money for my life

Internet Marketing: How to Monetize Your Blog

There are lots of ways to monetize your blog, and all of them are quite simple. Google offers you perhaps the simplest that is available on your blogger.com blog. At the bottom of your dashboard (when you sign in to your blog), there is a section labeled Tools and Resources and you would choose the AdSense hyperlink to sign up for free advertising to display on your site. You will earn a few cents to a few dollars for ads that are clicked on from your blog. A word of caution: NEVER click on your own ads or have somebody else click on them like crazy because Google could ban you … FOR LIFE! Just put them on there and if people are interested, they will click. I know that I sometimes will see something on a site that interests me and click. Heck, that it how I got started in the whole internet marketing venture.

You don’t have to use Google if you don’t want to. Simply do an Internet search for PPC (pay per click) advertising and your site may qualify for them. Currently enough money is made from the advertising to pay for my internet connection. Just don’t make your blog a virtual marketplace for advertising: You want to provide information for your visitors first. Revenue comes later.

Have a GREAT day!!

Tags: advertising

Going My Way?

Once you have a website going, the key to success is getting traffic there. Sure, telling your friends and your family are good starts, but if you are to make any sort of money on Internet, you will need to drive traffic.  Here are a few ideas

Pay Per Click - You can go with Yahoo! or Google and you can bid on keywords that will have ads displayed. The great thing is that you don’t pay anything, until somebody clicks on the ad.

Blogs - You can set up a blog for free (I have six) at www.blogger.com. You will need a google account (they are free) and just besure that you include lots of key words so that the search engines will pick up your blogs. One way to do that is to regularly ”ping” your blog through www.pingomatic.com. If you have wordpress on your blog (free) it will do it automatically.

Comment On Other Blogs - search in google for other related blogs, and post a comment on that blog with a link to yours. Traffic will come soon enough.

Have You Blog With Your Signature On E-Mail - that way if you happen to forward a message (that others may have forwarded to you) the message may get forwarded and others will now have your link.

Advertise With Other Websites - You can always ask the website webmaster how much they would charge you for the ad. Some are inexpensive and can easily drive you valuable traffic to your website.

Advertise The Old-Fashioned Way - believe it or not, you can always use print media and radio.  It costs more, but if you have an exciting product to offer, you can always try to use this route.

Don’t give up and Never Surrender! Look at what other successful people are doing on their websites and simply employ some of the same techniques.

Tags: action, advertising, money, niche marketing, web traffic

You Gotta Be “Niche-Picky”

One of the most important things to using the Internet to make money is to be “niche-picky”.  What does that mean?  Well, it is part of marketing in that you have to know who your target market is and make it as specific a market as possible to enjoy success. Perhaps it is best to use an example.

Let’s say that you have a great product/eBook/program that you know everybody would love.  After all, you love it, why wouldn’t anybody else.  For this example let us assume that this is a sure-fire way to lose weight quickly, effectively, and permanently.  (The weight-loss industry has endured for years, and there definitely is room in this field to make a decent amount of money).  So, you think that your target market is overweight people.

Too broad (no pun intended).  There are millions of people out there that are overweight and want to definitely lose the weight quickly.  The problem is that you are too general.  You need to target it your advertising/marketing toward individuals that feel as if you are speaking directly to them.  So, you narrow your field…Overweight Men.

Still too broad.  While you may have just cut your audience in half, there is a lot of people in this category.  How old is your target audience?  How active is your audience?  What do they enjoy doing?  What sort of jobs do they have? 

Whew!  That’s a lot to think of.  So you narrow your field again: Overweight men over thirty years of age.  Now you are getting closer, but narrow it even further.

Overweight men over thirty who are largely inactive.

Overweight, inactive, tried-every-diet-under-the sun, need simplicity men.

THAT”S A LOT CLOSER!! You see if you target just overweight people, nobody will read your articles, go to your website, purchase your products, … so forth and so on.  You need to have your product geared to catch an individual’s attention.  Find the individuals, and they will grow your business and will be the most loyal customers because they have felt as if you are speaking to them.  

Go and find your niche!

Tags: advertising, making money on the internet, money, niche marketing, target audience

Should I Pay or Should I Go?

When in the process of developing traffic to your website (remember that traffic = $$$),  you may wonder if it is good to pay for your traffic.  Several different options are out there such as Google’s adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.  Of course you don’t have to use either on of those.  You can simply type “pay per click advertising” into the search field of your browser and see how many thousand results pop up.  Read through these carefully because you will get traffic to your site because you are paying per click to whatever company you choose to help direct your audience to you. 

Most of these companies (or at least the most reputable of them) will allow you to set a daily limit (budget) on the amount that you will pay.  Google is excellent at policing the click history for you to help prevent somebody from quickly depleting your available funds.  Paying for traffic is one of the fastest ways to generate traffic to your site, but you will not need to always have that avenue used.  In fact, if you will ntice some of the bigger sites (those that generate millions of hits daily) don’t need to have to pay for visitors, they tend to have people pay them to redirect people from their site.

That brings us to another way to generate traffic: have your site linked on another site.  You may have to pay a small monthly stipend to the webmaster of that site, but typically the costs are minimal and the results are priceless.   One of the keys is to first get people to visit your site, but it is up to you (and this is where the work comes in) to continually upgrade your site to have a lend of the familiar mixed with new.  People like familiarity, but attention spans seem to be growing shorter with time and people want variety.

Give the people what they want!  If you have any questions, just drop me an email, and I will answer as best I can. Here is to your succes in having money for your life and living the dreams that you have dreamed!

Tags: advertising, money, pay per click, success, wealth creation, web traffic