Hello my dears,

This week I was so busy to write something for you, so instead I collected a series of links that I found while reading my feeds:

• Four Ways To Find More Personal Time by Laura on Freelance Folder.
• How to Blog for a Global Audience by Liz on ProBlogger.
• 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search – Google Beware by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• Things You Need to Consider When Planning Your Placement Targeted Google AdSense Campaign by Jason on JohnCow.com.
• Tips for Making More Money with Facebook Ads by Zac on ZacJohnson.com.
• The Art of Writing Damn Good Blogs by Salwa on Thou Shall Blog.
• Feeding the Monster: Where to Get Content for Your Blog by FMFon JohnChow.com.

Also, I want to let you know that guest posts are welcome now. So if you want to publish something here just send me an email or contact me through Twitter @mrjavo.

I almost forget something! My friend RJ Tayaban, blogger of TheWebblogZone is holding a great contest which you can win a WordPress blog:

• One Year Blog Hosting with BlueHost
• Domain Name (Subject to availability)
• Thesis WordPress Theme
• Custom Header, Logo and Banner
• WordPress, Thesis And Plug-ins Installations
• Blog Transfer: Blogger To WordPress
• One Month Free Support + 30 Minutes Telephone Support

This contest is to encourage Blogspot bloggers to migrate to WordPress . Check his blog to find more information.

Have a good weekend!

Hi guys,

This link love post will be brief due to I just focused in making money articles. Therefore, I collected the following 3 links for you, which contain great resources that will give you more ideas to make money with.

• How Do You Maintain Multiple and Profitable Niche Blogs by Garry Conn at GarryConn’s Blog.
• Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings by Darren Rowse at Google Adsense Blog.
• Blog SEO Tips: Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid by Alex Cristache at Blogsessive.

These were what I could find in my feed reader, but if I missed something great related with making money and you want to share it with me and my readers, drop the link in a comment!

Hi guys,

It’s fridaaaay! So as I won’t blog this weekend (theorically, I have scheduled posts ) and as I won’t give you all my affiliate marketing information at once, I’m going to take a breath today respecting AM and I’m going to share with you my incomes report of the first month of 2009:

• Private Sales: $129.5
• TLA: $21.16
• Affiliate Commissions: $215.5

Total: $366.16

The other months I was earning about $400, so you could appreciate a little drop during the last month but algo note I didn’t make any Web Design jobs, which ussually gives me at least $100.

So what do you think about them? With all this posts about affiliate marketing I’m very inspired and working in a couple of affiliate campaigns which will increase my earnings by hundred dollars – or at least I hope so.

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

In the last weeks I have received a big quantity of emails from people who is wondered about How to make money through blogging. I was analizing the content of this and similar blogs about this matter and I think the information is not arriving very well to that people who is starting in this lifestyle.

Making money by blogging is not so easy as many people say. In fact, it could be a hard task, and also it depends of the niche. First of all, it is very important to understand that the more people you have, the more money you earn – that’s a fact. Money is on masses, and if you want to earn big sums of money you should have many people following you, otherwise how do you expect to earn money from?. Tip 1: Traffic is key

The first thing many newbies think about making money with their blogs is Google Adsense. I must to say that you won’t earn a penny if your website doesn’t get enough traffic. So no matter how relevant the ads could be, if you don’t drive enough people to your website you will be wasting your time. Tip 2: Advertising does not work without people clicking on it

Another way to make monney with your blog is to sell ad spaces on it, i.e. 125x125px banners or textlinks. You can earn money by exposing other people’s services/products… Wait a minute! did I say services/products? Tip 3: You can make money by selling your own stuff: services, products, resources

There are other ways to make money online but you need to realize the idea of this post.

Is it possible to make money blogging?

Well, the answer to that question is quite simple, IT IS NOT. It is not possible to make money by blogging simply because Blogging cannot generate money by itself! Blogging is a medium, a path between you and an audience who is mainly looking for information and probably for products or services.

You need to devise something to generate money with: it could be a software, a service, a book, a clip of audio… And after then, you could use your blog in order to promote and inform the people about what you offer.

So why people say that they make money Blogging? I think they are not expressing the idea so well, they should be referring that they make money through blogging, or with the help of, using a blog.

Conclusion

Photo by jenn_jenn

To make money “blogging”, you need to have something to sell. It could be whatever you want, in my case i’m involved with web design services, private sales (advertising), text link ads, SEO consulting and affiliate marketing.

When you have something to sell, you need to attract customers by driving traffic to your blog. To learn more about this topic, you can take a look into my Boost Traffic category.

One more thing, and probably the most important lesson of this topic. You need to be patient! It’s very difficult to see good results in a week, so you should have the patience to wait a couple of time until being successful!

What about you? How you do make money through your blog?

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

Many people think that creating a website and placing ads on it is an easy way to make money online. The only thing they are right with is that certainly, displaying advertising on your website or blog is a good way to make money online, but it’s deeper than they think.

Placing banner ads is like an art, depending of your website you will have more success in certain positions than in others, so you need to try and see what works for you. For our luck, the act of displaying advertising is not a new thing and there are some strategies which you can follow in order to have a start mark.

Before start displaying ads in your website you need to ask yourself some questions:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Remember that is very important make the visitors feel comfortable in your site. If you place banners everywhere, they will not find content to read and they will automatically leave. So where should you place your ads? Let’s analyze the following heat map:

 

In this heat map you can see that some locations tend to be more efficient than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance), which normally are those  placed bellow the fold – banners, i.e. when you need to scroll down to see the banners.

A banner near from rich content tends to be clicked because the reader has its eyes focused in that area. Also those banners which are in the bottom of the content are clicked for the same reason. At the end of the content many websites have bookmark buttons, which make that area a good point to display a horizontal banner.

Talking  about the sidebars, you can see that people tend to watch the left sidebar more than the right one. The reason of this is simple, the most of the languages are read from left to right and unconsciously, the eyes catch better the banners of the left more than the banners of the right.

Remember that is really important to try different positions and banner sizes in order to know what works for your website. Depending of the structure and layout this heat map may not be applicable. In the case of blogs, in almost all of them you can see a sidebar on the right, but in absence of a left bar and due to the blog’s nature the people tend to watch the right sidebar.

So be creative and remember to not disturb your visitors with plenty of banners.