review plugin for wordpress
Nov 01

How to create your first online asset

Blogs, Doodling, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, WebWriMo challenge 7 Comments

To continue the businessman way of thinking posts, and to give some actual advice rather than fuzzy “way of thinking guidelines”, here is the way to make your first online asset.

What is an asset? It is something that gives you money. That means, that we need to create something that gives us money.

The easiest “something” to create is a blog. What is a blog? A site about a certain topic, with chronological based hierarchy. Or its a web journal, whatever definition you prefer best.

What can we blog about? The answer is, what can you not blog about? You can blog about blogging, you can blog about shitting, you can blog about working, about sleeping, about fucking, anything.

Pick a subject that interests you, something that fascinates you personally. Screw the guides that tell you to do keyword research etc. Keyword research is for optimization, what you need is a kick in the ass to get started!

And no blogspot or wordpress free blog. Pick a cheap hosting plan, I suggest this one. Grab a brandable domain, one that is easy to remember, and work on setting up your blog. Even if the idea alone frightens you, you will learn a lot from working on your own site. Many online moguls started with no computer skills and a crappy website.

And no, I will not write down a step by step guide on everything, there are thousands of guides out there, and the first skill you need to develop is called “Just fucking Google it“.

Install a wordpress blog, set it up right, and pick a theme. And simply start writing. Set up a Google alert on your topic, 4-5 keywords. Check your gmail every day, and write about the current things in the niche. Also, find the other blogs in your niche, read them, and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

Around 10 Google alerts in your gmail every day, and a subscription to 30 blogs are more than enough to keep you filled up with topics. Also join the niche’s largest forum, and put your link in your signature.

Don’t worry about how the site looks, how your writing is, all that will develop over time. Practice makes perfect. You will change your site’s look a dozen times anyway…

Anyway, your goal is to get up at least 30 pages of unique content, ideally 100 of them. As you write the content, whenever you post a page, submit it to social bookmarking sites. Go for Digg, reddit, stumble, delicious, mixx. Create accounts in all of the above, and put the buttons on your browser for easy submission.

Social bookmarking coupled with the Pingcrawl plugin can get you around 20 deeplinks on every post. Those are more links than you really need. And yes, forget the directory submissions. Also, link to other blogs everytime you can, and remember to link to a post, not the homepage, to utilize the trackback.

So, the min 30 pages will get you easily a 500 yahoo linkdomain count from the start. Of course, it will take time for the links to pop up, but they will. Forget about them for now.

Install the NextGen gallery plugin, and start downloading and gathering pictures related to your niche. Upload them to the blog, make a new page, add the tag gallery=1 in ][ and you have a gallery of pics. These will get indexed in Google images, and hopefully bring in some more visitors. Stumble the image page, this is a must.

Then go to youtube, and pick videos related to your niche. Gather up 20+, embed them in a post, with or without your comments, your choice. Social bookmark those two.

This will take a variable amount of time, depending on your web design skills, your writing skills, any set-backs etc. Lets assume that it takes 2 weeks (I have done it in a day. Yup… Nuts, I know)

Now you basically need to forget about your blog, posting occasionaly, every 2-5 days. You are waiting for the next PageRank update basically. As soon as your blog gets PR, you are on for the next phase.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , ,

Oct 26

3 ways to monetize your blog without banners

Blogs, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, Techniques, mAdsense 7 Comments

Every blogger reaches that dilemma at some point. Do I whore out my site for extra cash, or do I leave it pretty and bannerless and making a hole in my timeline with no benefits?

For affiliates I believe, the choice is much easier. Most of us are in it for the money, so it’s weird for us to see a site without at least an ad. 

Hobbie bloggers/webmasters though, the ones that actually made the internet what it is today, reach that intersection at some point, and hate the idea of flashy ads all over their pretty little snowflake.

Well, I am here today to suggest something radically different. 3 bannerless ways to monetize your blog, here it goes:

What are they? They are automatically selected keywords in your site’s content, which have a double green underline. When the visitor moves the mouse over the link, a banner pops up from it. The banner is discreet, and mostly relevant to the keyword. 

If the mouse is somewhere else, the ads are nowhere to be seen.

