There are many different ways to earn revenue from a blog that every home business owner and online entrepreneur should know about. You need to be aware of the fact that blogs can turn out to be extremely profitable extra sources of revenue for your home business, if handled properly.
Earn Extra Revenue The Adsense Way From Your Blog :
There is no doubt that the Google Adsense program is one of the most popular and lucrative for many home based business blogs. The Adsense program just like the Google search engine, thrives on content and many online entrepreneurs find it easy to generate lots of content for their blogs as a way to attract targeted hits for their main web sites. There are of course other affiliate programs that can be run alongside the Adsense program to generate even more revenue. I am of course referring to a program like the increasingly popular Kontera which also uses content but instead highlights certain keyword to create links to their advertisers.
Sell Consultant Services Using Your Blog :
Blogs are also very effective in helping to sell consultant services related to the industry being covered. The large amounts of content produced in blogs are ideal in showing off the expertise and knowledge of the blogger concerning the topic being covered.
This is why it is so easy to offer your consultancy services through your blog. Many online entrepreneurs have been able to do this very successfully.
Products And Services That Compliment Yours Is Another Way To Earn Revenue From Your Blog :
There is also nothing wrong with joining affiliate programs that deal with products and services that complement yours. You can then place the affiliate link in your high traffic blog pages. Some bloggers with a huge enough traffic earn some very high income from one or two affiliate programs thye have joined and whose affiliate links they sprinkle on their blog sites.
Still one needs to be very careful here not to take away business from themselves and their main site where they are pointing their targeted blog traffic to.
In Conclusion :
What I have listed here are just a few of the different ways in which one can earn some extra revenue for their home business from blogs. There are in fact many other ways you can look at. After all there is no harm in maximizing on the use of your blog site. It is rather obvious that blogs will continue to grow in leaps and bounds in terms of their significance and importance to online entrepreneurs and home based business owners.
About the Author:
See other ways to make money from blogs and web sites at http://www.capitalistnow.com
14 February 2008
Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google
And in other search engines, too
No matter how much some people claim the SEO industry is a den of snake-oil salesmen, there are still definite ways webmasters can improve their rankings, and thus their visibility in Google's search results.
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.
That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content
The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
Related Posts :
No matter how much some people claim the SEO industry is a den of snake-oil salesmen, there are still definite ways webmasters can improve their rankings, and thus their visibility in Google's search results.
This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.
That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.
1. Title tags
Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.
2. Content
The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.
3. Quality Links
Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.
4. Quantity Links
Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.
5. URL
The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.
6. Spider Food
Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.
7. Site Architecture
There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.
8. Frequently Updated Content
You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.
9. Start a Blog
A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.
10. Don't Forget Humans
This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.
Related Posts :
12 February 2008
How to Determine the Effectiveness of Your Internal Link Structure
Question: How do I determine how I am best utilizing my PageRank? How do I know if my navigation is successful?
Answer:
Answer:
- Google Webmaster Tools shows your internal link counts to different pages. You can use that to show which pages are being emphasized on a crude level.
- Optispider ($129) shows on site link structure and compares link text to page titles
- SEO4Fun has a free PageRankBot tool which shows internal link flow. I think it is a bit complex to set up, but is cool when you get it set up.
- If you have pages of limited importance but link to them frequently (like sitewide links to your privacy policy, shipping, or about us page) consider using nofollow on those links.
- Track a few pages of your site with a tool like CrazyEgg to see what links users are clicking on and if you are drawing enough attention to the most important assets on your site.
- Use data from your web analytics tools to focus more link equity on your most important (highest traffic and best converting) pages
A few more advanced ideas
- If your site is large and you keep producing new content, use Google's date based filters to look for new pages that are of low quality / noisy (like a page dedicated to a photo but with no text on it, or other common duplicate content issues)
- Use analytics to track how many pages (and which pages) are pulling in traffic. Compare those pages with all the pages on your site to see if you can free up some dead weight, or if you have a valuable section of your site that is not well linked to. You can use Xenu Link Sleuth, a sitemap generator, or data from Google Webmaster Tools to see what pages are linked to (and perhaps getting indexed).
- If a particular page works well for you consider adding more content to that page to pick up a broader basket of related keywords. If a particular query works well for you consider creating a second page to target that query.
- If you have a high authority page that links out to many other websites consider adding more internal links to that page to keep more of the link flow internal.
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