Ways To Make Money Online

Sample Blog Layouts

As promised I  have put together three examples of layouts that you can use to figure out how you want to setup your blog.  Please keep in mind these are just examples to be able to demonstrate and explain the benefits of structuring your site different ways.  Plus if you already have a site and just want to add a blog I have also demonstrated how that looks and I will explain how that is accomplished.

Another thing you need to understand is themes are getting more advanced and industry specific to allow you to better present yourself.  So if you are looking for more of a magazine look or you like it where there are pictures linked to blog posts sliding across the screen you can get those but understand there is still an underlying site structure.  Those features don’t always affect your site layout they are usually settings in your themes options and setting a “feature image” for each blog post.

As I just mentioned if you already have a site or would like to have your visitors land on a splash page that captures their email, etc then here is where you need to pay attention.

If you are trying to build a list you would set up your splash page on your main domain directory folder and install WordPress under /blog or /whatever-you-want-to-call-it.  Then you would configure your autoresponder to use your pre-sell blog post as your confirmation page.

If you are planning on just putting together a topic focused blog or a personal blog this might be a good layout for you.  You may also want to consider this if you are a small company that just needs a start up web presence that will direct your potential customers to you.

You could add another page for products and then create further pages that feature categories of that first page.  Just make sure you draw it all out so that you will have a nice flow for your customers to follow so they can find your products.

This is setup is actually done by creating a page called “Blog” and then another page that would serve as your welcome page.  You would then go into your Settings and Reading in the WordPress Admin area for your blog and set the pages to have a static homepage.  This is the current setup for this site.

I wanted to give you an idea of the most common layout for blogs that I’ve seen where the page that you land on is the page that features the blog posts.  You may have different aspects of your topic that you feel are more important and deserving of more attention and you would create pages for those.

If you choose to you can setup several levels deep pages that are only accessible if you have drop-down menu capability or if the visitor actually visits the page up a level in the hierarchy.  Which could be helpful if you are talking about clothing or something like that.

This structure really takes advantage of drop-down menus to conserve space on your menu bar.

Or if you are building a mini-site to promote a product you may want 3-5 keyword focused “Pages” and that would be the extent of your blog-site.  I hope this is helpful stay tuned for two more posts wrapping up creating your site plan the next one being: Your Blog Should Be Focused To Make Money.  Then I will discuss naming your blog and monetization.

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Marketing Techniques For Your Blog’s Marketing Strategy

When deciding how you want to drive traffic to your site you don’t have to spend thousands to have somebody else do a lot of the content writing, website creation, etc.   I was on a site the other day and saw somebody had paid over $1,000 just for a logo. I can show you where to go to get it done cheaper or you may just pass on developing a logo until later. But for right now you need to decide what your marketing budget is because that will determine which of the following marketing methods that are available to you.

Of course I don’t recommend going out and spending thousands of dollars just because you have them.   If you have thousands it would be better for you to plan on stretching that out and learning some of the low or no cost methods first. While you are learning those and seeing what really brings in traffic you will find plenty of opportunity to spend your money wisely either automating, ramping up or just improving what you found that works.

Article Marketing

Traditional article marketing requires you to write articles targeting keywords that are the same or related to the ones used on your blog. You write the article submit it to at least one article publisher like ezinearticles.com, goarticles or articlesbase.com with some sort of link back to your blog site in the author’s box.

The first option to this is to hire somebody else to write the articles for you. It’s common to outsource this task as it can be time consuming and does extensive damage to your productivity. I probably shouldn’t even be writing these blog posts about blogging but as you’ll find out letting somebody else put your ideas to paper doesn’t always cut it.

The next variation on this is to write an article, of course still targeting keywords you are using on your blog, and create different versions of the same article called spinning. Now these “spun” versions of the same article are submitted to many article publishers, one can be used as a blog post and other versions can be used on other publishing/blog sites like Hubpages and Squidoo.

Don’t get too hung up publishing your articles everywhere unless you are going to use a tool that can do the submitting for you. The reason people try to get their articles published to lots of directories is because it helps them generate links back to their site. As I’ll explain in a minute getting links back to your blog are probably the most helpful and important thing you will ever do to get free traffic.

There is another variation that has been developed to only require you to write one article…ever. But as it’s not my method and it is valuable content provided to members of a forum I belong to I will not be explaining it in any detail. Just know that I have already written a blog post about where you can learn some advanced, cutting edge techniques sign up for their trial if you want to learn more.

As far as tools the one I’ve seen used and recommended the most is Unique Article Wizard, this costs $67 per month and helps in spinning your articles and publishing them to lots of article publishing sites. I’ve seen other tools and still more coming out on the market but I haven’t seen the power that this one has.

