I’ve been thinking about starting a new blog, primarily with the aim of promoting it to make a few extra dollars each month. Nothing big, just something that I can do every now and then,.
So what is the best way to try to do this? I’ve looked into things like AdSense, and Yahoo Search Marketing so far, but a lot of people seem to have had bad experiences with them, but I think they might be a good place to start.
Can I even have both of them on the same site? Also, are there any limits as to how long you have to be around before these guys will let you put their ads in your blog or anything like that?
Thanks!

Worried about the next Google slap? Do you only rely on Search Engine traffic? Don’t know where to start when you need to drive traffic to your site? If yes, this article is for YOU! Whatever you do on the net, you will always deal with Traffic Generation…the holly grail.
To make it short, you have 2 main types of traffic :
1) Search Engine traffic
What is it? : organic traffic coming from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN
Pros :
- This traffic is free
- Traffic is highly targeted
- Volume of traffic can be very high
Cons :
- you don’t control it
- you rely on robots to analyze your site and deliver some traffic
- you need to get indexed…without being de-indexed (once again, you rely on search engines policy and algorithms)
- short term
2) Referred Traffic (I know Search engine traffic is also a sort of referred traffic, but let’s put SE traffic apart from this category)
What is it? Traffic coming from third party sites (other than search engines) and is a result of a “manual / human” action.
Examples : article directories, social bookmarking services, forums, partners, text link ads, banners, directories, rss…
Pro :
- you control it
- you have a lot of means to develop it (almost unlimited ; a lot are free)
- it’s highly targeted
- You can pay to get better targeting and control over your referred traffic
- Long term
Cons :
- Time & resources consuming
- Repetitive tasks
Now, through my membership, my forum, my readings of other forums, I know that most webmasters mainly rely on search engines traffic, our first category.
The aim of the present article is to throw the light on a different angle of the Traffic Generation big box!
Summary : the right way to get into traffic generation is to forget about search engines.
Focusing on search engine traffic gives a too narrow vision of traffic generation. It does not reveal all the opportunities existing outside of the search engines (understand all the way to generate Referred Traffic).
In addition, as you’ve seen from the cons above, you accept to rely on something you never control, and this is a HUGE risk in your marketing strategy.
Warning : I do not say, you should not care about search engine traffic. I say that it should not be your priority, and the first door you try to open when dealing with traffic generation. It’s a question of point of view.
Now, on the other hand, focusing on developing what we called Referred Traffic is a more positive, constructive and profitable attitude and marketing strategy.
Not only will you build traffic for the long term, but you will also “manually” control your traffic, either by submitting your content, your sites, your feeds, or by exchanging links, content, traffic with partners, being active on forums, blogs…
Doing it this way will give you a lot of power and effectiveness. Those sources of Referred Traffic only vanish…if you decide to let them vanish. Once again, you control everything.
Now, you have some positive side effects :
- By building Referred Traffic, you give a lot of food to search engines to index your site, understand them, and rank them well…
- …thus developing naturally your Search Engine Traffic!
Try to develop Referred Traffic by submitting your sitemap to Google, and you will understand the difference between the 2 approaches
Google and other search engines tend to change their algorithms quite often to produce more relevant content for users of their engines. Sometimes, your site is getting de-indexed in a day just because of this.
Are you lost, is your site dead? It could if you only relied on Search Engine traffic. It has no impact if you focused on building Referred Traffic.
In one case, you feel bad and like if you had wasted your time. In the other case, you don’t even notice it (on the long run ; of course, you can see a fall in traffic coming from a given search engine)
But even then, your site has a lot of chances of being re-indexed when you’ve build Referred Traffic, simply because the search engines food is still there! And this is a HUGE difference and one of the most valuable asset you can develop.
If you’re still with me, you should now understand my point : when dealing with bots, you need to act as a human…which means you should not try to talk to them Give them some “bot food” that you build naturally by developing a Referred Traffic Generation Strategy.
Here are 10 easy “pieces” to do what we described above :
Once you have a site…
1) Find some related blogs, read them, identify trends, and post comments (no stupid comments, no spam of course) with a link back to your site where you’re also discussing the topic
2) Do the same with related forums. Use search engines (!) to find relevant forums. Register and start being active on these forums. Use your signature to put a link back to your site
3) Create a blog (if you don’t have one) and post on a regular basis on it. Use a service like feedburner to syndicate your content with other webmasters.
4) Submit your feeds, blogs, and site to niche directories
5) Find “authority” sites in your niche, analyze them and contact the webmasters to :
a) propose a link exchange (you should first put a link to their site),
b) if you’re selling a report or an ebook, propose them to become an affiliate (give them a fre.e copy of your ebook first), and make it easy for them to manage their promotion
c) if they have a newsletter, read it, understand it, and then ask the webmaster if you can have a sponsored ad into it, or even better a solo ad where you could advertise your site, newsletter, ebook…
d) propose content exchange with link back to each other’s website
e) build a relation with them
6) The most effective : write articles and submit them to article directories (some with big traffic, and some niche related ones)
7) Social bookmarking and social networking :
a) build a Squidoo lens (see Squidoo Profits for more details: http://www.squidoo-profits.com). You can find many sites like Squidoo and build pages about your niche on these ones too. You can link them to your main niche sites, you can link back to your blogs, or even to your other “squidoo” like pages, thus creating a “niche social net” all relevant to your niche.
b) build a myspace account and create a profile around your niche, then build your “list” of friends around this profile
c) submit your site to social bookmarking services (digg, technorati, del.icio.us …)
d) You can also comment on the most popular entries with a link back to your site, blog, or squidoo lens. Use videos and sites like youtube.com (and similar) to drive traffic to your niche site. Produce a short video (2-3 minutes) around your site, your niche and you. Link to your Videos from your “niche social net” (see 7) ) Also, ask webmasters to put a link to this video (once you have build a relation with them) – Or they can upload it to their server and brand it with their affiliate ID, if you have an affiliate program
9) Make it viral : your best source of (new) traffic…is your (current) traffic!
Use some “Tell a friend” features on your site to have them promote your site. You can provide incentives (such as a free report, a coupon for your ebook…)
10) Paid Traffic : yes…all the above techniques do not cost a penny…(unless you pay for advertising on a partner’s site)
You can pay to get targeted traffic : you can advertise through text link ads, banners, that will appear on high traffic sites.
You should seriously consider paid traffic. Do not see it as a cost, but rather as an initial investment to boost your site. Also, if your site is correctly monetized, then paid traffic is the easiest way to get some quick metrics about this, and to make it profitable quickly.
As you see we could easily expand this list. But, those are, in my opinion, the most important sources of Referred Traffic.
Now, compare the above list with Search Engine traffic, and you will see why your approach should focus on generating Referred Traffic and not Search Engine Traffic. This type of traffic will come naturally anyway…

