Archive for June, 2008
Jun
12
You Think You’ve Arrived, But You’ve Only Begun….Watch This!
If you or someone you know is an author, this is the video to watch! It’s a great illustration of where most people are immediately after they accomplish a major goal…in this man’s case, he just finished a book.
Wow, you’d think you’d finally arrived, you’ve written a book, gotten it published…but wait, there’s more. Lots more. Now you’re faced with all the wonderful places the internet provides us with to market it…oh, not so wonderful, huh? More than overwhelming? It sure can be! This video is great the way it hits home to anyone that has been navigating the ‘waters of marketing online’! Watch….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/yxschLOAr-s&hl=en]
Jun
09
Put RSS On Your Blog
Frustrated with all the dead end searches in trying to figure out how to put RSS on your site? I was. It seemed that all the searches were either telling me how to pick up someone else’s RSS to read, or was a lengthy article explaining all the boring technicalities about what RSS is, not how to put it on my blog. You already know that you want RSS on your blog and it will help your traffic. So when I finally figured it out, I decided I would chronicle my stupidity and give you the short answer on RSS.
First of all, if you are using WordPress.com, or Blogger, your RSS tag is probably already there. Duh. Most of WordPress.com themes include it as part of the template, or you can ‘plug it in’ . On Blogger, at the bottom of your blog page, if you see a “xml” icon, then you have a version of it. If you want a pretty orange RSS icon at the top of your blogger blog anyway, Feedburner makes it extremely easy to generate the html, and then you just put it in ‘Add html or javascript’ (NOT ‘Feed’) in the ‘Add Elements’ part of the ‘Design’ area. Then, just move your elements around so it’s at the top. *see note at end of post
If you are on WordPress, Become a Blogger tutorial #10 shows you how to get your RSS feed from Feedburner and put it on WordPress. There is also another site on toprankblog.com that creates the html you need for a large variety of RSS buttons. Be sure to watch the video at becomeablogger.com before you start anything, it’s a lifesaver…well, at least a time saver!
Feedburner is now owned by Google, and has some great tutorials designed for beginners, according to what type of blog you may have (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc). You can learn everything you need to know – and you NEED to know this – here.
RSS video tutorial
Feedburner
Jun
07
Great Blogging Tutorials
Today I watched over half of the blogging tutorials that Yaro Starak has posted online to see if they were worthwhile, and was really impressed! I’ve gotten Yaro’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey via RSS for awhile now, and it’s not the best of the entrepreneur blogs, but he does have alot of good information. The biggest downfall of his blog, IMHO, is he is too wordy. They say you are bothered the most by faults in other people that you struggle with personally….so be it.
These tutorials at Become a Blogger.com are a little annoying because they cover every little detail, right down to how to type in an url and fill out a form. I can deal with it though, because I know there are people that are very new to everything online, and, well, been there, done that! Ideal for the ground zero newbie, there was also good material on how to put an RSS feed on your blog, which I had been anquishing over the last 3 days. Every place I went to assumed I knew MUCH more than I did, or was teaching you how to place someone else’s feed on your site. This alone has endeared these tutorials to my heart. Thank you, Yaro!
Starting with reasons to use WordPress hosted on your own domain, moving on to getting your own domain name to signing up with a web host, I have a big money saver to add to his suggestions: use wordpress.com (it’s free) with your own domain name. You can get domains for $6.99 at One & One, and it’s very easy to navigate their site to make the changes, and if you can’t figure it out, they have fairly quick tech support.
If you do want to sign up for a web host because you are in this for the big bucks, then be sure to get the coupon codes on this site to save substantial moola. I try to keep them current, and if you can’t find them, just do a search in the search box (at top of page) for “Host Gator”. You can always email me, if you still can’t find it, it’ll be worth your time, I promise! Host Gator is being recommended more and more by the online ‘gurus’, and for good reason. They are feature-rich, reliable and no gimmicks! And their support is in-house! Anyway, this post isn’t about Host Gator…sorry.
So, other than disagreeing with Yaro’s domain and hosting recommendations, these videos are perfect for anyone just getting started. I think I’m going to do a separate post on how to figure out the RSS post via these videos, just so others don’t have to go through what I did trying to find info on it.
Find the videos at: Become a Blogger
or on Yaro’s blog: Entrepreneurs-Journey
Have a great weekend!
More From HomeschoolEntrepreneur
Jun
06
How To Make Money Blogging-Part 4
Ok, now the last 3 blogging “lessons” have been on getting your blog set up, and hopefully you have found a comfortable home for your blog. I have hopped around looking at and trying different platforms and it’s such a pain to move your blog once you’ve started, be ABSOLUTELY sure you are happy where you’re at before you get started and you will save yourself alot of time and frustration.
