Basics of Email Marketing

Most Marketers will agree that email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your products and make money online. However, you can imagine when people open the inboxes there will be tons of emails and they may not have the time to read all emails. The worst case will be that they just delete the emails which are not relevant. As a result, you will need to send your email with care.

This first thing is that you should try to build your own targeted opt-in email marketing safelist. You should never just buy an email list and use it, even if it is a legal one.

After you have built your targeted opt-in email marketing safelist, it is the turn of the actual email, you need to pay extra attention to the title. Most marketers will spend a lot of time on the content of the email but they will just forget the title. In fact, the title is as important as the content, since the subscribers will decide whether to go on reading or not buy skimming the titles.

Considering the contents of your emails. Basically you have two types of contents. You may send promotion letters to the subscribers or you can also send them some useful contents. Sometimes you will send a mix of the two. You should try to send your subscribers all these three of emails. One day you may send them some useful contents. This is important since this can help to ensure them to continue to read your emails in the future. And the other day you will send them promotion letters.

No matter what kind of contents you are sending, you should try to keep it brief, short and to the point. This is because your subscribers who subscribed to your targeted opt-in email marketing safelistmay not have the patience to read a long email!

Paid Survey and Make Money Online

Nowadays there are a lot of different website which recruit people to do paid survey online. It is very true that some companies would like to get opinions of the public on say their products. And this is why they will pay people to do surveys. And the research conducted by these companies, or marketers, are sometimes international since there are products which are sold all over the world.

If you are planning to make money online from doing paid surveys, here are some tips for you:

  1. Join at least five paid survey programs.

  2. Be true to yourself. Do try to provide fake information just because you want to make more money.

  3. Be committed. You will need to spend say an hour everyday to complete some survey so that you will be able to have steady income.

  4. Check your junk mail box. The emails from the survey sites may fall into the junk mail box. You may choose to put them to the safe list so that you won't miss any chance of completing surveys.

  5. Do not join programs which require you to pay before you join. This is important to avoid scams.


With all these tips in mind you should be able to make some money from paid surveys.

Keyword Research - Things you need to do before you write your contents

I always hold a view that if you are writing for a certain topic it will be naturally optimized. In fact I am still hold this view. However, you need to find a topic to write for your niche though. In this case keyword research will be very important.

By conducting keyword research, you are trying to find:

  • Keywords that are of lower competitions

  • Keywords that are of high search volume


It will be very difficult to get high ranking for extremely competitive keyword and the above two points become very crucial. To be more specific, long tail keywords are usually easier to optimize for.

Normally, long tail keywords contains three or more words. Taking "office supplies" for example, a long tail of it will be "local office supplies in New York City". From this you should be able to figure out that the chance of getting a high ranking for the long tail key words should be a lot higher. Of course you may have fewer clicks to your site even if you get thr first place in Google. However, since it is highly target, the conversions can probably be very high with the long tail keyword.

How Do You Design a Killer Landing Page?

I was talking about if you will need a landing page in the previous entry. The question is: How do you design it if you decide to create one. In fact, the key of creating a successful landing page is to test and tweak.

I just read an eBook on creating landing page. It defines the different steps when making the landing page. These six steps are
  1. Conversion Defination

  2. Selecting URLs and Hosting

  3. Demographic Research

  4. Graphic Elements, Layout and Form Design

  5. Copywriting

  6. Testing and tweaking
This eBook also talks about some mistakes marketers will make when creating the landing page. Though I think some parts of this ebook is too general and it will be perfect if there can be more examples and illustrations (As a matter of fact it is a trial version of the paid ebook). But I still think it is worth taking this free copy and read it.

You can grab this free ebook from http://www.plurapage.com/ISBasics/

Landing Page - Do you need it?

A lot of affiliate marketers make use of landing pages to help to promote the products. A landing page is a web page you will use to presell the products you are going to promote.

In fact you may not really need a lading pages if you are managed to promote your affiliate links directly. However, if you are trying to promote your affiliate links directly on PPC system like the AdWords, the system many eventually filter out your links. In this case you will need a landing page since by doing that you link will not be filter out.

Besides, if you are going to do article marketing, some directories such as ezinarticles.com do not allow affiliate links and also in this case you will need to create a content page.

However, if you are just starting to test the effectiveness of certain keywords in Adwords, you may just use FRAME to mask your affilaite link for the moment and do the test first. Then you can decide how you do the landing page after your test.

