NetBusinessBlogWork from Home and Run an Online Business / Over 400+ Articles

The single most important part of promotion for any website or blog is getting more and more traffic, then using that traffic to make lots of money. Even untargeted traffic can be good traffic. Most businesses are based around a numbers game, unless you’re doing it just for the love!

Lets pick out some well known online bloggers in the Make Money Online niche and sum-up their route to Stardom!

ProBlogger - this guy did it the long way by just being good at blogging and offering his readers top quality Articles. (he got in early also and stuck with it)

This all boils down too, how can you do the same and get the same amount of traffic with a kiss ass loyal following and wads of cash?

If you cannot follow in the footsteps of Mr Chow and write Digg, Slash quality posts which I’m sure are not quality but nerdy enough to get Dugg lots of times which equals insane amounts of traffic.

If you cannot copy ShoeMoney and gain weight fast then document the whole thing on your blog with the odd sperodict post about making money online (you’ll have a loyal following in no time) with this one. Oh and Photoshop a Picture of some fat Adsense cheque.

If you cannot commit yourself to the long, drawn out and the boring way (sorry Darren but you just seem boring) of knocking out quality posts, licking major industry CEOs asses and being an all round goody-two-shoes but also providing solid content to your readers.

Then do the following:

#Stop blogging for money.
#Buy your traffic wisely (set a monthly budget).
#Get a Quality Design (theme).
#Hire a Very Good Writer (pay them well).
#Be as fussy (anal) as possible.
#Test many different Ad Networks to find the best conversions.
#Build a Brand and think long term (people love brands).
#Have Goals in place.
#Set solid reasonable advertising rates that suit your blogs traffic and visitors.
#Build interaction with your Visitors/Readers

Within about a year if you do all these things right you should become the Next Blogging Rockstar! then again 80% of the people reading this will not get of their lazy ass to do it - the other 20% well…Good Luck!

Happy New Year to all of you!

Fairly unanimous I guess. I’m not happy with the outcome as I really wanted to add this for January and may still do it. It was worth doing the Poll to gauge some opinions.

Some quick news, we have been having hosting issues which have now been fixed and also the new theme is getting closer. Again I wanted so many features I have had to drop some just to get the theme Live!

I would like to thank Hostgator for being a great host, although I have given them a bit of grief this month. I will be leaving them next month but I still have a Reseller Plan with them which I have had since 2005 and never had any issues with (small downtime). I really like that fact these guys are available at anytime day or night which is good to know in a Host.

You need to have confidence in your host as these guys hold your business up online. When you site goes down you lose visitors and or money

Just in case you want to know, I have a Dedicated Server on NetBusinessBlog.

Spec:

Processor Pentium 4 2.4Ghz
DDR Memory 1024mb
Hard Drive 80gb SATA
Bandwidth 1500GB
Monthly Price $174.00

HostGator have 20% off until January 1st - you can get this plan for just $139.20 using Coupon Code “SNOWMAN” in the checkout.

Note: The only reason I’m leaving them is because I have bagged a fully managed plan with some of the guys I use in the UK. Otherwise I was happy enough with Hostgators Dedicated Plans.

In my next update, I will be letting you all know how I’m getting on building my Mini Niche Forum

I am an Amazon Affiliate and have been promoting their products via Google Adwords. One major issue with being an Amazon Affiliate is their tracking, you’d think the World’s number one eCommerce Store would try and help their hard working Affiliates as much as possible.

Unfortuntely this is not the case, one headache is Live Tracking which they do not offer. So, for me using Google Adwords I need to track my sales live to make sure I’m getting the best ROI (Return On Investment) and using the best converting Keywords but I cannot. I will only find this out 24 hours later and then I may have lost a lot of money.

You see Amazon track(s) sales over a 24 hour period, so I can only see If I sold that product 24 hours later which is a bit of a guessing game.

