» passive income

Why Membership Sites Make Such A Great Business Model For An Online Entrepreneur

Albert — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:10:32 +0000

The term membership sites refer to the fact that it is exclusively restricted for the use among the members. A membership site only allows its members to surf and view the inside contents of that particular site. Most of these membership sites are paid sites. The paid membership sites charge a nominal fee from the viewers who wish to be a member of that particular site. These fees are usually charged on a monthly basis. But there are sites, which have six months’ subscription offer. It depends up on the regulation of the websites.

Membership sites offer various kinds of quality information to its subscribers. It also provides information, which the members cannot find elsewhere and will also search anything on the web if the topic for research is provided. There are innumerable membership sites, which offer variety of services to its members.

Some of these membership sites contain useful articles or information in a particular field or product or service and some publish the results of various tests and studies, while some membership sites provide access to web libraries or online libraries and other sites reference information. There are also some sites, which contain reviews, and there are some membership sites that act as a meeting place for like-minded people like the dating sites.

The question may arise to some people that why should one pay for one of these site. Well, the reason for paying is getting the best of all information. These websites provide specialized information, which the user would not be able to find anywhere on the web. There are users who pay for magazines, newspapers, books, clubs, and various other entertainment sites. So, users can also subscribe to these membership sites, which offer unique services and products and specialized information.

Membership sites make great business models for an entrepreneur. While thinking of building up a membership site the entrepreneur must decide if he wants to build up a free membership site or a paid one. Paid membership sites are most usually limited to a specific number of members. But the information and services remain special in these sites and thus it is necessary to limit the members. But free membership sites are easy to set up and easy to operate as well.

While setting up a membership site the entrepreneur must provide the viewers with timely fresh contents. If it is a free site then there should be the option of upgrade from free membership to a paid membership. A free membership site guarantees a long list of potential members. The site can earn through advertisements, as it will be available to everyone. Free membership sites are easy to run as they cost almost nothing to run, and yet the entrepreneur will have an almost unlimited number of customers and potential customers to market all kinds of products and services.

On the other hand, paid membership sites are a great way to generate passive income. Entrepreneurs who are looking for prospective customers for their products or services can set up paid sites, which will generate income and as well build up a list of prospective customers. Since it will be a paid site there will be the best group of the customers. And thus it will be easier to market products to these customers, whereas, in a free site the group may not contain the best customers.Similar Posts:

Post from: Home Business and Work From Home Ideas and Opportunities

Why Membership Sites Make Such A Great Business Model For An Online Entrepreneur

Active Income Vs. Passive Income

Albert — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:16:29 +0000

Google AdSense has been talked about, hyped about and even criticized over the past year. At the same time, WordPress has emerged as one of the leading blogging platforms used by almost all A-list bloggers. What do these two have in common?

I just came across Gobala Krishnan’s “WordPress AdSense System” course that combines the two, showing you how to create “autopilot sites” that make money from AdSense:

Here’s my review of the product, and why you should get yourself a copy.

(1) Overall Impression

When I read that this product has been selling well since 2006, I was pretty relieved. That’s because most ebook guides fizzle out and get outdated within six months. Gobala actually updates this guide from time to time to keep current with all the changes taking place in the blogging world. In fact according to Gobala the only changes he makes are the screenshots and URLs – the tactics and strategies he mentions in the book don’t need to be updates are they are time-tested and will work for anyone, for the foreseeable future.

(2) The E-book Guide and Tips

Flipping through the main e-book guide (over 150 pages), I find that the earlier sections are perfect for the absolute newbie. It explains in detail common blogging terms, how blogging works, and what to expect when starting a blog. Then Gobala goes into more technical, advanced stuff including how to transform a WordPress blog into a static website, how to optimize your blog, and also how to get traffic to your blog.

Even if you’re not new to Google AdSense or WordPress, you can find a lot of useful information in here.

