Making Money Adsense: April 2011

Earn More with Adsense: Tips & Layout Optimization Tricks for High CTR

Google Adsense is perhaps the easiest way to attract advertisers from across the globe to your blog. Just submit your blog or website to Google for approval and if their content team approves your content, you are ready to place contextual text ads on your websites. Every time a reader clicks an AdSense ad link, the AdWords advertiser pays Google a small fee and Google splits the revenue with you.

5 Google Adsense Secrets, Tips and Tricks

I want to share you some secrets I learned up until now. I am not going to tell you basic stuff like “use channels”. Also, bear with me on the graphics. I’m no designer :)

1. Blend your ads. Adsense color and font size

1.i It’s tested and it works. Use the same colour of your page background, for the border and the background of the ad.

1.ii Use the same colors used in your page, for the Adsense ad title, text and url link.

1.iiia If possible use the same font in your page, as the Adsense ads. Since the ads have variable text size and font, according to dimension and type of ad, you can never do this 100% right. But every little bit helps.

Real life Adsense font size and type

Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets

I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

Email subscribers are the lifeblood of the online business.
We all know we need them, and we all have specific ideas about how to capture them.
Ethical bribes, free eBooks, special reports, pop-up forms, Internet radio shows.
But if you want to have a truly fantastic conversion rate, you need to look deeper at the mind of the email subscriber.
You need to find out what causes them to hand over their email address to complete strangers.
Today I’m going to show you three simple ways to get into the heads of your potential email subscribers.

No.
And yes.
It depends on how you do it.
Some people do it horrendously wrong.
Let’s take a look.

Curiosity-Click Traffic is Crap

If one of your primary traffic strategies is to leave fast comments on the posts of larger blogs in your niche just to get a few clicks from the passing traffic, stop. You could get more traffic from one piece of stellar content than months of that type of comment strategy.

By Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans.
Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings.
Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke's 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on "links=seo". When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

5 Tips To Increase Your Adsense Revenue

Bloggers can make cash in with Google’s AdSense network. Instead of posting blinking lights, cheap animation and a bobbing and bouncing monkey (or the paper football, although I totally rock at that one) Google matches vertical or horizontal blocks of text with the content of the web page. The ads don’t blink or jump around. Instead, they match or relate to the topic at hand, so the reader isn’t seized with the immediate need to get it off the screen right now no matter what it costs.
Traffic goes up, income goes up. Making money on the Internet – it may be the World Wide Web’s Holy Grail. Still, despite the simplicity, there are several steps savvy bloggers can take to give AdSense added oomph.

Basic Adsense Tips

Once in a week, i will publish my personal article about an advertising program which is Adsense. For those who still don’t know what Adsense is, it is a pay-per-click adevertising program which website publishers can use to menetize their websites.
The first thing you need to know about Adsense is it is not a program where you can earn money esily. Well to said, your website or your blog need lots of traffic to take full advantage of this program. Now, you must be wondering on how to improve your website traffic. From my experience,for the first time my website receive very little hits per day which is about 30-50 hits. Its really bad and to solve the problems, I have use these methods:
1) Add good content
2) Do a SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
3) Improve the site layout

Greatest Blog Design Inspiration of 2010

Today we are presenting Greatest Blog Design Inspiration of 2010. I hope this simple list can help you to keep in touch with latest trends in website designing and find a fresh design ideas.

Wearelighthouse - http://wearelighthouse.com

Hellokavita - http://hellokavita.net

Nemesisdesign - http://nemesisdesign.net

Codedemocracy - http://www.codedemocracy.in

Safarista - http://www.safarista.com

Thelastletter - http://thelastletter.org

Themepresso - http://www.themepresso.com

Giantmediacorp - http://www.giantmediacorp.com

Rampchamp - http://rampchamp.com

Thecssawards - http://www.thecssawards.com.jury.php

Freshnotcanned - http://www.freshnotcanned.com

Robocatapps - http://www.robocatapps.com

Gazel - http://www.gazel.com

Code-to-africa - http://code-to-africa.de

Tiempodemagia - http://www.tiempodemagia.com

Matthewnsara - http://matthewnsara.com

Onetwentyseven - http://www.onetwentyseven.com

Chapel - http://www.chapel.org

Cookmateapp - http://www.cookmateapp.com

Cloudia - http://www.cloudia.cz

Interexpresso - http://www.interexpresso.pt

Liftux - http://liftux.com

Mrthemer - http://www.mrthemer.com

Themify - http://themify.me

Playintraffik - http://www.playintraffik.com

Elemodo - http://elemodo.com

Cooperskids - http://www.cooperskids.com

Powerybase - http://www.powerybase.com.bills

Chocomize - http://www.chocomize.com

Makemystay - http://www.makemystay.in

Loscoloresolvidados - http://loscoloresolvidados.com

Readymadedesigns - http://www.readymadedesigns.co.uk

Stripes-design - http://stripes-design.pl

Mcmillerssweetsemporium - http://www.mcmillerssweetsemporium.co.uk

Mkgstudio - http://mkgstudio.pl

Bythepond - http://www.bythepond.co.uk

Newtoyork - http://www.newtoyork.com

Kirkwhalum - http://kirkwhalum.com

Stockderock - http://www.stockderock.net

Carbonmade - http://carbonmade.com

101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips

From my and my company’s background experience, a 101 list of web marketing tips, ideas and best practices. I tried to cite as many websites and other respectable reading sources as possible:

