To Make A Living http://www.tomakealiving.com A Blog By ThinkTraffic.co.uk - Freelance SEO, Link Buidling & Internet Marketing Mon, 10 Oct 2011 11:51:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 49 SEO & Affiliate Marketing Tips http://www.tomakealiving.com/49-seo-tips?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=49-seo-tips http://www.tomakealiving.com/49-seo-tips#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:03:34 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=243 To build a successful affiliate system you need to use good SEO, so with that in mind; here are 49 SEO and affiliate marketing tips that you will need to know and put into practice in order to make money from affiliate marketing.

    URL related SEO considerations

  1. Use your primary keywords in your domain name
  2. Don’t use sub domains if you can avoid it
  3. Use a search engine friendly URL structure
  4. Use short but descriptive file names or post names
  5. Use a hyphen (-) to seperate words in files names

    6. Writing SEO content

  6. Write plenty of content for Google to index
  7. Write content about niche topics that are in demand
  8. Create pages about specific keyphrases
  9. Write fantastic quality content
  10. Publish new content regularly
  11. Update your most popular content
  12. Target long tail keywords with relevant content
  13. Make each page focussed, don’t go off on tangents
  14. Don’t overuse keywords, make your content sound natural

    15. On page SEO tips

  15. Carefully write page titles that get clicked on
  16. Experiment with headings to reduce bounce rates
  17. Use H1, H2 and H3 tags appropriately
  18. Keep your HTML code simple and lite
  19. Use em and strong tags to emphasis important keywords
  20. Use alt tags to describe any images you use
  21. Make sure your site loads quickly
  22. Write unique keyword & description meta tags on each page

    23. SEO friendly site layouts

  23. Make your site navigation HTML based
  24. Use keywords for navigation instead of images
  25. Make every page accessible within 2 clicks of the home page
  26. Include a site map listing every page and it’s URL
  27. Design your site for the most common screen resolutions used to view it
  28. Well thought out categories help users and search engines to navigate
  29. Have a good looking, simple site design that people will enjoy viewing

    30. On site links

  30. Include links to other pages in the body of pages
  31. Use keywords for link text, instead of things like “click here”
  32. Link to other relevant sites that might interest your readers
  33. Link to your most popular pages to boost them even higher

    34. Simple link building strategies

  34. Publish articles on top article websites
  35. Offer guest posts to bloggers in your niche
  36. Invite bloggers to guest post (they will probably promote it on their own blogs)
  37. Work tirelessly to make your content the best it can be
  38. Offer to exchange links with one or two highly relevant blogs in your niche
  39. Write about popular bloggers in your niche and tell them about it
  40. Links within the body of a page are more valuable than links elsewhere

    41. Checking for errors

  41. Regularly check for broken links
  42. Regularly check for broken images
  43. Don’t link to irrelevant or spammy sites
  44. Check for syntax errors in your HTML

    45. Miscellaneous SEO tips and tools

  45. Sign up for Google webmaster tools and then use them
  46. Customers and Readers first, SEO second
  47. Quality is more important than quantity
  48. Be patient, SEO results take time
  49. Keep coming back to this list, SEO isn’t a one off process

Summary

What have I missed?
Please join in and share your thoughts. What SEO tips have I missed?

So there you have it. There are plenty more tips that I could add, but having too many different ideas isn’t helpful, and any other tips I could add would add little extra value. My recommendation is to focus on the most important tips and do them really well.

You might also note that a lot of these tips don’t seem to relate directly to SEO. A lot of SEO now a days is all about making your site the best it can be for your users. SEO should never come at the expense of user experience.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/49-seo-tips/feed 4 Practical Ways To Increase Sales On An E-Commerce Site http://www.tomakealiving.com/increase-ecommerce-sales?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=increase-ecommerce-sales http://www.tomakealiving.com/increase-ecommerce-sales#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:10:42 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=594

I’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about SEO and bloggy type stuff, so I thought it was about time I re-visited actual e-commerce; not least because I genuinely think that selling stuff online is perhaps the best possible way to make a decent living online.

Sooo… Where to start? Well, I’ve already talked about actually getting your business started. There are two options to consider; You can start off by building an e-commerce website or you can start small, with an eBay business and work up to a website from there.

But once you’ve figured out what to sell, and you have your e-commerce website up and running, you will need to actually make some sales, and you will want to grow your sales and grow your business…

Email marketing

This is not a new idea by any stretch – but I simply can’t stress enough how important it is to build a mailing list. Here’s an example though:

Say your new business makes 5 sales a day; after 6 months you will have acquired 900 customers! If you can convince just 10% of your customers to return to you, and each of those customers makes a purchase once every 3 months, you can make an extra 30 sales every month. That means that by using email, you could increase your sales by 66% right away!

The critical things to do are:

Make sure you add every new customer to your mailing list. Keep all the information you can, so that you know what each customer has bought, how much they have spent etc. Make sure you follow any anti spam laws in your country of course.

