Guide to make money online!

I never believe in buying traffic. How do you think visitors come to know me? Did they pay to know me? Most probably they subscribed because of a free download in the first place. You may not remember how but YOU are the traffic. You are targeted because I hit your hot button correctly.

There are enough free resources out there on the Net to keep one busy with getting traffic, but here are the only 7 most effective methods: search engine optimization (SEO), link exchange, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, article submissions, blogging, viral marketing and massive giveaway events.

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your pages for the search engines so that your pages are optimized for the search engines to be searched with the most optimized keywords. You get the idea? SEO English is a bit like tongue twister. If you know the exact keywords your business or industry is famous for, you increase the density of those keywords in your page.

Actually, I don’t understand why some folks make SEO sound so complicated. On the other hand, other folks say SE spiders are so smart at discerning quality of content such that SEO is really much ado about nothing. Moreover, SEO English is just so unnatural sometimes and abuse may constitute as keyword spamming, unless you know the secret to writing it ‘fluently’. SEO is absolutely crucial in niche markets where competition in SE listings is not hot.

Exchanging links with like-minded webmasters create a network for increased traffic distribution. Interested visitors are free to visit your site when they see your link on other people’s sites. SEO targeted towards Google is only half the battle. Its PageRank tool measures your page’s link popularity and ranks it higher according to scale. The more links pointing into your site as opposed to pointing out, the merrier.

* PageRank looks at pages, not sites.

Pay-per-click advertising is all about how much you are willing to pay the PPC program for a high listing so that visitors take notice of your link and visit it. You incur the bid price you set for yourself for every visit (click). Considering ROI, this is particularly useful when you are selling a product. Security features are in place so there’s no point being trigger-happy if you don’t like some sites.

Article submissions can give you an amazing amount of traffic, but only if you use the method right. You should make sure the content you’re submitting is easily understandable, and only covers one or two points, leading the people back to your site with your resource box. Most importantly, you need to make sure that your article is interesting, compelling, and of course, informative. Once you’ve submitted these articles to several article directories, you’ll probably see a marked rise in link backs, traffic and more.

Blogging is a free way to make sure that you’re reaching traffic in all regions of your niche. It has come up in stature from its days of being simply a place to ’share’ with your friends and is now a valid, and often well used promotional structure for a site-or even a basis for the site itself. Using WordPress especially can mean that you’ve got an easy-to-promote, amazingly simple to update site structure that allows you to build and maintain effortlessly. As a traffic generation tool, it is also a good way to create, maintain and direct traffic to your site. The more you blog using popular search terms related to your niche, the more intensive you’re practicing SEO as the archiving system of the WordPress blog script is absolutely well suited for Google indexing. Try to post on alternate days if not everyday.

Viral Marketing is everything and anything to do with propagating your name and URL through giving away free e-books, reports, article and e-zine submission, classified ads etc. But this is only by technological means. With people, we are talking about word-of-mouth.

Massive giveaway events come once in a while but they are really the biggest source of opt-in subscribers for anyone who participate in them. The organizer announces a proposal to carry out such an event, inviting contributors to submit a product of their own or one with resell rights to be given away for free. When the event begins, anyone and everyone can download all these exclusive products as long as they opt in. It’s very easy to get 1,000 subscribers in a week.

Of course, the organizer gets the most numbers, but he also puts in the most work to make sure the web server doesn’t collapse due to traffic overload, the gifts don’t go missing and the event proceeds on schedule.

Awareness and application of the 7 above traffic generation methods slowly but surely builds a good list of followers who are willing to patronize us.

While many of you will be surprised after reading this, but there are many people who are making money by blog commenting. If you want to learn how to make money by blog commenting, then please read forward. Well the basic logic behind it is: Webmasters and Bloggers pay people for commenting on blogs to get them traffic and/or backlinks. You must be knowing about the dofollow commenting craze. Well getting a few of those dofollow comments to people would actually pay you off.

A better way of making money by blog commenting would be to break it up into smaller tasks and doing the work systematically. Basically we need to do three things:
1) Make up a big list of dofollow blogs (at least 100)
2) Find your market
3) Create smooth functionality and Make Money

Make up a big list of dofollow blogs

First of all you need to gather as many dofollow blogs as possible. You can check the list of dofollow blogs and get almost all of the dofollow blogs out there. To avoid problems in the future you can check out the blogs to see if there are any blogs which are not supporting do-follow anymore so that you don't waste time at a later time and modify it the way you want. Now save them and make sure they are accessible to you whenever you want.

Find you Market

I will usually recommend Digitalpoint or Sitepoint for this purpose, although any webmaster forum would work well. It is advisable to keep your eyes open for customers on at least 10-15 forums because diversifying will increase your target customers. Next, you can also send general emails to webmasters whom you think might be interested in your service, this will usually get you some positive replies for people interested in your services.

Create smooth functionality and Make Money

One thing that will be quite clear is that you will not make a lot of money with individual comments and hence you'll need to make your work very smooth in order to make some real money by commenting. That is, you'll sell comments in multiples of 5 and 10 like 10, 15, 20. You might fix your rates on something like this:

-$6 per 5 dofollow comments.
-Get 5 free do-follow comments if order is more than 50 comments.
-Get 15 free comment if order is more than 100 comments.

That deal is fair enough and you can easily attract quite a lot of webmasters. Usually one comment should not take longer than 3 minutes to write, so let's have a break-down of potential earnings considering we get an order of about 50 comments a day:

-Money earned -> $6x10 = $60.
-Time taken -> 3x50 = 2 hours 30 minutes.
-Pay rate -> $24 per hour.

Not bad eh? Also note that comments can be written in less than 2 minutes and your orders will only increase with time hence making you even more money. The potential is in front of you, and it can be adapted to make some easy money which does not involve too much time. But, you will never make any money is your primary commenting service contains even a small part of spam, be human and your service will become more commendable and you will get more orders! More articles on this topic will be posted in the future, so stick around.

