Beginner Tips for SEO

This is a really useful Network Solutions video I found earlier today for those of you who are just getting started on your site and need some pointers about SEO (search engine optimisation). The first 30 seconds are just introduction so you can just skip past that onto the good stuff. The three essential points made are:

- Good Content
- Links to your site
- Title tags and meta tags

They are the basic things that all sites need, in order to get organic traffic from search engines. So have a watch of the video and learn something new! Or for those veterans out there it’s a nice refresher.

Traffic Exchange Programs

Traffic exchange programs have been around for longer than I can remember (admittedly that’s not long...). Over the last month or so I have been playing around with a few of them to see it they are worth all the attention they get. For those of you who are unfamiliar with traffic exchange programs, they are very simple. You sign up, create an account and enter the URL of your site/s. Normally there is an option to 'surf for credits', which involves browsing the other sites listed in their database. After a given time on one site (e.g. 30 seconds) you can click a button that takes you to the next one. You earn 'credits' for each site you surf which are converted into hits for your site. There are usually other ways to acquire credits but these depend on which site you use and vary from buying credits to earning them by making referrals.

With what I have said to far you probably think they sound great, but there must be a reason why we don't do them all the time. Here are a few pros and cons of traffic exchange programs.

Pros
- Bring targeted traffic to your site at no cost to you apart from your time. (Unless you chose the paid option).

- Expose you to more websites, some of which may be interesting/useful.

- Can be fairly effective for gaining referrals for online schemes, because the users of the traffic exchange program will be web users and possibly affiliate marketers.

- You don't actually have to read the page you are surfing to earn the credits. I confess I often have a traffic exchange programs running while I am doing something else and I just check back occasionally and click the button to earn the credits.

Cons
- It is against many advertising programs TOS, namely Google AdSense to have a site on a traffic exchange program. In my opinion this is the single biggest con.

- The traffic may be targeted, but as I said you don't have to read the page to earn the credits so many people won't even read anything of what you have written.

- People learn to filter out the crap AND its BORING!. Meaning that on the rare occasions I surf 'properly' and read what I am browsing, I cannot help but be sickened by all the crap and spammy worthless pages that are floating around on these programs. This normally results in me switching off and just mindlessly clicking the button. If you want to know what its like to be a robot performing mindless repetitive takes you will love traffic exchanges.

- The presence of so many worthless sites shows that lots of the people using them are worthless as well lol. i.e. they couldn’t build a site of value if they tried so do you really want them to be your referral?

- Some of the sites are 'dodgy' and do who knows what to your computer. Many of the sites I have surfed using these programs have made my computer go REALLY slow for a while and do other nasty things to it, I have reported the sites that did this but there are still a lot out there, so beware.


Ok so those are a few pros and cons. I am a member of these 3 traffic exchange programs.

TrafficG - If I must pick a favourite this would be it. The credits earned here get used up very quickly, which shows that they have the most users. This means they there is the potential to surf all day and not build up a surplus of credits so you can get the most traffic with TrafficG. They also have the best quality traffic because the minimum surf time is 30 seconds. As well as that they also have a decent system where you get rewarded with a better ‘credits – hits’ ratio if you do a lot of surfing.

Blog Mad - have a minimum surf time 25 seconds which I suppose is a happy medium. However they do seem to have fewer users and I have been able to build up a stockpile of credits too easily.

AdSence Elite Team - have a minimum surf time of juts 10 seconds with makes surfing feel more productive but the quality of traffic you will receive will be much lower.

All in all there is not a huge difference between the different programs. If you are really going to get stuck into traffic exchange programs it would be best to use all three anyway. Also do not think these are the only ones, there are plenty more out there.

My advice would be to only use traffic exchange programs in the very early stages of your blog, if at all. There are lots of other more effective and rewarding ways of getting traffic, like building quality content. If you don't have a developed site and you are just promoting one affiliate program then you may find them more useful, but remember you cannot have AdSense ads if you do use one .

Spicypage is 1 Month Old!

CLICK TO ENLARGE
Spicy page sent this to me, "We are proud to announce that we are officially one month and one day old". I am a huge fan of spicy page. Don't ask me why that screen shot is a bit odd (the pie chart has gonw a funny colour), but you can still see that I get 2.1% of my traffic from Spicypage. The graph on the right is the Spicypage traffic plotted on it's own. You can see it started of high, because after I joined I voted on a whole load of sites and added their Webmasters to my 'Friends' list. Many reciprocated with a vote which got me on the front page for a few days. Its pretty easy to get on the front page, you just need about 10 votes in a day but you wont get massive amounts of traffic like Digg because Spicypage is still growing.

They also made this handy addition:

"Just a reminder that our policy allows for a site to receive votes from the same people every 30 days. So, for those of you who voted for sites 30 days ago, you can vote again for the same sites.

you can send messages to multiple recipients. So, if you need others to vote for your site/blog, let them know and keep on letting them know every 30 days. Your site/blog might be inside the Most Popular section all the time!"

Unfortunately for me I joined on January 25th which isn't 30 days ago. I think Spicypage has some great potential for growth so join now and get voting!

