Naturally, everything follows a pattern. If you read about fractals, you will find that they appear on tree leaves, broccoli and so on.

As you can imagine, people’s behavior DOES follow a pattern too, and you can see this fact by analyzing a group of people… If you are a leader, you should know that usually the people you speak to tend to follow a kind of line, or at least most of them…

The thing become interesting when you find persons who stand out from the crowd! So then, by analyzing this kind of people – aka freaks – you can actually know more about what is happening in the environment and so then, improve it.

Have you seen bloggers changing their theme from time to time? may be the sidebar or the position of the links? Well, this is because they probably would be using heatmaps in order to study the behavior of the people who visit their blogs.

How a heatmap looks like?

A heatmap shows you where the visitors have been clicking on your website. With this awesome tool you can test the position of your ads, may be icon alternatives for subscribing to your blog etc etc… Use your imagination! This can be used when you need an input from your visitors, without letting them know.

One of the purposes I use heatmaps for is to analyze which landing page  “looks” – aka sells – better. Remember that your audience will probably think different than you, so don’t make any suppositions because you don’t know how they will react to certain graphic.

So as you can see, this is perfect for split tests among landing pages, which I will be talking about in future posts.

The Tool

To run heatmaps, I use the services of Crazy Egg. There should be lots of web services out there, but I like this one. So try it by yourself and tell me what do you think about it! It’s pretty easy to use, you just need to upload a script to your website and walah! – you will be catching every single click made on your website.

Input request - Are you using heatmaps? What for? Share what you know about this topic!

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?

Hey buddies, some days ago I received an email from the team of OIOPublisher plugin notifying me the new percentage of commission for affiliates. Well, during January they will be giving 90% commission to any affiliates!.

You should know that this commission apply for everyone, no matter if you are or not an affiliate yet, you can enjoy of this offer by signing up and getting your copy of OIOPublisher now! It only costs $47, it means that you will earn $42.3 for every referrer during January!.

About OIOPublisher

I have made a couple of reviews about this product, but however I will talk about the basics:

OIOpublisher is an ad platform with a focus on performance, control and ease of use. Serve advertising on your blog or website and keep 100% of the revenue you bring in.

What bloggers say?

It’s worth every penny. You should make it all back and more with your first sale.

John Chow
JohnChow.com

OIOpublisher has proven to be a versatile plugin; even a necessity.

Ian Fernando
IanFernando.com

OIOpublisher consistently generates me about $2000 – $3000 a month.

Jon Waraas
JonWaraas.com

A must have WordPress plugin for any serious blogger.

Mattaw, USA
Moneybites.com

Buying OIO is the best investment I have ever made as a blogger.

Mark Fulton
DotSauce.com

What I say?

That plugin really worth the investment, the first month I got the inversion back and even more selling some ads and links… And certainly the best of it is the automatization, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Get your copy of OIOPublisher and start making money online!

As I told you once, I don’t know why I didn’t post about my blogging incomes before. But also, I promised you to talk about it every month! So this will be the first income report that you will see on almost 1 year of blogging!

Reviewing the last months, I can say that this month was a good one. Let’s see the table of earnings:

• Private Sales: $85
• Text Link Ads commission: $14.91
• OIOPublisher commission: $23.50
• Web Design Projects: $150
• Commission Junction: $180

Total :  $453.41

Unfortunately this month I didn’t make commissions with other affiliate networks, like I did in other months… Now with my web design services I hope to start earning some hundreds of dollars per month with them. By the way, I’m going to use the domain http://design.mrjavo.com/ to present my portfolio, but now it’s under construction… You can see one of my latest finished works by visiting Bruno Auger dot Com, which I redesigned completely. Remember that you can get a Blog Redesign just for $100!

The next year I will present another eBook, sharing some information about how I make money with the programs listed in this post, giving special tips and useful strategies…

The following days I will post about some SEO things and about how to migrate a wordpress blog!.

Branding is almost everything when you are running a company. No matter if you promote it offline or online, the important thing is to understand what is your objective as a company, and what should you do once you are established in the market.

But that thing of branding is not just for companies. Who else should be interesting on promoting a brand? Well not to go so far, let’s take as example the Bloggers. When you want to start a blog, you should think about something remarkable that people note and can remember easily. As bloggers, it’s very important to create a sense of loyalty between the readers and us, and that is only possible through a brand.

Also there are many people who can be interested on branding, people like entrepreneurs, web designers or may be book editors need to create a brand in order to have that magic thing capable of moving masses, imposing new behaviors to groups of people.