Question and answer sites are quite popular among people who are searching for specific information or have some knowledge to share. In these websites, users post their questions on any topic anyone could possibly think of and other users can post their answers. All questions and answers are then stored within the site. This way, those who do not wish to participate can still use the site by searching for topics that are of interest to them and viewing answers to other users' questions.

Today, the most popularly used question and answer site is Yahoo Answers. Among the most appealing features of the site is how users can select the best answer to any question. What's considered as the best answer then appears more prominently in the question's web page allowing other users to quickly view the most relevant information.

These question and answer sites can be very useful for people engaged in affiliate marketing. In sites like Yahoo Answers, affiliate marketers can simply search for questions that are related to their niche. This can be done either through the site's search function or going through the available categories. Whenever they find relevant questions, affiliate marketers can use their expertise on their niche to provide answers. Within the answers, affiliate marketing links should be included so users who are interested in reading more information will be directed to the affiliate marketer's site.

If you want this to work for making money online with affiliate marketing, try your best to provide detailed answers to questions that are related to what you have to offer. Never spam the question and answer site with your affiliate marketing information because that could be grounds for getting banned. For this reason, you should always provide useful information when answering questions. Be sure that you are subtle when including your affiliate marketing links and never allow yourself to sound like you're giving a sales pitch.

Question and answer sites are among the most useful free platforms marketers can use to increase their affiliate marketing commissions. By spending just a little time each day to provide informative answers to questions, affiliate marketers may have much to gain.

Google is the gold standard of search engines and as such you need to position yourself so that your website appears as close to the top as possible. Here are some ideas you can implement today that will help.

Most people think they have to spend more money on hosting when all they need is some tuning.

Your website is just another among Billions of other sites and more than one Trillion pages according to Google. How can you climb the stairs of the web?

Making a good website is easier than using your computer too.

But making a great site, that's not for everyone.

First thing you must understand is your user. Who is he? What he wants? What can you give to him when he visits your website? Content? Downloads? Links?

Your website must be constructed thinking about your user and Google. These days you really need to kiss Google because more than 70% of all your traffic will come from Google. Aside Stumble Upon most of my Triond traffic comes from Google, you can see that too on your Dashboard.

This happens because when the average user wants to find something he goes to Google, just like you and me. Yahoo and MSN are the alternatives but MSN is just not good enough nor it has a great amount of pages indexed. I prefer Yahoo to Google because I find their results more accurate and less repetitive. Google says they hate duplicated content but for some topics you can see the entire #1 results page with the same article on all websites.

Even with this faults Google is the most used search engine and his Market Share is just increasing everyday.

Google also offers you the best tools to manage your website that no other engine can offer. You can see everything about your website, you can see which keywords delivers you the most traffic, which keywords leads your site to conversions and also which pages are the ones that sends the user away. You can work on that page or pages or just delete them which is not the wisest choice because that will create a broken link in many sites and today nothing is worse than a broken link.

To get good Google Ranks you need to create a site that the user like. What does the user like? Unique content about things he starves for but he cannot find anywhere else. Things like how to make that tune to your laptop that makes the battery last longer, how to make that change to your website, great programs to make money without too much effort and of course content about where to get the latest free tools or the best software trials.

Good content is not just text. Images videos and links are great tool.

Links are probably the most important content pages because sites like Digg, Delicious and other are nothing but links to other pages which are better than your site because they specialize just on it.

Why don't you build a website just with links organized by you? Yahoo started that way when the founders started to organize their favourite links, then they started to get so much traffic that they saw they had a profitable business in hands.

You do not have to make a whole site about links, but a single page is enough.

Finally you must stay away from bad sites. Link farms, automated traffic and other things similar are bad for you.

Updating your site frequently is today's most important thing to do for your site. At least once a day is not enough anymore. You can do better than that.

Five very effective and powerful tips for creating a successful business on eBay.

If you own a website and needs to improve the number of visitors, then search engine optimization is a good option for you.

Some hints and tips on how to make the most money from selling on eBay, spend less and how to maximize how much you get from each sale.

Avoid paying for unnecessary listing "enhancements"

Add-on's for listings to enhance picture galleries, such as gallery plus or supersize picture are not likely to push sales up much further as buyers should already know what they are purchasing since they have made the search and have already clicked through to your page. The only thing needed now is to catch their eye with a good and tidy description of the item you are selling. Try not to over exaggerate it too much but be firm and precise and most importantly honest with a clear description of your item to catch their attention, make sure to emphasize on the positives and good selling points.

TIP: Sites such as Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com/) let you register and upload pictures for free, which provide an HTML link to where your picture is located. This will let you add as many pictures as you want to your eBay listing for free. Simply do this by selecting the HTML method when creating your eBay listing, and then insert Photobucket's HTML link into the eBay listing box, then switch back to the normal tab. This should now display the picture from Photobucket on your listing page, you can freely drag the picture to your desired size or location on the listing page. This will save you the extra money from purchasing gallery enhancements and allow you to freely add as many pictures you want, for FREE. Your pictures will be displayed on the listing as normal when buyers visit your page.

The options to highlight or bold text your listing will make your listing stand out, however, it may do so for the wrong reasons. Normal results (without the added features) will give people the impression of a normal, genuine listing, without it trying to be too "in your face". As it is typical for ads (banners, towers, popups, etc) to try and blend in with the rest of the content on a page but have a tendency to be a little "different" from the rest in order to draw attention to itself, they could have the reverse effect and give the impression that it is an ad as opposed to a genuine listing, prompting people to have a split second thought before clicking that link. The best way to attract people to your listing is to include a good, clear picture (the free one) and provide an eye catching title for the listing, instead of trying to make it too over powering and "ad-like". Again, as the buyer has searched for what they are looking to buy, they are more than likely aware of what they are looking for beforehand, so such enhancements will not likely do much in terms of pushing up the final price and you could end up spending more money to no avail.

