Tag Archives | List building

3 Reasons Why Blogging Will Boost Your Business!

By David Bazhaw on July 24, 2024 in Blog

Building your business can be a difficult task. You can put hundreds of hours of effort into the business, but if you still don’t have important components, you will not be successful. Today business owners are realizing that blogging boosts business. Blogs are typically only seen as personal places to express yourself and your views. The truth is however the blogs are also great places to reach people about your business or your products. There are several ways to do this type of blogging.

The best way a business can use blogging to boost their business is by taking part in the blogs of others. You can easily create quality posts with your business in mind without needing to set up a blog of your own. Try finding blogs that pertain to the area of business you are in. This will help you get started. With millions of blogs out there, you should be able to find some with no problem. Choose to post on all of them, or choose the few that get the most activity. Then begin posting. When you do, you will see positive results come in. If you are still curious about how this can boost your business, check out these three reasons blogging boosts business.

Quick Name Recognition

The fastest way to get your business’s name out in the public is to make it known to your targeted marketing group. If you want to get your company’s name out to men who like fishing, then you can find a blog that is about just that. When you find the blogs pertaining to this marketing group, post useful and intelligent information about topics that pertain to your company. You might not want to sound like an advertisement. Think about responding to another comment and simply tagging your signature with your company’s website. This is a subtle way to get their attention. The more you post on blogs, the more widely known your company’s name will become with the select marketing group. When they tell their friends and family about the site then your consumer group will have grown even more. This is a fast way to get started. You will have to invest some time however. At least an hour a day can be used for this type of task.

Consumer Testimonies

Your company might even think about hiring professionals to blog for your company. You can offer these employees products to try and give them the task of finding blogs where they can appropriately “praise” the product. By paying these people to do the task, you will be getting the work done that you need without having to devote much time. Consumer testimonials go a long way with other consumers. If these bloggers are productive enough, you will see an increase due to it.

Building Relationships

Smart business owners know that they can go further with the help of others. A great way to connect and build relationships with other businesses is via their blog. If you are a regular poster who values their business, they will be more likely to work with you. Working together with advertising is a great idea. You can swap ad space for no fee if you like. These are great things for business owners and are easy to get into when you blog regularly.

As you can see, blogging can be a great way to do business. It may seem like tricky advertising, and it is in some ways. However, it is free advertising that does the same thing as a commercial on television does. It reaches a targeted marketing group and lets them know your company’s name, products, and sometimes offers an endorsement. Overall, it is an effective way to get your business out there. When people have no idea who you are, they are not going to feel comfortable working with you. The better your reputation is, the more likely they will trust you. When you have no reputation at all, they will not trust you either. So, even if you just want to use blogging to build your company’s reputation, it will be worth your while. Give it a try and see what type of results you can get using these tips.

Blogging: Let’s Get You Started!

By David Bazhaw on July 21, 2024 in Blog

So what is blogging really all about? First off, let me tell you that it’s a lucrative business to blog and that blogs are easy to set up and manage. Imagine getting paid to write about subjects that interest you, whenever you want, wherever you are! The flexibility involved allows you to maintain your blog at your own pace, and with Internet cafés easily accessible all over the globe, even your vacation won’t get in the way of your blogging… Or should I say: even your blogging won’t get in the way of your vacation?

In this article, let’s take a look at the profitability of a blog and set up one of our own, free of charge! Interested? Read on!

First, you need to get yourself a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free one. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain one at http://www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) http://www.wordpress.com. WordPress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected by Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed more quickly. WordPress.com, however, is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. However, WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger or WordPress. Then, familiarize yourself by publishing your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are some words to start expanding your blogging vocabulary:

Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger account.

Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gain traffic, which I’ll discuss in a future article.

Content

Next, let’s look at the type of content that’s suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. You need to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in. Mind you, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable one is the way you write. What would you prefer: reading your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favorite author? People prefer to read “light” items most of the time. When they check out your blog, they are not only looking for information, but they are also looking for information that they can access easily.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current readers coming back for more, it’s very important to add a personal touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining that you’re talking with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humor, so try to add funny comments in your articles where relevant.

Another important point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. Don’t write as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, write as if you’re having a conversation with a single person, an equal friend, because this will make your reader relate to you more easily.

Besides that, it’s also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. We’re very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

There will be more on the subject of content the next time.

When word gets around about your command of blogging, others who need to know about blogging will start to actively seek you out!

2 Tier Affiliate Programs Explained

By David Bazhaw on August 8, 2023 in Blog

How will referring new affiliates to an affiliate program make me money in the future? Thats where a 2-tier affiliate program works like magic!

Affiliates are getting cleverer by the day. So these days, affiliates know the difference between the different types of traffic they can get paid for. There are a lot of definitions though CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, CPD and many more.

CPM is impressions, when the publisher (the website owner) gets paid every time a banner is shown.

CPC is clicks, where the publisher (or email marketer and other marketers) gets paid every time a banner or text link is clicked upon.

The other ways of getting paid are grouped together under the term performance marketing and this is where the term affiliate is most commonly used as well.

An affiliate is a marketer who sends visitors to another site using a variety of methods (such as placing banners or text links on their own site, buying sponsored listings on search engines, email marketing and many other different methods) and gets paid when an action happens. This action can be a lead (CPL stands for Cost per Lead), a Sale (CPS stands for Cost per Sale), a download (CPD stands for Cost per download) and many other variations.

Some in the Internet industry refer to performance-based marketing as CPA (cost per acquisition), although the term is also sometimes used for specific types of campaigns such as leads or sales.

Now that we’ve got over the hard part, the rest is easy to understand.

The affiliate gets paid for sending visitors to a specific landing page where an action happens either a lead, a sale, a download or some other sort of action that the advertiser requires. As an example, some advertisers are looking to build up their databases, so they pay for each opt in email address they receive, others want leads from specific locations, so they pay for zip codes, and then try convincing the visitors after they fill in their zip code, to fill in a more detailed lead form.

The common denominator is that the affiliate gets paid when an action happens.

A 2 Tier affiliate program is simply finding new marketers to sign up under you to do EXACTLY what you are doing sending visitors to different offers and getting paid when the visitors perform some sort of action. So why would you want other marketers to sign up under you to promote the same offers? Simple you get paid a percentage of the amount the affiliate you refer gets paid? Sounds complicated?

Dont worry, its not hard to understand. As an example, say John promotes 5 different offers on a single affiliate network. He gets paid for every lead, sale, email and zip code he generates from these different offers. John now tells Mark about the Network and gets Mark to sign up using a banner or text link that has John’s referral code built into it. Mark now signs up to the Affiliate Network under John and starts promoting various offers and advertisers from the Affiliate Network. These offers DONT have to be the same offers that John is promoting. Mark can promote ANY of the offers on the Affiliate Network.

And this is the best part.

For any amounts that Mark gets paid, John receives a percentage of the amount over and above what Mark gets paid. So, if Mark gets paid $1000 in Month 1, and the 2 Tier Affiliate program is paying 5%, then John would receive $50 just for referring Mark.

But it gets even better.

Some 2 Tier Affiliate Networks pay LIFETIME commissions. So, John wouldn’t get a referral commission just for a month or a year he receives it FOR ALL TIME.

If Mark becomes a super affiliate and starts generating HUGE commissions every month, John can just sit back and collect the checks as he referred him.

There are 3 important things to know when finding affiliates to sign up under you on 2 Tier Affiliate Programs:

Is the affiliate program or affiliate network credible, has proper tracking so your referrals are correctly tracked, has good campaigns and offers for the affiliates to promote so they actually do make money, and do they pay timeously? Assuming that the affiliate program or network is good, what percentage do they pay you on amounts that your referrals get paid? All programs vary so compare different programs to see what the industry standard is.

How long do you continue receiving referral commissions for? Some pay for a month, some for the lifetime, and of course there are many variations in between.

So do your homework and find a 2 Tier program that can make you money long in the future for the work you’re doing today.

Four Steps To Success!

By David Bazhaw on July 22, 2023 in Blog

Here is a four-step process that anyone can follow to become successful online:

Find a skill

The easiest way to make money online is to „sell‟ a skill. This skill could be any form of service that you can provide to help other marketers save time, save money and save effort.

Here are a few examples:
 Writing – you can become a ghostwriter, copywriter or blogger and sell your skills to other marketers.

 Graphics Design – you can create powerful E-covers for E-books or graphic banners for mini-sites.

 Technical – you can help people if you are good with programming (e.g., script installation, testing and website setup)

 Networking – help other people to recruit affiliates for their product launches.

If you want to develop the winning mindset, make sure you work hard by serving others first even if the pay is low or you are required to sacrifice time (and sometimes, money) in order to develop your skill and build your clientele.

Create Your Own Product

After you develop enough expertise with your skills, you can turn your skills into a product.
The most important thing to remember is that your skill must be something that brings value to others. If you can bring value to others and monetize it, others will most probably want to learn from you as well.
Once you teach others how to monetize their skill, you will have a product that will impart your expertise to others. For example: a product that teaches people “how to make money with copywriting.”

Create A Business
Once you are able to combine all your products together and develop your very own system, you have a business running already.
The important thing to remember about a business is that you must have a holistic approach when it comes to business building.

Don’t just focus on your primary skill alone. Try and outsource other tasks to other people. For example, if your strength is in writing, your business must not only include writing but many other aspects such as graphics, tutorials and even a helpdesk to help you answer questions.

At the end of the day, you need a complete system to market your business.

Automating Your Business

If your business is taking up too much of your time, the best thing you can do is to try and automate your business by letting others run it for you.

Basically, you still maintain ownership of your business (and revenue, of course). But what you must do is to train up people who are capable of running the business for you. By the time your business is successful enough to be automated, you can hire people who are smarter than you to run it for you.

The tradeoff is that you have to pay them a lot of money, but the best thing you have is more free time. When you buy people’s time with your money, you effectively remove the shackles that your business has on your time and you can use that time to invest into another business.

Remember the golden rule: Think BIG and think long term.

Building Free Targeted Web Site Traffic

By David Bazhaw on June 24, 2023 in Blog

The value of targeted web site traffic can never be equal to that of a merely free traffic. Visitors that are easily directed to certain web sites, even for free, if totally clueless as to what the website is all about, are likely going to exit your web pages just as fast as how they have landed on them. You may even find yourself falling from the search engine ranks if this continues to happen, not to mention being banned and the like.

But yes, the web is such an avenue for great opportunities that even free targeted traffic can possibly be obtained. But that does not come without efforts from your end. Here are some tips to building free targeted traffic.

Blogs. If you have a passion for writing and do not mind sharing your ideas on the web, this should not be very hard for you. Blogs are among the most effective ways to get “really” targeted traffic.

The freedom to express your message via compelling articles gives you the chance to capture readers’ attention through your writing skill coupled with some interesting images that are sure to spice up interests. When writing blogs, you have the option to directly pitch your website to your readers (seldom done) or do it in subtle, less obvious ways.

You may post ads on your blog, insert links on some key phrases – all of which will lead targeted traffic to your site when clicked. There are numerous blog sites on the web that you can tap all for free.

Forum Participations. This is also another way of getting targeted traffic at no cost. Simply visit forums that discuss topics related to the nature of your website. Participate either by posting your own questions or by answering existing forum inquiries. There may be instances when you can directly refer your website as part of your answers, or you may need to employ tactics to insert it as part of your main answers.

Usually, and this is the safest way to showcase your site for the possibility of getting free targeted traffic, include your web site’s domain name on your signature block. Don’t be satisfied by just putting your name at the end of your answer. Insert your domain names and URLs so that the readers (who are interested with the forum topic, which is related to the nature of your website) have the option of clicking them and hence becoming a part of your free targeted traffic.

Link Exchange. You are also free to browse the web for link exchange and invite web sites with similar or related industries as yours. Make sure to provide clear link details (an interesting title, clear description, and accurate URL) to draw targeted traffic from websites which visitors may also be highly interested on your web site content. Anyone who visits a web site and cares to navigate through its pages, so that he reaches its resources or links page and clicks on your displayed link – is a very promising portion of your targeted web site traffic.

5 Tips to Ranking Well at Search Engines

By David Bazhaw on April 12, 2023 in Blog

Do you have a product or service that you want to sell on the Internet? If so, there are a few fundamental components that you must know. Putting your product or service up for sale is easy. You can find a cheap hosting plan and get a 1-5 page site up within a few hours. But what happens next?

Unfortunately, most businesses will never sell their product successfully on the Internet. Their sites may be flashy, but they are not receiving visitors. To receive an endless supply of free, targeted, leads from the search engines you should consider a few of the 5 tips below.

Tip #1- Provide High Quality Content

Providing content does more than give out generic information. Providing content builds trust between you and your visitor. The more content you give, the bigger the bond. Your content should focus around very specific keywords. Each page on your website should be optimized and focused on one keyword.