Make it easy for yourself to email your customers. Look around for a simple email solution and make it routine for yourself. For this blog I have written myself a plugin which allows me to write a quick email right from my admin panel. The easier it is to email your customers, the more you will do it.

eBay

If you are selling stuff exclusively via your website, why not try eBay? To get started, just pick one or two products that you can purchase pretty cheaply. To sell them on eBay you may need to offer these products at less than you usually would, possibly even at cost; That’s fine though.

Unless you are buying very cheap, you will probably never make a massive profit on eBay, but if you take a long term view, eBay is a great way to find new customers. Every sale you make on eBay is an extra person on your mailing list and you might find you can quickly grow your customer base this way.

SEO

In my experience SEO is unbelievably effective for e-commerce businesses. I tend to focus on optimizing my category pages, because the traffic you can get is often very well targeted.

The downside to SEO is that it takes time to build links and get rankings, but if you can afford the investment it is well worth considering taking on an SEO company. Paying for SEO almost invariably produces a better ROI compared to paid advertising such as PPC.

If you want to do your own SEO though, have a look around the rest of this site, there are plenty more SEO type posts to trawl though! The best place to start is with your title tags…

Coupons

Offering a voucher code is a really great way to draw in repeat customers. If you are sending out email marketing regularly, why not offer special discounts to your loyal customers. Your cost of sale will be lower to these customers, so you can offer discounts and still make a good profit.

Affiliate program

If you sell a popular type of product and can afford to offer a discount, working with an affiliate network can be very effective. Affiliate networks have a database of affiliates who have large mailing lists and can provide a lot of traffic to your site. You will then have to pay a commission on every sale made by these affiliates.

To make these programs work you will often have to provide a discount code, so that the affiliates can entice their readers to click on their link to your site.

By the time you have paid your affiliate commission and given a discount on your products, you may find it hard to make a profit, but again you need to take a long term view. A good affiliate campaign can bring you a lot of customers, and if you can break even on those sales, you can build your customer list quickly – and any repeat sales will bring in some nice profits.

Up Sell & Cross Sell!

Whilst it is brilliant finding ways to make more sales, it really does make a lot of sense to try to sell more in each and every sale you make.

Start by gradually increasing the number of complimentary products you have, so that you can sell related items. You know how every time you view a product on Amazon you see “what other people bought”? Well you want to be able to do that, so have a think about what other products you can sell.

Next, look at your website and think about how you can make it better at cross selling. When a customer adds a product to their cart, get it to suggest other products. You could even consider offering product bundles at a discount. Offering free postage on multiple items is also a great way to get people to buy more.

Summary

When you are selling stuff online, the biggest part of your job is marketing. It is really important that you try to put systems in place so that your basic logistics process is as simple as possible – try to get your business working smoothly so that you can free up your time for all of these little bits that make the biggest difference.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/increase-ecommerce-sales/feed 5 Interview With Kirsty McCubbin – AffiliateStuff.co.uk http://www.tomakealiving.com/kirsty-mccubbin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=kirsty-mccubbin http://www.tomakealiving.com/kirsty-mccubbin#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:59:52 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=574 -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px; border-radius: 10px;'>

Need Help With Your SEO?

I now offer SEO consulting, training and link building
services especially for affiliate marketers!

Today I am interviewing Kirsty McCubbin from AffiliateStuff.co.uk. Kirsty is an affiliate marketer who hails from Scotland but now lives in Australia and works as a full time Affiliate marketer.

Kirsty is a fantastic example of what it means to be an affiliate marketer; she is dedicated to he affiliate sites and is always looking for ways to get better traffic and make her sites better. I have recently worked a lot with her after some negative side effects from the “Panda” update and it is always inspiring to see her positive attitude and her ability to bounce back from inevitable downswings that all affiliates must face.

She makes here money from a selection of different affiliate sites and also runs her own affiliate tips website, which should be required reading for anyone hoping to make money from affiliate marketing. I have learned a lot from her and my hope is that you can learn something too and get some inspiration for your own affiliate websites.

When you started out, what was your SEO strategy;
And did you spend money on SEO?

With Lingerie Brands it was at least 2 years before I began to use any kind of SEO company. I was an SEO and PPC consultant before I became an affiliate so I do / did have a good knowledge of how to structure sites well and effectively target “easy wins” on the keyword front.

Other than that I used my affiliate world contacts to get a handful of links, but in reality if you’re prepared to put a lot of effort into volume of content combined with well structured landing pages to make the most of the traffic you do get, you don’t need much link love to actually get things started.

What do you think is the biggest barrier to success for newbies?

I think being prepared to keep pushing at building a large content site and putting out a good volume of content consistently is a huge key to getting things off the ground. Once your site gets to a certain size it seems to take on a life of it’s own and some of the generic things you can rank for are quite surprising.