November 20th to December 27th earnings. Cost (spend) $1000 (profit 100%)

Luckily I have found some great products this month and got lucky with some others based on popularity. But this is not ideal, and I have lost money of broke even just to see if a keyword and product is going to be profitable.

The next issue I have is CashFlow, Amazon decided not so long ago to pay all of their Affiliates Quarterly. I mean Quarterly! this is a killer with PPC Affiliates - with organic guys its obviously not a problem but for the majority this is hard and can put you under unless you have a good budget. I missed out on sales because I was making so much on one product my budget ran out and I had to wait to get paid three months later!

This only happened once and now I am looking at other ways to promote Amazon products. Just some points for you to consider if you want to promote products using PPC with Amazon.

I have tried to get a programmer to work on Amazons API to get Live tracking which would mean I could make a lot of money but it still seems we cannot do it.

I will try and get around this as you really cannot lose with Amazon because of their monster brand power and loyal following. Once a consumer see’s it’s Amazon they know they are safe to purchase which ultimately leads to high conversion ratios.

For now I have to guess and hope after I spend say $100 I sold enough products to make my 100% back or even 50% I am quite happy with. With live tracking I could really tweak my campaigns and make even more money and more importantly not loss money…

I have so far fixed my issue with the SEO (url_rewrite) so now that is done I can start getting some posting done in the forum, I think I might need to start doing this myself. One thing I’m working on today is getting a reliable quality service to help me research my market and place excellent information (posts) in the forum for the members.

Just a thought…maybe I should be thinking of starting a Membership site instead?

I have contacted one company so far who charge a basic $35 to submit 100 posts in a forum.

CommunityStarters This is cheap so lets see what the quality is like (probably using overseas non-english workers on it) if so I will not pay for the service. I need the english grammer and subject matter to be of excellent quality (obviously).

I gained valuable information using one forum just asking questions on my market place which lead me too AARP.org a very well organised website covering all manners of subjects aimed ar Seniour Citizens. Once I have enough quality information I will look to advertise with them. They seem to have strict guidelines to adhere too.

In one the forums I have used to ask questions I have now managed to list in their advertising section to gain a little bit more exposure. (might not do well yet seeing as I have an empty forum)

I am going to shell out another $10 on Sitepoint to see if I can hire a team or a person to help get the forum full of questions and answers targeted to my users.

So far my outlay has been $74 if you include the domain name, Sitepoint and SubmitEdge. (if you were to include my time that would be much more) I have decided my budget will be $500 to get the forum fully promoted. I think this is completely realistic with me putting the hours in also.

I have just found out DIRSP.com has closed down (great!) Luckily I just wen’t to pay for the service and they went down?

Going to get some information and resources in the forum next while I wait to see how my other outsource services get on. Next one to pay for is SubmitEdge - I have decided not to use GetMeContent after hearing about their unreliability. I cannot afford to waste time on a service that costs $250 p/m.

To test SUbmitEdge out I have puchased their Article Submission, if this goes well I will use their top service which costs $299 for Links, Articles, Social Bookmarking etc.

100 Article Submission Service with free Unique Article writing - 8 Days

The package is designed to submit your site to 100 high PR article sites.

* Free detailed report

* One free unique 500-word article written for your keywords.

So far so good really, now off to put some resource info in certain sections of the forum.

So far it has all been about promotion but then that is most of what you have to do with any business. The rest is easy, I find. I have now paid for VisitorHost just to get numbers flowing and have also purchased the DIRSP 1000 directories submission for $69.99 for long term link-building benefits. (I do wonder how many directories actually activate your link, but its worth doing even if I got a 10% ratio)

I have come across someone on Sitepoint who is offering their serivce for $99 USD to hand-submit a Press Release to 57+ PR Sites & Networks. This will be invaluable as it will also do wonders for both SEO and link-building.

Outsourcing these tasks allows me to concentrate on getting content in the forum but to be honest I could just outsource everything. So far I have joined four forums within my niche asking for help and advice, I might even find a user who may even help me build my forum or come on board. The possibilities are endless once you start.

