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A week ago, I asked you to critique me for a chance to win a copy of my Ultimate Blogging Theme and my upcoming Google optimization book.
I got tons of really constructive ones, I appreciate those people who participated.
People pay for critiques
Last year I took a public speaking class to prepare for a 1 hour talk at Joel Christopher’s seminar. Because honestly, I’m an introvert, well I was an introvert :-)
The first few days were not hard, they were just speaking exercises, intonations and other stuff. But as we progress, it gets more “heart pounding”.
Seriously, it took the crap out of us.
Around the 2nd week of the class, we started to do VTR’s. They’d ask us impromptu on stage about all sorts of questions and record it with a video cam. Then they’ll “humiliate” (sort of) us when they play it right after we speak and critique it. It’s VERY awkward and I always think of myself looking funny.
We were already there, we paid for it. So no turning back now.
But that wasn’t all, the 3rd week, we were asked impromptu questions AND critiqued on stage! It sucks big time. One of my classmates got so shaky that she crumpled her notes while speaking!
Those moments changed us. We did it the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time and as we go on, we felt more comfortable on stage and because of those critiques, we were able to get rid of our bad habits in a flash. Like literally.
Totally sweet.
It takes a lot of guts
Getting critiqued takes a lot of guts. Actually, I expected more “hardcore” critiques from you but I appreciate you guys being constructive :-)
Now for the winnerSSS
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By darrenchow On July 3, 2009
No Comments
This article is guest posted by Darren Chow.
There are so many ways to drive traffic online that it can be confusing for new marketers. If you are just starting out learning how to make money online, you may need to focus on traffic generation methods that have been proven to work. One of the most effective methods of traffic generation is article marketing.
What exactly is article marketing and how is traffic driven using this technique?
Article marketing is the process of writing and distributing useful articles that is related to the website you are trying to promote. When you write and interesting article and publish it on an article directory, you get both short, mid and long term traffic.
The short term traffic comes from the directory’s existing reader base. For example, if the article directory has a newsletter, your article headline is likely to be published in the newsletter. That way, you get an immediate surge of traffic. The more popular the niche, the more short term traffic you will get.
Mid and long term traffic will come from the search engines. Once your articles have been published, it’s only a matter of time that the search bots will come and lap up the yummy content. Since your articles remain online indefinitely, you stand a chance to have visitors find your articles and click on the links in your author resource box to visit your website.
In addition, many article directories also syndicate their content through RSS feeds to other blogs and websites. That means your articles get published in related websites. Remember, these articles have your links in them. The more they get noticed, the more traffic you are going to get.
Having traffic is really nice. But in order to make money online. You must have something to offer on your website. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take it that your offer can mean anything from clickable ads to leads registration to product sales (i.e. anything that makes money). The very first thing you need to do is to setup your own website.
Setting up your money making machine.
If you are using article marketing to drive traffic, I highly recommend that you buy your own domain name and setup your own website. Sure, that means a little bit of work on your part. But you’ll be glad that you did it, for a few reasons.
Firstly, not all article directories accept affiliate links. Affiliate links are simply URLs that point directly to the affiliate website. Secondly, what happens if the offer that you are promoting goes offline? You would be driving traffic to a webpage that is not making you any money.
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By Shaun Connell On June 29, 2009
5 Comments
This is a guest post by Shaun Connell.
Very few bloggers have reached their income goals. Unfortunately, most seem to think that the way to achieve their income goals is by just crushing as much traffic as they can through their blog, somehow expecting the traffic to convert into more traffic, popularity and links until the money starts to flow.
But that’s not usually the case. In this post we’ll cover the other side of increasing your revenue: focusing on making your blog’s monetization more efficient. Doing this will allow you to up your income without having to actually increase your traffic.
Traffic is Often Overrated
I have several websites that pull anywhere from a few hundred visitors per day to a few thousand. Oddly enough to some, my most trafficked blog isn’t my biggest income blog.
I can’t stress this enough: Lot’s of traffic does not equal lots of money.
Traffic is just a fuel. It doesn’t matter how much or what kind of fuel you put into your riding lawnmower, it will never beat a racecar. When you’re trying to go as fast as you can, you need to focus on your engine.
Of course, the engine of making money online is how you actually monetize your website. Increasing the efficiency of your “engine” will let you go much faster than just tinkering with the fuel. If you efficiently monetize your website, you can literally double your income without seeing a change in traffic at all.
If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know I’m a huge fan of systematic business. An online business is a business just the same. Every internet business needs a business plan, as I explained in The 1-2-3 Plan: How to Make Money With SEO.
But enough theory. Let’s look at actual ways to you can increase you monetization’s efficiency without needing to increase traffic.
How to Convert Traffic Better
Re-Research Your Niche. Research your niche to find out which keywords are the highest paying. No guess work. If you have to, get a pen and paper out and use Google’s keyword tool. Now reorganize your post titles and keywords to make sure you’re targeting the highest paying keywords. I’ve seen this increase my AdSense earnings nearly 50%
Place Advertisements Better. Where you place your ads are critical to their success. For AdSense, the ads most likely to be clicked should be at the top of the page. Don’t forget about Google’s link units. These are surprisingly good at nudging your CTR up a few notches, and are grossly underused by bloggers in general.
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By Charles Lau On June 26, 2009
3 Comments
This article is sponsored by Winning the Web and posted by Charles Lau.
As an Internet marketer (both new and seasoned players), all of us are being bomboarded by our fellow Internet marketers with information about the different strategies that we can adopt for our Internet business.
