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Here are some of my favorite posts from August.

Blog Commenting

Build Your Business Reputation With Blog Comments
I gave a couple tips on improving your personal brand through blog commenting.

So, which blogs should you comment on? Here are two posts that give a total of 10 things to look for in blogs.

• 5 Principles For Choosing Blogs To Comment On
• 5 More Principles For Picking Blogs To Comment On

Practical Tips

The Best Productivity Tip Ever
This simple tip helps you focus on what’s really important in your online business.

How To Write More In Less Time
Want to increase your writing speed? Then keep the writing process separate from the editing process.

Monetization

“AdSense Or Bust” Is Not A Good Monetization Strategy
Here are a couple reasons why putting all your monetization eggs in the AdSense basket is not a good idea.

Monetization Methods More Profitable Than AdSense
These methods take more work, but they’ll make you more money than AdSense.

Quality Content

I posted twice about what to aim for to increase the quality of your content.

• Characteristics Of Quality Content
• Characteristics Of Quality Content, Part 2

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who’s reading this blog. I hope you stick around for next month. Also, I want to welcome the new RSS subscribers. Thanks for subscribing.

Here’s to a profitable September :)

Video seems to be the latest development in the make money online blogosphere. As I go through my RSS reader, I see more and more video. Mark Wielgus has done video on a consistent basis in the last couple of weeks. And other bloggers (like Nate, Darren, Yaro, and Glen) are joining him by producing their own online videos.

Now, I have nothing against video. I did a video case study last month. I think video is effective. The conversion rate for video is higher than text or audio. I like producing video. However, I’d rather read text than watch video.

I can process more information faster by reading since I read pretty quickly. I can learn more efficiently by reading.

I think I’m in the minority. I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies. I love reading. I like listening to podcasts when I exercise or drive. But I realize online video will be more and more important because the present generation is much more visual than the previous generation. Just look at YouTube’s insane traffic volume.

What about you? How much online video do you watch? Do you like video posts more than text or audio posts?

The title is a quote from John Chow’s post, If You Build It They Won’t Come. You may not agree with the percentages, but it’s hard to argue with someone who has close to 8000 RSS subscribers. You can have the best content in the world, but if you’re not marketing, how will anyone find your blog in the midst of the millions of blogs on the web?

John Chow admits,

There are tons of small blogs that can write better content than me.

However, because he focuses so much on marketing, he has a much more visitors than those small blogs. He writes,

Learning how to generate a buzz will get you a lot further than learning how to write a better blog post.

Here’s my theory. A blogger who posts twice a week and spends 4 hours a week marketing will have much more traffic than a blogger who posts 4 times a week and spends 2 hours a week marketing.

Check out this comment from John’s post:

One of the best things I did is cut my posting down a little bit and spend that extra time promoting and since then my RSS is up and traffic has increased five fold!

Marketing dictates how much targeted traffic you will get. And targeted traffic dictates how much money you will earn. And don’t think I’m saying, forget about content. High quality content is crucial to the long-term success of any site. However, you probably don’t need to create as much weekly content as you think. Quality over quantity. And then, market that quality content like crazy :)

Write less. Market more.

In your online business adventures, you’ve probably gained some skills you didn’t have before. Maybe you’ve become a quality writer. Maybe you’ve learned how to make good-looking designs through Photoshop. Maybe you’ve become a skilled php programmer. If you’re like me, you’ve grown leaps and bounds in your understanding of search marketing. Each of these skills (and many others) can be the foundation of a great freelancing career.

Think about your online skills. With a little bit of marketing, you can find webmasters that will pay for your expertise.

Why Freelance?

Freelancing…

• can be done in your spare time to increase cash flow.
• builds your online business contacts.
• gives you valuable experience.
• helps you become better in your field of discipline.
• can allow you to quit your day job.

Starting Out

If you’re just starting out, don’t expect to be able to charge a high rate. It takes time to build your reputation as a freelancer. But as you do good work for your clients, your reputation will grow and you’ll be able to charge higher rates.