Global Marketing (emphasizing technical specifications)

Don’t use site-wide links. They are highly deprecated in the latest algorithm changes, and may even lead you to a penalization of your website’s SERPs. As a measure of precaution, I recommend a maximum of one site-wide (no matter the number of pages) for every 40 to 50 unique links from 40 to 50 unique domains.
Use the title and meta description tags as wise as possible. They are your best choice of avoiding supplemental pages. Try to make each page with it’s own unique title and description, and never repeat more than 20-25% of the title and description tags content on different pages. Use a limited number of characters (8-10) in the title tag, and put the most important of them, relevant to each page, at the beginning.
Read my previous post on 14 search marketing questions, asked by Digitalpoint members.
Try to use H tags (1,2,3 etc) at the top-most possible location in the pages of your website, in the source order, and NOT visual order.
Don’t be a Copycat. Don’t write news or posts just to have something for the big Google. Nowadays, duplicate-content filters are continuously evolving and even if you gain something on the short term you will loose it later. Try to be innovative.
Use a pen and paper. Always have an agenda and a pen around. Note down every crazy idea you think of … Most of us have truly great subjects to write about, but during the day we forget, busy with other issues. I always note my ideas. At the end of a day, I am amazed to see a 20 subjects list to write about, versus 1 or two that I can come up with at writing time.
Suggest “related websites” in your website’s Alexa information page. That will bring some traffic.
If you want that early search engine boost, don’t just buy a new domain and invest $10K on the website design and development. You are better off buying a 5 year domain and investing $5K on the website. Age matters a lot and it will matter good years from now on.
If you own a website that contains 80% Google and you are always on the lookout for new content/news to write about, please and I mean PLEASE read Ionut’s Google System. He’s still a student at a University in Bucharest (I live in Bucharest, so I have to meet him soon) and he can write all those stuff about it. Imagine him 10 years from now. He’s great on finding every bit of information, bug, unreleased service or any other thing about Google.
Try to build other websites that revolve around your primary niche. Use them to better market and infuse brand and traffic into your primary website. I’m not talking about building scraper websites. Build quality content ones, and invest money and time and work hours in them. But in the end, just make them a vehicle that you will use to better market your primary website.
Use Google’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s(that’s the Moreover ping server which will ping MSN) sitemap services. Not only that it will provide you with invaluable server and website data, but it will get your pages in their index faster.
If your website is in DMOZ, and Google and MSN (Live.com) show the DMOZ title and description, and that doesn’t work for you (most of the time, the DMOZ information for your website sucks) just bypass it and use your own ones. MSN and Google both support this function.
Don’t ignore Google’s, Yahoo’s, Live’s and Ask’s image search functions. Most of the times, you can get a higher traffic from the image search engines then from the usual search, especially if you have a content rich website. Just a reminder for you: use the title attribute on links that surround the images, and use the ALT attribute on the image tags themselves. Also, always remember to rename your images with relevant descriptive words (a maximum of 4 words works best).
Have a look at the websites I read (Bloglines), and subscribe to their feeds. Read them regularly.
Advertising and Affiliate Marketing
If you use the Adsense, YPN! or adCenter contextual ads on your website, try to optimize them. Don’t just insert them in your website and leave them. Work with them, change the position, the ad layout, the colors, the content around them. And remember, that at least for Adsense, the ad that’s placed in the highest position possible in the source’s order, will yield the highest income per click.
Use affiliate programs once your website has started to receive some quality traffic. Depending on your niche, affiliate programs are a much better way to convert your traffic, then all the other advertising methods like contextual networks, banners, links etc. Commision Junction is a good way to start your research.
Effectively lead your readers to your MDA (Most Desired Action). That may be a newsletter box, a banner, an Adsense etc. Place your MDA right below comments, or in the left/right sidebars, or in the header. Experiment. Analyze. React.
Build an affiliate system for the services products you are offering. Let others do the PR and sales job for you.
RSS & Newsletter Marketing
Don’t trust yourself only in RSS feeds. A lot of users are “old-school” and prefer e-mail newsletters. Always offer this option.
Another good newsletter tactic is to offer a periodical e-mail digest with the top stories in a certain period. A week, a month etc. Maybe some of your visitors missed a few interesting posts/articles.
Research Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites (Part 2 and Part 3 available too) and market your RSS feed in all those websites. Don’t know what an RSS feed is ? (if you don’t, you’re either a moron, or you should fire someone).
Not only submit your RSS feed to different RSS aggregators, but learn to market it.
Analytics Marketing Techniques
Pay attention to your website’s statistics. Install a good analytics tool like IndexTools or Google Analytics. Not only the absolute numbers and statistics (like total users/total visits) count. Try to go deeper and analyze the navigation patterns, entry/exit rates and pages, the new /returning visitors ratio etc.
Continuously monitor your server stats, referrers and logs, and try to respond to links and articles that reference your website. That shows dedication and it’s another way to market your website indirectly.
Survey your visitors (you need a free user account to read this article). Learn what your audience and demographics are. Strive to improve your readership towards your website’s business goal. Constantly re-survey.
Research your market and always be up to date with your competitors. What their prices are, where do visitors go, is the site designed for success ? Look for things like quality code and content, internal/external linking, keyword density in content and links, pages indexed, Google Pagerank, quality titles, headers, site layout and design, conversion process, site load time, dedicated host, what new services they develop and announce etc.