I am planning on starting a web based business in the future and as a project I am going to start a blog (unrelated to the business idea) and try to learn how to build traffic and make some money from it. I’m not expecting a major cashflow from this, more of just an incentive to grow some entrepreneurial marketing skills and such.
Since at the moment I am studying and don’t have a job, I would prefer a free site like blogger to start up my blog as long as I can use 3rd party advertising things on it and other tool you use to make money from blogs

With the advancement of science and technology, internet is emerging as an efficient and effective tool by businesses to promote and market the products and services a business has to offer to its clients. Many communities and forums on the web have allowed netizens to find information and look for people effortlessly. Squidoo also happens to be a popular online community which has pioneered in prevailing outburst of communities and forums. This is the quickest and easiest way to increase traffic and improve visibility of the business website.Squidoo gives its users a great opportunity to be known by virtually everybody by helping the users create their own mini Web Pages called the lenses and its popularity is growing day by day among businesses who desire to get more potential clients to visit their websites or by general net users who want to get their work published and familiarized in the net world. Here are some tips to generate more traffic to your lens:1.    Quality content in your lens:The first step which is very essential in order to increase website visitors using Squidoo; by making the lens more alluring with rich quality content. The main aim here is to make the lens more content creative and vibrant yet professional. Another point which is important here in order to increase visitors to your website is by keeping the content keywords rich. The keywords which the business or user wishes to target within the Squidoo lens must evenly spread throughout the webpage. This in turn helps to increase website visitors to your Squidoo lens because of the high search engine rankings the lens receives.2.    Take advantage of the Squidoo community itself:Secondly the business or user can boost the number of website visitors using Squidoo by taking advantage of the Squidoo community itself. The user can interact and communicate with other lens owners by posting comments on their lens and providing ranks to their lens. The user must show himself to be an active member which will ultimately help in gaining favor with Squidoo and augment website visitors from network itself.3.    Usage of Backlinks:Lastly to increase the traffic and improve the visibility of the website is by pointing one way backlinks to Squidoo lens. The users can easily point one way backlinks to the Squidoo page by posting blog comments and forums. The users can easily write articles to build the link popularity to your own Squidoo lens. The advantage of building links to your website perks up the search engine ranking and thus making it more visible on the internet.Squidoo can really prove to be an advantage to gain popularity by generating traffic and improving visibility of website on the major search engines. There are a number of benefits while using Squidoo like it is a social networking site wherein people can express their opinions, advertise and share to their professional expertise.

