Archive for the ‘Making Money Online’ Category
Monday, January 11th, 2010 |
I received a really interesting Tweet a couple of days ago, where a reader asked me how I manage all of my online activities. I immediately understood his question, because to the outsider looking in, I’m currently all over the web.
There are a lot of online writers out there who are just like me - with their hands and their words in everything. Submitting writing and content for clients and at websites throughout the Internet. In my case, I do paranormal research and writing with RealityUncovered, I explore conspiracy theories at TopSecretWriters, I write countless informational articles for LoveToKnow.com, technology articles for MakeUseOf.com, educational articles for Educational-Freeware.com, and I’ve published numerous articles for Associated Content, Helium and even eHow.
As I said to my friend and RU colleague Steve recently - it’s like I’m a grenade victim and I have bits and pieces of me that have exploded all over the Internet.
Managing Your Online Activities in a Sane Way
The first thing I should point out is that I don’t do all of these things all at once, or all of the time. Building a powerful online presence and a solid reputation as a professional writer takes a long time, and a lot of building blocks. All of these pieces throughout the Internet are simply stepping stones toward a larger and greater future. Some of them will become cornerstones of that future, while others will not.
The benefit of distributing almost 50 articles every month, to a variety of online destinations with your name credited to each one of them, is that you control your online identity. Even if anyone attempted to write something negative about you, you’ve overwhelmed the Internet with so much of your own work, that anything anyone else writes will never see the light of day - it’s a perfect online insurance policy. Plus - whose going to take you on when they see that you are such a prolific writer, willing to take on any topic and any issue?
Tools You Can Use to Organize
The key to managing all of this is organization. While Twitter and Facebook can certainly turn into a time-drainer, they can also provide a perfect platform to distribute new material of yours to your fans. And yes, you will soon have fans because people have preferences - and your writing will appeal to a specific crowd.
Don’t doubt it. But when that happens, you need an easy way to let those people know that you’ve just written something they may be interested in reading.
Another approach is something that I’ll be writing about soon at MakeUseOf, and that is this - one of the best ways that you can organize yourself online is by creating an author profile blog. I know, you’re thinking not another blog!? However, this one isn’t a blog that you’ll need to babysit. It’s one where you can embed all of the feeds from your online endeavours, and where you can offer an occasional update about your work and your current activities.
A personal bio blog can also help you organize all of the places that you’ve already been published, and it can land you some amazing opportunities for even better places to get published in the future.
So, here’s to staying busy and profitable in all of your online efforts!
Posted in Life As a Writer, Making Money Online | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 |
If you’re running a free website (one that doesn’t require a reader subscription), then the odds are pretty good that you’re probably depending on ad revenue to support your operating costs (and hopefully some form of profit). In addition to using effective SEO techniques to attract as many visitors to your website as possible, another element of increasing your website’s ad revenue is by getting your visitors “converted” into revenue.
How do you convert visitors? As I mentioned recently in the 4 A’s of Marketing - you convert them into profit by driving them to take action that’s profitable for both the reader, and for you. It’s profitable for the reader because you’ve chosen products and services to advertise that you know are high quality and valuable, and it’s profitable to you because those companies pay you based on referred sales.
Google Adsense is one of the best ways for new bloggers to learn what ad placement techniques work on a website and which methods don’t work. On one of my blogs, for the longest time I couldn’t manage to generate any clickthroughs to my Google ads. On the one hand, I don’t like introducing large and obtrusive ads into my articles or on my website, but on the other hand I could tell that my visitors weren’t recognizing the value of those ads and taking advantage of those links.
After doing a little bit of research about website “heat maps,” I figured out what I was doing wrong, fixed it, and increased my ad revenue by over 600 percent. In this article I’ll quickly review what I learned so that you can put it to use on your own blog or website.
The Website Advertising Heat Map
As I mentioned, Google Adsense is one of the best learning tools for a new blogger that’s looking to get into earning decent revenue through advertising. Google is extremely helpful in that effort, because they actually provide a very valuable ad heat map on their Adsense help pages that shows you exactly where you should place ads on your website for the highest clickthrough percentages.
As you can see from the heat map, according to Google that most effective areas for advertising on a website are first and foremost at the very top of your content area. Now, there’s a tradeoff here. Personally I feel that placing a huge Google ad at the top of your content is very tacky and a major turnoff - it doesn’t look very professional. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of websites that do it, and they retain their readership - so proceed carefully.
The areas of any blog that I recommend concentrating on (if your template design allows for it) is the menu bar on the left and the menu at the top. These aren’t in the reddish-orange area, but they are still in the hot spots that generate the most action from visitors. The website where I tested this heat map concept was TopSecretWriters. I decided to place a large Google ad at the top of the left menu bar.
I did have to slide some of my favorite graphical content down below this ad, and it did involve tweaking some of the template code itself, but in the end it was a smart move because it transformed the almost non-existent ad revenue on TopSecretWriters into a very healthy stream of clickthroughs and profit.
The moral of the story is this - the Google Adsense heat map is accurate, and I would highly recommend taking the time to become familiar with it and then redesigning how you structure the ads on your blog or website so that you are taking advantage of those hot spots.
Posted in Making Money Online, Search Engine Optimization, Website Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, December 7th, 2009 |
I’m sure your first question is, “Why are you writing about the 4 A”s of marketing on a website devoted to online writing and search engine optimization?” The answer is that owning a successful website or blog takes two parts well-written and insightful content, and two parts brilliant marketing. Why marketing?
Well, the first thing you have to realize about having a website is that it’s existence alone isn’t going to generate a crowd plowing down the door, anxious to read your wit and wisdom. The first step in growing any website is getting folks to notice it, and not just any folks, but the folks that you are specifically writing for.
So, how do you know who you’re specifically writing for? This is where the 4 A”s of marketing come in. This was also the title of a very in-depth and detailed e-book written by author and lecturer, Brian Norris.
While Brian isn’t a website marketer or an SEO guru, he is a sales and marketing expert, and ultimately the techniques he describes will work effectively in marketing your website and converting your visitors into cash revenue. In this article I’m going to briefly outline how the principles he describes in his e-book can be used not only to drive tremendous traffic to your site, but also to generate a lot more profit from your website as well.
The 4 A”s of Marketing Applied to Your Website
The first thing you need to know about the 4 A”s of marketing are what each A stands for! The four A’s are as follows:
- Analyze your target audience. Who are they and what are their typical characteristics such as their age, interests, gender, purchasing trends and more.
- Attention of your audience. Once you know who they are and what they like, you’ll have the insight you need to successfully get their attention.
- Accept your product. This is what you need to make your audience do - accept that your ideas, your products, or your services are exactly what the need even though they have many other choices. You need to convince them to accept that yours is the best of the best.
- Action. The moment you convince them that you’re the best, you’d better have some sort of option available that they can act on once you convince them. This may be as simple as purchasing your services or buying your e-book. If you’re simply writing to generate ad revenue, then make sure that those ads are placed within the “hot spots” on your page (more on web page hot-spots in an upcoming post).
By following the simple guide above, you’ll be able to move from gathering your target audience from all disparate areas of the web that they visit, and drawing them into your website where you’ll guide them comfortably through the process until you’ve convinced them with very little effort how and why they need to perform a particular action. That action is what will generate your website revenue.
Analyze
The analysis part is something that I actually stumbled upon during my early freelance writing years. One particular client sold niche marketing analysis reports for a very hefty sum. He contracted me to research and write them for a few hundred dollars, and he turned around and sold them for a few thousand. Pretty good deal for him, and I didn’t care because I needed the money. However, what I gained more than money from the experience was the training on effective ways to perform a niche analysis to identify the demographics of your audience, depending on what niche you’re serving. For example the online gaming industry is actually dominated by white, middle-aged women - and you learn this as you conduct the niche analysis, using the sort of resources I described on my MUO article outlining resources you can use to conduct that research.
One thing I can assure you is that the research looks much more difficult than it is. Once you start using the resources listed in that MUO article and you discover a few studies from Pew Research or government agencies, you’ll discover your niche audience fairly quickly.
Attention
Once you learn more about your target audience, including what they believe, how much they typically earn and what they spend their money on, you’ll be in an excellent position to get their attention. The most important things you should learn about your audience is what websites they typically enjoy the most, what periodicals they read, and where they spend most of their time. For example if you know that your audience is made up of mostly college-age male computer gurus, and that they flock to large multi-user games and like to read computer magazines - then you know where to go to get their attention.