Research on previous sale prices, and keep up with the competition

It is important to have an idea of how much your item is most likely to sell for, to know this, make a search on eBay for similar, if not the same item(s) that you are about to sell on eBay. Make sure you are logged into eBay (it usually doesn't work if you are not logged in) and click on the "Completed Listings" link on the left hand side bar, which would show you what has sold and for how much, when it was sold, if it failed to sell etc. You may choose to sort this by price + PP from highest to lowest and vice versa, date, etc. depending on what you want to have an outlook on. Once you have a general idea about the demand of your item and the potential selling price, be sure to keep up with the competition and stay ahead of the game one step. If you are buying and selling items at buy it now prices, make sure to find another seller who is doing the same and try to slightly beat or at least match their asking price, attracting more customers to you rather than them. As long as your price for the same thing is the lowest on eBay, people will buy from you, even if you are asking for 5p lower (with a good reputation and feedback too, of course).

If you are in it for the long run and have many of the same item to sell continuously, then it is better to have more sales generating a bit of profit, than setting the asking price too high and putting off buyers, resulting in a potential for greater profit, but less likely to get it as the chances for a sale are lowered, with possible loss of money due to listing fees.

To find a quick answer to the above question then it does indeed help if you know how to carry out research. If you have a fairly accurate understanding of what people want to buy then it certainly helps with regards to how successful you could be in selling.

It is simple, what people wish to buy is what you need to be selling. You do not want to sell something that no one is buying. It is the holy grail of all salespeople that nothing is better then finding hungry buyers waiting for your product with credit cards in hand. Most online buyers are only interested in what THEY want to buy.

The person who is selling this product is not of one bit of interest to the buyer. If you happen to be able to position yourself to provide exactly what they are looking for then your chances of making the sale vastly increase.

Quite often the first mistake online sellers make is to try and sell a product that there is little or no market in. They create a product or start selling someone else's product and then try to find a market for that product. Do you see how this approach can lead to failure? This is why market research is so important.

There are hundreds of ways to find out what people are looking for and what people are buying and there are hundreds of websites where you can do free market research. You just need to know where to look.

There is an excellent product on the market that will teach you how to become a market research sleuth. It's called, “How To Research A Product”.

This training program comes with nine videos and four ebooks all targeted to how to do market research.

Do yourself a favor and do the research into what people are buying before you start selling any old product.

You'll be very glad you did and your bank account will thank you too.

Do you want to make money with adsense? Well, first of all you'll need to sign up as a publisher so Google can send you your earnings every month. Once you are approved as a publisher you will be able to monetize your sites with adsense providing they comply with Google's terms of service.

Here are 5 steps you can follow to make money with adsense:

1) Choose A High Paying Niche - What I recommend you do here is choose a niche that has an upper range above a dollar and a lower range no lower than 50 cents. This is the amount the advertisers pay and you will be receiving a percentage of the revenue that Google charges.

2) Do Keyword Research - You will then need to do keyword research and pick out a number of keywords to build pages around for this site. You want your site pages to be well themed, so take care to choose keywords that are both relevant and don't have so much competition that you have no chance of ranking for them in the search engines.

3) Build Your Site - You can either choose a site building tool or use a html editor to do this. You will also need a template so you can populate the site with content and include menu navigation on a side panel.

4) Promote Your Site - I recommend you use a mixture of directory submissions, article marketing, bookmarking and getting links from sites in your niche. At this stage don't monetize your site with Adsense. Hold off until the site is indexed and getting traffic from the search engines and your other promotion efforts.

5) Optionally Flip Your Site - This is where you can take things to the next level. Once your site is matured and steadily earning, consider selling your site and using that cash to fund making more sites. You will make more money from 5 sites than you will from one, so if cashflow is an issue consider this step to ramp up your earnings over the long term.

Adwords are an effective and simple way of advertising a business over the Internet which helps in reaching a larger expanse of audience without costing too much. Because of the vast popularity of the Google adwords, all you need to do is to paste an advertisement on the content and search sites of the Google. By this, you will be able to advertise your business all over the Internet and reach a huge number of potential buyers without the need to spend too much upon advertising. With a professional Internet marketing training course, you will be able to reach the potential customers at the exact time when they are already looking for your products or services, thus increasing your chances to make a sale.

Actually, there are millions of people searching for bargains over the Internet and Google advertising can help you a lot in reaching these people. In this way, you will be able to find market for your products or services and your advertisements will be place next to or above the relevant search engine results on the Google. It is a fact that only people who are really interested in buying your products will click on your advertisement and here comes the concept of pay per click advertising. In this kind of advertising, you only have to pay for the number of clicks that your potential customers make on your advertisement, rather than paying a huge sum for the placement of your advertisement. Internet marketing training course will also guide you through the process of studying your advertisement’s performance and to make the necessary changes whenever required.

As far as Google advertising is concerned, you will be able to select from a wide range of advertisement formats, including text ads, video ads and image ads. You will also be able to change your advertisement any time and you can also keep a track of the performance of your Google adwords by checking through your control center of the online account. With pay per click advertising, you can also customize your advertisements so that they can be showed only on relevant sites and at relevant places so that no unnecessary clicks are attracted towards them. For example, you can customize your advertisement to be shown only when a visitor from a particular country is searching for your company. Most customers will not like to buy from your company if you are situated in any other country and this means that they will unnecessarily click on your advertisement and increase the amount you will have to pay for your advertisement.

