In my last post I have showed you one of the examples of how to make money with Tweeter via sponsored tweets and how much Ad.ly is paying some of the mega tweeter users. Today I will share some of my thoughts explaining why everyone thinks that they will do a better job than any other Sponsored Tweet companies. Keeping in mind that if a company is successful, the investors aka the tweeter user will have a hefty return aka higher pay out per tweet and more referral bonus.

Information is the key to marketing, more targeted audience that you will have, more revenue you will generate. As of now, most of the advertisers found a way to display their content within 140 characters at a time, but they don’t really know who they are reaching and what their habits are. Ad,ly, started by Sean Rad, a 23-year-old entrepreneur, appears to have found a way to deliver what any marketer wants: targeting. Ad.ly gathers information from Twitter users’ accounts about their tweeting subject histories and makes it available to advertisers. The advertiser, therefore, can make better, more educated decisions that will lead to targeted advertising with a better result.  And for the tweeter user’s standpoint, Ad.ly pushes a tweet every other day from a Twitter user’s account (of course with user approval). The tweeter user sets the price that the advertiser will pay.

Take a look at the images above and you will find how quickly the ad.ly website went up the ranking based on the belief that they will be one of the top paid sponsored tweet company. So, I say go to the Ad.ly and open up an account for your tweeter account so that you can start making some money on the side .

Look around and sometimes you will be surprised that how many people have thousands and thousands of twitter followers. Since using twitter we can constantly updating our status, more and more companies are trying to convince Twitter users and advertisers with in-stream advertising options, where instead of updating a “true” status the user will tweet an advertisement and will get paid. Simple but it works.

Now, we know how the “sponsored Tweets” work, let’s look into one of the how you can get paid doing sponsored Tweets.  At the early stage of Sponsored Tweeting, this type of service started off targeting all the celebrity Twitter users and then was available to everyone. And Ad.ly is one of the startup based on this business model. Started in Q4 of 2009 and quickly backed by a $500,000 investment, they already books a bunch of celebrities (look below).

Ad.ly offers pretty much the same service but its offering a little more $$$$ per tweet since its platform is better to target the audience thus delivers a better results for any ad campaign.  Take a look at the examples below from Shoe Money’s and John Chow’s Ad.ly account and how much they are getting paid per tweet. 

I am not saying that you will earn that much right away (unless you have  tens of thousands of follower) but still it can be a great revenue source for any tweeter user.  On top you tweets Ad.ly is now offering referral bonus on 12% of whatever they make/earn. Imagine you refer only 10 people then you will make roughly 100% of what they are making.  Also, they even simplified the sign up and/or the referral process.  All you have to do is go to Ad.ly and sign up.

So, is you have a tweeter account (I assume that you do) go to ad.ly and start making some money.

5 Ways to Attract Expensive Google Ads: Optimize Your Adsense Ads

Last month I have posted a how I earn the highest CPM for my websites using adsense and chitika. And today I will share some of the ways that you can attract higher paid ads for your websites.

• Make the ads more relevant
  Use se Section Targeting when you work with Google Adsense. Use <!–  google_ad_section_start –> at the beginning and  <!– google_ad_section_end –> at the end of your Google adsense code. Also ignore reader comments and navigation by putting <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> at the beginning and <!– google_ad_section_end –> at the end of the adsense code.
• Targeting expensive keywords
  Check bids and revise content accordingly – e.g. house painting vs. home improvement. Try it and you will find an improvement. Also, if you don’t know what keyword to choose, go to the Google adwords tools section and choose for there.
• Put competitors and low CTR advertisers on your block list
  It’s a no brainer.
• Dispense with Flash-based or graphics-rich approach
  You already know that search engines do not like flash based or graphic rich websites. Content is the king, add it as much as you can in your site.
• Keywords in URL, H1 tag, body copy, title tag
  Use the keywords wherever you get a chance. Be consistent and precise with the keywords.

Finally one might ask, did I see them work? Yes most of the time.  But it also doesn’t mean that you will rush into making changes.  I need you to think about all the above and then decide if you would like to implement those or not.  Before i go for today, please keep in mind that you should try as much as you can to optimize for the better paid ads for your blog BUT don’t try any black hat ways to do anything. It will be a real shortcut to the end of you blogging career.

