising their knowledge base and forums, I could not find an appropriate resolution:

1. Your posts are arbitrarily truncated at 15 characters (including spaces), meaning your url does not contain the full keyword-rich title you need for higher Search Engine Rankings.
2. Spaces are replaced with an underline "_" as opposed to the more search-engine-friendly standard of a dash "-", which means search engines see "your-keyword-phrase" as one word "yourkeywordph" in their crawler (including the truncation from #1)
3. You are unable to modify the Meta tags on individual posts.  Although Google represents they do not use the meta tags for search engine rankings, many other search engines do, and the description tag IS used for display in the search engine results.
4. Your title tag always starts with the name of your blog, followed by the post title.  A keyword rich page title is an important consideration for high Search Engine Rankings.

As a result, I have decided to move to a host that supports the Word Press Installation (and hopefully most of the widgets that have been developed for WordPress as well).  I have initially chosen to go with BlueHost, which was recommended by WordPress. 

I will start by putting one of my new blogs up on WordPress to see how BlueHost performs. The account specifications are much higher than with TypePad, and the cost is less than half. I’ll report back with my experiences.  Please let me know if any of you have had experiences with either the hosted version of WordPress as a blogging platform, or with BlueHost as a hosting provider.  I’d be interested to find out more.

Do you find yourself often going off-topic with posts in your blog, or posting something you knew was not in-line with the rest of your blog’s content, but you just had to post it?  You may be losing out on ad revenue if your AdSense ads follow you and show off-topic ads as well.  Luckily, there’s a solution.

Section Targeting for AdSense let’s you tell AdSense which parts of your text should be emphasized or ignored when matching ads to your site’s content.  This let’s you go off-tangent occasionally with your posts while keeping your ad targeted.

How do you implement Section Targeting for AdSense?
The good news is that it’s a simple process, but you do need to use a little bit of HTML (I would say that basic knowledge of HTML is a necessity for anyone serious about blogging online).

You would insert the following tags before and after your desired section to emphasize for AdSense:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is the section of your blog that you want AdSense to emphasize, and should be contained in this space between the start and end tags.
<!– google_ad_section_end
–>

If you have a section within your post that you want AdSense to ignore, add a (weight=ignore) to the start tag like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This is the part of your blog post that you want AdSense to ignore.
<!– google_ad_section_end
–>

Using Section Targeting for AdSense will not result in immediate changes to the ads being served by AdSense on your site or the page on which you used Section Targeting.  It can take up to two weeks before their crawlers will take the Section Targeting into account.

While you can have as many AdSense Targeted Sections on your blog as you’d like, you do want to make sure that the majority of your site’s content is contained within the section targeting tags.  Section Targeting for AdSense is NOT a good way to try and get specific high-value keyword ads to appear on your site.  It is against AdSense program policies, and may also result in less-relevant ads or PSAs (Public Service Announcements) appearing on your page.