An important aspect of successful network marketing is the ability to identify and use marketing resources that are both low cost (preferably free) and effective. If Squidoo isn’t on your current list of resources, it should be. Here are seven tips on how to successfully use Squidoo in your network marketing efforts:
1. Do a good job on your Squidoo lens. Make sure you fill it with interesting and helpful content. Readers will rate your lens so give yourself every chance of receiving good ratings as they influence the amount of readers you will get.
2. Make your lens search engine friendly so that people searching on particular terms will be able to find your lens via search engines. The first step to achieving this is to do your own keyword research before even creating your lens. You can discover the most searched terms on Yahoo and Google so that you can write your content to reflect your target audience’s interest. You can also check Squidoo’s own tag clouds which show which words or phrases are most highly searched. Include your chosen keyword phrase in your title and add them to your lense’s tags. Squidoo allows you to have forty tags per lens so it is a good idea to find keyword phrases to take advantage of all tags. This will make your lens even easier to find.
3. Don’t be afraid to say you are an expert. We are all experts at something! You can sell yourself and your expertise in Squidoo’s bio area. Include your photo and make sure you are using a professional username.
4. Squidoo provides a social networking opportunity so make sure you make it easy to get your readers involved. This is an important free marketing tip for Squidoo as your readers can increase your traffic by recommending your lens. Here are some great ways to get your readers interested:
- Be controversial. Don’t be afraid to provoke debate or disagreement. Your aim is to get people involved.
- Utilize the Guestbook module to stimulate debate.
- Allow other people to link your lens to theirs using the Plexo module. Doing this will help your lens ranking increase while at the same time providing access to more content for your readers.
5. Update your lens regularly with new content. An easy way to keep your lens updated with new content on a daily basis is to use the RSS module. You can have your lens updated with RSS feeds from your own blog or from other blogs in order to keep the content fresh.
6. Attract return visits. One of the easiest ways to keep your readers returning to your lens is to set up an autoresponder by which you can notify them of changes. If you have your own blog you can link from it to your lens. If you guest blog you can include your lens URL in your bio information. If you comment on other people’s blogs or in forums you can provide a link to your lens in your signature.
7. Take advantage of pinging and social bookmarking services. By using sites such as Only Wire and Social Poster to bookmark your lens or the RSS services of blog pinging sites such as Pingoat or Pingomatic you will be able to create back links to your Squidoo lens. This is a great way to generate traffic to your lens.
A Squidoo lens provides a wonderful opportunity to market your network marketing product, service or business. If you follow these free MLM marketing tips you will reap the rewards of a highly effective yet free strategy.

Although it has barely been four years sense Squidoo came into the scene it has had a profound impact on the sciences of search engine optimization. Today Squidoo Lens creation is made a part and parcel of every SEO campaign. It is however important to understand what Squido lenses can do for you.The basic aim of the Squidoo site is to provide a platform where knowledge is being shared. During its initial years the site actually operated as a guide answering people’s frequently asked questions and giving them tips on how to do things themselves. Today businesses have the chance to use Squidoo to reach out to their clients by sharing with them useful information that they possess regarding the particular niche in which they operate. When you create a separate page for your self on Squidoo it is known as a lens. A professional looking Squidoo lens can actually create an impressive image for your brand and transform you into an authority with total command over your niche. At the same you have the chance to incorporate links into your Squidoo pages which is what makes Squidoo lens creation super beneficial. Today Squidoo enjoys great popularity on the internet and is highly ranked with the search engines as well. A high standard Squidoo page with in bound links to your website makes great bait for internet users and works wonders for your search engine rankings. The benefits however will only be reaped when you have high quality lenses to upload. As much as it would be easy, there is no hard and fast rule on Squidoo Lens creation. However over the past few years SEO specialists have experimented with various techniques and have managed to develop their own method to the madness. SEO specialists that have a nag for Squidoo lens creation can accomplish the desired task with ease and perfection. Hence rather than experimenting on your own you should trust an SEO specialist that has a well developed approach to the process. This will ensure that you start reaping the benefits of this unique SEO tactic in no time. Generally an online marketing company will be offering Squidoo Lens creation as part of their SEO services. Your SEO company may recommend you to combine Squidoo Lens creation with other link building strategies in order to reap maximum results. This is because creating an impressive Squidoo lens on its own will not bear much fruit. In fact SEO is only achieved when a number of different techniques are combined together to form a tailor made campaign for your business. If on the other hand you have already created your Squidoo lens then you can render some complimentary services that will help to promote your Squidoo page more efficiently thereby hastening the returns that you are looking to get from your Squidoo lens.