Marketing

Start a blog.
Even if you post once a week, your blog will help presell for your services. Here are five other reasons to start a blog.

1. Grow your network
2. Showcase your expertise
3. Generate a side revenue
4. Test drive new projects
5. Become visible in Google

Go to popular webmaster and internet marketing forums.
Forums like Digital Point are great places to network and find clients. In many of these forums, you can post your services. However, don’t just do that. Participate in the forum community by interacting with other forum members and posting useful information.

Scour job boards.
Check out this massive job board list.

Where To Get More Help

Here are two blogs that give great advice to freelancers.

Freelance Switch
Freelance Folder

Update: My friend just started Freelancing Tips.

Feedback

Any freelancers reading this? How have you grown your freelance online business?

I’m continuing the discussion of quality content from yesterday. Here are some other characteristics of quality content.

Useful

If someone needed information about your niche, would you point them to your content? One of my regular readers emailed me for help. As I started replying to him, I realized the reply I wanted to give him was already on this blog and another blog I write for. So, I sent him a message filled with links to my blog posts.

Also, you need to know what questions your target audience is asking. You need to know what problems they’re trying to solve. It’s easy to write about the things you like. But it takes the hard work of doing market research to write content that answers your audience’s questions and solves their problems.

Unique

Are you the 50th person in the last month to write about a certain topic? Are there already many resources in the topic you want to write about? If so, you most definitely need to add a unique spin to your content.

My favorite way of developing unique content is to immerse myself in a niche. Next, I ask myself, what relevant topics are not being covered in the niche? Then, I simply write about those topics.

Feedback

How do you determine the quality of your content? What are some other characteristics of quality content?

I like to think of online business like a 2-story building. (Please excuse my drawing. I’m not an artist by any stretch of the imagination.)

Step 1: Content

The foundation is content. Pun intended. Content is the key to a good long-term online business. Why? Because marketing costs time and money. You want to have content that gets passed on naturally through the internet. You still need to do marketing but you’re hoping much of your marketing will be done freely through word-of-mouth. And to leverage word-of-mouth, you need to have quality content worth talking about.

So, spend a lot of time planning and producing your content. Create a content blueprint to organize your content ideas. For me, this blueprint is a list of different types of content. For example:

• Tutorial
• Interview
• News
• Humorous article
• Commentary on industry happenings
• Video
• Audio
• Series of articles on one topic
• List
• Guest Article

Step 2: Marketing

Next comes marketing. With the growing amount of information on the internet, marketing has become more important. There are many sites with great content that don’t have much traffic because no one knows about them. Marketing is simply the activity of letting people know about your site.

I would create a marketing blueprint. However, spend most of my marketing time in a few marketing channels. It’s not advisable to stretch your marketing efforts too thin. Marketing channels take time to cultivate before they’re fully effective. Of course, if you have a lot of time for marketing or the money to outsource, go ahead and use more marketing channels. Here are some marketing methods that have proven effective for webmasters.

• Blog commenting
• Social media sites
• Press releases
• Forum posting
• Guest blogging
• Article submission
• Video submission

Step 3: Monetization

Finally, we have monetization. Now that you’ve thought about content and marketing, you can focus on converting your traffic into dollars. The key here is understanding your traffic. Why are they coming to your site? What are their problems? What can you sell them that would solve their problems?

Also, think of advertisers with products your audience would find useful. Contact those advertisers and see if they would be partner with you. Here are some methods for monetizing your site.

• Contextual advertising
• Advertising through a broker
• Direct advertising
• Reviews
• Affiliate offers
• Sell your own product or service
• Donations

Feedback

How do you juggle these 3 steps?

You’ve probably heard it before. If you want to make money online, you need to have quality content. But how do you know if your content is quality? How should you evaluate your content? Here are some things to think about when evaluating the quality of your content.

Bookmark Worthy

Can you see someone bookmarking your content? This means they intend to come back to your site. What can you write that will cause visitors to return to your site?  Here are some ideas for developing bookmark worthy content. Write a comprehensive resource that takes longer than 5 minutes to read. Start a series of articles covering one topic in depth. Make a list of useful tutorials.

