Sunday, May 24, 2009

Boost Your Business With Blogging!

Business blog is an incredible online marketing tool that saves you thousands of dollars but provides great business opportunities in just one click. Blogs are user-friendly, customized and flexible medium for disseminating useful information for effective positioning of your products in the market.


Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over its competitors. Here are some advantages:
Word-of-Mouth. In a survey, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day and about 30 percent of the 50 million users are blog readers. Imagine how much gain your company will have, if your products are advertised through blogs. With Internet, information spreads so quickly especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blogs will be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.
Awareness and loyalty. Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty among them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments make them all the more willing to try your products and services.
Feedback. Blogs is good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you observe your customers’ thinking and behavioral patterns. You can also take immediate action to your customers’ concerns.
Community halo-effect. Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They are more than willing to create blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely be considered in their next stop to the supermarket.


For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting your blogs to blog search sites and directories. Do not forget to paste in with your blogs, your URL. Be sure that your blogs contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in, read up your blog, move on to the next and click on again for updates.


Blog is like a setup booth in the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to strike your sale scales up.


The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are important too in conjunction with your blogs to get the best benefits. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. In this way you have better chances of people finding your website leading to your blogs. More traffic means more potential sales.


For this to be successful, you can use RSS for news update feeds which can be read through RSS reader application. This is a very useful tool for business and internet marketers as well.

START YOUR BLOGGING TO THE BANK 3.0

If you are already convinced with the potentials of business blogs for marketing and targeting sales increase, your company is now ready to start blogging. But first, you have to be in tune with your company’s business objectives and determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.

1. Several blogs are dedicated to teaching people the do’s and don’ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based too to give you an idea.
2. Setup several test blogs right away.


If your initial try out with blogs worked well, you can now start setting up your blogs.

START YOUR BLOGGING TO THE BANK 3.0

1. Study blog design. Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match the company’s identity and needs.
2. Choose a topic. Its good to have a line-up of topics you want for your blogs but be sure they are in consonance with your business objectives. This would be a test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may be going against the set objectives.
3. Remember the following safety measures in blogging:
legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging; it is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities;
corporate communication and legal department are responsible in educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business;
create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information are allowed to be made public;
avoid outright marketing blog or you will shy away your readers;
make content updated, relevant and fresh;
reinforce the company’s core values; and,
encourage employees to use it.
4. Start blogging and complete 20 posts before going to marketing.
5. Begin marketing.
6. Regularly monitor the coming ins and outs of readers and get updates. Then, measure your results.
7. Adjust if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it remains to match the company’s identity.
8. Strive to be consistent with your topic all the time.
9. Try to have unrelated topics with general and broad appeal.
10. Schedule updates regularly. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday would be best to update blogs.

START YOUR BLOGGING TO THE BANK 3.0

Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Blogging to The Bank 3.0

How to Make Money From Your Blog
It just had to be the first ‘real’ post on the Blogging to the Bank blog so lets cut to the chase and talk about how to make money from your blog. Millions of people across the globe own blogs, some of them know they can make money from their blogs and some of them do not.

The humble blog started out as an online diary, a way that ordinary people could express their thoughts online and establish their web presence. Some blogs have made people famous and some blogs have gotten people arrested. The blog has evolved and developed into so much more in the last couple of years though, and now a blog can be nearly anything you want it to be; an online store, a magazine website, a salespage, a membership site or just a blog! This is largely thanks to the emergence of wordpress and the various plugins and templates that have been developed over the years. All of these improvements and new features make it easier for people like you and me to own our own blogs and profit from them, so lets look at three real down and dirty tactics that will make you money with your blog!

1. Google Adsense

This is the fastest way to generate some income from your site, but let me warn you up front, you’re not going to make a lot of money with this method. Its just a real quick way to get started.
Google adsense is a program ran by Google where you put some code on your site which allows Google to place content relevant ads on your site. Every time a visitor clicks on one of those adverts you get a few cents. There are various rules to this program and requirements that your website has to meet (having a privacy policy, not telling visitors to click adverts, placing the adverts in a certain manner) but this is a program you can sign up to very quickly at google.com. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you do or you don’t have, Google doesn’t care, as long as you have some where to put the ads, you can do Google Adsense. It won’t make you the kind of money you need to quit your job but its a start!

2. Sell Advertising Space

This is one of the simplest and easy ones to do. Now before you can sell advertising space you want your blog to be getting a bit of traffic. You don’t need thousands of visitors a day, but the more visitors you have, the more you can charge for advertising. To start off with, I’d recommend joining a couple of forums like sitepoint.com and digitalpoint.com and looking through the “advertisers” section in the market place. There you can see what kind of prices are being charged on websites with or without traffic. So for example, if a website with 20k visitors a day is selling a “text link ad” for $100 a month and your site only gets a thousand visitors a day, then for a similar ad, you should be charging less than $100 a month.

You get the idea.

Go to these marketplaces and see what advertising space is popular with people looking to advertise. Make sure you do your research and find a good price point. Once you have done that, post an offer to sell advertising space yourself. Remember to post your site’s stats up and be honest about your traffic numbers and where possible provide proof.

