Blog Income Life

Archive for October, 2009

At my blog income fork in the road,just like with a real fork, there are plenty of tines to choose from.  It’s like one of those roads in real life where when you come to a crossroads, and it is called “Five Corners” or even six!  I have looked at the options and have chosen to get real good at affiliate marketing. Maybe you would like to get real good at affiliate marketing too.

In my view affiliate marketing is the obvious next step not just for me, but for those of you who are looking at the road less traveled and want to develop a good passive income. You’ve got the basics and are using them every time you work on your blog.  Hopefully your blog is already monetized, with at least Adsense and some products from Amazon.  Although there are people who make decent coin from each of these sources the commissions are minimal.  As your traffic increases these commissions will grow but I can bet you dollars for donuts that you won’t be retiring on the income generated from these sources any time soon.

It’s time to get serious, roll up your sleeves and look for some affiliate products that can pay up to as much as 75% of the selling price.  This part depends on what your niche is.  If yours is a dog related site and you sell a physical product such as a pet ointment, the commission will more than likely be in the 10% – 20% range.

To arm myself for better success in this area I went shopping and have bought several courses — five to be exact.  They are all instantly downloadable – so no cellophane wrapping to discard!   I will be giving a review on all of them in due course, however, in the meantime from previous experience with the authors and the little bit that I have already gone through, I am confident that these two are going to be well worth the purchase price:

Secret Affiliate Weapon – Ewen Chia .
You can still buy this one.

Affiliate Launch Bluepring – Michael Rasmussen .
Michael Rasmussen’s Affiliate Launch Blueprint sold out, but I just checked and see that the signup is available again.  This sometime happens because of duplicate purchases and some that may not have gone through.

Both of these are excellent products.

We’re on the road to a great blog income life!
Valentina
Blogger for Money …
…. would that be cheddar or Appenzeller?

Relative Posts and Articles
http://www.blogincomelife.com/making-money/the-blog-income-fork-in-the-road
http://www.earnpassiveincomedollars.com/passive-income/passive-income-most-desired-least-pursued

‘Tis the season of launches and one time offers. If you have been in internet marketing for any length of time chances are that your inbox has a daily inflow of offers that you just cannot pass up.  During the “launch time” which can be as long as one week, a special price is offered along with a bundle of additional products that is enough to make the sugar plum fairy look positively parsimonious.  I love these offers.

Before you go diving into your wallet however, consider whether this is the right time for that unbelievable course that will finally have you the living the blog income life that you have been dreaming of. Some of those courses are indeed phenomenal.  Over the years we have seen some that are now considered classics.  The people who bought and applied have  prospered.  Those who still have the packages sitting on their shelves safely wrapped in their original cellophane  are still looking for the magic to happen.

Here is the thing.  There will always be phenomenal courses.  In my view, they can only get better.  Before you run off and buy one or two of the offers, you need to determine what your next step is, what your goals are and then decide to purchase the course that is a fit for you at this point in time.

I am guilty of having bought without giving much thought as to where I was going.  The offer was always great and seductive. The truth is that while I did unwrap the cellophane I have not always followed through and actually “taken” the course.  Now knowing better, I have created a criteria set that I refer to before buying.  This might be helpful for you too.

1.  Review your current position vis a vis where you were when you started your  internet marketing journey.  Because you are reading this blog may I make the assumption, that like me, you have decided to make money blogging. When looking at courses keep this in mind.

2.  Determine your next step?  I recommend that you make a business plan for the coming year.  It does not have to be a complicated one, a simple

- assessment of your current situation
- where you want to be at the close of next year
- a timeline  on the progression of results need to reach that goal
- Looking at that list, what is it that you need to get really good at?

3.  If you are in the early stages of developing your blog income, then you need to look at ways to increase your traffic.  This is an evergreen need.  No matter how successful you become, you will always want to increase traffic.  It makes sense then to look at courses geared towards driving traffic.

4. Is affiliate marketing in your marketing mix?   If so you need to look at courses that teach you how to build a list.  This is important.  As the saying goes the money is in the list.  Of course it goes without saying that courses on affiliate marketing should be on your shopping list as well.

5. If you are an experienced blogger/internet marketer, you may be ready to develop a product of your own, or start a membership site.  There are courses that are skewed towards these online business models. Look for them.