Learn to increase your leads
~~Trial and error~~ Trial and measure: raise awareness of your products and services, convert a visitor into a registered user and/or paying customer, persuade exiting customers to make further business, developing loyalty.
Brand and Visibility Marketing
When commenting a post or story in another website don’t spam: “OMG that’s uber cool”, “Nice post” or something like that. Instead, try to make your comments in a professional way, show what you liked/disliked/agreed/etc, cite other sources, give examples, bring pertinent arguments etc. Remember, comments are an important part of a post/article. Over 60% of the readers will also read the comments.
Try to associate your name or your website’s name/brand with the big boys on your niche. Regularly comment their articles (don’t spam) and from time to time make reviews of their post on your blog/website.
Starting your website from scratch, always sucks. Seek out other websites/companies in your industry and try to establish a relationship with them. Try a mutual partnership and/or services recommendations. Don’t try to e-mail/fax your direct competitors.
Brand and paint your employee’s uniforms and your company’s cars with your logo and website address. This is especially useful if you have a lot of cars. It’s mass-branding and it will get people, thus future clients in your local area accustomed and comfortable with your logo, website and business.
Put your website address, on every possible internal piece of paper or communication device, including, but being limited to business cards, letterheads, invoices, newspaper and/or other print ads, yellow pages advertisements, receipts etc.
Always identify yourself with your visitors, especially if you own a publishing website/weblog. Always have your editor name written for articles and it’s best to have a profile too. A picture, a contact method.
Social Media Marketing
If you ever want to write something that will end up on any of Digg’s, Reddit’s, Netscape’s, Newsvine’s (etc) frontpage, write about how to get on their frontpage, about Firefox, Wordpress or Apple/Mac. No matter what you write about those, people love them and you WILL get on the frontpage, unless it’s un utterly stupid article.
Pay close attention to Stumbleupon. It’s a great alternative social network. Install their toolbar, and if you write a good post, submit it in their system. Be faithful and fairplay with the other members, help each other, and add friends to your account. Ask other members to review you if they liked what you stumbled upon. StumbleUpon traffic had the highest converting ratio (at least for me), in comparison to Delicious, Digg or Reddit users, which seem to be RSS and AD blind.
Whenever you have the belief that digging your articles will yield you an increased CTR on your Adsense ads, RSS subscriptions, comments or any other kind of added benefit to your website, you are wrong. I can sustain Davak’s post 80%, except the Alexa part. Digg users do use the Alexa toolbar or plugins that count as the Alexa toolbar. But you won’t notice any increased CTR’s, comments or clicks, no matter the traffic gained from a Digg.
Reward helpful and valuable users by promoting their work on your homepage, or develop a rating system. Invest 5 minutes of your time to send a quick email or note telling them you appreciate their help.
At least once per year, ask your visitors what do they think about your website’s content. What would they want to read more ? What new facilities should you offer them ? 10 reasons to survey your visitors.
Be humble. Don’t forget where you started from, even if you are a professional in your field. No one can be an authority in a certain category if others don’t link to/recommend/interview/blog about.
Link Baiting, Link Building and Research
Write controversial content that will self-generate links and discussions/comments. Pick on well-known people, criticize loved websites or brands.
When starting your website, try to gather a few links from already established and trustworthy websites. Stop trying to get your link on websites that are 2 months old like yours. Pay a directory submission in Yahoo!, BOTW, Webxperience!, Skaffe or other well known directories. Paying for a directory submission almost guarantees you a faster response time. DMOZ is an excellent way to start but you can’t get your way in fast and with money, so it’s best to “submit-and-forget-about-it”.
Build links slowly, to avoid the sandbox. Slowly can mean 5-10 gained backlinks per month.
When you research websites for IBL’s possibilities, don’t be fooled about high PR pages. What you need is Trust, not a high Pagerank. How can you tell if a website is an authority website or not ? Just find 5 titles of 5 articles on that website and search those phrases in Google. If the website appears on the first page, then it’s a quality website. After that inspect some of it’s backlinks, and try to see if the website is involved in dubious link schemes or has IBLs from irrelevant and spam websites. If it doesn’t, you’re OK to go. Remember, what you need is Trust, and traffic. Not Pagerank.
A good link building strategy is to comment or participate in discussions or content on other websites in your industry. It’s not enough to have good articles/content. The world has to know about them. Make connections/relations with other jounalists/bloggers/entreprenours in your niche, comment their articles, and links will come by themselves, with time.
Create posts/articles that help your visitors and attract natural links. “5 tips to …”, “25 easy ways to make …. better” type of articles are the best you can write.
Write stories/articles in the most highly-ranked websites of your industry and link to your website from the article. I am not talking about article directories, but industry websites that accept content contributions from members. (like ThreadWatch or WebproNews, for example)
Are you in any good relations with an US faculty/university ? Kindly ask them if you can contribute with something, and request a link from their websites. .edu and .gov links are supposed to carry a little more weight and authority then regular links. An excellent post in SEOmoz on ten ways to earn an .edu link
Do you write in forums ? Always put your link in your signature, and try to write a few attractive words too, to increase the likelihood of clicks on your links. Many forums like Digitalpoint or V7N, have a latest blog post function. If you have a feed, always use that functions (tip: it works with any feed, not just blogs).