(3) AdSense-ready WordPress Themes

This was what actually caught my eye in the first place – 30 super-cool looking WordPress themes that are “AdSense ready”. This means that the AdSense codes have already been placed in the theme in strategic locations. All you need to do is enter your AdSense publisher IDs and you’re done.

I think the theme alone are worth more than what the entire system costs, and by looking at them I’m sure they can generate quite decent click-throughs for your blog if you were using them. After all with Google AdSense you make more money when you (1) get more traffic or (2) get more clicks.

(4) Keyword Research Tools

A simple but useful keyword research tool is also included in WordPress AdSense System. Keyword research is extremely important if you’re trying to build auto-pilot AdSense blogs since most of your traffic will be from search engines like Google. You need to make sure you’re targeting the correct keywords before you write your first blog post!

The package also includes “180 Profitable AdSense Niche Keywords”, which is a heavy MS Excel sheet containing thousands of keywords Gobala has researched before. Of course you cannot depend on this data alone, but it’s a good place to kickoff some ideas of your own. There are literally thousands of niche markets out there you can tap into that are probably easier to make money in that the niche you’re in right now.

(5) My Conclusion and Recommendation

I’m pretty satisfied with WordPress AdSense System by Gobala Krishnan. I’ve bought a few such courses before but Gobala’s course doesn’t disappoint. In fact I found it easy to read and follow. There are also a lot of video tutorials you can watch where Gobala shows you step-by-step, exactly what you need to do.

You can get more information on WordPress AdSense System here.

WordPress Adsense System – Make Money Blogging Now!

- Albert

Create Your Own Income-Generating Website With Site Build It!

Albert — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:29:16 +0000

A Review by Steve Pavlina

Because I’ve been running successful online businesses for many years, people always ask me how they can achieve a similar level of success. How can I build a high-traffic website? How can I make money online? What do I have to do to quit my day job? Will you mentor me?

These questions have always frustrated me.

The problem was that I couldn’t readily teach people to do what I do, at least not the way I do it. I’m too old school. I’ve been using the Internet since 1989, and I built my first income-generating website in 1995. Most of the money I’ve earned in my life has come from my online businesses. But my approach has been virtually unteachable. Believe me — I’ve tried. After delivering a few workshops on blogging, it became obvious to me that I couldn’t teach this. I was overwhelming people with more info than they could handle. People got excited by the ideas, but they couldn’t implement them. In truth there’s just way too much hidden complexity in my approach.

Another frustrating element was watching people who were inspired by my articles “How to Make Money From Your Blog,” “How to Build a High-Traffic Website,” and “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job.” The first article even clearly states that 99 out of 100 people won’t be able to do this, but that didn’t stop people from trying to duplicate (or surpass) my results anyway. Nearly all of them gave up within the first six months. We’re talking hundreds of people that I know of. Starting a blog is dead simple these days. Creating a highly profitable, high-traffic website from scratch is very, very hard if you’ve never done it before.

An Unexpected Solution

The reason I’m writing this article is that I finally found a practical solution for people who want to build a successful online business without getting lost in a sea of technical details, using essentially the same business model I used to build my site. I’ll explain the details in a moment.

When I started my site, I’d already been running a previous online business full-time for nearly a decade. My web site didn’t succeed because I was lucky or brilliant. It succeeded because I’d already invested thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in an earlier business. I paid my dues the hard way. The articles I wrote merely scratched the surface of the complex lessons to be learned.

Eventually I gave up trying to teach people how to build an online business. Recently I received two more invitations to do my blogging workshop, and I turned them both down. I’d rather invest my time and energy where I can be more effective.

Late last year I had an interesting phone call with a successful entrepreneur named Ken Evoy. A mutual contact put us in touch, suggesting that we definitely needed to work together. Ken founded an interesting business called Site Build It!, a fascinating service that helps people build income-generating web sites. They provide complete hosting as well as an extensive suite of tools to help you build traffic and generate meaningful income.

