Friday, July 6, 2012

5 Tips On How To Make Your Blog Visitors Stay Longer

The length of time that you can keep your visitors on your website can be a crucial factor in determining how successful your blog will be.
Simply getting traffic in the form of thousands of unique visitors daily is meaningless if the time they spend on your site is less than a few seconds or your bounce rate is more than 95%.
There are certain things you can do in the way you present your pages and posts which will maximize the chances of your visitors sticking around for a longer period on your site.
The longer people stay the greater your opportunity to monetize their visit or convince them to take your desired call to action.
A call to action is an Internet marketing term which refers to the primary action that you want your visitors to take when they land on your page or website. One example of a call to action  is where you want someone to click your “buy now” button and purchase your product. Another might be that you want to get people to download your free ebook after signing up as members.
Below are some tips which will help you to keep the attention of your visitors or at the very least keep them interested long enough to stay and explore your site and ultimately perform the call to action you want them to.

How to Increase Your Online Persuasion Abilities

Persuasion techniques for the Internet are often quite different to persuasion techniques which are used in face-to-face situations.
In contrast to the art of face-to-face persuasion, the online world means you are unable to read physical cues such as facial expressions and body language, which in turn means that you can’t instantly adjust your delivery based on these cues.
On the Internet, your website and its various pages is mainly responsible for the task of persuading your visitors to buy your products or services.
Thus, persuading people on the Internet usually means anticipating what people want or what action they will perform next.

6 Tips to Help Ignite Your Creativity and Increase Your Success

When it comes to achieving success on the Internet or anything in life for that matter, it probably isn’t a secret that having some capacity of creative spark or talent can increase your chances of attaining your goals.
But what makes some people more creative and successful than others? Is creativity something genetic and does that mean those who aren’t blessed with this gene are doomed to never be creative or successful?
Well the simple answer is that creativity is something which we are ALL born with but some people lose it more than others as they grow older. If you observe young children playing you’ll know what I mean when I say we all start with a propensity for some kind of creativity which is usually fueled by curiosity.
Many people lack a creative spark because they stopped doing the simple things which leads to creative ideas in the first place.

The 3 Ingredients of The Secret Sauce of Successful Blogging

With millions of blog websites already in existence and many more sprouting daily, you might already be aware that there are a relatively small number of incredibly popular and successful blogs out there on virtually any topic you care to think of.
When you visit a number of these successful blogs you quickly see a common thread – there is a certain quality inherent in most of them and furthermore, they provide something useful or amusing for the people who follow or visit them.
Conversely you may have also come across a disproportionately larger number of not-so-good blogs that don’t seem to provide any usefulness or make any sense because they are so poorly put together or badly written or jammed with so many spammy advertisements that the first word that comes to mind when you see them, is “junk”.

How to Handle Negative Comments

If you run an online community service where others are encouraged to participate with their own thoughts, you’re sure to come across negative comments throughout your blog or forum’s life. While negative comments may be one of your greatest fears as a social media participant, they are a reality. Furthermore, the way that you deal with negative comments can either make or break your online reputation—and the reputation of your business.


Check out the following tips on dealing with negative comments in the online arena:

 1. Walk Away

Whatever you do, do not respond to negative comments immediately. Chances are that you’re fairly upset or offended by the comment or comments, and replying while in an emotional state of mind isn’t the best way to deal with negativity on your blog or forum. Instead, give yourself a couple of hours (at the very least) to sit on the negative comment. Then allow yourself to respond.

11 Ways To Boost Your Blog Readership

Starting a blog is an exciting venture. Whether you’re doing it to help promote your business or just as a personal enrichment activity, it’s your chance to broadcast your ideas to the world. But, as excited as you are about your posts, it will take some time before you build up a significant reader base that is also excited about your posts.
Here are eleven easy tips you can utilize to help boost your blog readership from the beginning of your online writing adventure. Follow these tactics and you’re likely to see a boost in stats in the days and weeks that follow.