The Best Spinner is a spinning tool as suggested by the name, if you plan to do article marketing spinning helps you leverage the articles you write by helping you generate more articles on the same keywords from the original. This is done by you rewriting your sentences and phrases so that they mean the same thing but say it in a completely different way. Spinners then take the different versions and mix them up so you get many new versions that can seem completely new. Careful though the search engines have been catching on so “uniqueness” has become more important.

Video Marketing

I haven’t personally used this technique yet but I know of a guy that is making a killing using it. Of course he spends his time finding the less obvious ways to draw traffic too but I digress. Video marketing requires you to create brief videos targeting keywords and information valuable to your viewers. Traffic Geyser is the standard in teaching and software that helps you in your video marketing. In case you are wondering they suggest the first videos you create are you faq’s and saq’s (should be asked questions).

Videos actually do give you increased perceived authority, not to mention video’s have been ranking higher than content sites lately in the search engines. The great thing about publishing videos to sites like YouTube is you can embed this same videos into posts on your blog because YouTube gives you code to use to do this.

Tools for this method, if you are going with this method a simple Logitech microphone and your web camera can get you off to a great start. If you have more money to invest you may want to check into traffic geyser I know he suggests a nice camera to use. Either way it doesn’t take fancy editing software to create your videos and with webcams coming preinstalled now most computers have video software preinstalled too.

If you are having stage fright issues just thinking about this try creating a powerpoint presentation or download Jing it’s free software that allow you to record your screen. Then you can talk and demonstrate what you are teaching in your video. Of course the better paid software is Camtasia I know other people say there are cheaper alternatives but they are unmatched in quality as far as I’m concerned.

Link Building

Links to your site are generated when a person bookmarks your website, you exchange links with another website, you put your link in a profile on another site, when you publish an article and put the full url of one of your posts or homepage in the author box, and forums will allow you to put your website in your signature.

All of these different types of links tell the search engine that other people think your site is important and translate that into increasing your “ranking.” Think of it like climbing a ladder the top rungs are on page 1 when a person types in the keyword to search.

You can pay people to create these links for you and they will usually give you packages of varying amounts of links you will get, I’ve seen a couple of people that offer these and the packages are very reasonable. You can create links on your own, like I said earlier article marketing done right helps tremendously with this and so does social networking.

Or you can pay for a service that allows you to create multiple campaigns, you can decide how many links per day you want and they charge by limiting the total number of links you can get. I personally suggest LinkJuicer there is a trial month, they charge $47 for their basic package and that gives you 1,500 links per month or 50 links per day.  Alternately you can use a more robust and costly service like senuke x that runs between $67 to $147 dollars per month and essentially there is no limit because you are in charge of setting up their program to do all the different levels of linking.

I don’t suggest SEnuke for beginners even though they do give training videos I didn’t find them to be easy to follow for someone just starting out. Then there are people like me that would rather outsource or set it and forget it so I use LinkJuicer because I can set it up and walk away, it’s not complex and it works on the same principles.

Google Places Listing

It’s a free listing, it’s vital if you are a local business or organization, it gives you free publicity and credibility. Some tips on using this don’t be afraid to use categories that aren’t listed but realize they want you to use at least one of theirs. Probably the best way I can help you understand what to watch for is to give you some mistakes that I have either witnessed directly or committed myself.

I’ll start with my dentist, out of curiosity I looked them up in Google to see where they were ranking for a local search for dentist. When I say a local search that means I took the keyword and added a city name and sometimes state abbreviation. To my surprise they were about number 5 which isn’t bad but the only reason they were even that low was because nowhere in their name did they mention dentist. It was in the meta description for their site so it did show up with their listing in Google’s search results.

In my own experience I was listing my sister’s business and I didn’t realize that Google didn’t use the description I gave when I filled out the Google places listing, that was well prepared with keywords to help customers find her. Instead they pulled the meta description I had used on her blog that did not have all the keywords nicely lined up. Needless to say that problem has been fixed.

The take home point here is check your listing, try different things, and if it’s not showing up they way you want test and change things.

Your Blog Marketing Strategy

Believe it or not you can make your blog work if you only choose one of the methods I have mentioned but obviously what you decide to do depends on how much money and time you have to invest. Essentially all of these methods are free but to leverage your time and increase your productivity there are tools that I have suggested for you to consider.

To lay a foundation for your blog marketing I suggest establishing at least a Facebook page and a Twitter profile even if you can’t make it all fancy you can still choose some colors put your face or logo on each profile and build a following. I say this is the foundation because traffic from search engines isn’t always consistent and may change depending on the search engines but the traffic you build through these sites will stay your bread and butter.