There are two books that I have bought and will try to pass along the essentials to you. One of the books is a Startup Guide by Entrepreneur Press called Start Your Own Blogging Business (Startup)
My favorite part of the entire book is a little story they tell at the very beginning that I think you find encouragement in also. It’s a story about Caroline, who publishes a blog on everything about iPods, her favorite thing in the world. Currently, her blog receives an average of 15,000 visitors per day-reportedly a modest amount of traffic for her chosen topic, receiving the “typical” amount of ad revenue of $.80-$1 per click from her readers. If only 1% of her daily traffic of 15,000 (150) click on her ads, she will earn between $120-$150/day in ad revenue. That’s $4500/month, or $54,000/year with very little business expense, which isn’t bad at all considering she is doing something she loves!
This gets better… NOW…if Caroline increases her traffic, let’s say to 150,000/per day with the same daily percentage of 1% clicking the same ads at $1/click …that’s $1500/day or just over a half million dollars per year.
Seem a little outrageous? Not really. 1% is a low percentage as well as $1/click is a low estimate, too. As your traffic increases, your advertisers pay you more to advertise for them. Granted, 150,000/day visitor traffic will take a bit of work (duh), but it is not an unrealistic goal if your subject matter is a popular one.
If you’re thinking that you could never acheive 150,000/day traffic to your blog, there are a variety of opinions on this. In the reviews of ProBlogger’s new book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
What is the final lesson here? It’s two-fold: choose your topic carefully, and really work at building your traffic. Go to the website Problogger.net for lots of tips and information on building traffic, or check out their new book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
Jun
06
How to make money blogging – Monetize Your Blog (Part 3)
You have chosen your niche market and you understand who your audience will be and what they are looking for. You’ve chosen a great domain name and created an awesome looking blog. Wow. That was alot of work, wasn’t it? Well, we are just getting started! Now, for the meat of your blog.
Write Your Anchor Content
Now that you have your blog up and running, the first thing you will want to do is write as many posts as you can possible manage. Look around at other blogs like yours and see what the most popular posts are. To find these , there is often a widget on the side that will say “Popular Posts”. Now, please DO NOT copy their ideas or titles, but get an idea of what your market wants to read about. Then you will want to write a minimum of 2-3 anchor articles. These will be your most popular articles (hopefully). Put some effort into these articles and give away some of your most valuable information. These will be the articles that draw people to your blog.
Adsense
Some people don’t like Adsense for one reason or another, so they choose to monetize in other ways. However, there is a great deal of revenue to be made if you do it right. If you already have an Adsense account, you can simply log in and get your code and insert it into your blog. If you don’t have an account, it’s easy to apply. Simply go to https://www.google.com/adsense and follow the yellow brick road. It takes about a week to get approved. Be sure to read their terms and conditions, and know up front that Google will ban you from their program if you or your friends click your ads even a little too much. NEVER, ever, ( click your own ads, and if they notice the same people (friends, well meaning relatives) are consistently clicking your ads, you will be sliced irreparably from the program. No mercy. So beware.
There is an art to placing these ads on your site. Websites like Homeschool.com make over $30,000 per month on just Adsense. (reliable heresay) If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend finding an ebook on Clickbank or there are several good books on Amazon, too. The reason I recommend an ebook is because it’s difficult to find a published book on Amazon that isn’t outdated by the time it makes it to press. Google changes it’s terms rapidly, so the newer the information the better. I recommend Clickbank because there are so many scammers out there and Clickbank is reliable to weed out the garbage and will give you a full refund troublefree is you find it’s not what you thought it was. Information is power.
Affiliate Programs
The other main way you will make money on your blog is to sign up for some affiliate programs. Linkshare and Commission Junction are two of the top networks you will want to apply to. There are many others and you can read more about this in our post: The Top 10 Affiliate Networks.
Clickbank
If the internet is the information super highway, then Clickbank is the #1 truckstop. Like I mentioned above, Clickbank has a level of integrity to maintain so they are meticulous about not accepting junk. It’s also a tremendous source of useful information about almost any subject you could imagine. It’s easy to use and navigate. You can sign up for free to sell any product. If you want to sell your own product, it costs a one time $50 registration fee. But I don’t think you are quite there yet. Once you have your Clickbank ID, you will find creating links for any of their products very easy.
There are other ways to make money on your blog, but you will want to get a little more established first. Also, you don’t want to put too many ads on your site, or many potential readers will click away in a nano-second.
So now you are up and running, keep posting quality content 2-5 times per week and you will find that within 6 months you are doing better than you ever thought you could. There are a number of ways to tweak your blog, and of course, generating traffic will be your next hurdle.
Marketing Your Blog
We are only going to briefly touch on this because it’s an entire series of posts all by itself. We used to have a category called “Marketing” but decided it deviated too far from our intended focus. There are many ways to market your blog, but here are our top seven:
- Comment on other blogs (like ours) similar to yours and leave a back link
- Guest post on popular blogs (like ours! just email us with your post)
- Start a Facebook Fan page
- Start a Twitter profile and add others like yourself
- Register and use Delicious, Stumble on, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, and others like it. Download Alexa’s toolbar. You’ll know at a glance the best sites.
- Start a newsletter-sign up with AWeber or Constant Contact.(60 day free trial)
- Post really interesting stuff, top 10 lists are HOT
Well, that is it for our series, but we have much more free tools and tips on this blog to help you succeed. What kind of advice can you offer our readers that will help them get started? Thanks!
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