The promotion of services and products via Internet is dubbed as Internet marketing. Reduced marketing costs as well as the distribution of information on a wider range are few of the positive aspects brought by the Internet marketing. Emails, forums, websites, articles and blogs are commonly exercised for online advertising or Internet advertising. The best part about online marketing is that it targets a large number of audiences, thereby attaining speedy promotion of services and products.

If you are doing Internet marketing, it is very essential for you to go through internet marketing training in order to directly aim the targeted audiences devoid of wasting your precious time. When it comes to marketing training, the foremost consideration that you should keep in mind is to always think from the viewpoint of your potential customers to devise the most excellent marketing strategy as well as tools. Sensing from the perspective of your targeted audiences is the most effectual way of amassing generous and only targeted audiences.

Numerous other tools essential for Internet marketing include:

Keywords: Always ensure to put in the most sorted keyword, as this will increase the quantity of visitors that will bookmark your site and will visit again. Also, this will allow your website to rank in the top ten list of leading search engines, thereby attaining business growth. Make sure that your website content includes the most frequently searched keywords or key phrases to build a reputable website rank and potential customers.

PPC advertisement: It is another most effectual way of generating online targeted traffic. PPC is the online advertising model where the advertisers pay when the users click at the Internet advertisement. In this kind of advertising method, the advertisers bid over the keywords. When the webpage content having the bidden keyword or key phrase is shown, the ads related to it are displayed as well, thereby creating possibilities that the visitors will click them.

The website charges the advertisers on the total number of clicks an advertisement receives. The Google AdWords provides PPC advertising where the advertisers specify the phrases and words, which are expected to trigger their ads. Their ads are positioned within the category of the sponsored links at the search result webpage of Google. Numerous other ways of effectual Internet marketing are article marketing, Google AdSense, Forums, Blogs, SocialNetworks and emails.

Sometimes people will ask me, "If you were in charge of getting my website a higher search engine ranking, exactly what would you do to achieve that goal?"

I am happy to share this info with you because I have my own websites that I want to rank highly in Google and the other search engines, and I want as much targeted traffic as possible and to also draw more business into my website.

Isn't that what you're after too?

I have spent a good bit of time and effort figuring out what works and doesn't, and I have developed a strategy for my own sites that has produced really excellent results. I used this strategy for my most recent article marketing campaign that I started about a year ago, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

Over the past few weeks I have been sharing this strategy with you, going step-by-step through each and every thing that I did to create an article submission campaign that works and is pretty easy to execute.

Nothing has been difficult or 'advanced' so far–In steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 you have been very detailed about where you're starting from and how to get to where you want to go. The focus has been consistency in your article submissions, and in Step 4 when I was telling you how to write an article, I also told you not to sweat the keyword stuff–at least not right at the beginning.

So far, the only things I've advised you to do with your keywords is to 1) figure out what they are, 2) keep them in the back of your mind, 3) learn how to make an HTML resource box, 4) and to enter your keywords into the submission page (there is a field on the article submission page that asks you for your keywords).

This is what I told you–as you're just getting started, submit articles consistently on the topic of your website. Don't obsess over keywords or fret about where and how to use them in your articles.

The reason for this is that too many times I see folks who are new to SEO and marketing a site, and they just get overwhelmed with the concept of how to use keywords, and then they overdose on keywords and misuse them and forget that they're supposed to be writing for a human audience.

Using keywords in your article submission is very useful when you're trying to get a higher search engine ranking, but things can also go terribly wrong if you don't know what you're doing and if you try too hard.

The Right Way To Use Keywords

If you use keywords correctly, you end up with an article that is extremely readable and useful to your target market, and it is not obvious to anyone that you are targeting certain keywords. You are just writing an article on a certain topic, and when you do that certain words come up naturally along with semantically related variations of those words. Your article does not look repetitive or sound stiff and cumbersome–it just reads like a quality piece of content.

The Wrong Way To Use Keywords

On the other hand, we can probably all spot an article that has misused keywords–it is not very readable, and there are obviously certain words/phrases that keep re-appearing throughout the article where other words would have served the article better. There may be words in the title that make you think the article is about a certain topic when it is really about something different. In general, when you look at the article, it sounds like it was written by a robot for a robot–the sentences and phrasing just don't sound natural.

Now, this next step in creating your own Article Marketing Strategy is for when you start to feel comfortable with writing and submitting articles. It may be months after you start your submitting articles, or it may be years. As I've told you before, the most important aspect of a successful article marketing campaign is submitting articles consistently each month, so don't feel like you have to understand everything about keywords in order to see results with article marketing.

But if you're ready, let's take the next step.

When doing article submissions, there are 3 main places where your keywords are can make a big impact:

1) Your title

2) Your article body

3) Your resource box

We've already covered how to use keywords in your resource box , so let's focus on the article body and your title.

Your goal, as always, is to produce a well-written, easy to read article that contains helpful information.

You might try just writing an article as you usually do, and then after you're finished read through your article again and see if there are any places where you can use your keywords or semantically related versions of your keywords in a natural way. You may very well find that your keywords are already appearing in your article, because they naturally pop up when you write on the topic of your website.

I would advise you not to try to use the same exact word/phrase over and over again throughout your article–this impacts the quality and readability of the article, and using a particular keyword too much in an article can cause some publishers to decline the article.

A good rule of thumb is this–keep your keyword density to no more than 3%.

Example: Let's say that your keyword phrase is 'sail boats'–this does not mean that you need to pepper your article with that phrase. Your article will be on some aspect of sail boats, so variations of that phrase will appear throughout your article. Google recognizes semantically related variations of words, like 'sail boats', 'sailing boats', 'sail boat gear', 'how to sail a boat', etc.

I just put my keywords where they will naturally fit in the article. The more you write, the easier it will be to use your keywords in your articles without sounding contrived.

Your title should always indicate what your article is about.