1. Network

Get involved in the blogging community and network with other bloggers. If they start to mention your blog in their posts, their readers will be intrigued and will check out your blog. There are forums and special events that you can participate in to meet with the other bloggers. You can also network by reaching out to other bloggers whose blogs you respect.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

7 Steps to Profiting from Niche Affiliate Adsense Sites with WordPress

I’ve turned into quite a fan of Google Adsense.
Here is a way that anyone can make money online without having to sell anything.  And given that selling on the internet is one of the hardest skills to master, the Adsense program provides a way for newcomers to internet marketing to make their first bit of passive income without getting bogged down with the ins and outs of conversion and payment processing.
Yet, at the same time, it can be a complete waste of time if people go about it the wrong way.  The most common mistake I see is poor ad placement and optimization, followed closely by keyword optimization for terms that don’t pay!
Having made decent money from Google Adsense for over a year now, I wanted to create a quick 7 step plan that can be followed to generate an income online.  And here it is…
Quick disclaimer: don’t expect instant gratification from this strategy – it can take anything from a few weeks to a month to start receiving traffic from the search engines and therefore make any money.  But, when you do, it’s very easy to scale everything up.

10 Tips to Increase Your Sales Page Conversion

If you are selling something online then you need to pay attention to the conversion rate of your sales page. The conversion rate can vary wildly and is totally unpredictable but even an one percent increase in conversion rate can make the difference between losing money or making profit.

What is Conversion Rate?

In online marketing conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action (for example: make a purchase or click an ad).
You can think of conversion as pouring traffic into a funnel where they get filtered on different levels and at last the remaining portion gets converted. Usually a large portion of the traffic will leave the sales page right after they land. A majority of the remaining traffic will abandon the sales page when they see that it does not fit their need or they want to do research or compare the price with other sites. The small remaining portion of traffic consists of customers that have already researched the products or were referred from another site and are looking to make a purchase.

6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic

Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.
The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.
1. Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts
If your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs without further improving them through off-page optimization or link building.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Monetizing a Site Through AdSense

There is a lot of misconception about Google AdSense; many marketers see it as one of the most rudimentary ways to monetize your site. As such many markets prefer to build affiliate sites, spend an age writing sales driven content, building email lists to try and sell on the back end, but the most important aspect of getting the sale is completely taking out of their hands, once you send traffic to the merchant they are the ones you have to rely on to push your traffic through their checkout page. If the merchant you are promoting has a poor sales funnel you will suffer.
This is not the case with AdSense, once you get the click then your job is done and your money is in the bank of Google.

7 Advantages to Using PayPal to Buy Online

PayPal is one of the largest online payment processors in the world. After rising to prominence through its partnership with Ebay, online merchants all across the Internet accept PayPal as one of their accepted methods of payments.
Those who have never used PayPal may wonder why so many people use it as their only way to pay for online purchases. After you review the following seven advantages to using PayPal to buy online, you will likely want to start using PayPal yourself.
1. Credit card security: When you sign up for a PayPal account, you type in the credit cards and bank accounts you wish to use for purchases one time on the PayPal secure system. Once that is accomplished, you never again have to disclose your credit card information online. By paying with PayPal, you keep your credit card information private, meaning that you can shop without worrying about a hacker downloading your account data from your online merchant.

10 Plugins to Improve the Usability of WordPress Blogs

WordPress is a quality platform that many of us use. It is very popular and has much to offer. In fact, there are almost too many options in terms of plugins and widgets to add to our blogs. These may make our sites look great and add value to what we are offering, but they can bloat the blogs making them slow to load and at times producing a cluttered look and other problems.
The good news is that there are plugins that address this problem and improve the performance and user friendliness of our blogs. Since usability is an essential for maximum profitability these are well worth considering. Here are 10 plugins that will surely improve the usability of your WordPress blog.