Well… Ken and I had such similar business philosophies that our phone call lasted more than 2-1/2 hours. This guy is really passionate about helping people build businesses online, and he found a way to succeed where I could not. Ken realized just as I did that the technological complexity required to build a successful online business is just way too high for most people.

At first he tried to teach people how to do it — even writing a book on the subject (it sold over 100,000 copies, so he knew what he was doing) — but he ran into the same frustrating problems I did. No matter how clearly you explain it, it’s just really hard for people to grasp the details, so they always screw it up. But instead of trying to teach people how to handle every little technical detail, Ken decided to build a service that would do it for them, automating as much as of the process as humanly possible. Ten years later Ken’s vision is a huge success, with thousands of “raving fan” customers who’ve built real income-generating websites via Site Build It!

Ken is an incredibly hands-on entrepreneur with a rare level of dedication to his customers. He’s extremely active in the Site Build It! members-only forums, with more than 4,700 posts of his own. That’s way more than I’ve made in my forums, and I thought I was pretty active. Ken makes a tremendous personal effort to help people succeed, and from talking to him myself, I could tell that his interest in people is authentic. Ken isn’t alone though — there are lots of highly active members in their forums who are passionate about helping each other. This definitely isn’t a take-your-money-and-run operation.

How to Build a Profitable Online Business

Site Build It! is designed around a simple formula, which they refer to as CTPM. This stands for Content -> Traffic -> Presell -> Monetize.

You may recognize that this is precisely the model I use. When done correctly this “content is king” approach can generate tons of traffic, in my case millions of page views per month. Preselling is the process of building a relationship with visitors, which essentially means treating visitors like human beings instead of sales targets. People visit this site looking for ideas to improve their lives, so that’s what I focus on providing. The final monetization step occurs when people click on ads or buy affiliated products that happen to be of interest to them.

The major limiting step in this formula is building traffic. If you can’t build decent traffic, you won’t succeed. But the overall formula is sound, and it works if you do it correctly. It just happens to be very difficult for human beings to apply it without screwing it up. The advantage of Site Build It! is that it provides technical solutions to help reduce your chances of making mistakes. Where it cannot provide a technical solution, it provides clear instructions and education to help you succeed.

Even with Site Build It!, there’s still no guarantee of success. This isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It will still take commitment and effort to build a successful online business. But this robust suite of tools will definitely put the odds of success in your favor. You don’t have to become a technology expert to earn enough to quit your day job.

The key benefit of Site Build It! is that it provides tools, guidance, and coaching to help you stay focused on the correct actions. This begins with providing easy-to-use research tools to help you figure out what kind of site to create in the first place. A lot of people fail because they create sites that were doomed from the very beginning. It really saddens me when a blogger emails me to say that s/he is still getting no traffic even after writing 100+ articles. I don’t like telling people that they made their biggest mistake before the site was even launched by choosing a topic with virtually no demand… or one that’s oversaturated with entrenched competition. Site Build It! can help you avoid soul-crushing problems like this.

Why Use Site Build It?

If you already run a successful online business that generates thousands of dollars a month in income for you, you don’t necessarily need Site Build It! But if that’s your situation, I highly recommend you join their affiliate program, which will give you an extra passive income stream. (To learn more about their affiliate program, scroll to the bottom of this page, or visit their Affiliate Center directly.)

However, if you’re new to online business, or if you’ve tried and failed, or if you’re stuck trying to build traffic and generate income, then you should definitely take a look at Site Build It!

With Site Build It! you don’t have to build your web pages from scratch using HTML and CSS. They provide point-and-click tools and templates to generate your pages quickly and easily, including images. This allows you to focus on writing your content instead of wrestling with the underlying technology. Of course, if you’re already comfortable with tools like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash, knock yourself out. Site Build It! is compatible with other HTML editors, so you’re always free to fall back on your own tools if that’s your preference. This gives you maximum flexibility to create the look and feel you want.