8 Simple Rules for...Successful Blogging!

They are in order of importance, 1 being the most important.

1. - - --Create good content to act as what everyone has been calling 'linkbait'. This can be done a number of ways:

a) By saying something controversial. This can only be 'used' a few times as it gets old after a while. This is a way of grabbing the attention you deserve and is especially effective if it is the Title of the post. Of course the main content must stand up to the expectations that the controversial title brings.

b) Say something Useful. Your readers are human beings and they want to experience pleasure, be it through reading an entertaining/controversial article, or by learning a valuable lesson. You can think of learning is an investment in future pleasure. I.E. preparation. If your content is so useful that they cannot stop themselves using it then you have succeeded. They may reciprocate with an encouraging comment, a digg/vote or maybe even a link back if they refer to your article.

c) Say something inspiring and LEAD BY EXAMPLE. People don't want to hear that they are 'never going to make it'. People like to hear success stores and they need role models. I have mentioned John Chow as mine and Darren Rowse. This does not mean lie to people about your earnings, but you need to be genuinely ambitious and believe in yourself.

As a rule of thumb, be specific, original, get the grit and use keywords in your articles to make Google smile on you.

I often find it useful to think about content this way:

Thousands of people are going to read what your write (over time). Imagine reading out your article aloud to all of them (if you are shy then use the old trick of imagining them being naked). Would you be proud of what you said? Would they applaud you? Of course you would write in a slightly different style if reading aloud, but otherwise that analogy is sound.

What good content achieves:
- A sense of pride in your blog.
- Keeps readers coming back
- Acts as 'linkbait' to generate inbound links
- Is good for SEO (from the keywords and the linkbacks
- Trust from your readers.

I.E. Good content creates traffic.

2. Submit your site to the major Search engines, such as Google, MSN, DMOZ. They are free but can take some time to list your site so submit it early on. (Especially DMOZ which can take FOR EVER!). The benefits of this are obvious, Google organic searches provides over half of this blogs traffic. Organic Google is also more likely to click on ads unlike Digg traffic which is ‘trained’ not to.

3. Exchange links with sites relevant to your niche and that have more inbound links than your own. This is especially important in the early stages, just to get your blog of the ground. It helps SEO, traffic and all that, because each inbound link is viewed as a 'vote of confidence' in the eyes of the search engines.

4. Submit your blog to ranking systems such as Technorati and Spicypage.

Benefits:
- Useful for your own knowledge about the number of inbound links your blog has.
- Useful for advertising your blog, I.e. gives you the ability to state your blogs rank.
- Great for networking. I used the Technorati searches to find blogs in my own niche which were also slightly more popular. Then I had a look at those blogs, learnt from them myself and requested a link exchange. Spicypage is a great place to do much the same thing, only it is much smaller. Note: Social Networking sites like Mylot can be used in a similar way to make contacts online and promote your blog.

5. Monetise your blog with Ads. These could be with Google AdSense ads orText Link Ads among others. People often make the mistake of doing this first in the desperate hope of getting a couple of clicks. This is pointless. Unless you have a decent amount of quality content your blog will appear to be a sleazy MFA site (made for AdSense) which will have a negative effect on traffic.

6. Join a few trustworthy affiliate programs such as AGLOCO and Bestcashrewards. These will earn you extra income and they give you something else to blog about, although you shouldn’t write about your affiliate programs too often.

7. Submit your better posts to article directories like Digg, and Go Articles and isnare. Don't forget to leave information about yourself and a link to your blog where allowed. Digg is a little different; it is focuses on news about technology, politics, business and gaming so there is not point in going through your old posts and submitting a news post that you write a year ago to digg.

8. Submit your site to niche/smaller directories. This brings traffic directly from the directory as well as giving a helping hand in SEO for the major search engines.

That was an abnormally long post for me. If you made it this far I succeeded!

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!

Bestcashrewards

Hello world! I soon will be adding exiting new articles to this blog! There will be a range of topics including archaeology (which I am studying), and more reviews of the most popular blogs out there to find out if they really deserve all the fuss. I am gradually shifting away from moneymaking advice in order to make this blog a thing of real interest to its readers. If you have suggestions for new topics go ahead and say them, you never know I might like your idea!

I do however have one more moneymaking site too tell you all about.

Bestcashrewards is a fairly new affiliate scheme, in which you get paid for viewing online seminars. Your earnings (once you have enough referrals) is $3000-$40000 per week, so there is potential there, despite the large need for referrals.

Bestcashrewards intends to reward you (the consumer) and the advertiser. If there are any advertisers out there this is what you have been looking for.

Advertisers have the opportunity to promote their product/service to thousands of people.

Once you have the referral requirement you get paid for each referral who watches an online seminar each week (were advertisers give a talk or ‘seminar’) talk live, online, to you. I suggest you have a chat to the moderators, who are online to help you 24/7 via mic (you can type your questions to them if you don’t have a mic. You can talk to them before making your decision about signing up, oh and signing up is free.

To take a look, click here.