Then you should pick at least one of these: article marketing, video marketing or link building. If you decide to go with more than one I suggest you start with one and work with it until you get it working for you. Then add another method otherwise you get spread too thin and you lose focus.

Finally create your listing on Google Places even if you don’t have one definite location. Those other four places will all point people back to your blog plus you are somehow developing large volumes of different types of links that point back to your site. That is a wrap for now, I have not forgotten about email marketing but I will be giving that attention a little later on.

Here is the next post in this series:  Sample Blog Layouts

First Step To Your Blog’s Site Plan Is A Marketing Strategy

I suggest starting with marketing because there are considerations and research that you will do while determining your marketing strategy that affect the structure of your blog. For one you will research your keywords in developing your marketing plan so that you know what people are asking and how they are wording their questions.

If you are using complex or confusing terminology you might be making it unnecessarily difficult for your customers to find you. In addition different methods of marketing will direct your potential customers to different types of pages and/or blog posts.
I don’t want to confuse anyone by my use of the term customer so just to make it clear I am considering a customer any visitor to your site that has a potential to buy your product, an affiliate product or click on ads you are displaying on your blog.

Marketing Strategies For Your Blog

Marketing always starts with your product or content, the first thing to do is establish your brand. Believe it or not your brand is only second to your vision and philosophy, having that worked out will help you decide what is appropriate and you can incorporate your brand from the start.

Branding Your Blog

The key to branding your blog is consistency, if you are going to show a picture of yourself make sure that it shows up on every site you send your customers to. I’m not saying every page of your website, I’m saying if you choose to use social marketing techniques your customers should be able to easily recognize that it’s you in that picture.

So here are my suggestions, use a logo when possible, staying consistent with your color scheme. Don’t go crazy on colors pick two or three and keep them in the same places. For example if your font is black keep it back across all sites, it your background is green on your blog it should be a prominent color elsewhere.

If you are using pictures either use the same picture everywhere or take a few pictures in the same clothing or different clothing same smile and pose. There must be consistency so when your customers arrive there is no question in their mind that it is you or your company they are visiting.

Using Keywords For Your Blog Marketing Strategy

Find keywords for your topic that will draw targeted traffic, this can be a long drawn out discussion all on its own so I am going to do you a favor and send you to the best guy for the job, just promise you won’t get sucked in to all the fancy ads and great info around this post. I don’t get anything for sending you to him other than the satisfaction of knowing you won’t be struggling to figure this out on your own.

After considering that some people are literally doing this on a shoestring budget and that even if you pay for somebody else to find your keywords at first you will still need to understand what they are all about I decided to write an ebook that will take you through the process this is still in progress but will be available soon so if you would like to receive a free copy just subscribe to my mailing list by entering your first name and email in the form on the top right side of this page.

Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

There are different ways to increase traffic to your blog and it’s done through two types of marketing push marketing that means the traffic is literally pushed through your doors or to your blog in this case through referrals and your social media traffic funnel. The second type is called pull marketing; this is your advertising that you create to pull customers through the door.  Push marketing is done by others, pull marketing is done through your own advertising.

On the internet just like offline there are methods that cost money and others that don’t. You can actually generate a ton of traffic without paying boat loads of money and these are the ones I recommend even if you have boat loads to spend. It’s better to learn what works first before you back up the dump truck to give search engines your money. Believe me if you understand how keywords work to get you traffic you will spend your money better and it will work harder for you in the search engines and banner advertising.

Creating Your Traffic Funnel

If you decide to use social marketing (a push marketing method) and unless you are just creating mini-sites you should then you will be constructing what is often called a traffic funnel. That’s because these places that allow you to interact with your customers actually funnel people to your blog. If you are interacting with them it gives them the opportunity to like you and want to hear more from you. They help you attract more customers just by interacting with your current ones, get feedback, make announcements, participate in discussions and give recommendations.

To say the least they are the best way to leverage your marketing time and if your employees have nothing better to do they should be chatting it up for you online. Plus how better to get instant feedback on what you are doing and offering.

You should create a solid funnel structure by creating accounts on Twitter, Facebook and another community like Squidoo or Hubpages or forums your customers visit often. Those last few I recommended actually help you to leverage other people’s tools and efforts. With your blog this will gives you four legs to stand on and a very solid beginning for your blog. Create profiles, use their search functions to invite people to friend you, use your blog to invite people to “like” you (Facebook) or “tweet” your blog post and “follow” you (Twitter).

BTW I just put up my Facebook page and twitter profile so please use the links on the left side of your screen to “like” my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter.

I decided to devote a whole blog post to discussing marketing techniques for your blog. So that you can really get a good idea of what your options are before I give you some sample site structures.

If you are ready here is the next post in this series:  Marketing Techniques For Your Blog’s Marketing Strategy