I see lots of affiliate sites that had bags of potential and the person who started it just got bored and went away. I think a lot of people fail due to lack of determination. There’s a lot of uncertainty that needs pushing through.

What strategy would you use if you started again now?

If I were to start a new site now I’d probably do similar. Get a few inbounds from friends, chase a few industry specific links from directories, and try to put some linkbait out there.

Also, if I chose the right niche area it’d be relatively easy to get quality links. Some areas have a good sense of community and it’s easy to get links from bloggers.

A good example of this is my mens underwear site which I have never paid any SEO money for. It has links from underwear brands, key bloggers, and even some nice “surprise” links from places like cracked.com thanks to the more unusual nature of some of the mens underwear styles I feature.

How much did you invest in your first site before making a return?

I started Lingerie Brands with an initial investment of £100 on domain, hosting, and some premium WordPress themes and plugins and it was making around £3,000 a month by the time I paid for any SEO.

How many visitors does lingerie brands actually get each month?

At it’s height it brought in around 60,000 visits per month – last month it brought in just shy of 9,000 thanks to a combination of the Panda update and those pesky scrapers who nabbed my content. Hey ho, that’s affiliate marketing for you though. I’ll probably have it back to around 20k to 25k (more with a good following internet wind) in 6 months time and the site will be better for it.

A large part of affiliate marketing success is to not let the setbacks put you off – setbacks come with the territory, LOL.

You spoke about building a large volume of content;
How do you control the quality?

That was a major weakness with Lingerie Brands and it’s not a mistake I intend to make again. Since Google’s “Panda” update I’ve been through that site about 6 or 7 times altering the brand pages. The rankings for those pages are now better than they have been in about 18 months and that was something I lost sight of thanks to the sheer size of the site… Does make you think.

What’s your view now on building a big site Vs maintaining quality?

I think it is still possible to add lots of content and monitor things like page bounce rates and be able to go back and change page structure en-masse. I use set templates to put my blog post type content into, I’ve been monitoring bounce rates on those (still not great but getting there) and tinkering about with the structure.

Once I have something that works I’ll go into the WordPress database and do a search and replace on the code to apply that template to all the content. Same thing for future changes. I’ll probably also pay individual attention to any that turn out to be good traffic generators (there’s always a surprise or two!)

However, en masse editing strategies aside I think I’ll employ a strategy of having more key content pages / in depth overviews designed to pick up generic terms such as “see through underwear” etc. I had such pages previously and they did well so I’ll go back through analytics and find the “easy wins” but do a really thorough job this time and really individualise those pages. I think that’s how I will strike the balance this time around.

What’s your SEO & link building strategy going forward?

I think the formula is probably a lot more complex than links. Not only do you need to get lots of links but you need to be engaging in social media in it’s many forms. I’m having lots of luck getting large brands to retweet my posts on Twitter at the moment which I think will help. I’m also doing all sorts of submissions to things like stumbleupon, using Facebook, engaging with bloggers etc and I suspect there’s still a lot for me to learn in this area.

I think you need to give off a massive array of signals moving forward. Some may not be terribly important right now but I’ve decided to do all of them before they become vital in some way – it’s a very complex but interesting learning process.

I think you can still get good momentum even with a relatively one dimensional approach, I know there are still a lot of people with standard blog type structures to their sites who don’t do a lot of link building and are getting good traffic. However I don’t think a one dimensional approach is that wise any more.

I think it’s important not only to have an affiliate site but also an information resource. This balance is bloody hard to strike when you are as monetisation minded as us affiliates. However, I’m now adopting an approach where 2 out of 5 blog posts that go on my site are non monetised / newsy in nature.

How do you keep your content informative / not too “affiliatey”?

I think it’s important not to have the body of a page 100% occupied by affiliate links (masked or otherwise). If I were Google I’d be working on percentages and placement. Therefore even on my monetised pages there might be say 5 links throughout the body a page. Only one of those will be an affiliate link leaving the site, and it won’t necessarily be at the top of the page, but it’ll be cunningly structured to be the one people can’t help but click on. The rest will either be links to internal resources of relevance to the page content or links to other relevant sites.

I think this has a strong role to play in catching those long tail phrases. Don’t ask me for scientific evidence but I have a site that lost a bit of longtail, and a friend of mine had a site structured very similarly. The key difference between the two was the above – which made a whole heap of sense to me in light of the research I have done on all this Panda jiggery pokery.

I’ve been using this strategy on lingerie brands for about a month now. My traffic has increased by 30% in the last few days. If that momentum persists I’ll hit 12,500 visits this month. Still small but from 7,500 in June I think that is an encouraging result. It’s just common sense really – you have to try to think like Google would about your content.

So how many affiliate sites do you actually have?

I have 3 main sites and then another 4 or 5 that bring in dribs and drabs which I don’t really maintain terribly well other than a periodic tidy up. There is one got a healthy traffic boost off the last Panda update and sales are on the up so I suspect time will be devoted to that one very soon!