How to Make Money Tweeting: Sponsored Tweet

Yes, it’s no secret that Twitter can be a tremendous time-suck. But imagine getting paid for wasting those precious minutes of your day. Thanks to companies that are desperate to reach consumers in the social-media crowd, it’s now possible to make a buck or two — or much more — on Twitter by something called “Sponsored Tweets”. The way it works for Sponsored Tweets is that Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for the privilege of tweeting an ad on their behalf, and wait for the offers to come in.

So, you can be any Billy Bob or Joe Blow but as long as you have followers you have a potential of earning. Now, you wonder how many tweeter users will use or actually use this service. Let’s take a look, Ted Murphy, founder and CEO of IZEA, says more than 7,000 Twitter users have signed up for Sponsored Tweets in its first month. He also has paid more than $100,000 to twitter users in his site’s first month of operation. Yes, I know the average per user is only $15 but keep in mind that given the current economy this could be a great way to earn spare change on the side. So far if you are interested to try this out then try out Ad.ly . They are one of the best rated sponsored tweets company.  Also, stay tuned for more on Ad.ly and how you can make money by sponsored tweets.

Best CPM Rate for Your Blogs Page View

Unless you are the top 100 websites in the USA and you have a group of dedicated sales people trying to sell you ad slots, probability is that you are not really that happy with your CPM rate that you are generating through your advertising network. Unlike you guys I also have tried out a bunch of online marketing companies. I have tried them individually, as well as mixing with each other. After trying them out for a while with different variation I will suggest the following advertising networks for anyone who is trying to generate a HIGH CPM rate for his/her website/blog.

Google Adsense:
Google Adsense, by far the best payout for ECPM. Google adsense program is easy to get approved and they pay on time and so far they paid every time.  I have seen up to $5/ECPM with Google. But again, on average it’s safe to say that about $3/ECPM is what I was making on average. Since Google was pretty continuous with its revenue, I was happy but not satisfied. So, the only things that I could do is the raise the number if impression by increasing the number of ad slots. This also has a limitation since Google will allow only 3 ad slots in a given page. So, I moved forward by trying the following.

Kontera:
Thanks to DP I found out about contextual ads and I started to look around. Based on the user reviews I went with Kontera, which so far has treated me, nice. I am generating a decent amount of revenue through them every month. But as far as the $/CPM goes, Kontera has been consistent with around $1/CPM using 2 links/post. It’s really easy to get approved with Kontera and you can get paid via paypal as well.

Chitika:
Since the banner was ads were not much a revenue generating sources, I decided to try out Chitika by replacing one of the slots for banner. Looking at the result I was about to kill myself just because I didn’t go with chitika a long time ago. Chitika has been and still is a nice compliment to Google Adsense ads for all of my blogs so far. I have a variance of $/CPM with Chitka but I would say, at the least you will get $1.50/CPM. And if you find a good placement for Chitika ads resulting a good click through rate then it will go up even more.

Keep in mind that from the very beginning I tested different revenue generating sources, which will comply with Google Adsense. In other words, I always looked and tested ONLY those sources, which can be used in addition to Google Adsense. Now you tell me, would you be happy with at least $5/CPM  for your page views from your blog. I know I would.

White Hat Link Cloaking

If you want to generalize, Link Cloaking or Link Masking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. Usually this technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. And that’s why Black Hat Link Cloaking is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning. Just incase you wanted to know the difference between them, read through my “SEO Ethics: White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO” post.  Having said that, cloaking links in any Internet Marketing activity is important, especially if you promote lots of products. But its needs to White Hat cloaking. Today i will talk about 6 reasons to cloak you affiliate links as a blogger and in future how to do it.

Spam Complaints:
When a visitor clicks on an un-cloaked affiliate link, the affiliate’s link details will be displayed in the address bar. This serves to alert the visitor that they are not at the official website they believed they were being directed to.  And if a subscriber files a spam complaint with their ISP, the ISP could get the website shut down. So, to mitigate this issue, it is recommended for websites owners to use a link cloaking system to convert all direct affiliates link into a link with the domain name.
Example: Instead of link http://abcd.dot.com/aff3453 , you can have www.your-domain-name.com/product link.

Link Hijacking:
In the competitive internet marketing world it happens all the time and may or may not happen to you yet but probability is that it will happen. There are a lot of black hat way for the link hijackers who will simply substitute your affiliate ID with their own in the link, – stealing the commission at point of purchase. 

Conversion Rate:
Usually the merchants landing page or sales pages contain extra bonuses and newsletter subscriptions which may deviate customers away from buying and allows the merchant website to overwrite the affiliate’s link at the last minute. If you use an affiliate link cloaking service then you will be able to send you r subscribers to the specific product page resulting a high conversion rate.

Building Trust:
Often, a product that you are promoting at your website is withdrawn. And if you have used a direct affiliate link for that product then you will be sending all of your subscribers to something which doesn’t exist, losing your credibility. However, if you use a link cloaking system or service, then all you have to do is change that link for your destination page and you will be sending your subscribers to an alternate page.

Branding:
As you will be moving forward with your website, keep in mind that you also will be branding your website. By cloaking you affiliate links you will expedite your website’s brand building process. Once simplest way to perform this task is to format your link where your domain name stand out .
Example: http://www.Your-Website.com/Reviews/Product

Performance Tracking:
“We pay for our ignorance”, which is why as an internet marketer you need to be tracking you affiliate links click reports. You need to know how your keywords are working or you so that you can optimize them and make them more profitable. A decent link cloaking system will provide you with click tracking records. You can track your links click through rate, followed by conversion rate and you can also perform a lots of tests to optimize your profit.

Hopefully by now, you will have a decent idea about the importance about cloaking while blogging about other stuff. So get you cloaking script and start enjoying the benefits.

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

In an ideal picture perfect scenario there would be no run time error for your website. Whatever page your visitors want to get access will be right there even though you have redesigned/updated your website thousand times.  Of course, in reality errors are inevitable. Things go wrong always, links will break, posts will be moved and never will be redirected etc. A 404 page gets displayed when a user request to access a web page that doesn’t exist. And when they do, unless you change it, they’re going to get a default 404 page. 

Assuming that you have been already blogging, you already know that it’s much easier to engage an existing reader than it is to go out and find a new reader. And that’s why creating a custom 404 page for your site is so important. And if you have redesigned or reworked you website then chances are that you will have some 404 error page.  If you just google it you will find five gazillion ways to customize your word press 404 error page. I will not reinvent the wheel, rather I will through in some Engineering thoughts into it and will show you how to develop a systematic approach to create a custom word press 404 error page. 
Step 1: Design Layout

The first step is creating the custom error page is to layout a conceptual custom 404 error page design keeping reader usability, SEO and reader retention in mind.

• Usability should the first and most important functionality that you need to integrate into your custom 404 error page design. The goal is to format the navigation such a way that it will provide a smooth transition from an error page (a negative thing for yours website since you don’t have what the reader wants) to some other pages that you would like you readers to go.
• Second functionality is SEO. Assuming you know the importance of anchor text with back links for your website, you can implement breadcrumb method to optimize your website content for both the readers and search engine bots inside your custom 404 error page. From your 404 error page use anchor text to link to the major categories that you want your visitors to go and then followed by some of your other most visited blog posts (I would do at least 10). Keep in mind that if you use a software to generate the top 10 posts then you will not generate any backlinks. So, if I would be you then I would do it myself so that you can generate 10 great backlinks for my blog and/or site.
• Monetizing should be another functionality while you will design your custom word press 404 error page. Depending on your blogs topic if you want then you can also replace your most visited blogs with something that will make you monkey. You can also replace the top 3/4 posts links with some other posts links where your have some kind of affiliate link embedded into it. Why not making some extra $$ while you can without bothering others. Take a look at Darren’s bio page from where he refers reader and make money. You can always create that bio page into your customs 404 error page for your word press blog and generate cash flow.
• Personality matters. Be yourself by bringing your own personality into the page. Replace the typical ” page cannot be found” with something that you would feel when you cant find something. Feel free to add a picture or some crazy comment that will make you stand out.

Step 2: Conceptual Design:

Being an Engineer, I have developed a habit of visualizing everything’s before I go into execution. So, I have sketch the following two different types of customs 404 error page that should give an understanding what I have explained above.

Example 1:

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

Example 2:

How to Customize WordPress 404 Error Page For Maximum Benifit

Step 3: Execution:
Now, you should get a pen and paper on your hand and design your own layout. Once done update your blog and thats it.

Also, if you have customized your 404 error page already then why not sharing that here. Till next time, TA TA.

