Archive for the ‘Blogging Tips’ Category:
5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing May Not Be The Answer For Your Blog
Credit: evagor@sxc.hu
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money blogging. As long as you are writing about a niche that a few people care about, there is a good chance you can find affiliate programs that can help you promote products to your readers and get compensated when they buy using your links. There is no magic number of dollars that you can make with affiliate marketing. Many bloggers assume that there is no ceiling to how much money you can earn from affiliate products. While that may be true, since you are only getting a small percentage of what you are selling on your blog, there is so much money you can earn. But there is a floor. That’s when you don’t sell any products. So affiliate marketing is quite risky for publishers especially if you have CPM deals lined up for your blog.
I have been fond of affiliate marketing for years now. It’s what allowed me to start my business and fund it when I didn’t have enough resources to hire people or purchase equipment and services for my business. So affiliate marketing will always have a special place in my heart. But there are reasons I am not focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing anymore. The business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and while the industry is not dead, it is being pressured from all sides. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t consider affiliate marketing to be right for my business:
- Control: when you start your own business, you’d hope that you can have control on what’s going on with your business, and what you can do to increase your revenue. In reality, affiliate marketers are not in control of their destiny. In many cases, affiliate programs are too uptight with all their rules and policies. Some affiliate programs don’t pay you if you blog about their products. Others will right off your affiliate commissions if you refer people to them through the search engines. Worst of all, your affiliate program could ask you to make major changes to your website in order to continue your relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in the corporate environment, and I am aware of the challenges of working with partner companies in the past. But I have found many affiliate programs to be too demanding and uptight.
- Unfavorable Landscape: affiliate programs have shown that they really don’t care about their affiliates. When companies cut their affiliates off the minute Internet tax is imposed in a certain state, you know you are not a priority for your affiliate partner. I guess it’s only fair as affiliates are there to generate leads for their merchants. So expecting merchants to care too much about affiliates may be wishful thinking. Many merchants are struggling these days and affiliate marketers are getting the boot as a result. Fair? Read more »
Blogs On Shared Web Hosts: Right Idea?
Whether you are a professional blogger or have just started with your own blog, you have probably had to deal with hosting issues in the past. Web Hosting is one of those tricky issues that can determine the success or failure of your site. You can work on your content all day, but if your website is down when your visitors pay you a visit, you are not going to get too much value out of your web host. Unfortunately, choosing the right web host is not an easy process. There are plenty of companies that promise you a lot of things but don’t deliver on their promise. In the past, I have talked about how you should go about choosing a web host for your blog, so there is no reason to address that again. But even if you do your best to research all the web hosting services around, there is still a chance you can sign up with the wrong partner.
When you start your blog, there is a good chance you are not going to get a lot of traffic right from the start. So the idea of signing up for a shared web hosting service can be intriguing. After all, nobody minds paying $5 a month for one of these services. But many bloggers feel hesitant when it comes to signing up for a VPS or dedicated server account. Those accounts are going to cost you significantly more money. Of course, there is a reason for that.
Shared web hosting services will work fine for new blogs. As long as you are not getting a decent amount of traffic, your shared web host should be handle your traffic. But there are many limitations on these accounts. It’s so easy to hit those limits with bad plugins or scripts on your server. What happens when you hit those limits? Your site could crash or become so slow. That’s the easiest way you can lose your loyal visitors as no one likes to wait a minute for your site to load up, no matter how good your content is.
Spy On Your Blogging Rivals with SpyFu Kombat
SpyFu is one of the most powerful and most affordable spying tools on the market. Many bloggers make the mistake of not watching what their competitors are doing. While I am not suggesting that bloggers should copy what others are doing in their niche, it’s always nice to know what your competitors are working towards. Maybe you can offer more value in the areas your competitors are focusing on. SpyFu Kombat is a cool tool that lets you figure out what other bloggers are advertising on and what organic keywords they are going after.
SpyFu Kombat is a part of SpyFu membership program that lets you compare your own organic and paid campaigns against those of your competitors. Let’s say I want to compare bloggingOT against Problogger. It would certainly be nice to have a tool that could tell me what areas I need to work on to catch up to Problogger in the search engines. That’s what SpyFu Kombat offers and then some. It not only shows you what areas you need to work on to take your blog to the next level, it also shows you what areas you have in common with blogs you are competing against. Read more »
3 Best SEO Training Courses for Bloggers
If you are blogger, you love traffic. The more traffic you get to your site, the better chance you have of making it as a full-time blogger. Besides, it’s always nice to get recognition for your work. That wouldn’t be possible if only 2 people are visiting your website per week. One of the best ways to take your blog to the next level and drive more traffic to it is by optimizing it for the search engines. Climbing up the rankings may not be easy (especially if you are in a hyper-competitive market). At the same time, if you take your time to optimize each and every post on your blog for the search engines, you’d be surprised how much traffic you can drive to your site for free.
Not a lot of bloggers spend enough time learning the art and science of SEO. Some only think about outsourcing the process. I can tell you from experience that knowing some SEO can always help when you are writing your posts or planning for ways to add more content to your blog. There are plenty of SEO books that teach you the basics of search engine optimization. But if you want to go beyond the basics and get a firm understanding of search engine optimization, here are 3 SEO training resources you should look at:
SEOBook: the best search engine training program on the web. It goes deep into topics not covered by other books or courses on the market. These guys have been at it for years, and the content keeps getting better. Read more »
5 Blogging Myths Demystified
Credit: soooo
Just like any career, blogging has its own myths. Blogging is obviously a hot buzzword these days. It has been for a while now. So it’s no surprise that people have some assumptions about what bloggers do and how much money they make. But those are people looking in from outside. There are plenty of newbie bloggers who have a set of unrealistic expectations when they get into this business. It’s too easy to assume that if Darren Rowse is making thousands of dollars a month from his blog, so can you. You may also assume that you can run a blog for just a few dollars a months, essentially keeping most of everything you make for yourself. In reality, things don’t work that way. A lot of things that people tell you about blogging are myth. The sooner you realize that, the better off you are.