Oddly enough my mens underwear site got a traffic boost after losing 40% Google traffic in the last update – and I hadn’t really done a thing to it that was significant?!

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/kirsty-mccubbin/feed 0 Photos to inspire the Digital Nomad http://www.tomakealiving.com/digital-nomad?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=digital-nomad http://www.tomakealiving.com/digital-nomad#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:32 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=256 Building a location independent business takes a lot of work, and that means you need to be motivated. Very often in the game of lifestyle design and earning a passive income online, it is not the most talented who do the best, but simply the ones who don’t give up.

So with that in mind, here are some photos that should get you good and inspired to keep working towards your dreams, no matter how long it takes and how much effort you need to put in.


Nb: This post was inspired by a similar post over at Freepursuits.com 50 Photos to Inspire Life as a Digital Nomad. This blog is fantastic for inspiration, and Corbett is a great blogger, so check it out!

an-otter-in-Aisa

Asian Otter living with wildlife… By Ben

Siruvani-Dam-Palakkad-Kerala-India

Siruvani Dam, Palakkad, Kerala, India… By Smevin Paul

Dusk beyond these palm trees

A Dusk beyond these palm trees… By Saternal

forsaken red sand beach

Ban Khlong Chao, Trat… By Ben

Jewel-of-Khmer-Art

Jewel of Khmer Art… By Souvik Prometure

maale

pathway to heaven, Maale… By Mode

sunset in Maale

The sun setting in Maale… By Sharaff

Palm Trees on a lonely beach

Tall trees are known by their shadows… By Ben

rainy-season-thailand

Rainy Season in Thailand… By Ben

beautiful-sunset

Sunset on Koh Mak… By Ben

tea-plantations-kerala

Tea plantation in Kerala, India… By Lo M

mist-over-mountain

Shiva’s Earthly home pointing to heaven, Champasak… By Ben

peru-mountain-temple

Incan mountain top temple, Peru… By Grabby Walls

A boat trip in Kerala

And finally, one of my own images.. This was taken during a long tour around Kerala in south India and is probably one of my favourite photos ever. Th scenery in Kerala is truly stunning, I am yet to find anywhere to match it.

What are you waiting for?

Do you want to spend your life sat in an office? Or would you rather escape the deferred life plan, make a passive income online, become location independant and see the beauty of the world?

Your first step is to find a way to earn a living on your own terms, it takes a lot of work, but all the best things in life generally do. It all starts with the first step, so if you haven’t already begun your journey, now is the time. If you are already on your way, good luck to you, keep marching onwards.

I hope you enjoyed this post, a little off topic perhaps, but I think it is important to take a step back every now and then and remind yourself what you are working towards.

Where is your favourite place on this planet?

Your turn now. What are the most beautiful locations in the world? Which places do you dream of visiting? Which places have you experienced so far? Kerala is my personal favourite, but the mountains of Bulgaria are pretty stunning too…

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/digital-nomad/feed 11 Earn Income Online; Make a Living From Your Blog http://www.tomakealiving.com/make-a-living-online?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=make-a-living-online http://www.tomakealiving.com/make-a-living-online#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:59:13 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=251

How would you like to be able to make a living from your blog? That’s the ultimate aim of most bloggers isn’t it, to earn income online? The problem is that it can seem like a massive goal when you are first starting out.

If you have just started a blog, or are thinking about doing so, then currently your blog is making you $0… So how do you get from an online income of zero to blogging for your living?

Well the first thing to note is that it takes time and hard work, but you also need motivation, and staying motivated when you are facing such a big task can be tricky. So let’s figure out what our task actually is.

Define your “living”

First of all you need to figure out what the living that you want to earn actually is. Many people assume that to earn a living they need to make the same as they do at their current job and whilst that would be nice, it is worth rethinking what you actually need.

So what kind of lifestyle do you want? Is owning a nice car essential to you? Do you want to live in a big house or shop in the poshest shops? If so, you have a bigger job ahead of you, it is still doable, but it will take longer.

If on the other hand, your ultimate goal is simply to be able to work on your terms, at something that you enjoy, then perhaps you will be happy to get rid of a few possessions and make your life a bit simpler… That’s what I have done.

The cost of a simple life

I certainly don’t live on the bread line. I go out when I want to, I eat out regularly and I’m pretty happy with the car I own. But all in all I live pretty cheaply.

Here’s what my fiancée and I have to spend money on in a month:
Rent $780
Travel & car costs $300 (if you work from home your travel costs plummet)
Bills $120
Food $300
Leisure $300

This is pretty simplistic, but basically I know that we can live off about $1800 a month. With both of us contributing that works out at $900 each per month. When I first started this blog I had two goals… One main goal and one milestone:

milestone: To earn my share solely online
ultimate goal: To be able to support both of us

I haven’t hit my ultimate goal yet, but I’m well on my way now. When I was starting out though, I focussed on my first milestone $900 per month.

