5 Ways to lose blog readers

Write too many sponsored posts in too shorter space of time. Sponsored posts are great; bloggers earn a little, the company your writing about gets some attention, the sponsor gets some money (from the company) and the reader has something to read, so why is it dangerous?

It’s simple. Sponsored posts often do not reflect the bloggers real views. This is especially common in new bloggers who do not understand this. They just want the cash regardless of whether they loose some readers because they are overly-flattering in their post. It is especially dangerous if you have not properly researched and spent time using what ever you are reviewing. You should all know by now that you must be careful about what you endorse. Just imagine... your reputation would be left in tatters if an affiliate program you recommended suddenly closed it's doors for no reason and you and your referrals lost all their earnings. Some sites do allow you to write negative reviews, but this is only useful if you are actually going to use the site and find out it's bad points; which you are less likely to do if you are writing a sponsored post every day.
Note - I am including posts about affiliate/referral programs here, because in the long run they are sponsored posts.



Not replying to your blog comments.. Not only will this piss of your readers and make them feel little and insignificant but it’s just plain stupid. There are numerous benefits of replying to your comments.
Benefits
• A comment may be suggesting an improvement you could make to your blog. Even if you carry out their advice, replying makes it more obvious you are open to criticism and makes them feel happy because they have said something useful. This means they are more likely to return to your blog to get more of that feeling!
• First time visitors to your blog often judge it by the number of comments they see (which is a sort of very rough traffic/popularity guide). If you reply to your comments that number will be higher, especially if you spark of a debate. If they see a high number of comments they may request a link exchange, or just become regular readers. It may seem like a small point but it all adds up.
• Some comments are questions. You wouldn’t want your reader (who thinks you know the answer!) to lose faith in you, so answer their questions!
• Some comments are compliments, which we all love. Saying a quick 'thank you' is polite and encourages more compliments to come your way.
• Some comments are spam. Don't reply, delete them.
• Your more knowledgeable readers may disagree with what you have said and spark off a debate. If you don't reply it looks like you are hiding from them. It also shows your expertise if you can come up with arguments to counter what they have said.




By hiding things from them. This is a very broad category and has several possible interpretations.
a) If you are a successful blogger throw a rope down the mountain and help your readers to the top with you. After all, that’s probably how you got to the top.
b) Lying about affiliate programs - this is covered in part 1.
c) Your earnings. This is especially relevant to blogs in this niche. Why pretend to have earned more/less than you really have? I know some people out there are apparently 'offended' by revealing their blogging earnings, but if you are then this probably isn't the niche for you.

I try to be as open as possible about this blogs progress, which I why I make a Weekly earnings report and a Google Analytics Weekly overview.



By making your archives difficult to access. In my opinion this is the single biggest limitation of blogger blogs, (the lack of categories). I have tried to get around this by referring to past articles as a write but there are some that hardly ever get linked to. This is most important for the regular readers of your blog. Most of my 'new visitors' don't arrive to the homepage of this blog, but emerge somewhere in the archives so Google has done a good job of indexing them all.




By cluttering up your site with ads. This is an obvious one, multiple big banner ads are a no-no, and too much AdSense will send your readers in the other direction. There are ways of integrating ads so they don't stand out so much (which also gets you more clicks). For an example of this see my post on Kontera. Banner ads have been 'scientifically' proven to get less click through than Text Link Ads and too many banners on a single pages results in one long loading time for people with slower connections. This is true for all images so don't include too many.

Those are the 5 ways to lose blog readers. There are others of course but hopefully the basics are covered there. Many of them are pure common sense but you would be surprised how many people fall fowl of them. Number 1 is the most prevalent in my opinion, because the authors see it as a sort of 'happy medium' between a site full of ads and a site that provides a service so make sure you spread sponsored posts out.

Kontera - In-Text Advertising at a Glance

About 1 week ago I signed up to Kontera (they don't have a referral program don't worry). They provide another method of site monetisation in the form of in-text advertising. They used to only accept high flying sites but recently they opened their gates to us ‘little-uns’. As I write this only a few in-text ad have appeared, but hopefully that will change soon.

I have just glanced back at the Kontera Publisher FAQ and one of the requirements is to "Generate more than 500,000 page impressions per month". This site doesn't get anywhere near that amount of traffic and was still accepted. They can't have just changed the rules because they say they will notify me by email if there are any changes and I have not received an email, so it's probably OK for you to give it a go but don't take my word for it (sorry!).

What is a ContentLink™?
A ContentLink™ is a contextually relevant keyword. ContentLinks™ appear as distinctive links with a unique underline that open a little window containing relevant advertising information. (They are the orange double underlined words).

Details
- Minimum payout is $100 buy check.
- Kontera is currently working in the following countries: USA, Canada and UK. Within the next few months they are planning to launch ContentLink™ in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
- Don't forget to log on to your account and add the rest of the code (I didn't realise I had to do this and so the first few days I just sat here wondering why it wasn't working).
- You can check out their Kontera Demo here.

So that’s Kontera for you. Hopefully by the end of next week you will be able to see Kontera’s contribution to my weekly earnings.

Blog Review: Desinotes

Desinotes is the next in my series of short reviews of sites that I have found useful information about making money online. I hope you find it useful as well.

Desinotes has a wide range of topics. Many are closely related to making money online, which is what we are all here to learn about! Here are some examples of the topics:

Online Business
Online Marketing
Internet

These contain original ideas, which will help you to gain credibility with your blog and hopefully make a whole fist full of cash while you’re at it. It is a very well developed blog with over 300 posts. You have a lot to read, so get going!


Coming up:

- More reviews, I spend MY time finding these sites, so you don’t have to.

- More advice and great free ways to be successful online.

Blog Review: Wealth Coach

Wealth Coach is a site I have found especially useful in my online money making 'journey' (I know is corny). It is the blog of Nicola Cairncross, a successful internet marketer.

As you know there are lots of useful sites out there, but on Wealth Coach I found some ideas I had not read anywhere else before (whether this means they are original or not I will leave up to you). One of these includes a post about using Myspace to our full advantage. I have had a profile on Myspace for some time and I 'sort of' knew that I could try and use it as a marketing tool but I never really got into it. Nicola's post about how to use Myspace made me realised how valuable social networking sites are to internet marketers (and anyone trying to get traffic).

You take a look at her Myspace profile to get and Idea of what you can do here. You can see a certain professional looking approach has been taken and she has been rewarded with positive comments from people in her 'friends' network.

Stay tuned for reviews of other great sites to learn from, but while your waiting, why not learn from Wealth Coach or you can scroll down.......

How to Drive Traffic to your Blog

I have previously explained about ways of profiting from your blog and about affiliate programmes like bestcashrewards and AGLOCO. It is all well and good to be a member of such programmes, but how are you going to promote them without have a constant stream of traffic to your site?

Well, a major contributing factor is Search engine Optimisation (SEO). Traditionally this has been done by link exchanges, because each link is viewed as a 'vote' in the all-seeing eyes of the search engines. However this is all changing. The search engines are using more and more complex algorithms to help separate out the wheat from the chaff.

This does NOT mean link exchanges dead. You simply have to more picky when making them. There is little/NO value in having a link from a unknown, unrelated site. It will bring you no traffic because it doesn’t get any itself, and it is worthless in the eyes of the search engine because it is unrelated and is considered almost a sort of spam. This is BAD news for your site.

The solution is to attain links from RELEVANT AUTHORITY SITES. This means sites that are popular, get large amounts of traffic (you can find this out by using and Technorati, the biggest blog ranking site on the net). And as you know by know, they must have RELEVANT CONTENT.

This need for relevant content is why in some lines of Internet business, link exchanges are dead. If you think it through, if you are trying to sell a product, you are just putting links to your competitor’s sites right there for your customers to run off to. So DON'T use link exchanges if you are selling something!

For those of you who are not selling something, you can get link exchanges from authority sites by e.g. offering to write a review of their site containing links to their site and putting it on yours. For an example of this see my review of JohnChow.com

For more advice on making money online STAY TUNED!

Successful Blogging For Money

Whether you are getting 100s, 1000s or 10,000s hits on your blog per day, you are GARENTEED to make more money if you DIVERSIFY.

What is Diversification?

It is when you generated MULTIPLE sources of income. This does not have to mean e.g. selling a physical product AND having adverts, it simply means don't put all your 'eggs in one basket'. This means you must not ONLY rely on adsense as your source of imcome. There ARE other ways to get ads on your blog out there. On of them is:

Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads have a far more stable level of income and can be displayed on the same page as adsence. The only 'down side' is your site needs fairly high levels of traffic, and good site content. In the wider schemes of things this is actually a good thing, because it motivates bloggers to fill their blog will original content and actually make them worth reading.


I have given you an alternate source of income from ads, now for another source of income altogether.

To generate income from this method you do NOT need any product to sell.

This method is known as AFFILAITE MARKETING. As everyone knows, there are scams out there so you must judge carefully. There are some affiliate programmes that have become so popular, OTHER people have taken the risk for you. One of these programmes is AGLOCO. You only have to read a few of my previous posts to understand the potential of this programme.

However this is only one affiliate programme and seeing as the lesson of the day is to DIVERSIFY, I will let you know about 1 more. This one is called bestcashrewards. I have a post about this in my archives. You can either go take a look at that, or click here to take a look.

And there it is. People ask me; 'why do you do all that stuff online?'. I used to have no choice that to say 'because I can' in a dramatic manner, now I can say, 'because I make lots of money'. And YOU can too!

The AGLOCO Member Calculator

CLICK TO ENLARGE
If you haven’t already read my posts about AGLOCO then go ahead and read them. I am introducing you to the AGLOCO member calculator, which, believe it or not, allows members to calculate their monthly earnings.

Above is a screen shot of what my monthly earnings would be if I were to have 3 referrals, who each made 3 referrals them selves. If you cannot see that clearly enough it says 458.75. That is if each referred member spends just 5 hours per month using the AGLOCO viewbar, which will be released at the end of February (see previous post).

NOTE: If those figures where increase sightly, to 5 direct referrals and 5 extended referrals, your monthly income would increase up to 4886.25!

To sign up for AGLOCO click here

Traffic Tips for Beginners

As you have all noticed, I have taken a break from explaining my experience of making money online. This is not because my experience has stopped, nor because I have no advice to give you. It is in fact because I have been so busy finding out about new methods that I have had not choice but to make 'short n sweet' posts.

A very useful way of making money online is by bringing more traffic to your website/blog. This can be done a number of different ways, all off which should be utilised.

1. Get higher ranked in the search engines.
2. Have your site listed in the main directories.
3. Have your site listed in niche directories.
4. Publicise your site in forums e.g. Mylot.
5. Publicise your site in free classified ads, e.g. Vivastreet.
6. Have your site jam-packed with useful, original content.
7. By getting links to your site displayed on other sites of prominence.

Number 1.(debatably the most important) can be achieved by using the other methods. This is because each link to your site acts as a 'vote' in the all-seeing eyes of the search engine. You can go about gathering links by browsing blogs and requesting link exchanges to blogs that are related to yours, have a high quality of content and (hopefully) have a higher level of web traffic than you. This method, although rewarding (as you develop a more personal relationship with your fellow bloggers) can be very slow, and ineffective.

Untimatly, it all comes down the OC (like everything in the world...) ORIGINAL CONTENT. If you content is good enough you will find people coming back for more, and if its REALLY good they will tell their friends and you will have to spend less time completeing the tedious other methods.

I will be explaining more about the other key ways in the near future, so stay tuned!

Book Review: The Complete IDIOT'S guid to Creating a Web Page

When starting my online moneymaking enterprise, this book was my first port of call.