I have never seen this technique in any other site, I may even be the only one that uses it. Honestly, I have found this technique working so well, that I just drop the code in every site I make, be it normal or sploggy. A simple, clever, practical fire and forget method, just the way I like it!

How do you make it? Simple.

  1. Signup for AdBrite if you are not already.
  2. Create a new zone. 
  3. Put your site’s info.
  4. Uncheck the other boxes, leave only the inline ads checked.
  5. They give you a small piece of code, and you simply put it between the body tags of your template.
  6. Voila, you are done.

Practically, the links get clicked a lot despite them having small bids. The layout of your site remains untouched and pretty. And you still get some revenue. The inline ads I believe are much better than banners.

Amazon has a similar trick in their program, and I have tried that as well. My opinion is that Amazon’s script is much heavier, producing larger page load times. Also, it does not seem to convert that well, and with AdBrite you get paid per click.

What is that? It’s a very clever business model actually… Basically, SpeakToMe provides a service to you, through which you can give personal, one-on-one consultation, paid by the minute.

It really needs some explaining to understand it because it is so revolutionary. The idea itself is old, it is the same as those phone lines, where the caller is charged by the minute, and the receiver helps him, and gets paid his cut. 

Well, take that tried and tested business model, and put it online.

You have your online presence, your reputation, your audience, your writings etc. And people contact you all the time, asking for your advice and help. 

Well, now you can do the same, while getting paid as a consultant. If your advice is as good as you think it is, you will actually be doing your clients a favor, by giving them a cheap, easily accessible way to rent your time. And since you are getting paid for it, you will be more focused in actually giving them good advice so that you show you are worth their time and money.

On a more practical note, the SpeakToMe service basically gives you a widget that you can easily integrate to your website, for example a page named “Speak to me now”. The installation itself is a simple copy paste after you have signed up. Another benefit is that payment is accepted inside your website, so the visitor never leaves your site.

Do you want to see a demo? You can nag the creator of this service right now! SpeakToMe expert widget demo.

The service is free to signup, easy to use, and they even give a guarantee of 50$ for the first 1000 visitors. Now that is confidence.

SpeakToMe’s cut is 20%, leaving you the remaining 80%. I find it a rather logical percentage for a service. Not much to discuss on that issue.

To avoid any misconceptions on the charges of this service, here is the exact page from their signup page:

SpeakToMe’s service charge
Broadcasting on the Internet to an unlimited audience is expensive. Accordingly, SpeakToMe charges a service fee to experts of 1.5 pennies per minute. 10 hours broadcasting time, in other words, will cost you $9 in future fees generated.

Credit card processing fees of 6%
Client accounts are funded through credit cards, and we pay a 6% processing fee for this service. This 6% is charged to your gross revenues.

SpeakToMe takes a 10% cut of revenues
In addition to the credit card processing fee of 6% and the $0.015 per minute service charge, SpeakToMe takes a cut of 10% of gross revenues. The remainder (over 80% of gross) is paid to the expert. 

If you are an expert on a niche, and your audience would be glad to pay a small amount in exchange for your one-on-one consultation, it is worth at least considering this business plan. It does not fit all businesses, but it can work wonders on others, and remember that the offline version is tried and proven to work amazingly well.

The most discreet way to monetize a blog. TLA needs no introduction, you see their banners all over the blogosphere. I have mentioned this again, but it fits this “bannerless blog” issue as well.

Text link ads can pay as much and even more than banners. The added benefit is that the income is stable, even if you get a sudden traffic drop, the link is still there. Of course, if you do not provide a valuable link spot to the advertisers for a long time you will lose them as well, but there is a much larger time buffer than ppc banners for you to react.

TLA has recently opened their “secret” inlinks marketplace to the public, and in summary, they are now selling like hotcakes for 7$ a pop.

Inlinks are simply handpicked keywords from advertisers, like “texas holdem” or “seo services” for example, that are linked automatically from the TLA plugin to his site.

The links are normal, like any other link on your site, and they are as discreet as it gets.

Of course, you can still review the links and deny any dirty ones, though the ones I have are all quite clean up to now.

So, here they are, 3 ways to monetize your website without any banners whatsoever. Go. Create.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , , , , ,