Make money with your blog

Improve Your conversion Rate With An Online Sales Silo

2007-11-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

You're probably wondering what an online sales silo is and why you need to create one. In the past, sales and marketing experts told us to create a sales or marketing funnel. You dump all of your prospects into a wide funnel and a few would drop out of the bottom of the funnel that may turn into customers. Using the power of the search engines, you drop highly targeted prospects into a silo instead of a funnel. Once they are in the silo, you lead them directly to the product or service they were searching for and sell it to them.

Why does the online sales silo work so well? In today's society we all have the same problems, lack of time and too much to do. We're unfocused and our attention spans are now measured in seconds. For example, recent studies show that when we visit a new website we decide within 3 seconds if we're going to stay. If the graphics load too slowly, we don't like the colors or fonts, or if we don't find what we're looking for in 3 seconds we abandon that website and move on to the next. We're a society that thrives on instant gratification because our time is precious and we have a million other things on our mind.

When you do a Google search you're looking to solve a problem or you're looking for some form of pleasure or entertainment. When your prospect has a problem they want an answer immediately. They type in a keyword phrase and they land on your webpage where they find your product or service that solves their problem. They complete their purchase and it's a win-win for both of you.

Sounds simple doesn't it? Then why doesn't it always work that way? Because when they type a keyword phrase they're expecting to land on a webpage that contains those keywords and a solution to their problem. If they type "lower back pain" in Google, they want to land on a webpage that offers a solution to their lower back pain. If they land on a chiropractor's home page with beautiful colors, holistic music playing in the background and a picture of him holding a model spine, they get frustrated and click away.

When someone searches for "lower back pain" their back hurts and they want to land on a webpage that tells them how they get rid of their "lower back pain". They don't care what's causing it and how qualified the chiropractor is. They want their "lower back pain" to disappear now!

When you create an online sales silo you create a process that will take them by the hand and lead them directly to what they're looking for. Imagine walking into WalMart and the greeter asks you what you're looking for. You say you're looking for a new pair of running shoes and he takes you by the hand and takes you right to the running shoes. He doesn't' take you near the shoe section. He doesn't take you to the dress shoes or the casual shoes. He takes you right to the running shoes. No distractions. No confusion. Instant gratification.

Turning your website into an online sales silo is a simple process. Using this process will improve your conversion rate, increase user satisfaction, increase your repeat visitor rate and improve your bottom line.

Step 1: Identify what action you want the prospect to take. Do you want to collect their contact information so you can contact them? Do you want to sell them a product on the spot? Determine if your goal is going to be lead generation or to complete an ecommerce transaction.

Step 2: Identify the keywords and keyword phrases that best describe your product or service. Imagine your prospect searching Google and you want them to land on your website. What keywords would they type to find you? You can use keyword research tools like Wordtracker (freekeywords.wordtracker.com) and Google's keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Step 3: Create separate landing pages on your website for each keyword phrase. This webpage should contain only information about that particular keyword phrase. If the keyword phrase is "lower back pain" the webpage should only contain information about solving lower back pain. Keep the reader focused on lower back pain and don't distract them with other services you provide.

The landing page should have a compelling headline that contains the keyword phrase like "7 Ways to Eliminate Lower Back Pain Instantly". The search engines like headlines with keyword phrases. Your content should also contain the keyword phrase to keep the reader focused on what they're looking for.

Stay focused on one keyword phrase or topic per webpage. If you also talk about how you can solve foot pain on the same page, they'll get distracted and forget about their lower back pain. Remember to take them by the hand and lead them directly to the solution their looking for.

Step 4: Make it easy for them to complete the transaction. If you're collecting leads then make the contact form short and easy to complete. Give them a free report, free consultation or some other compelling reason for them to you their contact information. If you're selling them something, make the Buy Now button very clear and visible. Also make the checkout process very easy to complete.

Step 5: Give them an easy way to contact you if they have questions or difficulty on the website. Add your telephone number and an email address to the landing page so they can easily contact you.

Step 6: Add a privacy policy and terms of service agreement to your website. This adds credibility to your website and shows the visitor that you are a real company providing quality products and services.

Step 7: Follow up the transaction with a series of emails. The first email should be a "thank you" email with the details of the transaction. Thank them for signing up for your newsletter and tell them how to download their free report. If they purchased a product, thank them for their purchase and give them some tips how they can best use the product. Follow up with an email every other day for a week giving them more information about your products and services, and always direct them to your website for more information.

That's how to create your online sales silo. Remember to keep the website visitor focused on one topic and only

Google's Paid Search vs. Organic Results - A Rickety Wall of Separation

2007-11-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

The good people at Google have long maintained that there is a Chinese Wall between paid search results and organic results - that is, the department responsible for advertising is completely separate from the department responsible for organic search engine placement. The company insists that Google Adwords is a completely separate entity than the Google search engine, and never the twain shall meet. This all sounds very good, in theory. But do they live up to this ideal in practice?

You don't hear Google talking much about Chinese Walls these days. This is certainly in part because they have had great difficulty gaining traction in the literal and very competitive Chinese market (headlines such as "Google Hits Chinese Wall" or even "Google Advance Halted at Great Wall of China" were commonplace). But might there be other, more nefarious reasons? Is there a reason why we hear less and less from Google about the virtual wall that separates paid search results from organic search engine placement?
What Is Google Really Doing for Its Big Spenders?

It has long been rumored that Google will offer technical assistance in achieving better organic search engine placement to those who spend more for paid search results. I know for certain that these rumors are true in at least two instances. In fact, I actually have the minutes from one of these technical assistance meetings after the company met with Google engineers. While the identity of these two companies is irrelevant, suffice to say that they are companies that you have almost certainly heard of and that they spend millions of dollars on paid search words each year.

To be fair, based on the meeting minutes I have, the advice that the engineers gave to the company does not include anything groundbreaking. It is mostly common sense advice that a good search engine optimization firm already knows about organic search engine placement and other issues, and much of it is already covered in the publicly-available Google Webmaster Guidelines. This, however, is beside the point. Google has obviously decided that it must offer perks to its big paid search spenders to keep them happy (or rather, happy enough to not pull their advertising). Clearly, one of these perks is access to Google engineers and the ability to glean information about organic search engine placement, a luxury that smaller advertisers do not enjoy.
Organic Search Engine Placement for Sale - The New Google Reality?

From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense, of course. Big-dollar advertisers make up the bulk of Google's revenue for paid search, and any intelligent business will take whatever steps they deem necessary to hold on to their most valuable customers. This is why larger advertisers already have a designated account representative from Google. I am willing to bet that this perk was not Google's idea. Rather, it almost certainly stemmed from the sense of entitlement that those spending large sums on paid search felt and the fact that technical help with their organic search engine placement is what they demanded.

Unfortunately, this reality leaves an advertiser with a small budget for paid search at a disadvantage. If Google is willing to offer this secret perk to larger advertisers now, what might they do in the future? Offer price breaks to larger paid search spenders? Increase the minimum monthly spend to squeeze out smaller companies and please the larger ones? It certainly has the potential to become a slippery slope, and I am interested to see where it goes next.

One final point - since Google is willing to give advice about organic search engine placement to companies that spend a great deal of money on Google advertising, is the phrase "While Google never sells better ranking in our search results..." truly accurate? I suppose this is open for interpretation. It may be technically true, but offering advice regarding organic search engine placement straight from the horse's mouth in exchange for millions of dollars in money for paid search results isn't far from selling rankings, in my opinion.
Conclusion

Please don't get me wrong - I still believe that Google is the best search engine out there, I greatly admire the way that they are continually reinventing themselves, and I think they are still the target for those seeking the most benefit from organic search engine placement. They have the folks in Redmond constantly guessing and always three steps behind, and I love how they have started from humble beginnings to take on one of the biggest corporations in the world (and consistently win). I simply believe that they have played the underdog, anti-corporate card for too long, and that even if it has not outlived its usefulness, it has outlived its truthfulness. Google is now a huge multinational corporation that answers to its shareholders. To pretend anything otherwise is silly, but it seems that, for now at least, the charade will continue.

Google's overriding principle, one that they have been happy to espouse to the media, has long been "Don't Be Evil." Whether they still adhere to this principle since they have become a public company is another question that is open for interpretation. If you are a smaller advertiser and feel that Google's favoritism toward larger paid search customers regarding organic search engine placement is evil, it probably seems as though the "Don't Be Evil" principle no longer applies. You may conclude that the principles of "Don't Be Evil" and "Keep Shareholders Happy" are mutually incompatible, and that the latter has gained the upper hand.

Google Adsense vs Affiliate Programs

2007-10-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Google Adsense is a structured way to earn good money out of what Google makes from its advertisers on Adwords. The way it works is that advertisers pay top dollar to get their ads listed on Google. Google gets paid on every click that happens on the ad. By distributing the ads on your website and mine, they stand to gain more exposure, regain advertising funds quicker and also pay us good money!

Why you benefit?

The reason Adsense has become so popular is because it allows websites like ours to earn good money from the commissions Google receives from advertisers. By just placing a couple of ads on the site, you can earn a good commission percentage. However, there are certain drawbacks that an Adsense program has.

What it can do for your site

One good thing about Adsense is its immediate ability to boost your page ranking and popularity on search engines. That way you tend to receive a lot of traffic to your affiliate site. Also, people with affiliate programs on their site can actually look at Adsense as an alternate way of supplementing their income. Adsense lets you monitor which ads are performing and earning you most income. They do this by placing some Javascript code into your site which monitors the performance. Most of the time the traffic that comes to your site will most likely not find what they are looking for, on your site alone. That's where Adsense helps you. Even if customers don't find what they're looking for on your site, they can still visit the ads sponsored by Adsense and help provide you additional income. It basically provides you an alternate path to earn money online.

The context

In order to make your Adsense program most profitable as part of your affiliate program, you need to ensure you have contextual and relevant ads placed on your site. Else it defeats the very purpose. You want customers to click on these ads if they don't find something on your site. Hence it needs to be closely related to your website theme and your own products. Most contextual ads are characterized by lots of clicks but poor conversion rates. So make sure to test these ads out before placing them on your site. Pros and cons Both affiliate marketing and Google's Adsense have their own pitfalls and benefits. Here we explain the pros and cons of each.

Google Adsense:

Pros:

- Good for informational sites which do not have associated affiliate products to sell

- It allows you to create a content page without worrying about updating the content

- Very scalable. Adsense sites are low maintenance which make these good for the upkeep of multiple sites.

Cons:

- Not a good income generator when considering long term opportunities. It's because mailing lists are best for building customer relations. In Adsense you aren't asking for a subscription, instead just asking customers to click on ads.

- Search engine dependency. Adsense sites predominantly depend on the search engines to divert traffic. Hence if by chance an algorithm changes on a search engine, you risk losing a lot of income and traffic in the process.

Affiliate marketing:

Pros

- More long term in nature which allows you to build on assets and customer relations

- Main focus is on creating and building email lists since they are the backbone for all promotional efforts

- Allows you to focus on a niche segment you like. This is unlike an Adsense program which tends to focus on only high paying keywords.

Cons:

- Involves the use and skill over persuasive tactics in order to coax customers to visit the site and buy products. For novices, this can be a difficult aspect.

- Every site needs plenty of effort. You need to spend time in creating product reviews, email list creation as well as web content creation - which can take up considerable time.

Balance it out

Both Adsense as well as affiliate marketing have their own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, the best approach would be to balance the two to maximize your income potential online. You could have content on your site which you are interested in, while combining it with Adsense revenues.

DON'T TRY TO CHEAT GOOGLE

2007-10-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

Why You Shouldn’t Cheat AdSense
If you applied for AdSense account with intention to cheat and earn fast bucks, I hope by now you have understood that you shouldn’t.
Why? You say. Google is so rich, losing some pennies won’t hurt.Well. Probably. But when I say you shouldn’t, trust me. You really shouldn’t.
These are just some reasons:
1. You can’t cheat Google
Every once in while, someone will comes out with ingenious idea of how to get more money from AdSense in less than honorable ways. He will announce to the whole world, posting in every forum and tell people how smart he is. His idea is always untraceable by Google, it is always original, and it always gives easy money.
What he doesn’t know is, few months after that, he will get caught by Google, always. And his AdSense account will be disabled. Always. And he is banned from ever applying for AdSense account again. Always.
Google is a giant, with 2005 revenue of almost US$ 10 billions, and profits of more than US$ 1 billion. A large chunk of this comes from Adwords / AdSense advertisements.
More click fraud means less trust, less advertisers and less money, to the extent that if unsolved it will bring collapse to pay-per-click advertisement business. Now. Do you think Google will let you jeopardize their billion dollar business model?
They have money and ability to bring together many of the the smartest and brightest engineers and scientists on earth, has been doing that and will continue to do so. How smart do you think you are that you can outsmart collaborative effort of the brightest brains?
You might be able to pull through for two or three months, but eventually the fraud detection algorithm will catch up and you are caught. And you get banned from Google AdSense, among other things.
2. Cheating = stealing
No matter how you want to justify, face it, cheating is stealing. You are not only stealing from Google, but also from Adwords publishers. Majority of these are are not big companies, but small webmasters depending on Internet to make a living.
Moreover, even if your morality (or lack thereof) permits stealing from your own fellow, bear in mind that stealing is illegal. Regardless of whether it is done offline or online, a crime is a crime. You might get jailed for that.
In fact, Google has started to bring AdSense fraudsters to court a few months ago. Some were jailed, and some others were fined heavily.
3. It is just too easy to earn more, legally
Let’s say you managed to cheat AdSense undetected. You don’t use clickbot or proxy or click-ring or paid clickers. You managed to somehow get the clicks from distributed IP. You don’t use pop-ups, spyware, adware. You are careful that your CTR does not exceed 10%. Still, your earning is limited. There is a cap you can’t cross, else you will invite unwanted attention to your account.
With so much effort to cover your traces, actually you will get better result if you concentrate your effort to improve the website.
Write more contents, submit articles, improve on your search engine optimisation, improve adsense placement, and you can get the same earning or even more. Sure it will take some time, but this is legitimate.

Benefits of Joining MyBloglog.com

2007-10-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

Guys you All must be Posting in your Blogs for a long time but not getting any traffic to your Blog & no Comments… I also got frustrated in the same way. Finally , I have found the way to get traffic on my blog & my traffic is increasing day by day. The Success lies behind the Mybloglog.com , YES! It’s True…You must take this Site into consideration . This Site helps to overcome the mighty Problem of Traffic! …

BUT HOW?...

I will show you how to get traffic from this Site in 7 Easy Ways

1. At first log on to http://www.mybloglog.com/ & Register..

2. Then fill in the fields:

3. Now login into your account , create your profile & build your community( Name of your community should be attractive).

4. Select good pictures for your Avatar & a good screenshot of your Site.

5. Now after building your community,
You must leave messages (like Praising their site & praising them) on other
peoples communities & must join them .

6. Do this regularly .

7. You will see the traffic growth in a week or even in few days! if you are doing it Sincerely.
So follow these steps , increase your sites traffic & make more $ Money $ From Your Site....

Simple Steps To get traffic to your blog

2007-10-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

1. First of all you must stick to your topics this will show your knowledge about the topic & people will always be attracted towards your site in search of the information regarding the particular topic .

2.Then you should update your blog Everyday or with a gap of some days this will show your sincerity towards the topic & would help to establish your Site or Blog in that particular Field.

3. The 3rd thing usually seen in most of people is that they get frustrated of not getting Comments or Replies to their posts & finally the stop writing. But this should not happen because whenever we are writing or Updating our Website our Rank on many Popular search Engines continue to increase & we start getting traffic within 1 to 4 Months.

4. You MUST use Pinging sites such asi) http://www.pingomatic.com/ http://www.pingoat.com/whenever you update your Blog .This will help in Better Rankings in Search Engines like Google.

5. You Must give Powerful comments on the Blog or Site of others & always put a link to Your site .This will impress the owner of the site & the other people commenting on the sites . This will help to increase traffic to your Site.

6.You Should make your own communities at sites like http://www.mybloglog.com/ when other people will join your community it will help in greater traffic to your site & don’t forget to join the communities of other people.

7.The last step is that You should Never leave the Spririt & should Continue writing & Finally you will be able to get the desired amount of traffic & will be able to generate $$Revenue$$ from your site...

Don't Worry if Google Banned you

2007-10-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Adsense Alternatives !

Most of us are trying to Earn with Google Adsense but are frustrated with this Program... and want to have some other source just like this program...

According to me Experimentation is the Best way to gain something...

I have found these alternatives for Google Adsense all of which are worth trying..

1. Clickbooth 2. Bidvertiser 3. Revenue Pilot 4. Chitika 5. Clicksor 6. Yahoo Publisher Network 7. Tribal Fusion 8. Vibrant Media 9. Bidclix 10. Cpx-Interactive 11. Fastclick 12. Adbrite 13. Addynamix 14. Burst Media 15. Oridian 16. Adtegrity 17. 24/7 Real Media 18. Expoactive 19. Adsonar 20. $ Agloco $

Increase your Blog's Readers & Traffic !

2007-10-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hi
I have prepared a list of Some Websites on which are very helpful to every Blogger interested in having visitors to his Blog..

What you Have to Do?
It’s a very easy Task.. You Just have to Register your Site or your Site Feed on most of the Sites listed below. The main thing which you will do by registering is Putting your links on the these sites. Register one by one & note down on how many sites you have Registered yet.

What will happen after that?
If you have Registered to Feedburner or any other site like that which tells you the current number of readers of your Blog then you will see a gradual increase in the Readers & your Traffic will increase Continuously . Registering on these sites also increase the reputation of your Site in the Blog Market.

Here’s the list links & Start Registering Now!

1. Newsgator
2. Yahoo
3. Bloglines
4. Myblog2u
5. Feeds AOL
6. MyBlogDirectory
7.TheFreeDictionary
8. Blog Skinny
9. Top Blog Area
10. Excite Mix
11. Feed Lounge
12. Netvibes
13. Bloggernity
14. Blogarama
15. Blogcatalog
16. Blog Top Sites
17. Digg
18. Icerocket
19. Blogflux
20. 2RSS
21. 5StarBlogs
22. Citypages
23. MyBlogLog
24. Bumpzee
25. Addurlblog
26. All-Blogs
27. Blogbar
28. Best Blogs
29. Blogbib
30. BlogBunch
31. Blog Burst
32. Blog Cave
33. Blog Charm
34. Blog Code
35. Blog Digger
36. Blog Explosion
37. Blogflare
38. Blog Pulse
39. Blogrunner
40. Blogsrater
41. Blog Street
42. Blog Universe
43. Blog Woods
44. Feedage
45. RSS Feeds
46. Spot Plex
47. My Feedz
48. Feeds 4 All
49. Feed Base

Trade Links With Related Websites

2007-10-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Another thing I do to help get my blog ranked is to trade links with other webmasters who have sites on similar topics. I find them by searching for the keywords I want to rank for. If the blog category is not a competitive, commercial category, you can write directly to the webmasters of the top 20 - 50 results and see if they will exchange links with you.

If it’s a more competitive, commercial category, you can find out who links to the top websites for your keywords by searching for “link:http://www.YourCompetitor.com/”. That will show a list of URLs that link to your competition. Write to the webmasters who own those linking sites and see if they will trade links with you, too.

When you request a link exchange, be sure and make the request personal. Mention something that you like about the webmaster’s site and why you think that your blog is a good match for a link. You might even go a step further and put up a link to the webmaster’s site before emailing them. That way you can say “I’ve already put up a link to your site on my blog and wanted to see if you felt that my blog was a good match for a link back from your site”–or something like that. Take the first step, it’s a good gesture and it helps you get more links. Of course, if they don’t agree you can always take their link down.

If they agree to exchange links, make sure that you have them link to your site using the keywords that you want to rank for. For example, if you want your blog to rank well for “Home Made Widgets”, be sure to have them use the link text “Home Made Widgets”.

Getting Traffic to Your Blog

2007-10-12T07:38:00.001-07:00

Once your blog is properly configured, spend about a week making a good, informative post or two per day. You don’t want to go advertising an empty blog, so it pays to make some good posts first.

You can post to the blog by clicking the “Posting” tab. Make your title be eye-catching while still containing the keywords that the post is most relevant to. For example, if your post is going to be about how to build blue widgets from scratch, and you want to be found when people search the engines for “Build blue widgets”, try and make your title at least start with those keywords. For example, “Build blue widgets – from scratch”. The dashes help the search engines differentiate the keywords from the rest of the title.

You might get some stray traffic from people searching for blogs on Blogger, and your posts appearing in the “most recent posts” list, so don’t be surprised if you get some traffic and AdSense clicks even before you start advertising.

Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories

To get the traffic rolling you need to submit your blog’s RSS feed to as many Blog Directories as you can. If you search Google for “RSS submission site”, the number one result as of right now lists off 55 directories that you can submit your feed to.

With a Blogger blog, your RSS feed is always your blog url plus “/atom.xml”. For example, if your blog url is:

http://myblog.blogspot.com/

Your RSS feed url is:

http://myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This is very important, because it will help attract the attention of the search engines as well as get your blog noticed by people who are searching for information and for content for their websites.

All of this will result in getting in-bound links to your site. Most people will use the title of your blog as the link text for the link to your site, and that’s why it’s important for your title to be the keywords that you want your blog homepage to rank for in the search engines. Having in-bound links that contain the keywords you want to rank for is a very powerful way to get ranked well. I have blogs that rank on the first page of search results for my keywords because of this (some even in the first or second position).

But you don’t want to sit around and wait for the links to start to gather. You want to…

Setup Your Profile

2007-10-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Once your blog is setup, you want to setup your profile. To do this, click the “Back to Dashboard” link at the top of the browser window. Once at the dashboard, click on the “Edit Profile” link in the right hand column.

Check the “Share my Profile” box, and the “Show my Real name” box, unless you have a really good reason not to. It helps build trust if you have this information showing on your blog because people can see you’re a real person and not some anonymous nobody. Your profile by default will be shown on your blog.

If you don’t mind people contacting you via email, you can select “Show my email address”.

Click “Select blogs to display” and make sure that your new blog is checked.

If you have a photograph somewhere on a website, you can point to it with the Photo URL. I recommend doing this because again, it builds trust and makes you more real and personal to your readers. If you don’t have a picture on the web, or don’t have a website, I’ll gladly host a picture of you on one of my servers for free. Sticky-mail me and we’ll arrange it. Just one of my little ways of paying back to the Webmasterworld community.

Go through and fill out the rest of the information. Focus on the “About Me” box, because that will show on your blog pages. Use that description to establish yourself as an expert on the topic that your blog is about. People like to know that they’re reading an expert opinion that they can trust. This box is your chance to prove you have an expert opinion!

Save your profile when you’re finished.

The Templates Tab

2007-10-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t already picked a nice template from the list, click on the “Pick New” link under the templates tab and select one of the templates that you like and that fits your topic.

If you don’t already have an AdSense account, you can click on the “AdSense” link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. That’s how badly Google wants Blogger blog owners to use AdSense on their blogs!

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to paste your AdSense code into your template. Click on the “Edit Current” link if you’re not already there.

There are two methods of setting up your template. You will generate the most clicks by doing the following:

1) Find the section of the template that looks like this:

2) Paste your AdSense code for a 336x280 large rectangle directly after the second

tag. Be sure to format the colors of the AdSense to blend in with the background of your blog for maximum results.

3) Optionally, if you want to show a second 336x280 block at the bottom of the list of posts, look for this code in the template:

Put your AdSense code between the tag and the first

tag.

Click the “Preview” button to make sure the AdSense blocks look correct and did not mess up the look of the template. If all is well, click “Save Template Changes”.

Note: Once you’ve made changes to your template, if you go and select a different template with the “Pick New” link it will overwrite your changes and you will have to put your AdSense code back into the template.

The Settings Tab

2007-10-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Settings Tab.

A discussion of the important points of each settings tab is outlined below.

Basic

On the "Basic" settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.

Give a good, detailed description about the benefits of reading your blog daily. You want to get people to add your RSS feed to their aggregators and websites so you can get traffic, and this will help.

Answer “Yes” to the question “Add your Blog to our listings?”. This will have your blog appear on the main page of Blogger when you make new posts (albeit for a brief period of time), and allow people to search and find your blog using Blogger’s search tool.

One other, lesser known detail about setting that question to “Yes” is that if you set it to “No” Blogger will shove “nofollow/noindex” meta-tags into your blog template header, which will prevent your site from getting crawled or indexed. I believe this was done to fight what Blogger called “spam blogs”.

Publishing

Set the “Notify Weblogs” setting to “Yes”. This will send a notification to Weblogs every time you make a new post. Weblogs is a site that lets people (and search engine crawlers) know when new content appears on a blog. You want the crawlers (and visitors) to hit your pages when you add new content, so be sure this is set to Yes.

Formatting

You can do what you want on this tab–I personally set the number of posts on the main page to between three and five.

Comments

Allow comments unless your blog topic is really controversial and you’re likely to get a lot of flaming (people lashing out at you for what you have to say). Allowing comments is good because it gives more food to the search engines and keeps your blog updating and fresh even when you’re not posting to it.

I usually let anyone comment, and don’t limit it.

Don’t show the comments in a pop-up window, because that will prevent the crawlers from being able to get to the content since it’s javascript-based.

If you’re concerned that people might flame you, but you want to allow comments, enable comment moderation so that you have to approve each comment that is added before it goes live.

If you want to be notified when a comment is made, set the Comment Notification Address to your email address.

Archiving

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days. If you post every day daily is the best way to go, because it gives the search engines more unique pages to crawl and index. More unique content means more traffic to your blog and more clicks on your AdSense ads (I’ll get to adding your AdSense to the template in a bit).

If you don’t do a daily archive (and maybe even if you do), enable post pages so that each post will still have its own unique page even if multiple posts appear on the same archive page. Having multiple posts on one archive page is not a bad thing if you have post pages enabled, since the posts tied all together make for yet another unique page on the blog.

Site Feed

Definitely enable the site feed. If your posts tend to be very short, you might enable full descriptions. But if you have long posts (which I recommend), do not enable the full feed, use the short feed. Here’s why:

If you put the full post in your RSS feed, then the person reading the feed doesn’t have a reason to go back to your blog since they have already read the full post. No visitors to the blog means no clicks on your ads. AdSense has an “AdSense For Feeds” in beta testing, but it’s not open to all publishers yet, so at least for now you need to induce people to visit the blog.

If they can only read part of the blog post, then if they want the whole story they will need to go to your blog. You can plan for this by making sure that your title and the first 255 characters (about the first 50 words) really pull in the reader’s attention. You need to use those first 50 words to make them just have to read the rest.

Also, if your RSS feed appears on websites, you don’t want to give away the farm by showing the whole post. You’re letting websites use your feed so you can get clicks on the posts in that feed and get visitors to your site to build AdSense revenue.

So set the “Descriptions” to Short, write long posts and make the title and the first 50 words count.

Create the Blog

2007-10-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Once you have a topic chosen, it only takes about 5 minutes to setup a blog. From the Blogger homepage click the “Create Your Blog Now” link and follow the blog wizard instructions. I won’t get into detail about them because it’s pretty straight-forward, but there are a few points I want to make.

First of all, when you choose your blog URL, make sure that the URL contains the keywords for your topic. For example, if you’re creating a blog about health insurance, “healthinsurance.blogspot.com” is ideal, or “health-insurance” or even “health-insurance-blog” or “health-insurance-12345”. Just make sure that your keywords are in the URL, that will help you be found when people search for your keywords in the search engines.

Also, be sure to pick one of the professional looking templates. I suggest you just pick the plain-white one that is first in the list of templates when you're creating the blog. Once the blog is created, then click on the "Templates" tab and select one of the nicer ones shown there. I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't show you all of the available templates in the blog setup wizard, but they don't.

Building an AdSense Business With Free Blogs

2007-10-11T20:13:00.000-07:00

Building an AdSense Business With Free Blogs
When I first started out with AdSense, I had little money to spare on web hosting, and I knew nothing about how to get a site ranked in the search engines or to generate traffic. It took a lot of work, reading, experimenting and failure before I discovered great ways to build my AdSense business.

I feel like it’s about time that I paid back to the community for all of the knowledge and help that I received along the way. Hopefully this post will help you get started in the AdSense business even if you have little or no money to spare but desperately want to try your hand at it.

Normally Google won’t approve AdSense applications for free websites, but there is one exception. So if you're short on cash for hosting and are eager to get started, you might give this a try.

Blogger.com Blogs

Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners. Blogger is great because it has an easy interface, Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, and best of all if you're broke--they're free, and Google loves to give out AdSense accounts to Blogger owners.

So if you're looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works. If you already know this you can skip ahead. I make reference to this in the setup instructions, so it’s important to understand.

An RSS feed (as it applies to a blog) is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog. People can use “RSS Aggregators” (software that continually checks up on your RSS feed to see if there’s anything new) to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites will also want to publish your RSS feed on their sites if your content is good. This gives them fresh content for their visitors. And we all know that content is King in the world of website building.

Blogger blogs come with an RSS feed built-in, and you can use this to your advantage to generate traffic to your blog. I’ll discuss that in a bit, but first let’s get into building the blog.

Create Your Blogger.com Account

Determine Your Blog Topic First

Before you create the blog, you need to figure out what topic the blog will focus on. Think about your skills or hobbies that you’re really good at. You might not be a mechanic, but if you’re really good at working on cars on the weekend, and you love to do it, that would make a great blog topic. Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It’s important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

I will say this: If you have some knowledge on a commercial or industrial topic, this will usually get higher paying AdSense ads. But a hobby blog can do very well also (I know this from experience!).