The title is an extremely beneficial spot to use your keywords for these reasons:

• Your title will sometimes be used as part of the URL for the page where your article is published. For example, look at the URL for this page–the title is in the URL. Keywords that appear in a URL speak especially loud to Google and the other search engines.

• Your title will appear in search engine results.

• Search engines pay special attention to titles.

Knowing how beneficial it can be to have your keywords in your title may tempt you to insert them in the title when it's just not appropriate.

Let's say that your keywords are 'New Jersey physical trainer'–unless your article is specifically about some aspect of physical trainers in New Jersey, it would not be appropriate to use those keywords in the article title.

If the article was about a more general topic–"10 Ways To Find A Good Physical Trainer", then putting 'New Jersey' in the title would not be right, because there is nothing in the article about New Jersey.

Also, sometimes your keywords will just not sound right in an article title because of the topic:

Let's say one of your keywords is 'low carb smoothie recipes', and your article is instructing people how to pick out a quality blender. The article is on the same general topic as your website (you need a blender in order to make the smoothies), but the article is not about 'low carb smoothie recipes'. Consequently, you would not use that keyword term in your title.

First and foremost, your title needs to tell the reader what your article is about. Anything that the title promises must be delivered in the article.

Your title should attract a reader's attention.

Your title should be written in such a way that it catches the attention of a reader who is looking through a list of titles in Google or on an article directory.

You have to keep in mind that people are skimming article titles when trying to see if they'd like to click through and read that entire piece. This holds true when your article appears in search engine results listings as well as on article directories.

A great technique is to focus on the first 3 words of your title since those are the first words that a reader will see, and if your first 3 words are attention grabbing, the reader is more likely to click through and read your article.

Now, this is not always possible, but many times it is–when you're writing your titles, try to phrase it in such a way that the first 3 words give a clear indication of what your article is about.

What is this used for?

The keywords you type in are used on many sites where some keywords are wanted for the meta keywords tags for the page where the article is published.

In plain English, meta keyword tags are a technical thing to help Google and the other search engines determine what your article is about. Additionally, these keywords also help search functions on some article directories.

Directories will also use your keywords (just one usually) when they are creating the URL for the page where your article is published, which helps Google and the other search engines identify the subject matter of the page.

But I don't know what my keywords are…

That's okay–with a little research you can determine the best keyword for your website.

I have a saying that I often apply to many situations in life: "Don't go to China to get to California."

How does that apply to online marketing? More often than not, we determine an online campaign's success through some high value action, like lead capture, video view, or something similar. But just as often, and even though these actions are at the heart of a campaign's success, those actions are hidden or put at the end of a process or banner.

Critical messages and calls to action are obscured by creative, images, and messaging, and they're relegated to the back of the visual and click-path sequence. Yet those items' resulting metrics are the first thing people look at when evaluating a campaign's key performance indicators (define). This is done for a variety of reasons, such as simple ignorance of best practices, an aversion to asking people for what you want, extraneous pages and content, or an overly hard sell that focuses on selling a product rather than the escalating or high value action on a landing page. The result is always the same: users are forced to jump through more hoops to engage in the behavior we want and conversion rates go down. Users are being forced to go to China to get to California.

Below are six tips to helping your users get to California by a more direct route:

• Promote and deliver on benefits and offers. Google did a study a couple years back showing that 70 percent of what influences clicks in its text ads are the benefit and offer statements. Our agency has found this fact applies to most things online; tell people how you will help them and what you can give them right then and there. Display benefits and offers in your banners, deliver on them on your landing pages, and watch your conversion and action rates go up.
  
  
• Use a reverse-pyramid message structure. Typically, good creative people love building to a crescendo. Lead with a tease, then deliver the payoff with a bang. This may be good for a mystery novel or an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but for banners and landing pages it's not so good. When trying to get people to take action online, lead with the payoff and get right to the point. Most people won't sit through :15 animation frames to get to the offer. You need to grab them right away with the wow factor, then follow up with the facts. Sizzle, then steak.
  
  
• Have a static call to action. No one will care about your call to action if she doesn't see it. Leave real estate in your banners for a constantly displayed call to action. That way people don't have to sit through all your brand messaging to see the offer. Don't just lead with it, make it ever-present. It should be brand message next to offer, not brand message then offer. And with skyscrapers, always put the offer at the top of the banner
  
  
• Make your landing pages deliver. This should go without saying, but deliver your benefit and offer right on the landing page. Don't make people dig for it. If you have a form, limit the form to just those items you really need.
  
  
• Surface calls to action. Remember, people may not convert on your landing page. They may click through to your site or even come back later. When it comes to the rest of your site, don't drown those calls to action -- surface them! Make sure you have real estate on every page for those great offers.
  
  
• Sell the action, not the product. Finally, if you want to capture leads or build your e-mail list, sell the action, not your product. Let's say you're a high tech company with a hugely expensive solution; we're not talking impulse purchase here. Expecting a landing page to sell the product is a pretty daunting task. Let the landing page sell the white paper or lead capture event, and leave the selling to your salespeople. Sure the page can inform and warm, but it won't close the deal.

First of all let me say that earning money from Adsense is easy, that is if you want the odd dollar here and there. However, if you wish to earn good money then it is hard work and the time you devote to the project really will make the difference.

Adsense, as I am sure you know, is Google's programme that allows website owners or publishers to place Google advert on their website. When a visitor comes to your site and click on that advert then you will receive a payment. The payment amount is variable according to the advert itself. That really is it. You sign up for an Adsense account, copy and paste some Java Script code into your site and off you go.