My best advice for gathering a LOT of easy links is to create and release free templates for any wide-spread, free CMS system out there. Wordpress, PHP Link Directory, Joomla, Mambo, Typo66, Drupal, etc. You are not a designer ? Hire one to build you some templates. What’s the benefit ? That small “template by X” in the footer of the template, that will reside in all the websites that use it. The more functional and beautiful the template is, the more people will use it. Colleen, from Kalina Web Designs as well as Chris from Pearsonified come highly recommended by me and others. It’s not worthwhile to tell you that I too have a design company. We’re too expensive for your ass ;)
If you are interested about Pagerank rather then relevancy, whenever you submit to directories or other websites that accept links, try to search the most relevant page with the highest PR, and submit to that. Keep the relevancy pretty high on your list though, otherwise they will reject your website for sure. I would and will.
Viral marketing, word of mouth, tell a friend schemes can get your server on fire in hours. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. I guess this Threadwatch article about a Mini-Cooper AD will tell you more.
Ask friends or colleagues in your industry, to review your business website. If you have high profile friends, then you are sure to bring a high traffic and increased authority impact to your website.
Build a funny 404 page that will make your visitors laugh a bit and maybe will attract some links.
Don’t overlook linkbaiting: Organize a contest, adding a competitive element to it and offering a prize, post a very cool and funny post (usually a video or a cartoon or something that everyone would understand visually), ideally related to your industry etc.
Take a 6 months/1 year college class and get a personal page on the university’s .edu domain. Prices are usually cheap
Corporate & e-Commerce Marketing
Issue press releases for your website. No matter the field, a well written press release can not only improve your marketing strategy and gain a few inbound links and link bait from other websites, but can lead to journalists that will cite your company in their offline/online magazine as well as in online news websites like Google News and Yahoo! News.
If you have a company or product presentation website, try to provide multilingual pages. Helps for ranking in different localized search engines and user experience …
If you have local conferences or shows, that relate to your industry attend to them. Go yourself, or send an employee. Make business connections, friends, discuss daily issues, socialize. You wouldn’t imagine how much that will help you on the long run.
If you sell products or services on your website, regularly offer discounts or promotional coupons. That will not only increase sales and visibility but will attract links and stories, especially if you are a well known company. Issue a press release each and every time you offer that discount. Journalists and news search engines like Google News usually pick up the press release if it’s written correctly.
Offer a Privacy Policy (think about how much information is on the Internet; your credit card, your home addresses, your personal letters by email. etc.), a FAQ section, a Help section or any other functionality that will bring your website closer to your visitors, increasing authority, trust and re-visit rates.
No matter your writing skill, read a few pointers about how to write a professional press release (excellent 21 pages e-book on the new rules of PR – local mirror) and try releasing a free press release at PressBox, Free Press Release, PrLeap, i-Newswire, 24/7 Press Release, PR.com, PR Free or ClickPress. After you’ll see the benefits, hire a professional press release writing service and do it by the book at PrWeb, PrNewsWire and/ore other global, more authoritative PR distribution services.
Read the PccPolo 101 marketing tips (local mirror) and the United States Small Business Administration 100+ Marketing Ideas.
Your customers are always right!
Thou shalt remember that not only Google has a Bible: The 10 Commandments of Marketing (you need a free user account to read this article).
Personalize your company’s cars license plates
Optimize your website’s shopping cart and watch how your average order size increase and your cart abandonment rate decrease.
Blog Marketing
Do you have a company or corporate website ? Build a blog for yourself. Blogs are a common way of internal company communication as well as a good source of PR. Clients and possible clients feel close and can interact with your team, online.
Do you blog ? Pimp your blog with social bookmarking tools, a Feedburner account with the FeedCount option activated to show your RSS subscribers.
If you have a blog (but not only a blog) take full advantage of Technorati. Technorati offers you the chance to submit 20 tags relevant to your blog, when you create your account, and start to claim each blog/website. Don’t let that stop you. Use Technorati tags, tailored for each post individually. Technorati pages rank extremely well, and it’s a great source of traffic, so it’s best to use it to your advantage. Watch how PrWeb uses Technorati tags in every press release, to it’s advantage. The advantage is that your specific article will show up in searches of each of those tags.
Whenever you write a post on your blog, or an article in your publishing website, or a press release, try to think search too. Research with Overture and Wordtracker (if you have an account), what are the best words to use in your title. They tend to help a lot, because the title usually is used in the meta description and URL too. That will boost your page a little in the SERPs.
Plan your blog’s start. When starting a new blog, it’s important to realize that every detail counts. Don’t start with a default theme and ‘hello world’ – like posts and then ask for links. Try to start with 2-3 good written subjects. Always plan ahead and write today, tomorrowâ€™s post.
Always link from your blog. Link to as many quality websites as possible. Don’t be afraid to “spread your PR thin” or some other BS like that. Link to good posts of people, link to good newspaper articles, and most importantly, link to relatively unknown blogs/websites that feature a good original story. In most cases that will yield you some free PR. Most other websites (like PrWeb or blogs etc) have trackback plugins so they’ll feature your story in their comments.
Read Quadzilla’s 9 rules about blogging (disregard rule #10) and Seth Godin’s how to get traffic for your blog post.
Have a blog ? Always ping update services. Here are the Update services I use for this blog (For Wordpress, they are located in Options/Writing/Update Services):

