Blog and Ping

Create a Blog you can install the blog on your own site or use a free blogger tool like Blogger.com. Update the blog everyday with content specific to your niche and a link back to your niche site. Ping the blog using a free pinging service like pingoat.com. This will update several services about new content at your site. The Search Engines will spider your blog and find your site.

Find other blogs related to your niche. Do a search on blogger.com for blogs related to your site. Leave very relevant comments with a link back to your site. Again people and the search engines will find your site. Do not leave worthless and spam comments on other blogs. Be a benefit to the blog community with good information.

Article Submission

Article submission to article directories is awesome. You can earn very valuable backlinks to your niche site. Ezine authors search articles directories for articles to publish in their ezines. Publish a good article and it could be published to thousands of ezine subscribers for free. Write a solid author bio with a link to your niche site. Websites and Ezine Publishers must publish your bio with the article. You will receive visitors from this effort.

There are specific places to submit articles to for massive visibility like GoArticles.com. You can use an Article Submission Service to mass publish your article on thousands of lists and article directories all over the web saving you time.

Forums

Find forums that allow you to post free ads. Better yet find forums related to your niche website. Answer questions on the forum including your signature line with your web link included. Also ask questions. Forums are not only great for posting your web link but can be great to get ideas on new articles to write.

Search Engine Optimization

Work on your Search Engine Optimization. Learn about on and off page optimization. Learn about keyword density, image alt tags, meta tags and link popularity. Search Engines are going to be a huge asset to driving traffic to your site. With a little effort you can find your niche site in the top 10 keywords.

Start a reciprocal link campaign with other web sites in the same niche. Trade links or simply ask for a link to your site. You can do this for free with a links directory script to manage your links.

Text links

Text links are keyword specific links to your web site posted on other sites. You can pay for these or you can set up trades as well.

It is now possible to assign multiple custom channels to a single ad unit. This feature enables you to track your ad performance with greater flexibility and view more granular information. When generating your ad code, you’ll be able to add up to 5 custom channels to a specific instance of ad code.

What’s the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel? Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one ad unit across several different metrics simultaneously. For example, let’s say you run a sports website and you’ve placed a leaderboard at the top and bottom of every page. To track the performance of the ad placement, you’ve created two custom channels — ‘TopLeaderboard’ and ‘BottomLeaderboard’ — and regenerated your ad code appropriately.

But what if you also want to compare your football pages and your baseball pages at the same time? With multiple custom channels, this isn’t a problem. Just create two new custom channels called ‘FootballPages’ and ‘BaseballPages’, and add them to the appropriate ad units. Now your leaderboards will each be tagged with two custom channels that let you know which position they’re in (top or bottom), and the type of page on which they appear (football or baseball).

More information can be found in official AdSense Help Center.

Just about all of the contextual advertising services and many other types of services use JavaScript to include their ads on your website. This is great because it’s easy to put the code on your website, have ads running and then forget about it. But what about those users who have Javascript turned off?

Well first of all they won’t see anything. Your content that is below it will just move into the space and you won’t get credit for the adview or the chance to have a click or sale from that user. Analysis of my last 1 million unique visitors shows that 7.5% of them have JavaScript turned off.

7.5% of 1 million is 75,000 unique visitors! That’s 75,000 people who would be viewing the site without any ads and without me having a chance to monetize their visit in any way!

So, how can you solve this issue?

Well thankfully browsers have built into them an alternative tag for JavaScript and it’s called the *noscript* tag. This tag has been around forever and is nothing new. It also doesn’t modify existing JavaScript on your page and therefore can be implemented without violating any of the Terms of Service from Google, Yahoo, Chitika or any other services.

So how can you implement this into your page so that something will show where your ads normally do and what can you put there?

You can use any type of affiliate marketing or commission systems out there. The simplest is to place some Amazon books or products in the noscript code. You can see an example of how I did this with some code and some images of a website with Javascript turned on and off (link).

Here’s how you implement it. Using Google AdSense as an example, you place their code that they give you on your website. Then just below that you place a noscript set of tags. Inside those tags you place what you want to appear if the end user doesn’t have it Javascript turned on. I have included some books from Amazon in a simple table, but you can always put text links or other forms of advertising there.

You can include whatever you’d like in place of what appears. It doesn’t need to conform to the same size or width of the Google ad, so if you just want a 120×20 button or some text there that’s fine.