Breaking down your target

When you’re starting at $0, $900 still seems like a lot though doesn’t it? So let’s break that down into bite sized chunks:

$900 per month
/ 30 days =
$30 per day
/ 24 hours =
$1.25 per hour

So that’s it. That seems pretty doable doesn’t it? To break my first milestone all I had to do was make $1.25 per hour. All of a sudden that task looked a lot more doable, and that really kept me going in the first few months.

How to earn your living

So now you need to think about how you will actually make your target income. You have plenty of options and I would recommend using several of them:

Adsense:

Always a popular option. This is more successful in some niches than others. Cost per click varies a lot, but if for arguments sake I get 10c per click, that means I need about 12 clicks per hour. If I can achieve a 1% click through rate, that means I need about 120 visitors per hour.

Affiliate marketing:

Commissions from affiliate sales vary hugely from product to product. I could for instance sell someones eBook and get $10 per sale. In this case I would need to sell 3 per day.

I also have another affiliate product on which I get a commission of about $45 per sale. This one obviously sells more slowly, but I only need to sell 2 of these every 3 days to make my first goal.

Product sales:

Selling a product of my own is also an option. I don’t do that on this blog at the moment (although I am thinking of doing in the future so watch this space) but I do have another business where I sell stuff online.

If I were to sell an eBook for $15, I would need to sell 2 per day for example. If I sell a physical product that makes me $10 profit on each sale, I would need to sell 3 of those per day.

Summary

In reality, my income comes from a mixture of all of these methods, but hopefully you can see from this that my goal is actually pretty easily achievable when you think about it. Of course you should probably also think about how you can make a little bit extra so that you can put some money away and start thinking about boring things like a pension and all that…

If you are prepared to simplify your life and trade possessions for lifestyle and experience, you might be surprised at just how easy it might be to start making a living from your own blog.

A final thought

One popular aspect of making a living online, for me at least is that it makes you location independent. So if you want to pack up and move to warmer climes you can do…

The funny thing about the world, is that some of the most incredible places to live are also the cheapest… Take India for instance, it is a truly stunning country, and the cost of living is ridiculously cheap.

So if I decided that I wanted to pack up and live in India for a year, what’s to stop me? From experience I reckon that my fiancée and I could live like millionaires for no more than $450 a month.

So all of a sudden, I only need to be able to make 75c an hour to be able to live a fantastic lifestyle in one of the most beautiful places in the world… (Sounds tempting doesn’t it?)

What’s your goal then?

The first thing you should do is lay down exactly what your cost of living is. Strip out everything you can stand to. Remember, this is only a starting point. Once I reach my $1800 goal, I certainly intend to set new, higher goals.

Having an achievable milestone to work towards will really help you to keep going. It enables you imagine yourself actually achieving that goal, and if you can imagine it you can achieve it.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/make-a-living-online/feed 7 5 Ways To Start Building Blog Traffic http://www.tomakealiving.com/building-blog-traffic?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=building-blog-traffic http://www.tomakealiving.com/building-blog-traffic#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:58:45 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=249

One of the hardest things about building a passive income earning blog is getting those precious first few visitors. Once you have earned a modest flow of traffic you might be surprised at just how much that can snowball…

Building traffic is really like building a cartoon snowball – if you can get it rolling, you can soon turn it into a fully blown avalanche. As such, those early visitors are actually worth far more than just their own presence, building a couple of extra readers now could gain you 10 or 20 visitors later – it’s all about making the most of every visitor you get.

So for all of you who are still getting started and want to accelerate your progress, here is my guide to going viral and starting your very own avalanche (of blog traffic):

Rule 1: Titles matter

There is plenty written about writing good headlines, in fact here is a post by Tim Ferris which actually inspired me to write this post: Blogging by Numbers: How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted.

If you want your blog posts to go viral, headlines are probably actually more important than even your content. Content is what builds repeat visitors, so don’t let that slip, but you need to write titles that grab your readers.

The main things to remember are that you need to write headlines that get clicks, not only will this directly increase the number of visitors that come into your site, but it will massively increase your chances of being linked to by other bloggers / webmasters.

Rule 2: Commenting not just for the traffic boost

Commenting on other blogs isn’t exactly a radical new idea, but there are better reasons to do it than just for the odd extra visitor. People who read comments are often people who leave them. If you do plenty of commenting, you are likely to gain a few comments yourself, and when you are starting out, getting the first few comments really helps to start building your community.

As an added bonus, I often find that the most prolific commentors are also bloggers themselves, so again, a good title and some good comments often leads to a link or two. Commenting can be helpful for SEO, but it’s more about community and networking.

Rule 3: Rub other bloggers ego’s

The best types of links are the ones you get when people decide to link to you purely because they think their visitors will enjoy the content. But it is often difficult to get these links because many bloggers are reluctant to give up “link juice”.