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

I use the Bloglines, Technorati and Google Blogs pings to update those services immediately and not wait for services like Pingomatic to notify them hourly.

Design, Content, Accessibility and Usability Marketing
The quality of the layout and design matters. Don’t release an ugly, badly design website. I would rather wait to do a much better design and release the website afterwards. The same situation for websites that are already online. Got an ugly design ? Redesign the website. It’s proven that a new, more beautiful and accessible design for a website strongly increases the likelihood of bookmarking, re-visiting, and subscribes to the feed and newsletters.
Write with the user in mind. A BAD post example is like writing a long citation of another blog-post/authority site, and actually writing no opinion of your own. Try to add your own analysis and views of the subject. No matter how many other websites blogged or wrote about a story, they will never write the same post as yours, with the same pro’s and con’s.
Spell check your content. There’s no other big mistake for a publishing site than users criticizing the misspells. Take those extra 2 minutes to check the spelling errors in Word or even Google.
Try to get your readers to comment and to involve themselves with the subject at hand. Uses phrases like “I’d like to know what you think?” / “I’m waiting your suggestions about …” etc.
If you can’t write good stories, don’t. Hire an experienced publisher to do the writing for you. John Scott hired Peter Da Vanzo to blog for V7N’s blog. Not because John can’t, but because he’s not the writing geek and because he wanted a professional blog. That does the job well for him and that can do the job well for you too.
If you have a website where people can pay online for products, make the job easy. Put a BIG button or text, use multiple processors like 2CO, Paypal etc. Don’t hide the payment link in some footer or sidebar space. Make it visible. If you don’t have your own shopping cart, then let the visitor know that he will be redirected to a 3rd party website, to complete the payment process.
Make sure the website is consistent in look, feel and design. Nothing is more disturbing to a visitor/customer than feeling as if they have just gone to another website. Keep colors and themes constant throughout the site. And yes, this is a marketing tool too. You DO want your visitors to come back right ?
If you have a content website, try to keep your posting frequency regular. If you decide to post 1 post per day, then post 1 post per day, every day, every week, 365 days/year. So what if it’s Christmas ? Just don’t make your posting habit irregular. Today 1 post, tomorrow 5 posts, 1 week no posts etc. That disturbs visitors and that will hurt your RSS subscribers and newsletter subscribers numbers.
If you just invested a lot of cash for a beautiful Web 2.0 design and layout (Web 2.0 hotties and how to design Web 2.0 style), why not make the best of it ? Make sure that it’s a valid XHTML and CSS layout and submit it to the hottest CSS galleries around the world like CSS Beauty, CSS Import, CSS Remix or CSS Vault.
Always personalize your e-mail responses, newsletters, invitations and any other material that ends up at your existing or possible future clients. Never send a bulk message. Most of the current clients get offended by such messages and the future possible clients will just ignore them.
Send out a “thank you” email to all existing customers and alert them about your plans for the next year.
Add interactivity to your website. Visitors need to have a communication highway one way or another. If you still haven’t included a commenting system, a forum, a blog or other interactivity systems to your website, do it now. Always ask questions from your readers and try to involve them in your world.
Create an (extensive) glossary of terms in your industry, like Aaron did for his industry: search engine marketing. That will set you apart and will make you an authority website in your niche.
Create powerful anti-spam blocks for your website. No-one will trust your authority if your website is full of spam. Use a Captcha module, or a math module, asking visitors to identify a string or to do a mathematical calculation before their comment gets approved. According to Akismet, 93% of (blog) comments are spam. Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal got hit with 850.000 spam comments since he installed Akismet (thanks for the info Loren).
Put the accent on visitor experience not traffic. Traffic is useless if you can’t convert it into paying customers. A visitor experience optimized website with 500 visits/day can bring you twice the income then an un-optimized one with 10.000 visits/day.

Only 90 ? I want you guys to continue with the last 11.

Have a great week-end.

How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide

The number of excellent resources that have come out since the beginning of the year on attracting links and building traffic has really mushroomed. Plus there are some timeless classics that are still very relevant today.

I think it makes sense to compile the very best in one handy location and share it, so here’s my entire collection. If I missed your link and traffic resource let me know and I’ll take a look.

Now, it doesn’t matter if you like the term “link baiting” or not. It’s the process that one goes through to attract links that matters, not whether you prefer to think of your content as bait for links. I like to think that creating content that increases web traffic and builds links simply falls under the general social media ~~optimization~~ marketing buzz phrase that is gaining in popularity.