Moreover, the information comes in all sorts of media. It can in an ebook, e-report, blog post, email course and membership sites. This causes a very big problem to all of us here – that is “information overload”.
It is really difficult to keep up with the Internet trend while working on our respective niches. It’s even more difficult when our niche has nothing to do with the Internet trend. However, we still need to be kept in the know on how to get our information disseminated in the Internet.
In this post, we are going to touch on a review request of the an ebook titled The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Internet Marketing Strategies. This ebook is authored by Gyutae Park.
About Gyutae Park
Gyutae Park is an SEO expert, Internet Marketer, blogger and entrepreneur. He has spent the past 9 years on the web, creating websites for himself and working with various large companies such as Nokia, The Northern Trust Company, and the Bradford Group. He also had consulting gigs with smaller publishers, an affiliate network, seven different well-known pharmaceutical brands, an e-commerce site selling gourmet chocolate, and a few bloggers. He had the opportunity to work with some amazing companies and people, making his journey a phenomenon one.
The Winning Way ebook
My first impression upon receiving this ebook is that it looks like another make-money-online ebook again. However, this time round it is free! Moreover, I can sense a lot of hard work is put onto this 118-pages of ebook which can potentially be sold for about $47 in today’s market. And as I read through the pages, I must admit that I can really learn something out of it!
It is basically a book of ideas!
At the beginning, you will tend to see some similiarities with most of the make-money-online ebooks. However, as you read further, you will realize that this ebook is doing a fast track of telling you what you can do to make the money that you want!
It basically summarizes what you can do to make money online. Anyway, this ebook is free! So I will recommend you to go ahead and download it to have a good read at it yourself to find out what you have been missing so far after doing your online business.
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By Carl On June 25, 2009
16 Comments
I’m feeling of doing something “radical” today…
I’m gonna open up the comment section and let you “critique” me.
But to add a little twist, the person who makes the best critique wins a copy of my Ultimate Blogging Theme ($97) and my soon to be released Google optimization book, Feed Kid Google ($47).
I’ve got to tell you, you’ve got tons of stuff to critique about me…
- My writing – I easily switch plural and singular stuff
- The design – The UBT is tested, but not perfect. Testing just keeps going on and on.
- Your first impression – This one I can’t test all the time. I’ve already asked almost all of my friends about it and I’m still tweaking the blog up to now so I’ll appreciate your comment about the first impression.
- How I portray myself – If they say Carl Ocab, what pops out of your mind? What do you think are my qualities?
- Tons more, those are just the stuff that came to my mind first.
I’m not really like the “master” of blogging or something, heck I’m not even close to that so I’ll really appreciate your comments.
P.S. Winners will be hand picked :-)
By Dee On June 24, 2009
4 Comments
This article is guest posted by Dee Barizo.
One of the reasons many people join Twitter is to converse with other people in their industry to learn more about their niche. You may have seen bloggers who wrote about asking a question on Twitter and then getting many responses.
So, you join Twitter, follow a bunch of people, and then start asking questions. However, no one replies to you.
That’s what happened to me. I followed many people in my niche and most of them followed me back. However, no one would reply to my questions.
I then realized that I had to do more to build a responsive Twitter network. Here are the things that worked for me.
1. Answer questions.
Instead of just waiting for people to answer my questions, I started answering the questions of my followers. Because I became helpful, many of my followers now respond to my tweets.
2. Retweet liberally.
As I followed my network, I realized that they had a lot of interesting things to say and interesting links to pass along. I retweeted those tweets and some of them thanked me for it. A couple of them have become regular responders to my tweets.
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By Crystal Miller On June 23, 2009
4 Comments
This article is guest posted by Crystal Miller
News stories about Twitter have surged in recent months. Oprah jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in April 2009 and major news stories have been broken over Twitter in the last eight months (the January 2009 US Airways plane crash into the Hudson and the Mumbai shootings in November 2008 are two examples). These along with other news events have boosted the awareness of Twitter across the world.
What does this mean?
The Business Insider recently revealed a chart of the day (on 5/21/09) comparing the number of worldwide unique visitors of three big names in social networking: Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. The chart from comScore follows the number of unique visitors each month from April 2008 through April 2009. Take note Twitter fans: While still only 1/10 th the size of Facebook, with around 32 million unique visitors, Twitter is on a similar growth trend. This exponential growth provides the perfect sweet spot for tapping into a massive stream of laser-targeted visitors.
Here are 10 ways you can take advantage of this surge to build your business and increase your profits.
1. Sign up – if you haven’t already done so!
This almost goes without saying, but obviously, you can’t take advantage of Twitter’s popularity if you’re not on Twitter. Sign up for your free account today. Experiment with it. Set up your profile. Watch what other people are doing for a while (and brush up on your Twittequette) and then adapt it for your own business needs. Scads of good help can be found with a quick search on any Twitter-related topic. A great place to find tips is Mashable, the social media guide.
2. Create an account for each niche or area of interest.
At this point, there is nothing that says you can’t have more than one Twitter account. In fact, it’s best if you keep your interests separate within the social networking realm whenever possible. This helps you communicate only with people who are interested in the same things as you. If your interests are gardening and science fiction television, you can’t assume that your followers in the gardening niche will also be interested in time travel or laser swords, too.
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Carl Ocab is one of the most successful teenage bloggers on the net. But remarkably, Carl was just 13 years old when he rose to fame with his hugely popular “make money online” website: www.carlocab.com