Personally, I look for systems or software that can help me automate some of my daily tasks.  I think that this is also one of those evergreen products. Before you buy, it is always a good idea to see if any reviews have been written on the product, or if it is a brand new launch, see what sort of buzz there is around the product, and the producer.  Do some online research to see what people are saying about the author.  What is his reputation?  What has he produced before?   What is the verdict on previous products?

Right now it is the result specific products that are being unveiled.   Set a budget.  There is something out there for everyone.  Invest in yourself and your Blog Income Life.   Shop well – shop wisely.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for Money and the Big Awesome (cheese that is).

This is going to be brief.

John Chow, uber blogger is at the Las Vegas Blogworld Expo and has posted a video featuring Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra’s address.  Super interesting.  Great Info.  Recommend that you log on to John’s blog and view the video, it is eye openening:

John Chow dot Com – http://www.johnchow.com/

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

It seems that I made a tactical error when changing the domain of this blog from Blog Along With Me to Blog Income Life.  The error was in the “redirecting” of the domain name.

What I did:  Redirected Blog Along With Me to the new Blog Income Life

What I should have done: Redirected the new Domain name to Blog Along With Me.

Why?  Because all the hard work that I did on the old domain, did not transfer to the new domain.  That sucks!

Now to be honest I did check with people in the field as to which domain name should be redirected to which.  The reply I got was that it was not a good idea to keep redirecting the same domain name to a new destination.  If you recall, Blog Along With Me was already redirected to Rip Along With Me.  When I asked if all the stats etc. would transfer along to the new site, I was told yes.

I think both the advice and the answer given were wrong – to a point.  The stats did transfer with the blog but were unique to the original one.  They did not transfer to the new name.  In retrospect I think that what my advisor had understood was that I wanted to redirect the new domain name, to the redirected Blog Along to the Rip Along on blogspot.  I agree that would not have been good.  There would be three redirects and that is too messy.

This little tactical error is costing me.  It is costing me all the backlinks that Blog Along With Me has earned in the past nine months of work.  Blog Along had over 230 backlinks.  When I redirected this domain to Blog Income Life, the backlinks stayed with the Blog Along.  The two did not blend.

Here in my opinion is what the proper procedure should have been:

1. Make Blog Along With Me the destination URL
2. Leave Rip Along With Me Blogspot inactive (I have decided to keep it inactive for the time being with a notice at the top that the blog has moved).
3. Lift the “redirect” command off of Blog Along With Me.
4. Redirect or “point” the new domain name, Blog Income Life to Blog Along With Me.

If the above procedure had been followed my 230 plus backlinks would be credited to the new name.

As it is, I am building the links from scratch again. This is  nother reason to really do some good research on your domain name, the keyword of the domain and its competitive factor.  If you get this right you don’t have to mess around with redirects, at least not for the reason that I did.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

Blogger for Money
…….apprenticing to be a cheese maker (what are cheese makers called)

Related Blog Posts

Domain Name Selection - Jan 25 2009
Link Building – Oct 02 2009
Backlinks – Oct 05 2009

You have now been on the blog income journey for several months and have come to that proverbial fork in the road. Which one to take?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the next step to take in developing your own Blog Income Life.

The two options covered in that post were:

1. Take the road most traveled. Continue polishing what you have learned so far and get really good at it. While it may seem that this is a static position to take, it really is not if you rinse and repeat with a purpose and have a new goal to aspire to. Certainly you will get more attention from Google and other search engines with a result of at least some incremental traffic increase. Your expertise on your chosen topic will expand – even if you already know a lot about it, it is amazing how much more knowledgeable you will get as you do more and more research so as to meet the fresh content requirement for a robust blog.

You might even want to put up another blog in the same field, using a different niche within it. Your current blog and the new one should be complimentary but preferably not identical. An example might be if your current blog is all about canning vegetables, a complimentary blog could be making your own fruit jams or preserves. Or, you may want to take the same topic but market to a different demographic. For example if your blog is about working a business from home, stay at home moms are a different demographic than boomers facing retirement. This is a strategy that is often taken by the gurus. In fact they often have a slew of complimentary blogs.