Make sure you don’t let advertisers pay for too many months in advance. The more traffic your site gets, the better Pagerank you receive, the more you can charge for advertising. Once you have mastered all this you can join various ad networks that can make the whole process easier, pay you on a performance basis or simply get you in front of a larger marketplace.

Some blogs make thousands of dollars a month with advertising in many different obscure niches. The best bit about this, it takes virtually no work to maintain to keep the money pouring into your Paypal and bank account!

3. Affiliate Marketing

If you’ve got a loyal readership or if your blog is getting a reasonable amount of visitors then you might want to write a few posts recommending certain services and products and then provide a link to that product’s website. Of course the link you will provide will be a cleverly disguised affiliate link which will then allow you to make a commission on any purchases made by the visitors that visited that site through your link. You don’t want to make every post an advert though encouraging people to buy products. Make sure you give honest recommendations so as to maintain your integrity with your readership ad build trust. You might also want to try and build an email list using your blog so as you can email your subscribers from time to time with updates on your blogs and affiliate promotions.

4. Write Review Posts

I personally love this idea. There are hundreds and thousands of companies out there looking for people in the “blosophere” to write about their products and websites. They are so desperate for bloggers to talk about them they have even started paying them to do it! And now there are websites that put companies and bloggers together so that bloggers can get paid for a post they make about a company.

Basically you add your blog profile to one of these sites and companies in your niche or market may contact you and ask you to write a blog post in exchange for a value of money. How much money you get paid depends on your Pagerank and how many visitors you get to your site etc etc. Some people make $40 a post while others make $6000 a post. Its easy money once you get into it. If you’re interested in getting into this then go check out reviewme.com and sign up with your blog.

Alternatively, there is another site (payperpost.com) which allows companies to state what they are looking for and what they will pay, and bloggers can take them up on their offers as long as their blog meets the criteria laid down by the company in the campaign description. In fact, there are a lot of sites around that allow for this kind of work, its just a case of using our god friend Google to find them!

Try and not over do it with review posts etc though, as again you’ll lose the trust and goodwill of your readership.

So there are four of the most popular things you can do to make money with your blog. Some you can do today and see results with today, and some that take a little longer. If you’re a smart cookie, you’ll have noticed a trend in all of the techniques I have mentioned. The more traffic your site has, the more money you can make. That really will be the key to your success. You can still make money with a little traffic, and ten invest that little bit of money into generating more traffic. Once you get that traffic you can start charging more and making more money and then suddenly you are in profit. It doesn’t happen overnight, it might take a month or two of work, but it is doable and people are doing it every day.

It doesn’t matter if your blog isn’t the best, keep it simple and get some dam content up on it! Worry about tweaking it and making it uber cool later! Just build some backlinks and get some traffic to that thing!

So I hope this article has helped you out in figuring out what you want to do to make money from your blog. There are other ways you can profit from your blog, but these are some of the quickest, easiest and most basic ways of making with a blog. I wish you all the best, and as usual, if you’ve got any questions or anything to say about my post today, feel free to reach out, get in touch and leave a comment below.

Owner Posted : Rob Benwell / Blogging to The Bank 3.0 / May 8,2009

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Affiliate Marketing and Pay Per Click

Do you want to make more money? Do you want to turn that computer you spent so much money on into a cash cow? Well it is possible. It won’t happen overnight but with time and hard work you’ll soon be working from home if you choose.

Do you currently have a website? Do you wonder why it isn’t making you any money? You keep posting great content, wonderful writing samples and articles but still your balance is zero. Well perhaps you need to expand your horizons. By signing up for pay per click affiliate sites you can soon see cash going into your account simply by maintaining your site.

One of the most popular Pay per click programs is Google adsense. Google Adsense will take care of the advertising for you. When you sign up, your site will have new advertisements and banner places in the open spaces. If anyone visits your site and clicks on one of the ads, you get a referral payment. Again, Google takes care of the ad placement allowing you to concentrate on increasing the traffic to your site.

Joining a scheme such as Google adsense is a good idea. They will help to promote your site and advise you on how to increase your traffic.

If you have been maintaining your website for a while, you probably know that one of the best ways to attract traffic is through the use of keywords. The right keywords will have them flocking to your site. The wrong words will have them running in droves. Sites such as Google adsense can help with this as well. They operate Google ad words. This will help maximize the key word usage and help get the correct one for the most traffic. Google does charge for this service so you need to be sure it is worth it before you buy. You don’t want all of your profits ate up by the ad words scheme.

When you sign up for Google adsense, you can be assured that page appropriate ads will be places on your webpage. If you have a pet care site then things related to that topic will be placed. Obscure and ads that have nothing to do with your page are not likely to impress your reader or increase your earnings.

Google Adsense is only one example of search engines that offer a pay per click money making service. There are hundreds of others. One of the most notable is Yahoo publisher. It functions in much the same way as Google adsense and offers a similar style of service. Which one you choose will largely depend on you. If you have several sites, you could try both schemes. See which one is better and go with that one.