10 Ways to Proofread Articles Faster

No matter how much a person enjoys writing, almost everyone has a concern for writing clearly and accurately, without errors in grammar or spelling. Although proofreading can avoid embarrassing and costly mistakes, the pressures of deadlines and fatigue often cause the proofreading process to fail.
Saving time and producing better work are concepts that appeal to most writers. The increased output combined with increased quality represents a surefire approach to building a writing career. To help writers improve their proofreading skills, here are 10 ways to proofread articles faster and more efficiently.


1. Pay attention to your personal weaknesses: Often writers find themselves consistently spelling the same words incorrectly. Although misspellings often derive from a mental block or a lack of familiarity with a word, they can also result from a flaw in typing skills that causes your fingers to hit an incorrect key combination or from a keyboard that is defective. By understanding the cause of typographical errors and to the most frequently misspelled words, writers can discipline themselves to be extra attentive when those words come up.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Blogspiration: Finding New Blog Topics

It’s easy to find blogs that are, for all intents and purposes, “dead.” Plenty of people feel inspired to start using a blogging service or a social networking service (especially Twitter), then blow it in the follow-through; the blog gets a handful of posts, then the user loses interest in their blog, quits writing new content, loses or never establishes a reader base, and thus never gets a chance to make money. With no readers to buy potential products and no readers who might click on advertisements, the more likely way for bloggers to make money, the blog does nothing but occupy space, taking up domain names and usernames that other bloggers might have wanted for their own, more serious projects.

10 Fundamental Ways of Building Customer Trust

When your business is online only, the first (and sometimes only) contact that clients have with you is through your website. Creating trust is absolutely essential, since trust generates repeat business. Here are ten ideas to gain that valuable online trust.
  1. Visual Distinction: Customers associate with the branding that you offer yourself. Present a professional image by placing your logo on every page and keeping the same format on all of the pages within your site. When customers see that particular format, you want them to recognize it as yours.
  2. Recognition: Let clients know about the recognition that your company has received. A real referral and award is some of the best public relations that you can ask for. Don’t forget that the awards that you receive can be verified by your customers.

10 Tips for Writing an Autoresponse Email

If you are using an Autoresponder service (eg. AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp etc) then chances are that you will be writing auto-response emails that will get sent out to your subscribers once they subscribe. Every piece of communication that you send adds to the overall impression that a customer has of your product or service. Autoresponders can be used for simple acknowledgments, newsletters, or even series of newsletters. Here are ten tips about autoresponder use.

1. Acknowledge your customers

Send an email to thank your new users for signing up to read your newsletter. This reminds those users that you have received their opt-in request. It should also give your customers an idea of what they should expect in your writing as well as how frequently they should expect to receive it.

Tips On How To Become A Better Blogger

This is a follow up article for the How do I Start a Blog and Make Money Online series that we have been publishing on this blog to help the newbie’s get started with a blog. This article covers some good practices that you should develop to become a better blogger.

1. Chose The Right Topic For Your Blog

There is usually a big debate on which path to go down when choosing the topic of your blog. Some will advice you to find a niche that people spend money in and focus purely on the profitability. Others will say don’t go for the money at first, focus on your passion because things that you personally enjoy and know about will be easy to create good content on and in the process you will make money. I will leave it up to you to decide but I can only suggest that you consider both sides of the story before making up your mind. Some people can remain motivated because of the process, not the topic but that doesn’t work for me. I need to enjoy the topic.

Monday, July 2, 2012

10 Fundamental Ways of Building Customer Trust

When your business is online only, the first (and sometimes only) contact that clients have with you is through your website. Creating trust is absolutely essential, since trust generates repeat business. Here are ten ideas to gain that valuable online trust.
  1. Visual Distinction: Customers associate with the branding that you offer yourself. Present a professional image by placing your logo on every page and keeping the same format on all of the pages within your site. When customers see that particular format, you want them to recognize it as yours.