One of our exit strategies when we first build blogs is to sell them. When you have a grouping of related blogs, all of which are enjoying traffic, ranking and revenue producing, you can bundle the lot and sell them for a premium over selling just one blog.

2.Choice two is taking the unknown, the road less traveled. If you are ready to take on a new discipline to advance your internet marketing knowledge, to apply it to your blog and see exponential traffic growth (ok, eventually), then this is where you want to go.

This is a good time to decide what you want to tackle next. Here are some considerations:

- Learn how to market smartly using social media
- Choose one social marketing membership site to become an expert at, i.e., Twitter or Facebook
- Specialize in article marketing
- Learn how to effectively market affiliate products
- Become an expert on the importance of keywords and how to best use them
- Become a master at link building

There are plenty more but by now you have some familiarity with the above. This is where I recommend you pull out your wallet and buy a course on your choice. It doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact I recommend that you do not spend more than $100, $200 at best. There are lots of good courses that are significantly less than that.

In my “based on making money” opinion, affiliate marketing is the next obvious fit. Learning how to effectively market affiliates puts bigger dollars in your pocket and it is a good method of getting noticed by the owner of the product – why is that important? It opens the door for future joint ventures and then the big bucks begin to roll in. Yup! That would be the money truck.

Tomorrow more on Affiliate Marketing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for my big cheese!

What should your next step be in developing your blog income life? If you have been following along with me then you have the basics of your blog set up and running well.  As a refresher here is what we have covered so far:

1. Topic/Niche Selection
2. Domain Name
3. Selecting the right platform for your blog
4. Posting on your blog
5. Monetizing your blog
6. Repurposing your posts into articles & submitting to article directories
7. Link Building

It is time to decide on your next step.  As you have been learning how to blog for money you have also been learning about internet marketing … sneaky huh!  That is why I believe that blogging is the best introduction to internet marketing.  Its user friendly so that anyone can do it yet presents enough of a challenge so that you are learning new skill sets.  I like that part.  I find that my brain is quite happy to be exercised and I feel a sense of accomplishment when I overcome a challenge in my quest to master the art of blogging for money.

But now you have arrived at the fork in the road.

Here are your two choices right now:

1.  Continue applying what you have learned so far.  Keep polishing your skills.  You will find that with continued practice your skill level improves and your confidence level goes up.  You will find that it will take less  time to create a new post,  to re-purpose the post into articles, and to submit to article directories.  You will develop a system.

2. Add a new dimension.  This means learning a new application, or “task” which will take you further along the road to becoming an internet marketing master.  It means leaving your comfort zone and taking on a new challenge.   This is the option I recommend – but only if you are relatively comfortable with option one, and have set up a “system”  no matter how rudimentary, that you can follow.  This is the way to develop an awesome blog income life.

Tomorrow more on new dimensions

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Living a Blog Income Life
… going for the big cheese

Today we will tackle anchor text.

What is anchor text?  It is simply the text in a hyperlink which when clicked takes you to another page or site.  It is another way to build links and  driving traffic to your site so that you can begin to live the blog income life.

What differentiates this type of link from all the others discussed is that it is descriptive of what you will find on the page it is taking you to.  For example passive income is an anchor text which when clicked will take you to a site on earning passive income dollars.  The words passive income are descriptive of what the reader may expect when clicking on that hyperlink.

Google and other search engines place a high value on the proper use of anchor text in your postings.  It is important to note that the search engines are “ranking” the destination page by the anchor text.  To illustrate, passive income takes you to the site http://www.earnpassiveincomedollars.com .  Google looks at passive income as the search or keyword that it ascribes to the site.  For that reason it is important to remember to make your anchor text relevant to the page that the visitor is going to be taken to.

A frequent error that is made by internet marketers is to use the words “click here” when they want to take you to another page on a subject they are writing about.  Staying with the passive income theme, my article might have said something like this:

“for more information on passive income click here”

making “click here” the hyperlinked anchor text that takes the reader to the site on passive income.  The search engines will translate “click  here” as a keyword for that site.  If you get a lot of clicks for that anchor text, the site will begin to rank high for “click here” which of course has nothing to do with the topic of the site and will not drive any traffic for you.