A great way to encourage a blogger to link to you though, is to write a post about them. Find the best blogs in your niche and tell your readers about them, big them up a bit. Then just send the bloggers a little note to say that you have written a post about them.

It won’t work every time, but it can work very well. What blogger wouldn’t want to send their readers to a blog post about how great they are? Use a good headline and do some commenting to make sure the bloggers notice you.

Rule 4: Write guest posts

No list would be complete without guest posting, a lot of bloggers do it very half heartedly though. When you are getting started, building a lot of links is essential.

I will sometimes spend a week focusing on guest posting. I will write 10 – 15 posts in batch, then I will go out and offer them to bloggers. I don’t always target the very best blogs, but I will target reasonably good ones. Remember, today’s up and coming blogs might be tomorrows top flight blogs.

If you do this at least 1 week per month, you will very quickly have 50+ links coming in to your site. It is a lot of work, but if you want to get traffic fast, this is the way to go. Just remember that every post you write has to be top notch, you are building a brand for yourself when you guest post. If you can’t ensure that every guest post you write is excellent quality then maybe you should just stick to article marketing.

Rule 5: Plug the holes

Once you start getting a little bit of traffic, you want to make absolutely sure that you keep it. This means getting some analytics set up (check out Google analytics).

In particular, I am interested in how people navigate my site. If I notice one page gets a lot of visits I will make sure it is as good as it can be. And in particular, my top landing pages are the most important; these need to be constantly improved and re-worked so that every new visitor stays a little while at least.

I also look for the pages with the highest rate of exits (pages which people view immediately before leaving my site) I will try to improve the navigation on these pages and encourage people to stay just a bit longer.

What else can you do?

Well that’s my list for now. What have I missed? How do you boost your traffic? Leave a comment and tell the world what strategies work best for you… You never know who might find their way to your site.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/building-blog-traffic/feed 5 The Art of being yourself http://www.tomakealiving.com/the-art-of-being-yourself?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-art-of-being-yourself http://www.tomakealiving.com/the-art-of-being-yourself#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:58:13 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=252

How much of yourself should you pour into your blog? When you write for all the world to see, is self-censorship an option? or is complete openness the way to go? and if so, how can you even achieve that?

If you have been blogging for any amount of time, you can probably relate to this topic already. It may not be something that you think about often, but I’d bet that you at least know what I’m talking about…

Finding your voice

Blogging is a social medium. Being social (or do I mean sociable?) means making connections with people. Think of it in the context of a pub, bar, the park or whatever sort of setting you hang out in. Being social means actually talking to people doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, blogging isn’t quite the same; firstly it’s all done through text, or maybe video, either way you’re not connecting with people face to face. It is also a media that by definition requires you to say a lot more than your readers, you don’t share the conversation 50:50 with your readers like you would with your friends in the real world.

The question is then: How do you connect with your readers in the same way you would your friends in real life? How do you ensure that everything you write online reflects your true personality so that your readers get to know the real you?

Should you self-censor?

No matter how comfortable you feel with blogging, there is something about the idea of publishing content that will forever be available on the web (once it’s been found by a search engine it’s permanent, trust me) that might make you want to hold back at least a little bit.

So what is the right balance? and how can you ensure that you are true to yourself and that you convey yourself fully through your writing? It is my opinion that if you want to build a solid, unshakable readership full of readers who will keep coming back for more and who will listen to what you say just because it is you; you will need to learn to open the gates and lower your natural defenses.

Learning to be yourself

True and complete openness is probably not going to be your goal, but I am sure that there are a lot of bloggers out there who would admit that they could stand to be a little more open and true to themselves than they are. I’m sure I could.

Learning to be yourself online is a skill that has to be developed. Just like in real life, it comes more easily to some than others, but everyone can learn. It just takes practice.

Getting started

Here are some tips that help me to push myself to be more open in my writings, I don’t always follow them, but I think they make a good set of ideals to work towards wherever possible, so I always try to.

Write in one sitting

I find that my best posts (by far) are the ones that I write in one go. That doesn’t mean I don’t proof read, and sometimes alter the wording slightly, but when I just sit and write; sometimes the words almost ‘pour’ onto the page.

It’s hard to self-sensor when you’re only concentrating on the sentence you are typing at the time. This really helps me to get stuck into a post and the result is usually much better and much more genuine than a post that I build gradually over a few days.

If you need to do research for a post, that’s fine, but try to completely absorb and understand your research so that you don’t even need to refer back to it to write the post. Think of it like doing a presentation:

In the past when I have done presentations, I do a lot better when I talk about what I know, when I can just stand up and talk. If I have notes to read from, my speech comes out stunted and the whole presentation just doesn’t flow as well. The same thing happens when you write.

No distractions

I don’t like to have distractions when I write like this. I will even try not to correct spelling until the end. I just type and remain completely focussed on what I am writing. If you stop to correct your spelling, or to re-word a sentence that isn’t quite right, you can lose your flow. These bits can always be re-worked at the end if they don’t sound right.