Copywriting for your website - Intense Relevance

I have just gone through an article titled "Intense Relevance". It is about the contents of a website. It suggests that search engines is becoming smarter and we should now create the contents for real human beings.

Besides, it also suggests we should define the target audience for a particular website. It means that it will focus on a certain topic so that the website will not be diluted.

I think this is totally in line with my thought about copywriting of a website. We do not create a website for search engine. We are creating a website for human beings. Even if you want to make money with your website, who is going to pay you are human beings. It will be pointless to create a website barely for search engine.

Of course there are also something I do not totally agree with the author. In the article, it is also suggested we do not need to care too much about PageRank and link popularity. The backlinks will grow naturally if you provide fresh and unique contents. However, my opinion is that you cannot just make the website and wait for the results, you need to promote it anyway. You still need to do some link building work. However, you can treat the link building work as a way to build up traffic but not PR. And in this way your PR should be built up naturally.

I will suggest you to read this interesting and fruitful article from:
http://www.copywritingexperts.co.uk/latest-seo-developments

Making Money with Web 2.0 by Rich Schefren

A report called Doctrine Volume 2 by a web millionaire Rich Schefren was released and I think it is worth reading. Basically it is talking about how you can make money online in this Web 2.0 World.

Of course I think it is a must read report for people who are serious about making money online. However, I think the points Rich made are quite interesting and I will also recommend all others to read this report. I think the parts about Drawing Attentions and how the web 2.0 world can destroy a big company are quite interesting to read.

You can download a copy of the report from: http://www.strategicprofits.com/doctrinenew/

PR Dropped - No Need to Panic

There are some views recently that the Page Rank (PR) does not really related to the ranking of a site on Google at all.

I cannot tell for sure if it is true. What I have observed is that there are sites with very low PR but they get a very high rank for some keywords on Google. However, this still doesn't mean that the proposition is a correct one. There are too many factors that can affect the rankings.

However, what I suggest is that you do not need to panic if you find that the PR of your websites dropped. You cannot control this anyway. As long as you do not go for the black hat techniques, it will be ok. At the end of the day it can be sure that the importance of PR will be less since there are so many sites that sell and buy links. Unless Google work out a new formula for PR.

Getting Indexed by Google

When you have developed your new website, the first step you need to do on SEO is to make your website be indexed by Google. The most obvious way is to submit it via

http://www.google.com/addurl/

However, it will take you up to a few weeks (if not months) in order to have it indexed. In fact, there are services that can help to get your website indexed by Google within 48 hours.

There is nothing magical about this 48-hour-inclusion. You can also do it yourself. If you have some website which are already indexed by Google, you can place the link of you new website on the index page of these old websites for a few days and your new website will probably be indexed in 2 to 3 days.

If your existing websites are of totally different contents and themes compared with your new site, your other option will be post articles (with links back to your new website) to related niche on article directories.

I have used this method for nearly all my websites and it does work. So you do not need to wait for weeks in order to have your website indexed.

Affiliate Programs - A Site You Must Visit

I came across an interesting website on affiliate marketing last week. In fact it is a blog and the webmaster is called Paul. From the information of the blog, he can really make quite a large amount of money from affiliate marketing. He is really a super affiliate.

From his blog, he shares his experiences on affiliate marketing. It covers most of the topics you will need to know about affiliate programs. From finding a niche, choosing keyword to designing the landing page. Of course you should not expect he will tell you all the technique and secrets of his success in affiliate marketing. But it is still good to learn something from him.

His website is http://uberaffiliate.com/ and you should visit this site when you have time.

Submission to Free Directories

One of the ways to gain link popularity is to submit your website to directories. There are a lot of different directories out there, some are paid and some are free.

For the free directories, some of them may require you to put a reciprocal link to their directories while some will not. My suggestion is to submit to directories which do not require reciprocal link unless your website is related to issues like directory submissions.

To submit to the directories, you will need to write titles, descriptions and may be keywords for your websites. It is better to have some variations of them since the search engines will love variations.

Besides, the directories may require you to give them email address. This may lead to a lot of spam email. You can create an email account which is for submission so that your main email accounts will not be "attacked" by the spam emails due to the directory submissions. There is also a view that the chance of getting approval will be higher if the email you submit is of the same domain name of your website. In fact it is not verified but I think it will do you no harm if you can have such an email address.