Web Analytics 101 – Learn Which Analytics Data You Should be Using

If you are running a small website, chances are you’ve already heard of Web Analytics. If you haven’t, it is a tool for measuring traffic of your website. It provides data on the number of visitors, page views etc to gauge the popularity of the site. For many people, using analytics is limited to watching how many more visitors have come to the site, and repeating the figures to potential advertisers. If used smartly, analytics is also a marketing tool, an e-commerce tracker, an ad tool, and the list goes on. In this article, we’ll have a look at basic ways to use the analytics.

Choosing an Analytics Software

First of all, you need to have an analytics software set up for your website, which mostly means signing up for an account of an analytics provider, and adding a few lines of javascript code to your pages. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics tool. It’s also free and integrating it in a WordPress site is just a matter of adding a plugin to your site! If you like to have choices, you can search the Internet looking for some other alternative solutions. This article lists a number of analytics software and their pros and cons.

Site Speed is Now a Search Ranking Factor for Google Search

Google has officially made site speed one of the factors for search rank (there are over 200 ranking factors). So now is a good time to read the WordPress site optimization tips post and put some plan of action in place.
Now, you have no reason to go into a panic mode just yet. Optimizing your site for better performance is always a good thing from a usability point of view but Google has indicated that only about 1% of search queries and even fewer search results will be affected from this change at this stage.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ad – Which One Should You Choose?

Pay-Per-Click or PPC in short, is an effective marketing scheme for the Internet. If you have a personal blog/site that attracts moderate to high traffic, and you want to generate some revenue from it then PPC is a very good option for you. There are many companies, including the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. that offer PPC ad-serving applications for webmasters and publishers. After registering with the company, all you have to do is put some Javascript code or HTML in your pages and activate the advertisement. The company tracks how many times the ads have been viewed and clicked and makes your payment at the end of the month.

In this article we will take a look at some PPC ad serving applications and try to help you decide which one could be the best option for you.

Tips to Make Ubuntu Boot Faster

Ubuntu is pushing the Linux desktop movement forward. Since it’s inception in 2004, Ubuntu has released over 10 versions so far, each one improving on its predecessor. It remains one of those few operating systems, that boots really fast. Still, if you are one of those brave hackers who likes to tune your machine to maximize efficiency, here are a few tricks on how to make Ubuntu boot faster.
Word of caution: These tune ups have been tested on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Haron. I haven’t upgraded it as it has been pretty solid and stable release. So if you’re on a newer(or older) version, I suggest you do some research before applying these tricks. And of course, always keep back ups. Have Fun!

10 Common HTML Mistakes to Avoid

The following is a list of common HTML mark up mistakes made by front end developers. Whether you are a newbie web designer, or a programmer who wants to try his hands in UI designing, try to avoid these mistakes.


1. Don’t place Block elements within Inline elements

An HTML element is displayed as Block or as Inline by default. Block elements, such as divs and paragraphs, make up the structure of the document. Inline elements reside in these blocks, such as anchor and span tags. So you should never put blocks inside inline elements.
Wrong: <a href="#"><h2>Block inside Inline</h2></a>
Right: <h2><a href="#">Inline inside Block</a></h2>

2 Simple WordPress Blog Optimization Tips and Tricks

I have been pretty busy with the WordPress plugin development lately, so didn’t get a chance to write any posts for a few weeks. I think it’s about time I share a simple but effective website performance improvement trick with the readers of this site that I have been using on all my sites. If you haven’t read the WordPress site optimization tips and tricks already then you should read that first.
This trick involves changing some of the dynamic wordpress queries to static ones which in turn reduces the number of database queries and improves site performance. This does require a little bit of PHP knowledge but it’s really basic stuff.
In your WordPress theme’s header and footer you will see many statements similar to the following:
bloginfo(‘home’)

Secret Keyword And Unique for Google

Google is the largest and most comprehensive search engine today. You may not know that google has turned out some of the uniqueness of its search results. Try typing in the search as shown below.
You can try using a keyword below and you can see the uniqueness of the code.
 

1. askew
Go to google search engine and enter the keyword Askew.
Then you will see the search results screen and the text in italics.