Author:
- Paul McFedries, who is the president of Logophilia Limited. He has sold nearly two million copies of his various 30 computer books.

Cost:
U.S. $19.99
U.K. £18.15
CAN $29.95

As you can see this book is not cheap especially the UK version which I own!!

First Glance:

- The book appears to be very thick for an 'idiot's guide', it contains 414 pages.
- It seems to be clearly laid out, with bullet pointed lists inside, and examples of exactly what to do.
- Contains a CD-ROM, which includes a "complete Webmaster's toolkit".

Closer Examination reveals the book is so think, BECAUSE it is for 'idiot's'. There is no WAY that you could get confused about something using this book. You simply start at the front (duh) with basic HTML coding, and work your way through to the ways to "make your page sing and dance".

According the Paul McFedries "Smart People use Idiots guides - they are the perfect resource for immediate results!". I must admit, there is some truth in this statement. I would highly recommend this book if you are looking to make your own web page and you have no knowledge of HTML. (I did not need much HTML knowledge for this blog, my website has been put 'on hold' until this blog has made a greater impression in the 'blogosphere'.

Mylot

Hi everyone,
I have briefly mentioned the Mylot forums before, but I do not feel I did them justice. They are one of the many free money-making tools available to us on the net.

What is Mylot?
Mylot is a forum, with over 51,000 members. It is growing very quickly becase its users get paid in US dollars per post.

What exactly do the members get paid for?
Members get paid for:
1. Starting a new discussion. (the more replies they get the more money is earned, so they have to make them interesting!)
2. Uploading relevant images to their discussion.
3. Uploading relevant images to a reply they make to someone elses discussion.
4. Replying (posting) to someone elses discussion (better the post the more is earned)
4. Uploading images to their 'interests' section.

This can make posting on mylot actually quite enjoyable, as users strive to make a community that discusses only topics of interest.

Note: There is never any fee, I only ever talk about free ways of making money online.

My Tip:
Invite people to be be in your 'freinds' section, (dont worry you dont have to know them personally). You can then post in each others topics with benefits you both.

You can join mylot here:

Mylot

Best of luck!

Textlink Ads

Hi everyone,
As i'm sure you all already know, My blog contains my experience about making money online which I hope will bring you success with your online quest.

My latest positive experience has been with Text Link Ads . They specialize in placing static html links on high quality, high traffic websites. They work in a similar way to google adsence, and target specific ads to your website.

The advantage is, that you can put up to 10 of their ads per page, which you can place in strateigic locations to maximise revenue.

The downside is that you need to have a developed blog/website, with a fairly high rate of web traffic in order to qualify to display their ads. However, if you do, then they are another usefull method of increasind your revenue, and contain little/no risk as it is free to sign up with them.

You can apply to get textlink ads here:

Text Link Ads

I hope you find this useful. Let me know about your results and ask me any questions you may have, I am interested to hear about your experiences online too.

My Online Money Making Experience

I have tried a number of different methods of 'making easy money online' and I can assure you, none of them are all that easy. This is true, given that the few that actually work have taken months of sifting and experimenting online to even find them and separate the wheat from the chaff.

NOTE: NONE of the sites I have listed EVER charge a sign up fee.

PAID ONLINE SURVEYS:
are the first way I tried out, with mixed success levels. I signed up to about 15 or so diffferent survey sites, all with the promise of 'regular surveys and exiting prizes!' All was not to be.

Below is a brief summary of the sites I signed up to, and actually sent me anything at all, (the other 5 or so didn't even send me a welcome email). I have been a member of these sites for over 3 months now.

NOVATRIS - Would NOT recommend, they sent me a welcome email and nothing else.

SURVEY CLUB - Would NOT recommend, they are claimed they would send me surveys which and advice about survey sites, all they sent were a couple of very unuseful adverts in my email and were not very helpful at all.

ACOP or 'American Consumer Opinion' was moderatly unsucessful. They sent me a couple of surveys, but not enough to even requestt a pay out. This may be becasue I was not in their target market, so you may have better luck.