Link Worthy

Can you see someone linking to your content? Let’s get more specific. Who would be linking to you? This question helps you target your content to specific people.

For example, find 3 popular blogs that link out regularly. Now be relevant to your own readers, so choose blogs in the same niche. Follow those blogs for a couple of weeks and see what kind of content the bloggers link to. When you get a feel for their linking habits, create similar content. Even if you don’t get links from the 3 blogs, you might get links from bloggers that follow those blogs. Just make sure you’re also promoting your blog through blog commenting and other marketing tactics.

Here’s the main principle. The link worthiness of any piece of content depends on the link givers, or the linkerati. Write with them in mind.

Stick Around

Tomorrow I’ll have more characteristics of quality content.

How are you making your content bookmark and link worthy?

17 days ago, I wrote about a blogging exercise to find gardening blogs worth commenting on. I chose the gardening niche, because I know nothing about gardening and I wanted to challenge my niche research skills. Well, I finally did the exercise myself. Here’s how it went.

8:50pm
I started by Googling garden blog. I went to the 2nd webpage on the search engine results page (SERP). It was blog, but it didn’t allow comments. I went back to the SERP and visited the 1st webpage, a garden blog directory. The directory had a lot of gardening blogs listed, but no real way to determine the popular blogs. However, as I was scrolling through the directory, I noticed a Feedburner FeedCount chicklet. The directory was part of a gardening blog with over 400 RSS subscribers!

I went to the homepage, ColdClimateGardening.com. It was definitely a good blog to comment on. The blogger posted regularly and usually got more than 10 comments per post.

9:00pm
I looked back at the SERP. The 3rd webpage was another good gardening blog, Tangled Branches Blog. It had comments on most posts, though not as many as the first blog. Also, the blogger posted regularly with 10 posts in August already.

9:10pm
I went back to the SERP and visited the 4th webpage, a gardening blog based in Alaska. It didn’t have a lot of comments, probably because you had to register to comment. However, the bloggers there posted almost daily. And the domain had an Alexa rank of less than 30,000.

9:15pm
I hit the back button and examined the SERP again. The 5th webpage was a video game site and the 6th webpage was a gardening blog that wasn’t updated regularly.

I tried Mahalo, a directory/search engine. When I typed gardening blog, it gave me the option of searching for gardening blogs and forums. I tried that option, but it just gave me a list of gardening forums. I went back and searched for gardening blog, but it gave me google search results. Back to square one.

9:20pm
I finished looking through the rest of the SERP. The 7th webpage was a huge list of gardening blogs. The 8th and 9th webpage were rarely updated blogs while the 10th webpage was a blog that didn’t allow comments.

At this point, I felt stuck in my search to find 2 more good gardening blogs to comment on.

9:25pm
Instead of going to the 2nd SERP, I tried a new search: most popular gardening blogs. The 1st webpage was the gardening blog on About.com. I expected to find a lot of comments. However, most of the posts did not have comments. Also, the posts were really short.

9:30pm
The About.com’s gardening blog had a small blogroll so I visited the blogroll links. I found two good blogs. The first is My Grandpa’s Garden. This blog had daily posts. And all the posts on the front page had at least one comment except for one post.

9:40pm
The second is Heavy Petal. As I was looking on this blog’s comments, I saw a commenter that had also posted on one of the other gardening blogs. I clicked through the commenter’s link and found this blog, Bumblebee Blog. The Bumblebee blogger had only posted 7 times so far in August. However, she had comments on every post.

9:50pm
I went through the blogs again to rank them. I had to drop the garden blog from Alaska, because they didn’t allow links for commenters.