Finding a constant supply of articles to put on your blog or in article directories can be very difficult after your early enthusiasm begins to wane. The standard thing to do is to buy plr articles or even free niche articles that already have most of the work done for you. You mustn’t use unchanged plr content because google will just ignore it as duplicate content. One skill to grasp early on in your writing career is that of quickly rewriting plr articles.

 Using free Niche articles

If you are really efficient you can even get paid to write articles on the web but you have to pretty much rewrite the plr material. If I am looking to make money with my articles I usually write them myself as originals rather then rewrite plr content. You can put rewritten plr articles on your own websites as long as you have changed at least 50% of the content. If your aim is to get paid for articles I wouldn’t use plr material. I would focus on completely new articles that you have written.

 How to use and rewrite plr articles

Article writing instructions are few and far between so here are a few tips on article writing when you want to rewrite plr articles.

 Make sure the article actually makes sense as it stands. You really good quality plr content, poor plr articles will be nearly impossible to make something good out of it. The article does not have to be your very best work but does need to work.

Rewrite the first and last articles completely. These also must include the keyword you are basing your article upon. For the rest of the article you use synonyms once or twice for each sentence. 

The last of my article writing instructions is to make sure your article leads the reader to take the action you need. If you are looking for a click on a link make sure it stays relevant

Whether you are doing business online or offline, selling products or selling services, it is very important that you appear professional and knowledgeable. Your customers will only do business with you and refer business to you if they trust you and consider you an expert in your field. You wouldn’t do business with someone who was “shady” or untrustworthy – or even just appeared that way, so why would you expect any less from your customers?

There are steps you can take to polish up your professional image, showcase your expertise, and give your customers the assurance that you are reputable business person, someone they can trust to deliver what you promise. It doesn’t have to be expensive or take a lot of time – there are simple solutions, small things that you can tweak to perfect that image. These are 7 simple things that you can try.

1. Be consistent with your marketing material, whether it be your website, brochures, business cards or letterhead. Avoid “mickey-mouse” marketing, such as perforated business cards. You can have business cards printed inexpensively at Staples, or a similar office supply store, that will look completely professional and avoid the I-did-it-myself look. Have your logo on all of your marketing material, choose business colors and have all your material designed with those. You want to create a brand for your business, and keep it consistent throughout all of your business marketing materials.

2. Create valuable content, for your website and your blog. Write about your product or service, and topics related to it. Share your knowledge and passion for your field. Your customers will appreciate the information, and will view you as an expert and professional. Aim for quality, keeping grammar and punctuation correct and consistent, and providing information that is interesting and unique. You have a perspective on your subject that no one else has – take advantage of that!

3. Have a website that encourages visitor interaction. Create your own little domain on the web, filled with your valuable content from point number 2, and use different methods to get your visitors to participate and contribute. Offer a free newsletter, a classy wallpaper or screensaver, a forum for discussions, or other ideas that you think of. Have the site designed by a web design professional, so it is consistent with your brand and all the features are integrated properly. Avoid template designs, as you want a custom look to match your brand. A shabby website is a good way to destroy your professional image on the internet!

4. Treat your customers in a professional manner. Even when they are wrong or annoying. This does not mean being a pushover. It just means treating them with respect. Write your emails and letters thoughtfully, always keeping in mind that what you write is a reflection of you and your business. Answer your phone in a professional way, and be quick to return phone calls, emails, etc.

5. Take care of your physical appearance. Particularly if you are doing business in person. Dress well, carry yourself with confidence, and smile. Your appearance can go a long way with generating trust with your customer! Carry that confident, professional appearance to your online mediums as well. Ensure that any photos you put on your website look professional, whether it be you, your staff, or someone else.

6. Use a professional email address. For business emails, your email address should be yourname@yourbusiness.com or yourname@yourdomain.com. Avoid having an ISP email (you@telus.net) or a free webmail (you@hotmail.com) at all costs. It is very inexpensive to set up a domain name and email account, and it will go a long way in establishing a professional image for your business!

7. Use an email signature. Include the name of your business, your business phone number, and website address if you have one. You can also include your logo, if you wish. Keep it neat, not too long, and use it on all of your email communications. You may also want to consider letterhead for your emails, with your logo, colors, etc. Remember, you are building your brand. Your goal is to establish a consistent brand that customers will see and immediately think of you!

There are, of course, many other things you can do to perfect your professional image. It should be an ongoing process, in fact. Always think about how you would respond as a customer to you and your business. If you wouldn’t do business with you, then you need to take a look at what you are doing and what you need to change. Develop that professional image, and your customers will trust you, respect you, and want to do business with you.