That’s about all there is to it.

As webmasters, writers and authors we all want to find ways to maximize the profitability of our content. We employ a variety of methods such as Adsense, Yahoo Ads, links to affiliate products of all types but there are a couple of problems. There is the sheer time involved in creating these links and then keeping them updated to the most relevant and profitable products. To avoid a Google penalty you must use text-based affiliate links, as noted previously this can be a monumental task.

Keeping pace with the fast paced changes of the internet can make it time consuming, difficult and expensive to keep all of your content optimized for profits. What’s needed is a breakthrough technology to make it just as easy to keep a website optimized whether you have 10 pages or 10,000 pages of content. Well, the future is here! Michael Fortin and Sylvie Charrier have just recently unveiled what may be the single most important innovation for webmaster since Adsense.

While still in beta stage this new breakthrough is already beginning to turn heads. With just a simple snippet of code installed in the footer of a thousand page website, any group of keywords can be targeted and “automatically” converted to live links to the most profitable affiliate products at Clickbank and Amazon. Also you can target your own or any other product by designating which keywords, again even if there are a thousand instance of those keywords, once from the control panel.

What’s even better is that the program updates the targets regularly and follows the most profitable products without a single edit on your part. If the hottest selling weight loss product at Clickbank is outdistanced by a more relevant and more profitable product, your links will now be directed to the new profit leader. Similarly if a product is eliminated or removed your links never die, they just move the next most profitable one.

Can you imagine the work and expense of going back into thousands of webpages, ezine articles, ebooks and manually changing the links. Please! And can I go back to a typewriter too! Michael and Sylvie’s new software is going to revolutionize the web.

As this is still beta you can expect a few glitches as it is being refined and tweaked. The early birds already there. Remember the day you first heard of his software as one day you may be able to recount to others that you were aware of this before it became really big. I know I though Google’s IPO was sort of high and I would wait to pick it up went it came down.

Currently Clickbank and Amazon are “plugged in” to the system but close on their heels are Commission Junction, Digital River, PayDotCom.com, even eBay. All your content can now be working for you, night and day. The possibilities are mind boggling for a few visionaries legends will be told.

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans are starting up a new venture called ReviewMe, which is a paid review network for advertisers to pay for bloggers to review products.

This is a similar concept to PayPerPost, which recently received venture capital, and also has come under fire in the blog world for it’s concept and lack of transparency, although they are supposedly making some changes to their model.

ReviewMe is setting it up well, as the advertiser is only paying for the review, not necessarily a positive one. The blogger also does not have to link to the advertiser, it can just be a review. They are taking a very ethical stance which is great.

I do think though that this is probably still a pretty niche play. Even if the blogger has the right to do a positive or negative review, they still have to disclose they are doing a paid review. There are a lot of bloggers who are not going to want to do paid reviews at all, and if they did they might not want to admit it for fear of losing credibility with your audience.

On the flip side though, this isn’t that much different from reviewing a product and providing an affiliate link, which many bloggers have been doing for ages. It should be interesting to watch, and I’m all for anything that provides web publishers a way to generate more revenue from creating sites about their interests and passions.

via Conversionrater

As a result of my previous post about hitting the 500 RSS subscriber mark, I had a few readers ask for advice on how to grow their RSS subscriber counts.Always one to please my readers, I thought I’d post on the subject.

Why do we even want to increase these numbers? The main benefits of RSS are:

• Allow readers to keep reading your content without having to remember to come back to your site.
• Get your content picked up and distributed by other services and blogs.
• Avoid the need for email newsletters, or at least get that content delivered.

I’m going to package this in a time format to make it easy to achieve this in fourteen days. If you’ve already done any of these things, skip those days and move on and you’ll be done even sooner.

Day 1: Sign up for Feedburner
Feedburner is easily the best solution for managing an RSS feed. Feedburner has a ton of features that help out in varoius ways, but the main ways that it helps grow your feed count is that it allows you to consolidate your feed into one Feedburner URL that is extremely compatible with all the RSS readers and that you can allow users to subscribe to, and then even if you change blogging platforms or move your original feed around you can keep your subscribers in one place.

Feedburner also provides statistics on your feeds, the ability to control various aspects of feed, ping all the ping services, and more. It’s a must.