It will not be easy to find all these free directories. Luckily you can get lists of these directories from:

http://info.vilesilencer.com/

and

http://www.directorycritic.com/

The Myth of 25 Outbound Links

There are suggestions that there should be less than 25 outbound links. Here the magic number 25 should be referred to the maximum number of outbound links in one page.

In fact, no "SEO expert" knows exactly the algorithm of Google. I have personally see a page which contains more than 200 outbound links but it still get a good ranking in Google.

Maybe the 200 outbound links page is a rare case and there is no point for you to have such a page. If you would like to play safe, you may follow the "rule of 25 links" and it should at least do no harm to your website.

AdSense - Points to Consider

AdSense may probably be one of the best options when you try to make money online at the first time. You can just applied for an account and start earning as long as the contents of your website do not violate the policy of AdSense.

Some newbies may find that it is difficult to earn with AdSense, especially when the traffic to the site is not that high. The issue of traffic will be related more to the idea of SEO. I will focus more on AdSense itself in this post. In fact there are some ways to maximize the possible earnings:

  1. The very first thing you need to consider is the contents of your website. As we all know, there are some high paying keywords and you can possibly earn more if the contents of your website match these keywords. One of these keywords is the word "mortgages"

  2. You should keep your website focused. If your website is about making money online, it will attract people who have interest in this topic. Since the Adsense advertisement will be related to the topic, people will be more likely to click the advertisement.

  3. The last point is the position and design of your Advertisement. You have to test whether advertisement blending with your layout design works better or a little contrast is better, you can make use the channel to keep tracking of each individual adv space.


To me, I think the most difficult part is the third point. Since the test will be an endless process and variation over time may be good since it will be more fresh to your readers. And there is no definite answer for the design of the advertisement. So the only way is trial and error.

Choosing Social Bookmark Submission Services

Social bookmarking should be one of the tasks in your link building campaign. What is good about social bookmarking is that after submitting your site or blog entries, it will be included in the social bookmarking site instantly. As most of us know, you will need to wait at least for a while if you submit your website to directories. Besides, some social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us are of high Pagerank (PR). Submitting to social bookmarks can help you to develop the PR of your website.

There are a lot of websites or companies which provide social bookmark submission services. However, not all of them are equally good. If you are going to spend some money to hire others to submit to social bookmarks, you should not merely make the decision merely based on the prices. My suggestion will be:
  • Study the list of social bookmarking sites that will be submitted to. You have to make sure at least the most important sites are included.

  • Choose manual submission services. I have tried some so called automated program and it will just waste you time and money.

  • Only consider the service if they will register a new account in the bookmarking sites for submission when you place your order.

The last point is very important. I have tried some services which do not register new accounts and when I manually submitted my website to social bookmarking sites, I found that my website is "blocked" by some of the bookmarking sites. This is because the account of the people I hired for submission is considered spammer.

Of course you will need to register a new account every time if you are going to submit to the bookmarking sites yourself.

Remember, there is no FREE LUNCH in the world, you have to work if you would like to make real money online.

Find the best keyword for your niche

It is always believed that in order to make money online with your website, your website needs to be listed and ranked well in Google. This will fall back to the idea of SEO. However, there are some keywords which are more competitive and more difficult to rank well. On the contrary, there are some keywords which are less competitive and you may get a good rank relatively easier.

So, how do you determine the best keyword for your website or your niche. Here "the best" means keywords that are popular for searchers but with little competitions. There are basically some ways to research on the best keywords.

1 Using Software

One of the software that can help is Word Tracker. By using this software, you can get an index with the keywords you choose and you can know if the keywords are good as your target from the index. Another software, Wordze, can also do this job.

2 Calculating Yourself

You can make use of the Overture Keyword Tool to get an estimation of the number of searches in a month for your keyword, you can then simply divide this number by the total number of results shown in Google when you search for the keywords. i.e.

Estimated number from Overture / Total number of results in Google = INDEX

The larger the INDEX, the better the keywords are. Some people may further manipulate the formula in order to get a result which suits his/her needs. For example, some may take the square of the numerator to be divided by the total number of results in Google. As a matter of fact, the Overture Keyword Tool has not been updated for a long time. If you would want to get some more updated estimation of total volume of searches, you may also try Keyword Discovery Tool, which is free.

