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.

In the previews lessons of this series I talked about the importance of Selecting a Niche and Planning your Strategies. In this third part, I’m going to talk about everything you need to know when you are creating the blog. I wanted to write this post earlier but I couldn’t because of its dense content. I will cover this part with sub-chapters, to make it easier to understand.

3. Create A Blog

3.1 Choose a Brand Name

Before thinking in the hosting or theme for your blog, you need to think about your brand. This is not an easy step, because sometimes it’s hard to decide something, specially because there are a lot of blogs over there and the brand you are thinking to adopt could be in use.

So, think well about the name you want to be represented by, because once you start promoting yourself with a brand, you should not change it. Catchy and short names are perfect for your selection. Once you have selected a brand name, you can use it as the title of your blog.

3.2 Choose your Keywords and Taglines

This is a very important step because the keywords will determine your ranking on the search engines such Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc… There are a couple of free tools which you can use to select your keywords:

- 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.

- Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.

- Google Keyword SandBox: Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. You need to give a few descriptive words or phrases to get the 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.

I recommend you to use all those tools to get your keywords, and after then start merging the results. This way you will get a more accurate result.

3.3 Choose a Logo

The logo it’s very related to the Brand. In this case, it’s not 100% up to you, at least you are a designer. If it’s not your case, you can pay for a logo. There are many people (including me) willing to design a logo for your website or blog for a cheap price at DigitalPoint Forums. So you need to describe what do you want, the colors you want to have in your logo and the designer will do the hard work for you.

3.4 Choose a Theme

You can get a free theme to start, but I recommend you to get a personalized design specially for you. There are many companies which you can contact to create your theme: Unique Blog Designs, Weborithm, Reality Hosting etc… Also, if you have web design skills, you can create your own WP-Theme. If it’s the case, I highly recommend you to check the guides of WPDesignder, he has a very useful material there.

3.5 Get a Domain & Hosting

This step supposes to be easy, but it’s not. Getting a good domain could be a very hard task, specially if you looking for a domain which includes some of your keywords. There are many good domains already taken, and when you think you have found a good one, you notice it’s taken too. I usually use Godaddy to verify domain names, also you can use their Bulk Register tool to search domains based in the keywords you want.

Then, talking about the hosting I don’t recommend you to use GoDaddy. It seems to be cheap, but it’s really not. It’s truth that you can get a hosting for $6 a month, but when you start adding more services like php support, infinite subdomains and that kind of things, the bill flies like a rocket. So, I recommend you to use BlueHost, you pay $7 a month with no hidden fees, and by joining them you get a $50 coupon to advertise on Google, and a $25 coupon to advertise on Yahoo.

Wow what a large article, it has over 700 words! Well, I hope this lesson can help you to create your blog. I tried to cover everything but may be I missed something, so if you think I need to add something else to this phase, don’t be afraid to leave your comment .

Hello readers, this morning I was looking for a blog about making money online to make a couple of consults about some affiliate programs, but I couldn’t find the blog through my bookmarks, I must missed it when I formated my pc the last year. Although I tried to remember the title/url of the blog, I couldn’t and finally I ended searching on Google and finding the information I wanted but not in the respective blog. This fact inspired me to write this post about the commons which makes you forget a blog.

The following is a list of ten things that make you forget a blog. Because although I searched on Google for that blog, even the keywords of making money online could not help me to find it with million of results. Try to avoid the ones listed bellow:

1. The URL too long or too hard to remember: this is the principally because people forget about blogs. When I was thinking on a domain name for this blog, I discarded a list of about 20 URLs, leaving about 8 of them. If your blog has a *hard to remember* URL, your readers could start to leave it. The best is to choose a short URL or if it is long, it should be easy to remember.
2. A Bad title: this point relates to the first. The normal is to set the title according to your blog’s URL but it may not strictly be the same. If the title of your blog is too long, you can have in the URL an abbreviation. However, the title is something important, you may select it relating to your brand or something that anyone read it on Internet and recognize it easily.
3. A Bad logo: this is part of your brand. When you are going to create a blog, you should have plus the url and title, a logo for your blog. You may have a logo related to your title or niche. Many people uses as logo a picture or animated caricature of themselves, others use the initials of their blog’s name. It is up to you, but you should have something that anyone recognize it on social networks or ads.
4. Poor or repeated content: if your blog has poor quality posts with many grammar errors of simply bad content, your blog will be forbidden. It is important to read your post several and adjust anything which you consider neccesary. Also, if you steal or copy the content of other blogs, your readers will start to leave because they could read the same content in other blogs, may be best than yours. I don’t want to say with this that you must post 1000% original content, if you search on google “Reasons Why I Forget Your Blog” may be you will find several results, thousand or probably millions. I mean that you need to write your own content to your way.
5. You neglect to post: with this I want to say that if you don’t update your blog’s content often, the people who follows you regularly will start to leave your blog. Besides of keeping your blog updated, It is important to pay attention to your readers and reply to their mails or comments. It is better to have few faithful readers to have many occasional readers.
6. 1000 bloggers or more use your theme: it is better to have an own theme that one which everybody has over the web. With this you will not lose all your readers, but it’s something that helps to lose a handful of them. Your theme is like your personality, your presentation. If thousand of bloggers has your theme, it will be bored to your visitors if they’ve look that theme before.
7. A Bad navigation: may be you have paid for your theme, but if it has a bad navigation it will be hard to surf. A simple design with everything easy to find is the best way to avoid this cause. An archive or sitemap it is perfect to help to your readers to find the content on your blog.
8. Longtime to load: try to not overload your blog with many content. I have seen blogs, which shows like 10 posts a page, and this is bad, if your blog has many content, scripts or banners it could take many time to load, more than usual. Try to control that.
9. Your blog is boring: I once wrote a post about this point, about which makes your blog boring. Avoiding scrolling on your blog and having your posts clear of banner’s tons will help to make your blog more fun for reading.
10. Nothing special, your web isn’t unique: there is a possibility that your blog is not bad, but neither is surprising. You should try to have something different to other bloggers: attitude, humor, style… Something particular that distinguishes you from the masses. This is up to you, you may find the way to be the unique possible.

And cut! there are your 10 reasons why I could forget your blog. Try to not make these mistakes or if you did use one of them then try in the most possible way to correct it. Remember, never is not too late to correct the mistakes made on the past .

Today someone send me an email asking me for a page which he added to him bookmarks and today he tried to visit it and it was impossible to him. The page was not deleted, I just changed something in the permalink but he got an 404 Error Page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server cannot be made at all.

However this issue was good because it makes me notice that my 404 error page really sucks and I start to think how could I improve it…So I was thinking, in which circumstances someone get an 404 Error Page:

• When the url is written bad.
• When the url is deleted from the site.
• When the permalink is changed.

So I thought that is annoying when someone get a 404 message, the person is waiting to see the content and instead the person need to go back in the browser or verify the url. However that’s boring, so I will give you some tips to improve your 404 error page as I improved mine and give to the user a more pleasant sailing.

1. Be friendly with the user: ok may be this could be considered stupid but not everybody knows what a 404 error is. Normally this kind of pages only show a single message: “404 Error – Not Found” or something like that. The experimented user know what it means, but if you are not an Internet lover, you surely won’t know what to do. In this case, you need to tell them what’s happening, a little message explaining it is sufficient for this.
2. Include a search bar: if the user couldn’t find something, you need to help him to find it! how? if he is interested in something specific, he’ll want to find it, so what’s better than a search bar? a good and simply search bar could solve the problem, adding it to your 404 error page could help the users to find their wants.
3. Offer personal assistance: exist the case that the user simply can’t find what he is looking for. In this case you should offer personal assistance, let them know that you are willing to help them finding what they want. Placing a link to the contact form will be enough in addition of a little note.
4. Offer other posts: may be they can’t find what they want because simply the content does not exist on your blog. What should you do in this cases? offering other posts could be a nice way to attract them to your blog. I used a wordpress plugin called Customizable Post Listings for this, it let you to set random posts where you want with a simple php function: you can set the number of posts, the format of them, the author of them…inclusively you can set categories, so the plugin will only show random posts under these categories.

Building a 404 error page could be simple, but it’s very important for any website because depending of how is it configured, the users can leave or stay in the site when they can’t find what they want.

Happy blogging!