5 Blogging Myths
Get Rich Quick: there have been bloggers who have made it big time in a fairly short period of time. But 99.99% of bloggers don’t get to that point. And those who do have worked very hard for everything they have achieved. It’s easy to get encouraged by those $100K Adsense checks. But don’t ever assume anything unless you have all the facts.
Free Web Hosting: many new bloggers start their blog on Wordpress.com or Blogger network. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you are serious about blogging, you should always take time to register your own domain and host your own website. As your blog becomes more popular, you will have to spend more money on hosting. But consider it an investment in your business.
How To Write a Decent Product review
Credit: @sachyn xchng
One of the best ways to provide value to your readers on your blog is by writing honest, informative product reviews. No matter what niche you are blogging about, there are products that your audience could be interested in. By giving them the opportunity to pick up the best products to address their needs, you can not only build trust but also keep them coming back for more.
There are several reasons why you want to put product reviews on your blog. Sometimes, product manufacturers get in touch with you and ask you for a review of their product. In some other cases, you may want to write a review on an affiliate product to make some money on your blog. In that case, you may be inclined to write a positive review on your blog. There is nothing wrong about liking a certain product, but not everyone knows how to write a decent product review.
5 Ways To Handle Search Engine Rankings Drops
Are you a Google junkie? I know I was a few years ago when one of my first blogs was doing so great on Google. It’s quite addictive when you think about it. If you are pulling in 3000+ visitors a day just from Google, you know your content is getting some decent exposure without it costing you any money. Of course, nobody’s satisfied with any level of traffic. The more of it you have, the more of it you want. But those who live by Google, die by Google. In 2004, my top blog was pulling in 90K visitors a month just from Google. Sure. It wasn’t as popular as a super blog, but the blog was paying for itself, and it was making me a good amount of change for my efforts. Then came Google algorithm changes. The site suddenly disappeared from the SERPs without me making any changes to the code or the content on my blog. It took me months to get my blog back up to where it was. But I learned my lesson. You should never rely on one traffic source to drive traffic to a blog, especially one as volatile as Google.
A lot of people can’t handle the thought of losing their search engine rankings overnight, but it could happen. A lot of blogs get flagged for duplicate content and some even become victims of hack attacks or serve downtime. It doesn’t take much to lose your position in the search engine results pages. You can handle a drop in your search engine rankings two ways. You can panic and start going berserk, changing your code, web host, and even your domain, or you can think logically about it. While there are no guarantees that you can get back your original search engine rankings, there are things you should and shouldn’t do when faced with such a dilemma. Read more »
5 Tactics To Fight Back Against Copycat Bloggers
Credit: twvogel
There are three types of bloggers out there. In one group, we have a bunch of people who know how to come up with original blog posts on a consistent basis. These bloggers have mastered the art of grabbing an idea and looking at it from a unique angle. In the second group, we have a group of bloggers that come up with original ideas once in a while but mostly rely on other bloggers to do the job for them. The third group, which I happen to dislike a lot, are copycat bloggers. These bloggers not only steal your ideas but sometimes don’t even bother changing your posts enough to differentiate themselves.
There is nothing more frustrating than working so hard to come up with an original blog post, only to see someone else still your idea and run with it. To be frank, you can’t really complain about someone grabbing the idea behind your blog post and coming up with a unique post on the very same topic. But it is frustrating when someone copies you and your points and only changes the words around (we are not even going to talk about blog thieves). Read more »
5 Ways To Save On Your Taxes As a Blogger
There are a few things that are certain in life and tax is one of them. Whether you are a small time blogger or a superstar, you are going to have to pay taxes on the money you make from blogging. Your tax rate can be actually pretty high if you are making a decent amount of money from your blog. As a blogger, you need to take time to treat your business professionally. That means you should invest in your business and do what other businesses do to reduce their taxes. Now I am not suggesting that you should write off things that have nothing to do with your business. But you can always buy a better computer or pick up premium software solutions that are necessary for you to enhance your blog and take your business to the next level.
Small businesses are often very likely to get audited. There is a reason for that. There are some people who write every single thing off and always come up with zero or negative income. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you can prove that things you have bought are necessary for you to conduct your business. So don’t go on a world trip or buy a boat for tax purposes and expect the authorities to ignore your write off. That being said, there are simple things you can do to lower your tax and add to your blog. Here are 5 ideas to get you started: Read more »
5 Places To Dig Up Questions For Your Blog
One of the best ways to get more popular in the blogging world is by giving people what they are asking for. In fact, that’s the recipe to success in any business. If you can identify what people need and give them exactly what they are looking for, there is no reason you can’t make it big in blogging. Now, I am not suggesting that you can become a super-blogger by answering questions on your blog all day. At the same time, there are plenty of blogging ideas that you can dig up by doing your homework online.
Regardless of what niche you are involved in, you can always find people who are asking questions online that are probably being asked by many others. By identifying those questions and the needs of those people, you can write blog posts that people eat up and want to share with others. Not complicated on the paper but it does take some work. If you are looking to take advantage of this tactic to develop more ideas for your blog, here are 5 places you should look at:
Yahoo! Answers: still the best place to dig up ideas for blogs. There are plenty of questions in the database, which means you are going to have plenty of opportunities to develop ideas for your blog. You can also become an authority by participating and answering questions here.
Askville: a community by Amazon that doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves. If you are running a technology blog or have an audience that is hooked on Amazon products, Askville is a great place for your research. Read more »