Will power

We’ve all done it. You write a post and then you go over it to check how it sounds and you end up re-considering a whole section because you’re not sure how your audience will take it. Sometimes you have to, but be honest about why you are editing yourself. Blogging takes a lot of work – it’s all about trying hard.

Don’t be afraid to show your real opinion about a topic. If people dis-agree with you, you should be delighted… Do you agree with everything your best friends ever say? No, me either. In fact I dis-agree with them loads.

Healthy debate builds better communities and helps you to learn and grow. As long as your opinions aren’t discriminatory or out and out offensive, there’s no reason to be ashamed to let them show through.

Summary

I hope you have enjoyed this post, and I hope that it got you thinking. You may dis-agree with what I have said, if so great! let me know what your opinion is, and why. I can’t possibly please all of my readers all of the time, but as long as I get you thinking and get a healthy debate going I will be happy. So leave me a comment and share your thoughts.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/the-art-of-being-yourself/feed 0 Affiliate Marketing Guide For Beginners http://www.tomakealiving.com/affiliate-marketing-for-beginners?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=affiliate-marketing-for-beginners http://www.tomakealiving.com/affiliate-marketing-for-beginners#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:57:52 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=260 Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn money online. There are numerous advantages compared to other methods of monetization (such as Adsense) and the potential can be huge. It sometimes gets a bad name though, probably because of the number of get rich schemes there seem to be around the subject.

So I am going to set the record straight and explain why I think affiliate marketing is such a powerful option, and what you need to keep in mind if you want to fully utilise it and make some profits.

What’s so great about Affiliate marketing?

Firstly, you can earn a lot more with an affiliate site than you might with normal Adsense websites. That’s because you can go and find products that do exactly what your visitors need. You will be selling targeted products that you have chosen.

You will also be selling products that you recommend. Be honest when you review products and your loyal visitors will learn to trust your assessment, making them far more likely to buy the product than if they had just stumbled onto the products own website.

Stay true to your readers

Never abuse the trust that your readers have for you. If you do, you might make an extra bit of money in the short term, but you will lose readers fast. The whole foundations of an affiliate business are in building relationships, everything relies on building and maintaining that trust.

More of the Pro’s of affiliate marketing

Another thing I like about affiliate marketing is that it gives you content. You can only put Adsense on pages that you have already created, but with Affiliate products, you can dedicate a whole article, several even, to discussing exactly what the product does. If you have ever had a hard time thinking of new content to write, I’m sure you can appreciate the advantage here.

You can also use Adsense on your non affiliate pages for extra revenue, so there is nothing stopping you from creating review pages for affiliate income, and then more general information pages to help drive traffic. Multiple streams of income is always a good strategy anyway.

Things you need to keep in mind

There are a few keys to following a successful affiliate marketing strategy. If you want to build a long term income, they are worth keeping in mind whilst you build your site.

Be honest. Build trust with your readers, don’t abuse it and you will be able to keep selling your products for a long time.

Add value. Don’t just real off the standard sales speal. Review your products and tell your visitors which bits you like and which ones you didn’t. Answer potential questions and offer something that the products web page doesn’t.

Keep building valuable content that users will find helpful and that will rank well in the search engines and generate some traffic… Be patient, it won’t happen over night.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/affiliate-marketing-for-beginners/feed 0 Niche Vs Supersite: Google Adsense Earnings http://www.tomakealiving.com/adsense-strategy?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=adsense-strategy http://www.tomakealiving.com/adsense-strategy#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:57:06 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=259

As I have said before – there are plenty of different ways to build your Google Adsense earnings and generate a location independent, passive income. I focus a lot of blogging because I really enjoy it as a format. But that’s own preference…

If like me, you want to take the blogging route to making money online, you are going to need a big blog, and that means building a lot of content. Unfortunately (in most niches) it is not possible to keep building new content about the same thing indefinitely. So you are going to have to decide on your long term Adsense income strategy. Let’s look at the options then shall we…?

Option 1 – stay niche

You started in your niche, it’s going well, why would you want to do anything but develop it further? Sticking to your niche means blogging about the same thing but constantly finding new tips, new angles etc.

Pros

The advantage to this option is that you stick to what your readers expect to read, the blog remains much more focussed on your core readership and every post is appropriate to every reader. After all – loyal readers build blog traffic fast.

Cons

No matter how engrossed you are in a topic, when you are writing a minimum of 2 or 3 posts a week about various aspects of the same niche, it can sometimes get very difficult to constantly come up with new ideas for content.

You will almost certainly have days where you can’t think of anything to write about and this is going to result in your blog not growing as fast as you might like, or worse your content will not be of the high quality that it needs to be.