If you have a or several web pages that just seem to be doing nothing, then look into a pay per click program. Sites such as Google adsense and yahoo publisher will do most of the hard work for you. They will place the ads and decide which ads will be best for your site. This will leave you time to do the most important thing; increase your site traffic and eventually your ad revenue. If you have websites, look into pay per click. The service is free so you have nothing to loose.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Money Making Tips

Affiliate marketing is all about getting paid for
selling products you don't own and not going to
jail for it. Someone else goes through all of the
trouble to develop software programs, service, or
digital content products. They'll do all the work
then you collect the money!

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing arrangement
between the product developer, known as the affiliate
merchant, and the affiliate marketer who is anyone
that's willing to promote the sale of product by
advertising the product using any type of legal
means available.

The relationship will allow the affiliate merchant
to grow their revenue by paying only for the
advertising that results in a sale. The affiliate
marketer will profit by making a percentage on a
sale that he does not have to manage after the
sale.

Getting paid
Getting paid all depends upon how the affiliate
program is set up. Some merchants will run their
own affiliate program. They'll have special types
of software that assigns each affiliate marketer
a special link that's used in promoting the product.
The software will track sales of every marketer
and the merchant will pay the commission on a
periodic basis using either PayPal or another
method of payment.

Selecting products or services
Your income is directly tied to how well your
selected product or service sells, and the size of
the commission you earn, which makes it very
important that you choose carefully when it comes
to choosing the affiliate merchant you'll be
partnering with.

Choose programs that you aren't embarrassed to
promote and programs that you'll feel comfortable
recommending to your family and friends if they
were to ask you about it.

You'll do much better if you promote products
that you fully understand and are already familiar
with. This way, you'll be able to write better
ads without having to strain yourself coming up
with the right things to say.

You should only promote products and services for
companies who have gone through the trouble to
provide you with training programs and sales aids
such as banners and other marketing materials that
you can either use directly or model the one you
own after.

Be on the lookout for programs with commission
rates no less than 50%. You should give preference
to programs that pay commission on multiple levels,
which means you'll also have to earn commissions
on sales made by people who buy the products
through your link then go on and become affiliates
themselves later on.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Using Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

In affiliate marketing, there are many ways in which you can increase your earnings and maintain the account that you have worked so hard for already. Most of the techniques and tactics can be learned easily. No need to go anywhere and any further. They are available online, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
One of the more important ways of increasing affiliate marketing bottom line and sale is through the use of product recommendations. Many marketers know that this is one of the most effective ways in promoting a certain product.
If the customers or visitors trust you enough, then they will definitely trust your recommendations. Be very careful in using this approach, though. If you start promoting everything by recommendation, your credibility will actually wear thin. This is seen especially when recommendations are seemingly exaggerated and without much merit.
Do not be afraid to mention things that you do not like about a given product or service. Rather than lose any points for you, this will make your recommendation more realistic and will tend to increase your credibility.
Furthermore, if your visitors are really interested in what you are offering, they will be more than delighted to learn what is good about the product, what is not so good, and how the product will benefit them.
When you are recommending a certain product, there are some things to remember on how to make it work effectively and for your advantage.
Sound like the true and leading expert in your field.
Remember this simple equation: Price resistance diminishes in direct proportion to trust. If your visitors feel and believe that you are an expert in your niche, they are more inclined to making that purchase. On the other hand, if you are not exuding any confidence and self-assurance in endorsing your products, they will probably feel that same way and will go in search of another product or service which is more believable.
How do you establish this aura of expertise? By offering unique and new solutions they would not get anywhere else. Show proof that what you are promoting works as promised. Display prominent testimonials and endorsements from respected and known personalities, in related fields of course.
Avoid hype at all costs. It is better to sound low key and confident, than to scream and seek attention. Besides, you would not want to sound unprofessional and have that thinking stick to your potential customers and clients, now would you? Best to appear cool and self-assured at the same time.
And remember; prospects are not stupid. They are actually turning to experts and may already know the things that you know. If you back up your claims with hard facts and data, they would gladly put down hundreds, or even thousands worth of money to your promotions. But if you don’t, they are smart enough to try and look at your competitors and what they are offering.
While recommending a product, it is also important that you give out promotional freebies. People are already familiar with the concept of offering freebies to promoting your won products. But very few people do this to promote affiliate products. Try to offer freebies that can promote or even have some information about your products or services.
Before you add recommendations to you product, it is given that you should try and test the product and support. Do not run the risk of promoting junk products and services. Just think how long it took you to build credibility and trust among your visitors. All that will take to destroy it is one big mistake on your part.
If possible, have recommendations of products that you have 100% confidence in. Test the product support before you begin to ensure that the people you are referring it to would not be left high and dry when a problem suddenly arouse.
Have a look at your affiliate market and look at the strategies you are using. You may not be focusing on the recommendations that your products need to have. You plan of action is sometimes not the only thing that is making your program works.
Try product recommendation and be among those few who have proven its worth.