Archive for May, 2008

Years ago (1999), a friend and I were going to start a magazine in a niche that had never been done before (it still hasn’t so I will keep the niche under wraps for now). Anyhow, a friend of my magazine partner suggested that we just do a web based magazine. Looking back, that may have been a great option. Incidentally, the guy that recommended that we take the magazine online eventually became my business partner in my first Search Marketing Firm that I started – funny how things come full circle.

Today, nearly every magazine has an online presence, in fact if they don’t they would be considered behind the times. What I want to know is are people still reading print magazines or has the web taken over? Certainly there are benefits to reading print magazines:

1. You can read them on airplanes.

2. You can easily bring them to appointments.

3. Some people read them in the bathroom (although some also bring their laptops with them – ok… confession time)

How about Internet Marketing industry magazines? What are you reading? If you haven’t checked out Website Magazine, you really should. Sure, you can view it online, but why not add it to your free subscriptions? Visit Website Magazine for a FREE subscription today!

This has to be one of the most often asked questions by rookie bloggers. There are several ways to monetize a website, but the most critical factor in earning money is having visitors. Once you’ve gotten that down, the rest is simple. My recommendation is to study all you can about search marketing and social media marketing. This will get you on the right track to generating traffic to your blog (or website) and then you can decide how to monetize your website.

Here are 5 great ways to monetize your blog:

1. Sell a Product or Service. The most obvious way to make money from a blog is to have a product or a service. I encourage clients to establish themselves as a voice in their industry, which in turn builds consumer confidence and should result in business.

2. Selling Ads. Ads are often sold based on “x” per thousand monthly visits to a website, listed as CPM where $5 CPM would be equal to $5 per thousand monthly visitors. If you don’t have traffic, this will not be an effective means of monetization.

3. Affiliate Marketing. There is a goldmine in affiliate marketing in my opinion. I have been an affiliate marketer since around 1998, and have monetized several blogs and websites by selling affiliate products. If you want to learn how to do this effectively, I strongly recommend reading the Super Affiliate Handbook.

4. Contextual Ads. These are ads that are served on your blog based on it’s content. Google AdSense is the most popular of these type of programs, but rather than recreating what already exists, here is a pretty comprehensive list of contextual ad networks.

5. Donations. You can put your hand out and just ask people to donate, or make it creative (i.e. buy me a drink). Amazon actually has a widget you can use to accept donations, but one of the newest “donation sensations” is Scratchback which is a widget that allows people to donate to your blog and in exchange post an ad on your site (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours). You can list the ad for up to a month and can request whatever amount you think people will pay you as long as it is at least $1.00. I recently added the widget to this site, so if you want to make a donation, you can get listed here for the next 30 days (shameless plug).

If you learned something and it makes money for you, please come back and donate

If you want to keep up with these online business development tips, please use the email box to the left or one of the RSS feeds to subscribe to my blog.

I noticed today on a site that I managed that there are a few discrepancies in the addresses that Google Local / Google Maps is showing. Initially, it showed an old address that was the personal address for the person who had registered it years ago. The site had relatively little search engine presence so it really wasn’t an issue. When I came along, one of the first things I did was to update this info in Google Local so that the correct business address would come up rather than the owners address.

A few weeks ago I was alerted that the listing was showing the owners home address which was alarming to her. I found this odd because I had confirmed the change AND seen it live in Google. I was curious to know how it had reverted, so I did some searching and found some other dated references to her home address (Takeaway – don’t register your domain to your home address if you don’t want it public down the road). Anyhow, I attempted to update it, but it was still showing correctly in Google Local, so I picked up the phone and called my Google Local rep using the contact info on the site. The I WOKE UP because there isn’t any contact info, so I had to use the online form which didn’t give me an option to say that there was a problem without re-routing me to the help section, which by this point I could quote.

That brings us to today where I no only still have not heard from Google, still have the owners home address coming up on the Google Local listing, AND now I see where Google is picking up random addresses from the pages. I am not at liberty to share the site due to confidentiality, but having worked in the IYP (Independent Yellow Pages) world, I thought that surely they had seen this, so I went to Metro Directories, my trusty Atlanta Local Yellow Pages and did some checking. Sure enough, here is what I found:

You will see from this sample of listings from the site a listing with an address that is not that of Metro Directories:
http://www.oldschoolseo.com/images/gmap1.pdf

And here you will see the page from the Metro Directories website where the address was extracted from:
http://www.oldschoolseo.com/images/gmap2.pdf

I am curious to know if anyone else has experienced this. And Google, what’s the deal?

I have several Affiliate and Internet Marketing domains that I am selling. I am getting away from promoting affiliate marketing as a business, but certainly will not stop using affiliate marketing in my personal business and as a recommendation to others that I consult with, however I need to focus on my consulting business (Web Traffic Team) which is experiencing significant growth this year.

Here is a list of domains I have available and at the end is a link to a spreadsheet with pricing and other info. I am willing to entertain offers and you will notice that some are live sites, some have databases of customers and prospects, and some are excellent domains for selling specific affiliate products. Also, many of these are seasoned and have search engine rankings and decent (Alexa/Google) rank for those that look at those metrics. The spreadsheet gives all of the info you will need:
http://www.webtrafficteam.com/dl/domain-pricing.pdf

AFFILIATECRITIQUE.COM – Affiliate Marketing Domain

AFFILIATEGURUSEXPOSED.COM – Affiliate Marketing Domain

INSTANTINTERNETPROFITCOURSE.COM – Affiliate Domain for a Yanik Silver course

INSTANTINTERNETPROFITSCOURSE.COM – Affiliate Domain for a Yanik Silver course

THEAFFILIATENEWS.COM – Affiliate Marketing Domain

CLICKBANKPROFITSECRETS.COM – Clickbank affiliate domain

WHATTHEWEB.COM – Affiliate Marketing Blog

YOURINFOARTICLES.COM – Article Marketing site (live site, includes articles)

DAILYSOUNDOFF.COM – Generic domain

HAVETOSEE.COM- Generic domain

BIXXER.COM – Generic domain

PODCASTINGPROFITSECRETS.COM

PPCCLONE.COM – PPC/Affiliate domain

GOOGLEADWORDSHACKER.COM – PPC/Affiliate domain

GURUSLAYERCOURSE.COM – PPC/Affiliate domain

INTERNETMEGAPHONE.COM – Internet Marketing

THEWEBTRAFFICACADEMY.COM – Internet Marketing Training

WEBTRAFFICACADEMY.COM – Internet Marketing Training

FINDSEOJOBS.COM – SEO Jobs (not on the spreadsheet – $250)

BESTSEOJOBS.COM – SEO Jobs (not on the spreadsheet – $250)

Again, here is the spreadsheet link with all pricing and other domain data: http://www.webtrafficteam.com/dl/domain-pricing.pdf

Anthony