All the Tools, Training, and Support You Need to Build Your Own Income-Generating Website

Site Build It! includes an extensive suite of tools to help you build a successful online business every step of the way, including:

- domain name registration
- web site hosting
- point-and-click page creation
- content management
- blogging
- market research
- traffic stats
- search engine optimization
- auto-responders
- form builder
- graphic manager
- customizable templates
- sitemaps
- RSS feeds
- web mail
- newsletter management

Seriously, this is only a small fraction of the tools they include. Many functions are completely automated, and some tools work for you in the background even when you aren’t aware of them. For example, if you update a page on your website, Site Build It! will automatically regenerate your Google and Yahoo sitemaps. If you don’t know what a sitemap is, with Site Build It! you don’t even need to worry about it. The technology will handle it for you. This means you can focus on creating content instead of worry about getting all the technical details right. Site Build It! will even suggest new topics you should write about to increase your traffic, based on its analysis of your current search traffic patterns.

Site Build It! provides unlimited customer support as well as private discussion forums where thousands of members share tips and advice. I browsed their forums myself and saw a lot of enthusiastic members helping each other. It’s an extremely active community with hundreds of thousands of posts. They also have a team of moderators and in-house editorial staff who glean the best pearls from their forums and turn them into articles — on everything from brainstorming to monetizing.

Their near weekly newsletter keeps you up to date on the current best practices as well as additions and updates to their “Info HQ” knowledge base. They track what’s happening in the world of e-business (over 100 feeds, blogs, e-zines), so you don’t have to. This makes it easy for you to focus on your business without worrying that you’re missing important opportunities.

Site Build It! is basically an all-in-one solution for building a successful online business. They continue to add new tools and refine their existing tools to keep the service state-of-the-art.

Getting Started

I encourage you to look into Site Build It! to see if it makes sense for you. I recommend you start with the Site Build It! home page, watch the 2-1/2 minute video there, and follow whichever links interest you. The 30-minute video tour is a must — it will really clarify everything for you. The video tour starts out mostly motivational in tone (i.e. benefits of working from home), but later on it dives into the details of how the tools and monetization strategies work, using real web sites as examples. I think you’ll find it educational even if you have only a minor interest in making money online.

If what you see arouses your interest, but you’re skeptical about what to expect, you’ll definitely want to read my step-by-step Site Build It! walkthrough next. I explain exactly what to expect during the first 10 days, from the time you sign up until your new money-making website is online. I wrote this walkthrough myself from scratch — it wasn’t provided by the Site Build It! team. I also offer some additional thoughts about who should consider Site Build It! and who shouldn’t.

If you really want to do your homework, I suggest checking out some of the success story videos submitted by their customers as well as their in-depth case studies. If you have any questions about Site Build It!, you can submit them via the questions form, and you’ll get an answer from a real Site Build It! owner/user.

Of course Site Build It! comes with a money-back guarantee, so there’s no risk to try it for yourself. You can test drive it for 30 days and get a full refund if you don’t like it. If you register a domain name through Site Build It!, you can even keep your new domain for free if you later decide to quit. That’s a better than money-back guarantee, since you get a free domain name no matter what. Also, if you decide to quit after 30 days, you can get a pro-rated refund for the unused portion of your subscription… and of course still keep your new domain name too.

Become a Site Build It! Affiliate

Site Build It! has one of the most generous affiliate programs I’ve ever seen, so if you already have a website and are looking for new income sources, this one is very solid for several reasons. First, you continue to earn residual commissions when each referral you generate renews their annual subscription, so the earnings are ongoing. Secondly, Site Build It! has a two-tier affiliate program, meaning that you also earn commissions on sales generated by affiliates you refer. Thirdly, unlike some stingy programs, they have an extremely robust tracking system to make sure you’re fairly credited for your referrals. And fourthly, they support their affiliates with their 5 Pillar Club newsletter, detailed tracking tools, ad generators, members-only forums, and more. These people are serious about seeing their affiliates succeed.