SEO for Bing BUT Why : Bing's Search Market Share Analysis

As you all know that Yahoo and Microsoft has just a recent contract where Yahoo will be using Bing’s search algorithm for replacing yahoo’s own search algorithm. Looking at the past behavior of the search marking industry, Yahoo and Microsoft joined together to get on Google, who by far is the biggest player in the search industry. Having said all of that, what’s in for you as a webmaster? Earlier i have explained how to SEO for Bing and today i will back up its importance for every one of us who blogs.

Bing.com History Pre 2009:

Let’s take a look at how Bing was introduced and then we will look into its total market share.  

SEO for Bing : Bing market share

Bing.com History During 2009:

Now lets take a look at the market share in 2009 .

Bing market share 2009

Clearly you can tell that Bing.com will be another major source for webmasters to tap into with that wopping >28% search market share. Going through the Bing Forum seems like Bing will be much more predictable than both Yahoo and Live.com, which is a good news for all the webmasters.  Any other thoughts??

Confirmed: Bing Recommends 301 Redirection

I have been writing about Bing.com and how Bing.com is becoming another powerhouse for webmasters throughout last couple of weeks. Recently I added a SEO plugin for one of my cell phone news blog and which gave me a lot of 404 errors. To correct that I started to use 301 redirect based on the facts that google prefers a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that, Microsoft prefers a 302 redirect but I did 301 redirect anyways since google prefers 301 redirects. This question was also brought out in Bing webmaster forum and it has been verified that Bing now prefers a 301 redirect and it strongly recommends NOT to use a 302 redirect. So, for all of you out there, if you are doing 301 redirect then keep it going and for those who don’t, then its time to switch your 302 redirect into 301 redirect.

How to Perform SEO with Bing for Your Blog

In my last post I have talked about how to submit sitemaps in major search engines where you have seen the name of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Bing is already a buzz word in the search engine world. It is proven to be better than the old MSN.com but again, the million dollar question is as a webmaster “what’s in your wallet? Or how can you SEO for Bing? So, I decided to point out some of things that webmasters can do to improve your site ranking with Bing. SEO with Bing will be similar to SEO with Google. Let’s take a look.

What is Bing?
Microsoft has released a new search engine far better than MSN.com which is called Bing. As Microsoft describes it “Bing is really a decision engine—a faster way to make more informed choices”.

Why Bing is Important for webmasters
I will simply let the number do the talking. It’s been only a little over a month that Bing has been released and Bing is already ranking in the top 20 websites in the world. So, I have decided to compare Bing with Google, Yahoo and Ask.com for their traffic and found the following. For my websites, Bing is already taking over Yahoo for sending visitors. So, if I you would be you then I would keep a close eye on Bing and maximize its potential.

Bing search engine ranking

Things to do for SEO with Bing
Bing emphasizes on SEO very much. In their white paper they said specifically that “All of the benefits from these enhancements are available to websites that invest in SEO.”  SEO for Bing will require the following for all the webmasters:

• Submit your sitemap to Bing
  Submitting your sitemap to Bing is also very helpful for Bing to look into your smashing content. Read through my earlier post about submitting your sitemaps to search engines to find out more. However, there’s no need to resubmit your sitemap to Bing if Live Search previously indexed your website and there have been no recent changes on your website. You can use Google sitemap plugins for you WP blog to create a XML sitemap.
• Unique titles and Meta descriptions to each page
  By adding great post titles and descriptions you will provide Bing with good, keyword-oriented information that will well represent your website thus will rank better in Bing. Read though the “How to Optimize page Title” and then “38 Ways to Electrify Your Blog Post Titles and Headlines“. Once done, use all in SEO plugins for your wordpress blog and implement your learning’s.
• Systematic page Structure
  For Bing web crawlers a systematic and well organized page structure matters. Bing crawlers want the webmasters to use a consistent data structures between pages (such as placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as micro formats, etc.) to add more of your webs site content into Bing’s SERPS.
• High Quality Content
  Once you have performed SEO for you blog and blog posts, you need to start looking at our blog post content. Since, Bing offers a content preview, Bing wants webmaster to perform SEO for clear and high-quality page content.

Hopefully, you can find the huge similarity between the SEO for Bing and SEO for Google. The only thing that I Bing hasn’t mention is the importance of backlink. I assume as Bing learns more they will be asking for backlinks as well. Also, if you wanted to read Bing’s White paper you can find it here. Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that.