I frequently use anchor text to refer to previous pages on this blog or, as in my posting on Why I chose Wordpress Direct I used the following anchor texts

Wordpress, Wordpress.com & Wordpress.org
This anchor text took the reader to an article that discussed the differences amongst the various Wordpress products.

Wordpress vs Blogger
This anchor text took the reader to an article on the comparisons of Wordpress and Blogger

Each of these phrases is descriptive of the pages that the reader could expect to get more information on when clicking on these hyperlinked texts.  Notice also that  I just  used the anchor text feature for the title of the article in which these anchor texts appear.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Living a Blog Income Life
… and getting my own cheese.

To live a Blog Income Life you have to do some planning and some planting.  Read on.

Living the Blog Income Life to me means that I control my schedule and if I want, I can take a day in the middle of the week and go play.  A friend and I did just that this Wednesday.  Neither of us had been to Whistler for a while and we thought we should take a gander out that way to see how the Sea to Sky Highway had been improved and what the 2010 Olympic ski site looks like today.

It was a great day.

Our planning wasn’t the best — that’s what happens when you do things on the spur of the moment.  Unbeknownst to us many of the attractions had shut down last Sunday, not to be reopened until after  American Thanksgiving weekend which traditionally is the start of the winter season – so no gondola ride, no peak to peak ride, no decadent dining.

Would have been nice.  It did not matter.   We had a wonderful time anyway.

We walked throughout the village, stopped in to the vacant shops and chatted up the sales associates many of whom are Australian – for one brief moment I thought I had been transported to a different country.

Then I saw something that caught my attention.  A crew of gardeners were planting.  They were working on a freshly dug patch of earth in front of the Fairmont Hotel.  They had the bulbs set out in the exact spots they would be dug into the ground and the various bulbs were spaced according to whether they were tulips, daffodils or alium.  I was so intrigued that we stopped to chat with the gardeners and I  took a picture.

This got me thinking.  They were planting today for results that would be seen in the spring – perhaps as long as five months down the road.  For months there will be no sign of the fruits … errr flowers … of their labor.  Then one day, little green shoots will start poking their way out of the ground.  Hardly anyone will notice them.  The shoots will keep growing until one day there are buds on the ends of the stems and then suddenly they will bloom, rewarding us with a bountiful feast of beauty and color.

Blogging is the same thing.  At the beginning when we start posting blogs we do not see instant results.  Sometimes there is no traffic at all for the first few months.  Then visitors begin to drop in in dribs and drabs.  Some like what you blog about and subscribe to your RSS feed, or bookmark your blog, maybe even make a comment on your post.  Slowly your blog begins to get noticed.  It begins to bloom.

Back when I was in the corporate world we were always told that what we do today will begin to bear fruit months down the road.  Its never instantaneous.   Three to six months is common.  In blogging fresh content can bring you an instant positive blip on your stats chart, but what you are really doing is planting bulbs for your future.  The more planting you do the sooner the reward of being able to live  a Blog Income Life.

Elaine Babauta of SweetStacks writes:

“Hi Valentina,
I enjoy reading your newsletters as I learn something new each time! I do have a question for you. Why did you switch from Blogger to Wordpress Direct? What are the advantages that Wordpress Directs provides over Blogger? I guess I’m out of the loop with blogging sites. I use Blogger to blog about SweetStacks.
Elaine Babauta
SweetStacks, Inc.
www.SweetStacks.com

The first point of consideration when deciding which platform to choose for your blog is to answer the question: what is the purpose of my blog?

If the purpose of your blog is to serve your main website as a promotional tool, to help drive traffic to your sales page, then the Blogger vs Wordpress debate is not that critical, in fact, I almost always recommend that if you are completely new to the internet and techie type info gives you a nosebleed, Blogger is a good place to get started. I started all my first blogs on Blogger. It’s easy, you can plod along at your own pace, and as you begin to develop some net muscles you can even pretty it up a bit here and there.

Early on this year I began to notice that most of the internet marketing professionals were using Wordpress. I looked into that and found it very confusing, my techie skills were not up to it at all. Notice, I said Wordpress.