Here’s how I ranked the blogs in commenting effectiveness:

1. Cold Climate Gardening - most commented blog; 400 RSS subscribers gives evidence that it has a lot of traffic; only 3 posts in August because the blogger is taking a break; however, it’s a five year blog and July had many posts, so I think the blogger will continue posting regularly after her break
2. My Grandpa’s Garden - most updated blog; also well-commented
3. Tangled Branches Blog - 2nd most commented blog; also, the blogger does a great job interacting with her commenters
4. Heavy Petal - well-commented but only 9 posts in August
5. Bumblebee Blog - well-commented but only 7 posts in August; also, due to the blogging software, it takes two clicks to get to a commenter’s website

Two bloggers participated in this exercise so they get free links. First, Simon at Simon’s Money Notes posted about his experience. We didn’t find any of the same blogs. Second, Emma at Garden Ideas wrote about choosing gardening blogs. She’s already a gardening blogger, so she had a huge head start. I actually picked one of her five blogs.

I haven’t been blogging very long, so I’m not qualified to give the number #1 all-time blogging tip. However, Chris Garrett, who makes his living as a professional blogger, recently gave his most important blogging tip on the Blog Herald.

Give before you get.

Simple but highly useful and effective. I took his tip and evaluated my blogging to see if I was giving before getting.

Content: I link out frequently to other bloggers. However, I try not to just link out but also add my thoughts to the blogger’s post. I’ve linked out to people who have left insightful questions in the comments section. Also, I’ve given out links to bloggers who wrote useful content by answering a forum question in their niche.

Marketing: Some of you are really good at blog commenting. I think I’ve seen Glen Allsopp, one of my regular readers, comment on virtually every internet marketing blog I’ve visited this week. However, I’ve decided to go a different route with my marketing. With my busy freelance work, I only have time for one method of marketing. I’m focusing on social media sites. I’ve been participating on StumbleUpon and Netscape by making friends, submitting stories, and commenting on other people’s submissions.

What about you? How are you giving before getting?

Publisher Spot is the brainchild of Tyler Cruz. It claims to give “professional reviews of ad networks.” But does it live up to its promise? Let’s find out.

Design

The design is looks professional. It’s got a nice logo and attractive graphics.

The first thing you’ll notice is news section above the fold. This section gives the latest updates of the site. I don’t have anything against a news section. It’s a good thing to have. However, for a review site, it shouldn’t have the prime location. I would put it below the fold.

What should be above the fold then? The most important content. And Tyler’s most important content is definitely his reviews. So, I would stick a review where the news section is. He could even highlight a different ad network every month or week to keep the front page fresh.

Content Quality

I was impressed with the quality of the content. The reviews are lengthy and cover a lot of relevant information. Here is some of that information:

• Features
• Sign Up Process
• Ad Formats
• Control Panel
• Payment
• Customer support

As you can see, Tyler’s staff did their homework.

I particularly like the customer support section of the reviews. Tyler’s staff tests the customer support of the ad networks. In the Bidvertiser review, they called Bidvertiser customer support. In the PayPerPost review, they interacted in the PerPerPost customer support forum. In the AdSense review, they emailed AdSense with support questions.

Miscellaneous

Tyler should add an RSS feed and email newsletter to notify people whenever he reviews a new ad network.

There are no ads, which is awesome for the visitor experience. This is also a good monetization strategy because Publisher Spot is an affiliate site. Ads can distract the visitor from the main goal, getting an affiliate sale through an affiliate link. Also, Tyler masks his affiliate links with clean URLs, which adds even more value to the user experience.

As of this post, Tyler has 19 reviews with more to come. His reviews include well-known and reputable networks like Google AdSense, Auction Ads, Kontera, PayPerPost, Text Link Ads, and ReviewMe. I’m surprised Yahoo Publisher Network didn’t make the list. I would review them next.

You can rate the different ad networks in their respective reviews.

Publisher Spot has a good search feature. In the basic search, you can search by rating and category. The advanced search function allows more search options including payment methods, ad types, and ad sizes.

Conclusion

All in all, if you’re thinking about joining an ad network, I recommend reading the Publisher Spot review of the network. Publisher Spot is a great place to learn more about the different ad networks. It has some small issues that I’ve talked about, but its content is excellent. The reviews are useful and comprehensive.

Sponsored by: PublisherSpot.com