Now after you have done that, the hard work really begins. Adsense will only work for you as a publisher if you can generate traffic to your website and keep that traffic coming in. The first place to start all this is with good and interesting content. It is no use reading about someone else's fortunes and then copying their topics to get it to work for you. You need good content that you update and add to on a regular basis. This will get you new visitors and keep your old ones coming back. So write about what you know or something that you are passionate about. You then will be happy to update it regularly because it will be a subject that you enjoy writing about.

You can sign up for a blog to carry your adverts or you can design your own website. This is not as hard or as expensive as you may think. Even with a simple text editor you can build a good working website if you know HTML and CSS. If not, or do not wish to learn, then research web building software that will help you get that site ready. After that you need to register a domain name, www.mysupersite.com for example, which will direct your visitors to your site and you need to find a host for your site.

Now your site is ready, you have a topic you are passionate about, you have a domain name and you have a Google Adsense account. You have copied and pasted the code into the site and your adverts are now live. Well done! Now the work really begins.

The secret to Adsense, as I have said, is traffic. The more visitors you have coming to your site the more clicks that you should be getting. If you have a really specific topic that your site is about, laptop reviews for example, then the adverts from Google will reflect that topic. This means that visitors coming to your site to read your content will also notice advertising that is relevant to their needs and interests. They will be far more likely to click when this happens.

Now, to get that traffic you need to promote your website. Treat it like a store front that nobody know about yet. Advertise in directories. Mention your website and its regular updates on social networking sites and join forums that are devoted to your subject. You can introduce yourself, become a regular contributor and thus highlight your website.

Sitting back after you have created your site and waiting for traffic to start arriving will not work. You need to get noticed and you need other well ranked sites to link to you. This is how your ranking in search engines can go up and the more likely that you will get frequent unique visitors.

This is a really simplified look at Adsense and how to earn from it. Do not be fooled by the promises of instant riches that you see on so many websites. Yes you can make money this way and good money as well. However, you need to work hard, stay focused and be motivated and determined.

A myriad of websites crammed with entertaining, yet educational reading tools are improving our children's chances at becoming good readers.

1. Starfall

Starfall's website is bright, imaginative, and the most extensive. According to Starfall, their website curriculum is designed primarily for the 1st grade, but pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and second grade students also benefit by using it. Their website was designed based on how kids use computers.

Features of Starfall:

• A download center for Teacher printouts.
• Click-able, interactive pictures of each letter in the English alphabet with corresponding audio.
• Click-able, interactive reading activities, such as a calendar or making a gingerbread man. These activities teach more than reading, such as learning the days of the week, or shapes. However, the words used in these activities, such as "gingerbread" or "grandparents", can be difficult to read for a beginning reader.
• One of the best features is the "Learn to Read Section" which uses rhyming pages to teach.
• The "I'm Reading" Section includes some easy to read stories reminiscent of "Dick and Jane", and some significantly more advanced stories for a child who has learned the basics already.
• Includes a parent letter full of advice.

2. Foniks

This website is well structured and organized. The program is phonics based.

Features of Foniks:

• Foniks is organized using a detailed chart of steps, beginning with vowel names, and progressing to harder reading concepts such as clusters and different spellings. The cluster steps include helpful rhyming words.
• Easy "mouse over" feature has instant sound.
• Uses the theme "Hear it, Say it, Trace it, Write it, Read it" with each letter.
• Encourages the student to guess what the word is before it is spoken audibly.
• No games or books.
• There is a printable writing practice worksheet.

3. First 55 Come Alive

Learntoreadfree.com focuses on 55 first words for a child to learn. While it is phonics based, it is also based on the Montessori approach of stimulating, hands-on activities that appeal to the five senses. Montessori's belief was that during the first 6 years of life intelligence is fashioned, so learning during that time is critical. As amazing as it sounds, the Montessori approach sells material for children as young as 18 months old.

• This site does make you sign up for the free lessons.
• Includes a game room with 6 games. Ducky Lat's matching game shows written words and a picture that the student must match.
• As a student completes a lesson, his or her progress is shown, and kept for future reference.
• Has a detailed "The Reading Game Handbook" overview for whoever is teaching the student

4. Government Resource Page

The government website Ed.gov encompasses many topics on education. Part of this site includes a section with reading resources that is directed towards the parent, or teacher, not the child. There are no games to play, or childrens on-line books. What there is, however, is a comprehensive, insightful website that shows you where to find them, and many other resources, tips and instructions for creative activities to do with your child offline.

• "Helping your Child become a Reader" is an excellent activity section. It is divided into age appropriate activities that are neatly laid out, including a list of needed items necessary to complete the activity.
• Has on-line books for the teacher
• Has an age appropriate reading checklist to maximize your child's time spent reading
• List resources such as children's books and magazines.

5. Kaboose (ages 3-6)

If your looking for fun games to sneak reading into your child's daily activities, try this site. If your child is over 6 years old, try Kaboose (for 6+).

Happy Reading!

Everyone is not a writer and every writer is not a good search engine optimisation writer. If every person could do everything well, we would live in a rather strange world. Writing SEO Articles are not as straight forward as many people seem to think. Before you can write an SEO article, you have to understand how search engines work. You must know how search engines go about trawling through text in articles. Once you understand the fundamentals, it is possible to write an optimised article that sound natural and reads easily. Successfully optimised articles hold huge benefits for your website and is indispensable as part of your optimisation program.

What do search engines look for?
Search engines trawl your website and the keywords present in your articles are what they link to. Therefore you need to choose appropriate keywords that are specific for your website before you start writing the article. The easiest way to explain is through an example. You have a website that is based on Spanish Seaside holidays. Basic keywords for an article would then be: Spain, vacation, seaside, honeymoon and summer. This is a basic example; it is not always simple to find appropriate keywords.