This is a little confusing. Wordpress is not created equal in all its guises. I found two very good articles that you might be interested in:

Wordpress, Wordpress.com & Wordpress.org
Wordpress vs Blogger

Another interesting thing I began to notice was that it wasn’t just blogs, but what looked like websites were being powered by Wordpress. I became intrigued that with Wordpress you could have both static and organic pages in the same blog/site. It lent itself extremely well to both squeeze and long letter sales pages. My challenge at this point was still having to learn how to use FTP, and c.panel.

Enter Wordpress Direct. I found out about Wordpress Direct when going through the 30 Day Challenge this summer. Here was an answer writ in heaven: a system that offered the flexibility of Wordpress and the user friendliness of Blogger, I started a fresh blog for the 30 day challenge and as I followed along, I found that it was a no-brainer to switch to this system. Yes there were differences that I had to get used to but they were not difficult to master.

The main reasons I chose to switch this blog from Blogger, and others from other platforms to Wordpress Direct are:

1. Bigger selection of done for you templates. Over 150 templates The recommended ones come with tech support. For the tech advanced or gifted crowd only your imagination and level of ability limit the possibilities.
2. Done for you system. Wordpress Direct templates come loaded with widgets that help you with Search Engine Optimization and other important gizmos that enhance your online marketing efforts.
3. Direct online tech support. This is a major difference between Wordpress Direct and Blogger. It used to frustrate the living daylights out of me when I had to resort to the forum for responses to glitches that I was experiencing.
4. Point and click installation.
5. Easy to follow video tutorials guide you through the back end office – the admin area
6. Ownership of content. What you publish on your Wordpress Direct site is yours. With Blogger, which is owned by Google, Blogger has the rights and ownership to your content.
7. Ease of customization.
8. Mix ‘em up static and organic pages. The importance of this is that you can feature your online product for sale on a static page, while the organic pages which is where you blog give continuous fresh content. This means that your “site” is constantly being crawled by the spiders, increasing the probability of moving up in search engine positioning and ultimately page rank.
9. Automatic fresh content pings increase traffic to your blog/site
10. Categories. Each blog post, in addition to a running dateline order can also reside within one or more categories, determined by you. Enhances keyword recognition by search engines and ease of navigation of your site by visitors according topic interest
11. Selection of themes that offer two or three columned templates.
12. Templates with pre-set ad space
13. Detailed statistics on your site – although I still use Google Analytics in addition for a different reason.

Interestingly, in the war for blog supremacy, even though Google owns Blogger, according to the tech experts, Wordpress is favored by Google. This goes for all stripes of Wordpress I gather. If there was one thing I wish could be improved on it would be to have automatic updates at the press of a button. Wordpress’ open source status makes it a robust program. There are frequent updates, however they are not automatic for all areas that Wordpress Direct manages.

Wordpress Direct is a for fee service. You can get one free site but it is recommended that you get it hosted. I started with the entry paid version which gives me 10 sites/blogs for $19 a month and I chose Hostgator as my host at the baby level with unlimited hosting for $7.95 a month.

In conclusion my experience to date has been nothing short of excellent. In my opinion if your blog is set up to derive a blog income then it is worth the initial learning curve to start with Wordpress Direct.

Happy Thanksgiving Canada.

This is Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada and I just wanted to do a short post on giving thanks.

We live in tumultuous times – perhaps we always did and just did not know it.  It was not until the advent of TV and more recently, street level blackberry journaling that the minutiae of the day to day happenings around the world were brought into our living rooms.  It certainly underlines the many things that we have to be thankful for in our lives.

I think it is a wonderful holiday.  The gathering of families to celebrate and give thanks for the bounty in our lives.

What if we do that daily?  I don’t mean the family celebrations – and I’m all for those – but just the act of giving thanks?  What if at the end of the day we just go over the day and pick out just a few things to give thanks for for that day?  They don’t have to be big, even things like a beautiful sunny day, or a good rainy day – yes, those are good too, the earth needs the rain – or maybe you made some progress in your online marketing.  Personal development experts suggest a minimum of five items, and yes, they can be repetitive.

Giving thanks changes our perspective on our own lives.  It’s too easy to dwell on that which is not right instead of that which is.  Yet, by concentrating on that which is right we garner strength to continue, to go forward, to achieve personal goals in all areas of our lives.

Give thanks daily.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money.
…….. and the Big Cheese at Blog Income Life!