I’ve seen generous affiliate programs before, but they’ve usually been for lousy products and overpriced ebooks I could never recommend. Site Build It! not only has a great affiliate program, but they back it up with a truly valuable service that actually works for those who work it. I’d have no qualms about recommending Site Build It! to my own family members. I joined their affiliate program myself because Site Build It! solves a key problem for me and many of my visitors. I finally have a place to refer people for the tools and practical education necessary to create their own online businesses.

You can become a Site Build It! affiliate even if you never purchase a Site Build It! subscription for yourself. This is great for people who already have a successful online business. And again, you also benefit from each new affiliate who joins from your affiliate links. Due to the generous commission structure, some affiliates earn more than $10,000 per month.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Site Build It! affiliate program, visit their Affiliate Center, and check out the commission structure. It’s free to sign-up as an affiliate.

If I hadn’t already learned how to build an online business the hard way, I’d use Site Build It! to get there much faster. It would have shaved years off my learning curve if this had been available when I created my first income-generating site back in 1995. I strongly recommend you look into Site Build It! if you want to successfully generate income online.

Ken Envoy has also written some excellent eBooks.
You can download them FREE clicking the following links:

The Getting Started Action Guide
Affiliate Masters Course
Make Your Net Auction Sell Masters Course
Make Your Price Sell Masters Course
The Netwriting Masters Course
The Service Sellers Masters Course
The Webmaster Business Masters Course
The Work-At-Home-Moms Masters Course

Happy readings!
Albert

Thanks to Steve Pavlina

How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site

Albert — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:00:43 +0000

Step 1 – Niche Research

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog – which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success.

Step 2 – Site Creation

Once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use WordPress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched – by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines – and monetization – the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

Step 3 – Traffic Generation

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important – we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money – we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content – you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.
Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you – or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

Step 4 – Management

The final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Finally, something that needs to be managed on your blog is the updating of your content. The most successful blogs and mini sites always have something new for their readers all the time, and when you’re running more than one blog, this can be an ongoing challenge. The best thing you can do here is get yourself the help of some software like the above mentioned Firepow, which can help you manage a number of blog’s content from one control panel. Something like this will give you the ability to post content on schedules, get notified of when a blog needs updating, and offer you options of how to get relevant content on to your site without your effort.

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in this article, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this post informative and helpful.

by Andrew Hansen from FirePowSimilar Posts:

Post from: Home Business and Work From Home Ideas and Opportunities

How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site

Basic Guide to Affiliate Marketing

Albert — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:25:54 +0000

Basically affiliate marketing is a way to sell products and services, or generate leads for businesses online. Affiliate Programs are driven by Search Engines. Affiliate Marketing works because it allows people to take direct action. Affiliate Marketing works by placing ads on websites for the products and service people are searching for and want to buy. The way you make money as an affiliate is every time someone clicks though and purchases product from a sponsor’s ad placed on your site, you receive a commission.

Make no mistake Affiliate Marketing is Work. This is the number one basic concept to successful affiliate marketing that cannot be stressed enough. The harder you work, the more research into winning strategies you do, the more seminars you attend, the harder you work at being successful Affiliate Marketer the more money you will make.

Affiliate Marketing does require some investment. Affiliate Marketing is a business. The more time and the more money you invest in it the more successful you will be. Diversity is the key to being a successful Affiliate Marketer the more sites, or more programs you have invested in the more you will make.

The key to successful Affiliate Marketing is to drive traffic to your websites so visitors can click through and take the desired action. Successful programs will be those that are set up with tips techniques and tools to help you drive traffic.

Affiliate Marketing Programs make use of the entire internet, that means you do not even need a website to be an Affiliate, you can place affiliate ads on Blogs as well.

The nicest thing about Affiliate Marketing programs is that while they do take work, they actually generate what is known as passive income. Once the hard work is done on getting a particular program up and running besides for “routine maintenance, like having to “restock a vending machine” – Affiliate Marketing Programs can be a “set it and forget it” business model