Besides the above, there are still some other issues you need to consider. You need to take a look at the search results in Google to see if the web pages getting the highest rank are highly optimized. If this is the case, it will be difficult for you to get a good rank, although there is less competition. This is also know as a problem about such index. It is assumed that the difficulties in getting from 1000th to 500th will be the same as getting from 500th to 1th. But this is not true in most cases.

As a result, you should not just rely on the index or the formula, you have also to take other issues into account in order to get the best keywords.

Article Marketing for Newbies

You may have heard of article marketing before but have you tried it before? In fact, article marketing can be one of the things you do for your link building campaign. By writing artilces with good quality, you will put the links of your websites in the resources box or about the author section so that you can get backlinks when your article is approved.

You can submit your articles to multiple article sites so that you can get even more backlinks. To make life easier, you can join some article distribution program so that you do not need to submit the article website by website. Some such programms are articlemarketer.com and isnare.com. Both of these can be good choices.

However, one problem of submitting an article to multiple sites is that there will be a lot of duplicated contents and this may make the quality of the backlink lower. As a result, what I usually do is writing an article and submit it using isnare or articlemarketer. Then I will write a few slightly different versions of the article and hand submit them to article websites with high PR (Pagerank). Some of these websites are:

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.contentdesk.com

There is also a article site Goarticles.com, which is also good but you can have submmissions to it if you join the distribution program of isnare.com.

Make Money Online with Your Hobbies (Taking Photos)

There are tremendous way to make money online. Mr. John Chow is a perfect example. Of course you can also try to make money online by blogging. And indeed I am also trying to do so. For people who do not want to write, there are still other options. One of them is to sell their photos to stock photo sties.

This option is very perfect for you if you love taking photos. You are just trying to make some extra money from your hobby. Once you sign up accounts with such stock photo websites, you can upload your photos and you can virtually do nothing and wait for the results after the photos are approved. When someone download your photo, you will be paid a certain amount of commission.

In order to increase the chance of getting more money, the quality of the photos will be very essential since people will only download photos of high quality, they will probably use them for their design projects. You can go the the stock photo sites to take references to the quality of the photos. The amount of photos you have upload and are approved also plays an important role. The key is that when you have a new collection of photos, you can upload them so that you can make the number of photos being approved larger.

If your hobby is taking photo, you can start making money by joining some of the stock photo sites:

http://www.fotolia.com/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://submit.shutterstock.com/
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/

Checking Your Pagerank

Pagerank (PR), which is a Google invention (in fact it was invented by Larry Page, one of the founder of Google Inc.), is a numerical value to measure both the quantity and quality of the inbound links to a web page.

Some webmasters have a wrong perception that PR is for a whole website. But the truth is that every single web page in a website will have its own PR value. Of course the index page of a website would be of the highest PR value in most cases.

Why the PR value is so important? It is believe to be one of the important factors affecting the ranking of a web page. In terms of Making Money Online, the RP value can affect the prices of advertisement spaces in your website. A higher PR value will probably imply advertisement space. This is very important, right?

You can download Google Toolbar and you will see the Pagerank of the website pages you are surfing.

Personally, I will go to the following web page to check the PR value of my web sites:
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

About Link Popularity

Many SEO companies will stress on the importance of on site optimization, which is to optimize the content in your website.

There is no doubt the the contents are very important. However, it will be better to write the contents for the readers but not the search engine. What will be the use of SEO or getting a first position in search engine if the contents in your website is not catered for your readers. There will not be conversions if the readers do not find your website interesting or useful.

Besides, to my experience, when you start doing the SEO work, you will have some initial results after a week of so, unless you are aiming at some really popular keywords. Do not trust the "SEO experts" who tell you that it will take at least say three months to see the results.

And the most important thing is that inbound link is more important if you are aiming at google. My experience is that you can get a good place in google if you have good inbound links. And this is true even if your website does not really optimized for the keywords that the inbound links give you.

Welcome to This New Blog

Hi my name is Jerry. Welcome to this new blog. I will try to discuss and share with all with your folks about my ideas and experiences on making money online and SEO. Sometimes I will also share with you what I experience everyday.

I hope you will visit this blog from time to from.
Various Resources on Ways to Make Money Online. Ideas about SEO, internet marketing are shared in this blog.