So, here’s your ultimate “how to” guide to creating content that attracts links and drives traffic in the social media environment:

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 | SEO Book

101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips | SEOpedia

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog | Online Marketing Blog

10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic | SEOMoz

8 Reasons Why Lists Are Good for Getting Traffic to Your Blog | Problogger

7 Ways to Get to the Top of the del.ico.us Popular Page | Problogger

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic | Performancing

How to Get Traffic For Your Blog | Seth Godin

The Art of Linkbaiting | Performancing

The Art of Blog | SEO Black Hat

What is Linkbaiting? | Modern Life is Rubbish

SEO Advice: Linkbait and Linkbaiting | Matt Cutts of Google

Problogger Link Baiting Series | Problogger

Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 Revealed | Link Building Blog

What Makes a Site Link-Worthy? | Eric Ward

Using Digg to Attract Hits | Slate

Using Digg and Netscape to Get Traffic | Pronet Advertising

Social Bookmarking for Traffic | SiteProNews

The Sandbox and Delicious | Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Unleashing the IdeaVirus | Seth Godin

Viral Copy | Copyblogger

Building Traffic to Build Your Fan Club | Copyblogger

Trust Rank and Your Domain | Link Building Blog

Generating Buzz With Link Baiting and Viral Campaigns | Search Engine Watch

Linkbaiting for Fun & Profit | Search Engine Journal

Link Building Guide | Jim Westergren

Link Baiting & Effective Link Building | Search Engine Journal

Link Baiting and Viral Search Success | Search Engine Roundtable

How Much is Link Bait Worth? | Cartoon Barry

Link Baiting (How Nick Wilson Created SEO Even Seth Godin Could Love) | Stuntdubl

Link Baiting Case Study from Search Engine Journal | Search Engine Journal

Link Bait | SEO Book

The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do | Seth Godin at Squidoo

Building Traffic With Article Marketing | Copyblogger

Link Building Blog | Text Link Ads

Link Building Wiki | Text Link Brokers

Advanced Link Building Tactics | SEOMoz

Let me know in the comments if I missed something that isn’t covered by one of these resources. Happy reading!

How to Increase Website Traffic

One of the Internet's strengths is its ability to help consumers
find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. ~ Jared Sandberg

There are many creative ways to increase traffic to your website. Some will cost you money, and some won't. Below you'll find many legitimate ways (ranging from free to costly) to boost the number of visitors to your website. But if you don't have so much as a cent to spare, read How to Increase Website Traffic for Free.

edit Steps

Improve your Internet Presence

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Offer free, original, and quality content on your site. This is the most effective means for increasing traffic to a website; offering people something that they cannot obtain elsewhere, or at least, not to the level of quality that you are offering it. Ways in which to ensure that your content is of higher quality than competitors or is unique include:
- Creating content that is helpful and useful. Simply cobbling together information from another website will not generate traffic. You need to offer visitors the information they need to achieve a goal, solve a problem, be entertained, find out quality news or have a good laugh.
- Keep it fresh. For repeat visits, it is crucial to provide regular updates to the website, especially in frequently viewed zones. Add fresh content every few days if possible; at a minimum, weekly.
- To have a fully functioning and successful website, you need to make sure your tags are in place and your links are not broken. You also need to submit a sitemap.xml file to Google to have your website show up in Google's search engines. There is a tool that inspects websites just in case you missed tags and links and it creates a free sitemap.xml file. It gives you results in minutes.
- Outsource article writing. If you hate the thought of generating content yourself, or your team is not writing-savvy, consider outsourcing this end of the task. Depending on the length, content, specialization and quality required, prices can start as low as US$5 per article. However, don't neglect attempting to write your own work - who better than you knows your own business, hobby or club and can express precisely what needs to be said? Just sit down and start writing an article. You may be impressed when you're done!
- Add video to your landing pages (VLP - Video Landing Page) that is informative and relevant to your site. Respected studies show that good video can improve conversions and page ranking more than most any other item you can add to your pages.
- Use landing pages for fast fulfillment of your PPC advertisement.
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Trying to get more backlinks on your website this may help to increase the traffic.
- Get a proofreader. Poor spelling and grammar reflect badly on the services and information being provided; avoid unwarranted negative judgments by getting the writing in order prior to publication online.
- Avoid content generators. While these were once the delight of a fledgling web industry, they are no longer useful. Putting your own team's creativity online is what is useful.
- Never copy and paste from another website - Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines are too smart for this nowadays and will detect copied and unoriginal content, sending you to the bottom of the pile.
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Improve your search engine ranking by focusing your content on keywords related to your topic. This is called search engine optimization and will help people find your website when they're searching the Web. Make sure the keywords flow naturally with the text and when you are brainstorming for good words, ask around for words that come naturally to people of all ages when looking for your type of site. To help you understand better, realize that the keywords not only go into headings and page names but also into "meta tags". "Meta tags" are the software code that website visitors do not see but search engines do. Finally, don't overdo the keywords; over-stuffing keywords will result in a very low search ranking for your website. Also, be very careful not to place key text inside graphics; search engines cannot pick up graphics.
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Get linked. This is a very important part of website management. Exchange links. Trading links with other websites that are closely related to the subject of your website can bring you more website traffic. These are two-way links because you must provide a link to them, too, and linking to low-quality websites can threaten the credibility of yours. Only link to sites that are dead on topic, and truly help your visitors. Instead of trading links, you could also trade banner ads, half page ads, classified ads, etc.