That is why SEO Tools have been developed. To help by providing samples of keywords that applies to common phrases and search terms. The basic keywords listed above as example give the writer scope for quite a few articles. The reason being that the same information would be presented differently depending on the target audience. A first time visitor to Spain would be interested in a different article than tourists say from the Americas. Tourists from Africa or the Asian continent would benefit more from an article based on their own needs. In this way you generate basically one concept to write about, but generate various articles. This brings you a much wider target audience.

How many keywords are enough?
If you try to use your keywords as many times as possible within an article, you can fail totally. The term used is keyword stuffing and this will annoy the search engines and that is bad news. The optimum is to use between three to five keywords per article. Keyword density is important and keywords must be spread evenly throughout an article. This allows the reader to grasp the message easily without fixating on the keywords that are repeated too often. The secret is for the keywords to be used smoothly as part of a logical sentence.

How important is article length?
There is not a single answer to this. The length of an Search Engine Optimisation article would depend on whether it is for a website or a blog. The average website article length is approximately 500 words while a blog posting article would normally be around 100 words. In general it is better to have more articles of fewer words than one very long article. The reasons are that shorter articles are easier to assimilate for readers. More articles create more links to your website in the search engines and you can spread shorter articles over more web pages. This is more beneficial for your website as it attracts more search engine attention.

Before attempting to do the next post time to make a small check list to see if you have every requirement filled:

1. You have a great About Me page on your website. This is a must to anyone. They need to know your face, your name, your mail and the country where you live so they can know more about your culture and background.
2. You need to have credibility from other sites. Ask other webmasters to review you and post about it later. It's a great way to get traffic, important backlinks and also to gain a lot of credibility.
3. Next thing you need to do is to write down all your sources. I am sure you got a lot from any other sites and maybe a long time ago but even so you should credit it. Credit sites, credit people, credit events, credit it all.
4. Do not make a post about a product just because you are going to get a commission. This is a great trust blaster to your visitors. Nothing blows trust away so quickly like a site trying to make anything our of you. If you are using a great product that happens to have a great affiliate program, write about it and include a link to the product but if you are going to make money out of it you'd better tell them otherwise watch the traffic going down.
5. Do not make a post about multiple things. You are a person with a lot of ideas but you need to control yourself and keep the rest to another post. Right now you need to focus only on the same topic.
6. Make a post with images. Reading only text it's very boring and does not engage the users so well like images do. I remember more information about the posts that came with images attached than I remember blogs or sites with no images. This is something that article directories should read!
7. Now it's the right time to make a contract with yourself about how many posts you are going to make per day. Trust me, some people will subscribe to you to get your posts in real time, much like keeping up with you. I do it myself for the sites I like the most and that have more than 10 posts a day, specially tech blogs.

Yes, your business blog is not your official company website. What it is, is your website in a far more casual format. As such your blog should be treated exactly as you treat your website. Your business blog must be optimised in exactly the same way as your website. To promote your blog so that your prospective customers can find you is crucial. Optimising your blog becomes an integral part of your marketing campaign. Blogs are voracious feeders and their food is content. Your business blog is driven by blog posts that are content rich. It is futile to launch a blog and then sit back.

Blogging takes skill
You have to get your blog highly visible and keep it that way. Link building is a non-negotiable must for this is the way to build visible pathways. Optimisation as a whole is complicated with many angles and steps in the process. This holds true for both your website and your blog. Online marketing in all its various forms take effort and you will have to use all efforts to get your blog to show up in the search results pages. It does not matter what industry you are in, the same rules apply. The internet is the most competitive playing field the world has ever seen and you must work for your success. To have a winning blog that functions as a successful marketing tool takes planning. You will be judged on your blog and this can have serious repercussions for your business. This means you start planning your blog with its design.

Don’t blot your reputation
To slap together a template blog as offered by free blog hosts indicates to people that you are sloppy and stingy. If your blog is disorganised and lacks continuity, people will bounce out faster than you can blink. When you start off with a great blog design people will take notice. Populate your blog with content that holds the attention of readers and they will be intrigued. They will come back to see what your next offering is. Consistency is top priority as this builds trust in your growing number of readers. Remember that trust comes first, after that loyalty will follow. Your blog should not be seen as only an extension of your website. Your blog should be able to hold up its own identity.

Bloggers of the world unite
The blogosphere has become incredibly powerful and you want people to remember your blog. You can take it for granted that your blog will have competition when it comes to search engine rankings. The better your blog design and the more interesting your blog postings, the wider your audience will grow. Avid blog readers are a community on their own, so to carve a niche for your blog you have to bring the big guns out to gain appeal. To make readers want to start following your blog you have to feed them excellent visuals. You also need to appeal to their interests and their minds. Only then will your blog become a successful marketing tool for your business.

As you’re getting started submitting articles, you may feel a little overwhelmed at everything there is to learn. Learning a new skill is not easy in the beginning–when we’re first starting anything new, we tend to feel a bit awkward!

This is a completely natural feeling, one that every one of us goes through. I’d like to save you some anxiety though, and help you focus on just the key ideas you need to get started.

You don’t need to undertake every article marketing strategy all at once–you’ve got to walk before you can run. Focus on the basics first, and then as you get used to submitting articles you can advance at a pace that feels comfortable to you.

If you’ll just follow these 3 simple guidelines, you’ll create results that astound you:

1) Write educational articles on the topic of your website.

An educational article is free of any sales tactics or promotional, hyped up language. Your objective in the article body is to teach your readers, rather than get them to buy your products or visit your website.

Yes, you started submitting articles with the intention of increasing sales and traffic to your website, but the article body should not be used to accomplish that goal.

That’s what your resource box is for (more on this later).

So, when you are thinking of article topics, ask yourself– “What kinds of things can I teach my readers?”

I think the easiest types of articles to write are of the ‘how to’ variety, so it helps to focus your writing efforts around teaching your readers how to do something specific associated with your niche.