I have had lots of replies in the forums to my questions which is good as I can continue (slowly) to build up ideas and relationships.

I have found a suitable replacement for the BBB Reliability Program or near enough as a lot of high end sites are using this stamp of approval and end users will know they’re in safe hands which I want.

HackerSafe will cost me $TBA (still waiting to hear from them…)

According to HackerSafe:

When you display the HACKER SAFE certification mark, you not only increase sales by increasing shopper confidence, you build your brand with the security seal seen on more top sites than any other.

I’m in good company:

* Used by over 80,000 websites
* Seen on over half of the Internet TOP 500 (as reported in Internet Retailer Magazine)
* Proven in over 800 studies to outperform other seals
* Automatic listings in HACKER SAFE Merchant Directory
* Leader in security- chosen by companies such as Yahoo!, HP and Sony

This is even more important with the users I am targeting whom will not be willing to get involved or trust my forum unless you can show them you’re a bonafide business with good intentions. All of which I am.

Next to do is get some forum posts in but I am still having issues with the SEO plugin I mentioned in my last post so once that is fixed I will be getting a team of people to start posting and finding questions to ask and answer. Should be the weekend when all of this is started.

I’m happy so far and am looking forward to seeing users in my forum in the coming weeks.

No Pain No Gain…

I added this worthless widget over a month or two ago and so far here are my results, granted the understanding is the more views your blog/site gets the more your Blog posts will be shown. But this is just a joke - my new theme is almost ready and I’m not sure wether I’m going to include this useless Widget!

I have noticed the single most important job you must do to get click throughs is to write an “Amazing Post Title” that’s if you want this promotion tool to work. And what may you ask is the good title…I don’t have the answer to that question. Well…I do, it must have trigger words that match your target market Audience, that is one key fundimental.

By looking at my stats you’ll see - Syndicated is the amount of times my Blog Post is shown across the network, talk about a bad CTR “Click Through Rate”. This is like playing Google Adwords.

You can see my last post was shown 963 times and had one click through! (reader) They are ethier not targeting my posts to business blogs or I’m just shit at Writing Click Worthy Posts (bit of both I’d say) This is not the point though. I just don’t get Blog Rush and what it is capable of doing for the benefit of this blog.

I think a better business model for BlogRush would be to get paid everytime someone clicks through to our blog, simple solution I think. That would at least motivate me to keep the crappy widget on my blog, in a prominent area anyway.

Right now the rewards for having it taking up some (advert) space on my blog is just not worth it. I’m not happy with my results so far and unless things change there just doesn’t seem to be any good reason to keep it showing right now.

Maybe others have had it better, Are you using this widget and getting outstanding results?

Watch how “John Reese” confuses himself with his own system and the contradictions are funny. Especially when he talks about the Unique Visitor only to then tell you it’s actually impressions - which is the number of times your blog post is shown on another blog which means the chances of your blog post being clicked is very slim. It all amounts to nothing. John, you’re not selling benefits here!

BlogRush Phase Two

Kontera who I use on this blog, are offering a limited time sign up deal for new publishers. I like them so far and I am Making reasonable money, need more impressions to be honest.

If you’re not sure who Kontera are, they offer content links within any website, this allows you to utilise your great content with an added revenue source that is very unobtrusive for your website or blog. I prefer Kontera to Google Adsense having not used Adsense for a long time on this blog.

Kontera use contextually relevant keywords that are discovered in real-time on a web page from within Kontera´s vast network of publishers, which automatically turn a link into the most relevant ad from amongst Kontera´s thousands of advertisers.

With ContentLink™ publishers generate incremental revenue while advertisers reach their most targeted audience on a Cost-Per-Click basis.