Once you are established, It’s possible to ruin your brand?

Absolutely yes. In this post I deal with some details that could look insignificant, but they cause great impact on the market, frighten away your followers. Of course, you won’t want to lose them! So the objective of this post is to teach you what NOT to do, in order to let grow and to conserve your brand identity.

1. Break your code of honor: What you do with your brand, is to spread away your philosophy. Because of that philosophy many people follow you, paying attention when you talk or when you launch a new product… That’s how people see those 2 hours-commercials of Apple! What a better way to ruin your Branding that breaking your code of honor? So if you start violating those things that you were promoting and spreading by years, have in mind that you will ruin all that hard work!.
2. Lie: Lying is a typical resource used by marketers in order to catch clients. What they don’t know is that they are losing clients instead catching them. Possibly, they can catch them the first time, but what do you think will happen when they feel scammed? Ohh yeah! They won’t buy anything else from that marketer or company. Instead, if you are sincere with the customers you will create a sense of loyalty, buying the first, second and the next products you launch.
   
3. Badly treat your competitors: Branding is all about market. In addition of you, there will be another people promoting the same stuff that you. Either better or worst, there will be many people offering the same product in different ways trying to catch the most of the people. Competition or potential partners? Think about the possible future partnerships between you and those competitors because sometimes is not a good idea to break relations with them, and even more if you insult them or give them a bad treat.
   
4. Lower the quality of your products/services: Have you thought why people are stuck to you? You can be 100% sure that they are with you because they like what you offer them, because they feel comfortable with it. Either a service, product or just another different stuff, if you start lowering the quality of what you offer, the people will start leaving you and start looking for another companies that offer the same thing. Personally, I think that if you are going to do something bad, it’s better not to do it.
5. Ignore what they want: Times change and people too. Sometimes the people want something because it’s a fashion thing, something like a boom or just because that thing improve their experience as customers. That’s something you need to know, studying the market – how it’s evolving – and learning what the people want. This last thing includes studying your competitors,  they can be offering something better than you to get more customers… So if you know that your clients are demanding something, for your good, you should give it to them.

As you could note, that 5 appointments are pretty important if you want to keep your customers. In this case, by following them, you and your brand will broke forever and ever! Well it’s not so dramatic, you could lower the quality of a service but if you note that and make something to compasate that problem, you will be fine.

I aimed this to companies, or people who sale products or services, but this is perfectly applicable to bloggers. Instead lowering the quality of a service, you could lower the quality of your posts, which will make you lose subscribers!… If you think about all of them, they are perfectly applicable in blogs, websites and even forums…

Conclusion

That 5 tips were good, but you can be sure that they are not the only things you can do to ruin your brand. There should be another tiny things, just be sure to make the right movements by following the philosophy and concepts of your brand. Only them can guarantee the success of your work!

Yesterday, MediaWhiz released a new program which you can use to make money online called InLinks, or also better known as Text Link Ads 2.0. MediaWhiz also runs TLA, so if you want to register to InLinks but you are already part of TLA, you will need another email address, giving you an error of database etc etc…

How It Works?

First, let’s review the Advertiser‘s side. inLinks allows you to purchase links within the content area on web pages. You search for instances of your top keywords and replace those static keywords with a hyperlink back to your website. There simply is not a more natural paid link on the market. Once you bought a link, you will have editorial control over it.

That’s sounds pretty, similar than TLA.

Now let’s review the Blogger’s side.Once the advertiser buy a link in your website, you can either approve it or deny it, giving you full editorial control. And like TLA, they have plugins for wordpress, moveable type and drupal, which you can activate in your blog and they will take care of the rest, being an automatized proccess.

The Bad

By reading the description of the program below, it seems exactly like text links ads, but there are a main and big difference.  There are two things:

• NoFollow Free: The sold links are nofollow free, which means that will be indexed by search engines.
• Not Relevancy: You are able to buy links on websites that are not even related with yours.

As you can see, there are two big problems. If you start accepting links that can be modified by the advertiser, you won’t have control at all over them. Due to these links will be free of nofollow attribute, they will affect your ranking on search engines and guess what? When Google finds that you are linking unrelated websites in yours, you will probably get slapped.

Of course, if you can approve or deny links you won’t be so stupid to accept irrelevant things, but what if the advertiser change their configuration after you accepted them?.

I don’t know, I don’t trust in that but that’s just my personal opinion, may be I’m wrong… What do you think?