You would find a local LAN party near you and put up fliers, or sponsor the event so that you could advertise your site throughout the event. Or you could invest in an ad or two on a computer website (choose a small one with a decent readership if your budget is small). Through creative marketing, you’ll get your website name in front of the eyes that will appreciate exactly what you have to offer.
Accept
Convincing someone that you’re the best isn’t always easy. According to Brian, at this stage you need to focus on what the outcome that your audience is looking for (you’ll have learned this by now through your niche research).
If you know that middle aged, female online gamers are desperately seeking a free source of online games - then you need to convince them that you’re not only a good source for those games, but that you’re the absolute best resource on the entire Internet and that by sticking with you and taking a specific action, they’ll get the outcome that they desire.
Action
This could be anything - submitting a survey, submitting their email address to you, purchasing a product or anything else. Ultimately the action should be obvious and easy to accomplish, and it should flow directly from your effort to gain your visitor’s acceptance. One click and they get what they desire, or submit their email address in a form and they receive the outcome they want. That’s the secret.
And the real secret to doubling or tripling those profits is by following through and providing those visitors-turned-customers with the quality product or service that you offered. This results in return visitors and repeat profits - the bread and butter of any successful business.
Posted in Making Money Online, Search Engine Optimization, Website Marketing, Writing for Income | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 1st, 2009 |
First, a little bit about how I came up with the idea to offer online PC support on this blog. One of my favorite writing gigs is the work that I do over at MakeUseOf. The writing crew over there are some of the most talented and technically savvy folks anyone could ask to work with. One of the things that I love about MUO is that it pushes me to try to come up with interesting ways that you can “Make Use Of” Internet technologies in ways that most people don’t know about or even consider.
One of the things I really want to do is provide my blog visitors with a direct line of communication with me, and in that spirit, last month I tested and installed the VZOchat service on my blog. This service is fantastic and it’s an excellent way to offer videoconferencing over the Internet. The one drawback I noticed is that in reality, most people who are sitting in front of their PC really don’t want anyone seeing them - so they shy away from video chatting. I believe this is probably why videoconferencing never really took off as a major online service.
Offering Easy to Use Online PC Support Services
On the other hand, everyone loves to text chat. The popularity of IM services like Skype, Yahoo Messenger and the many other instant messaging services proves that people love to text. One of my favorite ways to get tech support when I used to be an Ebay Powerseller was through Ebay’s Live Support chat service, when they offered it. So, in my latest article at MakeUseOf, I decided to alter my videoconferencing approach into a text chat approach. It didn’t take very long to find the best service out there to accomplish offering high-quality online PC support - LiveZilla absolutely rocks.
The LiveZilla support software is really easy to set up - the Wizard does everything for you. It will FTP the files to your web server (assuming you have your FTP details), and once installed on each PC that you want to use to answer calls, you’re done. The last step is distributing your chat room links either through your blog, emails, Facebook - wherever. As you can see to the right, I’ve decided to use the LiveZilla service to offer online PC support sessions as well as SEO advice sessions at various intervals of payment.
Offering Your Expertise for Pay
Why charge for your LiveZilla online support service? Well, as a writer or blogger, the odds are pretty good that you’re very busy most of the time. If you’re not updating your blog, you’re fine-tuning your website theme or writing articles for other clients. The fact remains that there are people out there who could really use your advice and technical expertise. Do you want to help them? Sure. Do you have time when you could be devoting that time to writing another article that helps you earn more income? Of course. If you have to choose - which would you go for? Time is money - but you can still offer your expertise to your visitors who really need help, and are willing to pay for it. Think about it - most people are stuck with several options. One, ask a family member who claims to “know computers,” but who ends up messing things up worse in the long run. Two, hire a guy down the street who’s going to charge $60 to $80 an hour. Or 3, someone far less for a quick 15 to 20 minute chat session where they can ask their technical question and get a straight and knowledgeable answer.
Now, you can offer your blog visitors an option where they can pay peanuts to chat with you for 10 minutes, get a quick answer to their technical question, and their done. You haven’t wasted any of your time, and you’re putting your experience and expertise to excellent use for your blog readers and website visitors. It’s simple, easy, and you can add it as one more stream to your many streams of income earned on the Internet - it’s win, win for everyone.
Posted in Making Money Online, Website Marketing, Writing for Income | 1 Comment »