Give them a try…

$25 Sign Up to Kontera (Limited Time Offer)

a new regular feature for NBB will be the Sunday Night BreakDown which will feature talented and maybe the not so talented people who are found on the wonder that is YouTube!

First one up tonight is a 14 Year old kid from the UK. I play Guitar so I am always impressed when I see other musicians playing great music, his Bass skill for his age is truly outstanding (Cover of Victor Wooten’s “U Can’t Hold No Groove”)

Second to feature is this French guy on France’s version of “Idol” I had to watch it over and over. Amazing! Better than some boring singer doing a cover of Celine Dion of something similar…

Yesterday I spent the day scouring around for more services to promote the forum. I ended up paying for this service VisitorHost just as a test to find out what sort of traffic I get, funnily enough I have just noticed a PR3 for oapinsure.com/index.php - Google you little devils!

I joined one forum and posted a question about getting Insurance being over 50+ this may help find websites I need for later promotion and monetization.

My Actual post -

Hello all,

Looking for Insurers who deal with clients over 50+ ?

Thank you.

I will need to do this in at least ten forums to start getting answers and then I can start slowly building a following I hope. I have done some little tweaks to the site (a little as promotion is key) I had a good look around the Phorum.org community and ended up using some nice plugins that suit what I needed.

I used one called Banner Management which made it a sinch to add banner, text ads to any pages on the forum. The other was a Style management to change the colours when I want too. SEO wise again I used a plugin (mod_rewrite) this enables Search Friendly URLs I also changed the title and head tags. We all know how important TITLE tags are to search engines and nice looking URLs will help Google Spiders and my users hence why I do this from the start.

Note: I’m having problems with the mod_rewrite at the moment but will get it fixed today.

I have prematurely added a text advert and banner ads to make the forum look at bit more interesting and make it look like forum that has backing. (even if the users are not there yet) you must always remember when building any site to get into the mind of your users. What do they need and what would they look for etc..etc..think like them and you will be on the right track to some success.

I’m Affiliated with ShareaSale but will also use others to get better commissions once I have found the right company that suits my users.

I think I will also join BBB which will further the authenticity of this forum. I like to make my visitors feel they are safe to use the forum and this adds to the ethos and security. A very good way to let you users know you’re dedicated to Safe internet use.

The next service to pay for will be the Directory Submissions which I will sort out tomorrow or later today. I need to join another forum today and start a few posts which will eventually enable my signature to show when I post, this will encourage a visit to mine. This is all slow but very important to building a community like this. Although the building stage is a bit tedious even for me, once you earn your first bit of cash it will all be worth it.

Update: I have just noticed I cannot use the BBB Program because I’m based on the UK -

The company must be based or have a physical presence in the United States or Canada.

I will have to find a suitable replacement service.

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about traffic and the market in general. I am finding it hard to find where they hang out at the moment but, I know SilverSurfers are in abundence online these days.

I think I need to go after the out of reach keywords to at least get some numbers to the forum. Although this sounds back to front, for now I’m not too bothered with targeting Seniors Citizens as I think they will find me.

I know I need content as visitors will click away on an empty forum (not always the case) - I’m going to pay for this to get at least 50 members and questions/answers.

I’m going to get some backlinks built on these keywords -

“travel insurance”
“health insurance”
“auto insurance”
“car insurance”
“life insurance”

Some more easy to reach and targeted keywords:

“life insurance for over 50s”
“over 50s life insurance”

They are broad but not unbeatable on the Big “Google” I have checked my competition using a backlinkchecker- here are my results:

I’m going to use three services to help me while I get on with other promotion and tweaking the forum.

First Service:
Directory Submission not holding out for much but its worth outsourcing this duty.

Second Service:
Content writer on full time to help write Articles, blog about it, etc..etc…

Third Service:
Link Building Campaign to include Press Releases, Article Submission and Social Bookmarking.

I haven’t done any on page SEO based on these keywords but I will do that in the next part. I will now get these services under-way and carry on with monetization ideas and promotion.