SURVEY SAVVY - Would NOT recommend, they sent me a welcome email and nothing else.

GLOBAL TEST MARKET - Have given me a mixed message, they have only sent a couple of surveys, but that could be because I am not their target market, you may have better luck.


TEST AND VOTE (TO LUNA) - Would recommend. At first, to get started there are a number of fun ways to gain points(exchangeable for cash, or lottery tickets, amoung other things) on their site without even answering any surveys. They started sending me surveys after about 1 month of being member and these surveys were woth a lot of points.

LIGHTSPEED PANEL - Would recommend. This is my favourite and most reliavle survey site. They send me a survey every couple of days, each woth 100-200 'lightspeed points', which are exchangeable to money on paypal, and lots of other things.

IPOINTS - Would recommend. Ipoints, however, is not really a survey site. They have other offers online, and reward you for signing up with their affiliates and 'pay' you with unusual gifs, e.g. a cruise to Spain.


CIAO - Would recommend. They send me surveys fairly regularly, worth REAL money. You can build up a profile on CIAO, it has great potential that I am yet to explore.

NPDOR - Would recommend. They dont send me very many surveys, perhaps 1 every 2 weeks, but they have a sweepstakes that makes winning more likely.

NOTE: These sites do NOT reward you for getting referrals, what I have said here has no hidden motive.


AFFILIATE MARKETING
I am a member of 2 affilate marketing schemes.

AGLCOCO rewards you for browing the net using their trademark 'viewbar' (once availabe).

The way it works is simple. If you browse the net using their viewbar for 5 hours per month, they pay you whether or not you have ANY affiliates. You also get paid for when your affiliates use it, and when their affiliates use it. In this way it is possible to make a fair sum of money. However to be sucessful you must be able to get affiliates, although this is not especually hard because AGLOCO is a name that carries respect and people seem to know isn't a scam.

1 HOUR OF SURF TIME = 1 AGLOCO SHARE
AGLOCO are planning to be on the stock market by the end of 2007, which presents us with an oppoutunity. Members get 0.25 shares per hour people in their network.

There are therefore 3 possible outcomes:
AGLOCO sinks, and doesnt grow fast enough, resulting in its members getting their earnings from their browsing using the viewbar, and nothing more.
or
AGLOCO grows like crazy and the IPO is successful, in which case the members shares which they have accumulated may be worth a fortune.
or
AGLOCO grows like crazy and attrats the attention of the big boys like google and yahoo. AGLOCO would then be bought out, like youtube, except the members of AGLOCO will make big money from it.

Unfortunatly we do not know which of these 3 scenarios will actually happen. I believe it is worth being a part of.

You can sign up for AGLOCO here:
www.agloco.com/r/BBBK6378


The second affiliate scheme is BESTCASHREWARDS.
On BESTCASHREWARS you get paid by viewing online seminars, (1 or 2 30minute seminars per week).

Unfortunatly you can not earn anything without affiliates, BUT the overall income potentiall is MUCH higher ($3000-$40000 per week!, once you have enough referrals).

It is multi-tiered, which means that you get paid for referrals your referrals have made several steps down the line. I.e. you get $1.44 for each person in your downline who watches that seminar each week. So, if you were to get 3 referrals, and those 3 to get 3 more, and those 3 to get 3 more etcetc, untill you have a matter of 1000s. Therefore if say 2000 people below you watched the seminar, ...well you do the math.
This programe does require more commitment than AGLCOCO, but I belive it will be worth it in the long run.

You can sign up to BESTCASHREWARDS here:
http://bestcashrewards.com/affiliates/t.php?rid=2080



The Final way I have used to make money online, is on the MYLOT forums.
On these forums you get paid per post, and for uploading relevant images to discussions. The amounts earned here are small, but it is fun, and you can built a friends network.
You can sign up to MYLOT here:
Mylot

and there you have it. All of my experience written down on a page...I hope you find it useful and I wish you all sucess in your quest to make money online!