Be sure to not be too excessive with your link exchanges and do not make this your entire link building method.

Google webmaster guidelines specifically says to not engage in link schemes including "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")"
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Advertise your presence. Besides using links, you must make use of numerous other ways to increase web traffic. Sit down and write a list of all the ways you can think of to get your web address noticed and clicked on. For example:
- If you have money - consider pay per click. The big search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft provide schemes. But find out first how to limit your expenditure to the level you want.
- Use e-zines. Make your own that relate to your website and form a regular reminder each issue for people to visit your website. Submit all the free e-zine directories on the internet.
- Submit your articles to e-zines, websites and writing sites that accept article submissions. Include your business information and web address at the end of the article. This is a good way to create one-way backlinks to your website. This is the most effective way to get listed on any search engine. Usually, the more relevant links you have pointing to your site the higher you will rank.
- Go beyond the electronic medium and into the print medium. Advertise in local newspapers, business brochures, magazines, nationwide publications and mail-drop literature. And don't forget the perennial favorite, the good old Yellow Pages™ - printed version naturally!
- Small business cards left in cafés, on signboards, exchanged at meetings etc.
- Use local resources such as clubs, libraries and community centers for non-profit website awareness raising.
- Participate on message boards. Post answers to other people's questions, ask questions and post appropriate information. Include your signature file containing your website's URL at the end of all your postings.
- Start your own online discussion community. It could be an online message board, e-mail discussion list or chat room. When people get involved in your community, they will regularly return to communicate with others.
- Use word of mouth. Tell everyone you know about your website, give out business cards to passers-by in the street, and so on. You might even want to run a guerrilla marketing program!
- Use your car, especially if your website is area-specific (e.g. a website detailing local events or selling local services). Get some vinyl decals or bumper stickers created and turn your car into a moving advertisement, literally driving traffic to your web site!
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Give freebies. Who doesn't like a freebie?! Online freebies are commonplace and they leave the visitor wanting more when they are well written and informative introductory materials. Consider such freebies as:
- Giving away an eBook with your ad on it. Allow your visitors to also give the freebie away. This'll increase your ad exposure and increase web traffic to your website at the same time;
- Holding free online classes or seminars. They could be held in your website's chat room. The idea of "live" information will definitely entice people to visit your website. You will become known as an expert on the topic.
- Giving visitors a free entry into your contest or sweepstakes. The prizes should be something of interest or value to your visitors. Most people who enter will continually revisit your web site to get the results.
- Letting visitors download free software such as freeware, shareware, demos etc. You could even turn part of your site into a free software directory. If you created the software, include your ad inside and let other people give it away.
- Targeting specific groups who might worry about using the internet with free classes in using it on your site - senior citizens, busy workers etc. might find these convenient and alluring.
- Offering free online services or utilities from your website. For instance, they could be search engine submitting, copywriting, proofreading etc. The service or utility should be helpful to your target audience.
- Giving free consulting to people who visit your website. You could offer your knowledge via e-mail or by telephone. People will consider this a huge value because consulting fees can be very expensive.
- Offering a free start-up package that has a finite time; enough time for the customer to practice with your online product and like it enough to pay for continued use.
- Sending out free CD-Roms, CDs, DVDs etc. that contain starter packs or teasers to encourage the customer to use your site more.
- Offering free screensavers or templates for business cards, cards, writing paper etc., anything that a customer can print out.
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Be patient. Search engines need a lot of time to index a new website and domain. They need time to index all your content; it's worth the wait and should be factored into your website profitability and/or popularity timeline. In the meantime, continue to add high quality content to your website and keep it up to date and relevant.
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Use all of these free techniques to increase traffic to your website: USFreeads.net, twitter.com, bloggvertise.com, drop flyers, chat rooms, forums, Youtube, Myspace and Google Groups.

Improve Your Website

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Balance your page. To improve your website, balance your page because when users enter a website, their focus first starts at the top left of the page and hovers there before slowly tracking to the right. The web user is focused more on the text of the page, rather than images or graphics. This is where balance comes into place.
- Balance will not only make your page more visually appealing, but it will make your page easier to read and items easier to find. A good object will help the objects on your page flow.
- Keeping it simple. If you clean your website up by removing all the unnecessary visual elements, it will allow important items to stand out. You should leave some white space on the page so the illusion of the space is visually pleasing, as well as easier to navigate.
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Clean backgrounds. The background textures and colour you chose have the ability to estimate the overall appeal of the website. Lots of texture and graphics in the background can be distracting, and the more texture you add to the background, the less noticeable your text and images become. If you are going to use a colour on the background, you should make sure there is significant contrast between the background colour and the text. You will rarely go wrong with black text and white background because it’s clean and easy to read. You have to be careful when using brighter and darker colours such as red or yellow. They cause visual fatigue (temporary loss of strength and energy resulting from hard physical or mental work) and the reader will lose their focus on the text.
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For easy navigation, you should create a toolbar with links that are easy to navigate and position the toolbar in an area that makes sense. Web users often look for the toolbar across the top or down the left the left hand side of the page. You shouldn’t forget a link to your homepage. It’s often forgotten but very important to point your users to your homepage.
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Text readability should make your pages easy to read, break up blocks of text and create short paragraphs. You should consider the key points on each page and create headings and subheadings use one or two fonts. You should select one font for your headings and subheadings and another for the body text and highlight key words and phrases by bolding or using a different colour. You should be careful when selecting colours, and not to use every colour in the rainbow. Many such as yellow and pink don’t stand out well if you’ve selected a white or black background.