By the way, ‘how to’ articles are extremely popular with readers, so you may wish to make them the bread and butter of your article marketing campaign. ‘How to’ articles aren’t the only types of articles–they’re just the easiest to write and the most popular, so why not start by writing a ‘how to’?

Remember, all of your articles should be on the same general topic as the website you’re trying to drive traffic to.

For example, if your website is about ballroom dancing, then you would submit articles about topics having to do with ballroom dancing.

2) Carefully construct your resource box.

The resource box is the author bio that sits below your article. Each time your article is republished, your resource box is also republished. It is through the resource box that you will build backlinks to your site, but the resource box is about more than just your website link.

Take your time constructing your resource box and be sure you’ve got these elements:

• Your name
• A little bio info
• A reason for the reader to click the link to your website
• Your website URL

You usually have a limited amount of space in your resource box, so it’s a good idea to use all your effort convincing the reader to go to one particular website rather than several.

3) Submit articles consistently.

You may be surprised that the #1 reason why people fail at article marketing has nothing to do with anything complicated or technical.

Most people who aren’t satisfied with their results have simply not submitted enough articles.

When you launch an article submission campaign, it will be a long term endeavor and you probably won’t start seeing major results for several months (probably 4-5 months).

The reason for this is two fold–

• Search engines re-evaluate rankings based on incoming links only every few months, so even though you’re building backlinks, you won’t see the benefits until months after your articles are submitted.

Article marketing gets its power from:

• the accumulation of an arsenal of articles circulating the internet,
• those articles continuing to build links and generate views over time, and
• a continuous and sustained link building campaign.

So, it’s unlikely that submitting a handful of articles will create any great or lasting difference in your website traffic, BUT submitting a handful of articles every month for a year (or hopefully the lifetime of your website) WILL seriously impact your website rankings and traffic.

It’s a bit like rolling a huge boulder from the top of a hill–at the beginning the thing may be hard to push and you may not think you’re making much headway, but as you get over the initial hump and get the thing moving, you start accelerating faster and faster even though the effort you’re exerting is decreasing.

I would like to know how you come up with ideas for posts, and also how you store, and organize those ideas.

Most of the times ideas will come to me naturally. Sometimes I am surfing the web, other times I am taking a shower, and the idea will just pop in my head.

There are times when I not particularly inspired, though, and on those occasions I need to use some exercises to get the creative juices flowing. Here are the exercises that I use:

1. Looking on other niches. Sometimes I will browse around websites that cover completely different niches, and I will take a look at the content that they are publishing and evaluate whether or not I could translate those ideas or concepts to my own niche.

2. Reading print stuff. The print industry is much older than the web, and those guys have a lot of experience. You just need to buy a newspaper or a magazine on a topic related to your niche and I am sure you will get plenty of ideas for new posts.

3. Doing something else. Sometimes it is useless to keep trying harder. Maybe you are stressed with the work, maybe you are tired. On those occasions, doing something completely different can help. If you work in your home, for example, you could go out for a bicycle ride or jogging with a friend.

4. Using paper to brainstorm. Jotting ideas down on a piece of paper is a very efficient way to organize your thoughts. It becomes easier, after all, to interlink things and to see what ramifications they could have.

That is pretty much it.

The second part is about storing the ideas, which is just as important. In fact, one common mistake that people do is to not store their ideas somewhere, relying solely on their memories. Then when they realize the idea is gone for good.

My process for storing ideas is the following: when they hit me I write them down as soon as possible. If I am outside of my office, I use any piece of paper that I can put my hands on. If I am inside my office, I will write it down on the notebook that is always on my desk or on the whiteboard. Then at the end of the day I will add that idea to my WordPress dashboard as a draft. Usually I just include the title and some central topics that I think could be covered on the future post.

As of today I have 30 or so drafts stored. Whenever I don’t have something to post on a given day I will just go through those drafts, pick one, and write it.

What about you guys? What exercises do you use to come up with ideas, and how do you store and organize them?

If you spend much time on the internet you will find that there are advertisements everywhere trying to sell you something that will teach you how to make easy internet money. If you have ever bought any of these programs you were probably soon disappointed.

Most of these programs are based on the same concept. Most of them will tell you to make money by going out and trying to sell something to somebody. In most cases you will be told to sell the same money making program that you just bought. Whether it's network marketing, internet marketing or something that claims to be neither of the two most how to make easy internet money programs for sale are based on the same concept.

Some of these programs are fine for people who are good at selling and who like to sell. But most people are not good at selling and don't want to have to sell.

If you want to make easy internet money but don't want to deal with all these gimmicks then why not forget about all that stuff and make money online the same way major banks and many corporations that we are all familiar with have been making money for many decades.

Most people don't realize that by far the largest market in the world is the foreign currency market also called the forex. Trillions of dollars are exchanged on the forex daily. Not billions but trillions, this market is massive. World currencies are being traded 24 hours a day and this causes their values to constantly fluctuate. Banks and other institutions learned a long time ago that they can make massive profit from this constant fluctuation in value.

Now with the internet anyone can sign up for a forex account online and with a small amount of money be able to control a large amount of money with leverage and make a profit from these value fluctuations. In order to do this it used to require market analysis and being able to predict where the currency prices were going. That's not the case any more.

Now there is software that will do all of this for you. This software called expert advisors or robots are programmed by currency experts and once you set it up on your forex account it will buy and sell currencies for you at the right times based on time tested formulas and make money for you on autopilot. You don't even have to know how the currency markets work because the program does it all for you.

If you want to know how to make easy internet money try a forex expert advisor. The one I use doesn't cost much and is making me a very nice income all on autopilot while I do the things I want to do. Just make sure you get one with real live proof of making long term profit. Most forex brokers will give you a demo account with play money to practice on. You can try the expert advisor on a demo first just to make sure it works and will make money for you.