Option 2 – diversify, build a supersite

If you have started carving a little niche in one area, why not explore another related area or two… or three, or four. For any given niche there are likely at least half a dozen related niches that you could explore. If you are expert at one there is a good chance that you know a thing or two about the others.

Pros

The advantage to this strategy is that you get the opportunity to explore new areas, there is a good chance that a lot of these new topics will be of interest to your existing users, but you will also gain a lot of new readers. You will also have access to a substantially larger pool of topics to blog about and you can really get stuck in and create an authoritative site covering a whole range of subjects relating to a broader topic.

Cons

The only real con to this option is that it is possible to alienate your older readers, who may not be as interested in your new topics. It is important to mix up what you blog about, don’t just blog about one subject for more than 2 or 3 consecutive posts. Also, try to relate posts in one topic to other topics you write about.

So which option should you choose?

Well I can’t really answer that. Both options can work brilliantly, and in reality what you choose will depend on you and the topics that you know how to write about.

You need to consider the quality of the posts you are capable of creating and the scalability of any potential areas you might blog about. Of course you only need to have a look at my blog to have a good guess which option I prefer.

Decide on your long term strategy and start planning for it now

If you are going to follow a few topics, you stand a much better chance of keeping your loyal readers if you blog about a few topics right from the start. You can also plan your navigation structure in advance so that it works well in the future.

On the other hand, if you intend to stay niche, you are going to have to come up with a strategy for how you are going to make sure that you are able to think of new content and interesting discussions.

As always, the key is planning. You can take whichever route works best for you, but if you know where you are going right from the start, your journey will be a lot smoother.

]]> http://www.tomakealiving.com/adsense-strategy/feed 0 The two routes to Passive Income http://www.tomakealiving.com/passive-income?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=passive-income http://www.tomakealiving.com/passive-income#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:56:37 +0000 ToMakeALiving http://www.tomakealiving.com/?p=257 There are many different ways to make a passive income online, and having multiple income streams is always a good idea. But when you are starting out, you have to decide how you are going to begin building your first passive income stream.

One of the hardest things about this stage, is deciding what to actually do to get started. There is an awful lot to think about with so many different options.

What are the options?

Broadly speaking though, all of the options for passive income generation fall into two categories. Or more to the point, there are two ways to get there.

Option 1 – Income first

The first option is to build a business that actually makes money right from the start (or close to it). This would typically be a business that actually sells an item. The strength of this model is that you can use PPC advertising to start building traffic right away, and hence you can start generating an income sooner.

The challenge with this option is that once you have built an income, you need to automate it, which is tricky when you have products to ship and customers demanding your time. It can be done though, there are plenty of ways to reduce the amount of work needed to run this type of business.

Ideas

Thinking up an idea is typically the first hurdle to overcome. There are a few options for selling products, first you can make your own product, this requires some form of expertise, you need to have the knowledge to make something with a touch of your own personality and experience and then figure out a way to convince others that you are worthy of their hard earned cash.

The alternative route is retailing. This option is easier to get set up with, but as a result there is a lot more competition. That’s ok though, we don’t need to be better than everyone else, we just need to be profitable. Using PPC you can get yourself out there and in front of customers, that’s the easy bit.

The trick here is to make sure your product(s) sell well enough that you make a profit over and above the cost of the PPC advertising. It is easy to track absolutely everything through Google’s Adwords program, and a lot of the set up time should be spent monitoring the performance of each keyword you bid on and dropping the unprofitable ones.

Option 2 – Income second

The second route to a passive income involves first building a solid base of traffic that can then be “monetized”. You probably know about this method already; you might try building a large blog or a super site, or lots of micro-niche sites. Hub pages are also an option and there are plenty of other options out there.

This route is a much longer road, it takes a lot of time and dedication to build a site that starts generating free traffic. The great thing for you is that most people will give up before they ever get anywhere with it, leaving the door wide open for the dedicated few who stick at it.

Ideas

Coming up with ideas really means deciding what to write about. If you want to build free traffic you need to offer something of value and something that is in demand. I have written plenty in the past about finding profitable keywords, and thinking of stuff to write about, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.

If this option appeals to you though (and it should, it is a fantastic way to create a very consistent income stream) download my ebook for a full blueprint about making a living from your blog. Just put your email in the side bar (to the right), click submit and I’ll email it straight to you.

How to start

Having multiple income streams is always a good thing. So here is what I did when starting out, and what a lot of other aspiring digital nomads do to increase their chances of success:

Start a blog right now, keep at it and eventually you will reap the benefits. In the mean time though, there is nothing to stop you from building an income first business by retailing products.

What is really fantastic is that if you can start building an “income second” type business in the same sort of niche as your “income first” type business. You can eventually bring the two business together, creating a greater amount of profitability for both businesses and removing the need for high maintenance ads.

Summary

There are indeed a lot of different options, but the best thing to do is just pick the one you like right now and stick with it. The surest way to fail is to flit between ideas, or just not get started in the first place. So which ever option you prefer, go get started today!

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