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Scrolling Horizontal scrolling- it would be better if you get rid of horizontal scrolling because users hate to scroll left to right. It's disorienting and annoying, so if you've got it, lose it. Vertical scrolling is ok if you have to have it, but consider moving larger blocks of information to another page and providing links. There's also the danger of missing vital information that falls below the screen if a user decides not to scroll down to view it. So if you’ve got to have a scrolling page, try to keep all your important information above the fold.
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Make it quick. We all get impatient when it takes more than 5 seconds to connect to a website. Users want to make contact, and make it quick. You need to ensure that your pages load as quickly as possible. Eliminate unnecessary graphics, especially flash graphics they can be time hogs.

How To Make Money With Google Adsense

If you have a website or a blog, you should definitely sign up for Google Adsense. It’s one of the few programs you can truly ‘set and forget’ – once it’s there you don’t really need to do much else with it.

But there are ways and means to maximize your income from Google Adsense, and as you get to know more about it you can start to generate a decent income from it that will keep rolling in month after month. It’s a true passive income, which is why so many people are using it.

Most people have heard of Google Adsense, but not everyone understands exactly how to use it to its best advantage. So we’ll start with how to use it in its most basic sense and then progress to the more advanced benefits you can get from the program.

Special Offer: If you are interested in starting a website to earn money through adsense site but don’t know where to begin. We have arranged a special deal with a well trusted web host, where they will give you a free custom built site (valued at $2995) on a domain of your choice. To learn more about how this works, click here to watch a video which explains the process.

Basically if you have a website or blog you can sign up for a free account at Google Adsense and start putting contextual ads on your website. What do I mean by contextual? It means quite simply that the ads which appear on your site will be relevant to your content. So let’s say for example that your website is about tropical fish. The Google ads will then be related to tropical fish in some way. And because of the information that you give to Google, they will also display adverts that are relevant to your area. So if you are based in the UK the ads that appear will be relevant to UK buyers; if your site or business is based in Australia the ads will appeal to Australian buyers.

All of this is carefully worked out for you in order to attract the maximum click through possible for your website and your ads. Every time someone clicks on an ad you will get a few cents into your Adsense account, so it makes sense that the more attractive and relevant your ads are to your visitors, the more money you will make.

Let’s have a look at the appearance of your ads now, since this can affect the amount of click throughs you get. You can choose the color and borders of your ads to fit right in with the color scheme on your site if you wish, but it’s worth experimenting with having no borders at all around your adverts since this makes them blend in with your content more seamlessly and may encourage more click throughs in a subtle but effective manner.

However well you integrate Google Adsense into your current blog or website though, there is obviously a limit to the amount of money you can make from one site. If you get thousands of people visiting your site every day then you can expect to get a good income from it but many people don’t get this number of visitors and that’s where you need a separate strategy to try and up your numbers.

In this case you can go to the advanced level of Adsense income and think about starting several sites, all based around a different yet popular subject. You should think of these essentially as being content sites, since they are often chock full of articles and useful content which is carefully keyworded to attract plenty of search engine traffic on that particular subject. The Adsense ads are then placed in the optimum positions to achieve the best click through (the Adsense pages will give you ideas on where to position them but it’s worth experimenting to see what works best for you), and the site goes live for people to find and read through.

You can also insert affiliate links for products into these sites in order to gain even more income if you wish, but they are often known as Adsense sites simply because they are set up to attract visitors and click throughs on a specific subject.

Some people end up with dozens of sites like this, and the beauty of them is that once they are built and you have bought your domain name and hosting plan you don’t really need to do too much with them except for promote them. Updating them fairly regularly is good if you want to get to a higher position in the search engine results though, which will gain you more visitors as a result.

You can also keep your site updated more regularly (and encourage repeat visitors) by inserting RSS feeds of news stories related to the subject of your website. Anything that will get people returning to read more – and possibly click on more ads as a result – is worth a try.

One final note here – choose the subjects of your Adsense sites wisely. It’s tempting to go for whatever is in the news at the moment, but once the stories die down so will your traffic. You want something that people will always want to know about – saving money, getting a better job, earning more, and various other more personal subjects such as skin care and successful dating for example. There are plenty of options to choose from; you just need to get your thinking cap on to find them.

In short the best place to start making money from Google Adsense is to integrate it into your existing website or blog. As you gain experience and discover the best ways to use it you can start thinking about adding extra sites into the mix. You might end up being an Adsense guru and raking in plenty of money for very little work indeed. That’s the best thing about it – the ‘set and forget’ benefit that keeps on working even when you’re not.

If you enjoyed this article or have any questions or comments about it, please leave them by using the form below. Once you’ve done that it will be time to visit Google’s Adsense site to get started! Good luck.

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