Day 2: Display the universal RSS feed icon
While it’s not recognized by everyone on the web, those who know about RSS recognize the universal RSS feed icon and then know they can subscribe to your feed. You can download a set of icons at FeedIcons.com.

Additionally, moving your feed icon to the top of your page in a prominent area makes it even more obvous. Tubetorial.com does a great job of this by having a large icon with “RSS Feed” next to it. It’s hard to miss!

Day 3: Submit your feed to RSS feed directories
Just like web directories, there are a lot of sites that allow you to submit your RSS feed for listing. The purpose of this is that people use these sites to find RSS feeds in their areas of interest, and it obviously can bring additional traffic to your site.

The best resource for this is Robin Good’s list of RSS directories. Head there and start submitting in order!

Day 4: Make a page about RSS
Most avid readers of blogs know about RSS feeds, but the majority of the web population still isn’t familiar with RSS. Why not introduce them to RSS through your site? Here’s an example of a page on a site explaining RSS, letting users know how to subscribe, and what feeds the site offers.

Day 5: Use Feedburner Feedflare
Managing your feed with Feedburner allows you to add special links to the end of each content item called Feedflares. One type of link you can setup is a “Subscribe to this Feed” Feedflare so that every blog post or article has a link to subscribe to your feed.

Day 6: Use easy-subscribe buttons
Users who read RSS feeds may be using a number of different RSS readers. It could be Bloglines, Newsgator, My Yahoo, or others. To make it easier for these people to subscribe, you can provide buttons like you’ll see in the right column of this site that allow users to just click a button and subscribe via the feed reader of their choice.

Day 7: Exchange RSS feeds
You’re probably familiar with link exchanges, but how about RSS feed exchanges? If you know of similar sites to yours, approach the site owner about swapping links to your RSS feeds, or both of you could promote each other’s blog/feed in a blog post.

Day 8: Use an RSS auto-discovery tag
Adding a bit of code to the header of your site allows people with feed readers that can “auto-discover” your feed to discover it. For example, if you’re a Bloglines user you can add a bookmarklet to your browser that with one click finds the feed on the page and allows you to subscribe. Here is an example of the auto-discovery tag used here on this blog:

< link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Conversionrater" / >

Day 9: Post about your feed
Sometimes people need a little prodding to take action. They may know you have a feed, but just haven’t done anything about it. Why not remind them that you have a feed, and what the benefits are by subscribing to it. It’s a good time to also link to the page about RSS you created on Day 4.

Day 10: Promote your feed in your email and business cards

A very easy step to promote your feed is to add it to your email signature, or maybe even add a link to it on your business card. People who use RSS will appreciate it.

Day 11: Display your feed count
While to some it may seem like bragging, displaying your RSS feed count when using a Feedburner feed like I’ve got in the right column is a good way to let people know that others are reading your feed. When you see 125k subscribers on Techcrunch, you figure that you may be missing out if that many people are subscribing. Even a lower number like my feed count shows that there are people who find this blog interesting enough to subscribe to.

Day 11: Use an Email RSS solution
Feedburner and Feedblitz both provide ways that users can subscribe to an RSS feed via e-mail. This is great for users who are more comfortable with receiving email newsletters or just don’t know much about RSS.

Day 12: Ping the ping services
Using Feedburner, a blogging platform like Wordpress, or Pingomatic, you can set up your feed to all the blog and feed search engines. This will help drive new users to your site and feed.

Day 13: Use Feed analytics to improve
Use Feedburner’s analytics to find out information about your feed. See what posts are read most and create more posts of that type. Look at what feed readers are used and include easy-subscribe buttons for those readers, or talk about them on your Abour RSS page. You can also use it to track your progress as you grow your subscriber count, and by Day 13 it should have grown tremendously!

Day 14: Make your feed worth reading
If your feed isn’t worth reading, you’ll lose any subscribers you do gain, and they’ll never sign up in the first place if your content is crap. The following tips are all focused on helping you create a quality feed and to keep your subscribers:

• Be relevant and on-topic
• Use great post titles worth reading
• Publish full feeds instead of just summaries
• Avoid ads in your feeds
• Post often, but not too often
• Post original content

If you can manage to crank through all that in less than 14 days, that’s great as well. But if you follow those 14 steps, you’re guaranteed to grow your RSS subscriber count.

Via Conversionrater.com.