Finding keywords is a task in and of itself. I will be the first to admit that hunting down keywords with a high demand and low supply is not the easiest task in the world. It can be boring and repetitive. After awhile the numbers will blend together and you will feel a bit dazed. But do not stop now! Keywords are the foundation for your content pages and for your business.

Tip #2- Find Relevant Linking Partners

The days of trading links with any old site are gone. There was a period in time when search engines counted how many links in you had to your site. They factored that and determined if your site was good or not. So if your site had 300 other sites linking to it, search engines would have probably considered it a better site than one with only 10 incoming links.

Search engines have wised up since those days. Now search engines place more emphasis on relevant links. Your site should only link to other sites that are high quality and relevant. If your site is about cookies then you should not be linking to a site about gambling. It doesn’t make sense for your site visitors, and it doesn’t make sense to the search engines.

When you trade links with a relevant, high quality site be sure you specify where your link should be placed, for how long, and what it should say. I often see people exchange links and within a few days the linking partner has taken down the link. Only do business with trusted webmasters.

Tip #3- Submit Your Site to Site Directories

This is a great way to get high quality and high ranked sites to link to you. Think of a link to your site as a vote of confidence. Site directories are less popular than search engines, but their link to you helps you increase in search engine rankings. Be wary of any site directory that makes you pay for submission. There are plenty of great directories that allow you to submit your site for free.

Getting as specific as possible with site directories is a great idea. If your site is about cookies, you should try to find a site directory that only deals with desserts or foods. General directories are fine, but be sure you submit your site to the appropriate category. General directories tend to have a category for almost any topic.

Some site directories will ask you to link to them first. This is your choice. I do not link or pay to get into any site directory. There are too many free ones that do not require a link back. Remember to place only relevant links on your site. Would your cookie site visitors want to click on a link for a site directory?

Tip #4- Add a Site Map

A site map is a single webpage that contains links to all the other pages on your site. Adding a map will help your visitors find information quickly. Besides being a helpful tool for visitors a site map also helps search engines find pages. When a search engine spider visits your site it crawls through a page. It visits all the links on your page and it checks for keywords. This is why keywords and relevant linking partners are recommended above.

Once the search engine spider finds the site map it will find all of your other pages. Search engine spiders do not like to dig very deep into sites. They like to search through 2 or 3 ‘levels’ of information. So pages that are hard to find will not rank well or they will take much longer to rank well. A site map helps the engines find all your pages at once.

Tip #5- Be Patient and Find Other Means of Traffic

Waiting for the search engines to scour your site and rank it could take a bit of time. I recommend a lot of patience. When I post a new content page on my website, it takes a few weeks to get noticed. Some search engines are fast and rank the page immediately. Others are a bit slower.

While you wait for your pages to rank well I recommend finding alternative ways to drive traffic to your site. You can look into PPC (pay-per-click advertising), article writing, off-line ads, buying ad space in newsletters, doing a joint venture with a fellow webmaster or post in relevant forums.

These 5 tips to ranking well at the search engines are tried and true methods. I have built a site using these 5 tips and can personally attest to their sheer power. Patience is the hardest part. Keep building relevant content, link to relevant partners, submit to site directories, add a site map and then keep going.

Persistence pays off. Building a web business takes time. Your business needs to develop and mature. Using some or all of the above tips can ensure a big payoff down the road.

The Potential Of Affiliate Marketing As A Home Based

By David Bazhaw on April 9, 2023 in Blog

The Potential of Affiliate Marketing as A Home-Based Business

With more than 15 million Americans now running Home Based Businesses, what are the benefits, if any, to choosing an Affiliate Marketing Program as a part-time Internet Business!

Affiliate Marketing Programs are a great way for anybody to start a home-based Internet business. They offer a wide range of products and services that can, once you have mastered the skills of driving traffic to your website, make you good money.

Due to its almost unlimited potential, it is now one of the most sought-after ways to make extra income quickly. The most common reason that so many people get started in Affiliate Marketing is because by selling other people’s products you save yourself a lot of the headaches that normally go with starting a business.

The number one benefit for most people is there’s no need for you to invent, produce or stock anything. No need for staff or customer service. All these burdens are taken off your hands by the product or service provider. All you do is promote their products and services on your website. Your only real concern is how to increase your income.

Number two on my list of benefits for Affiliate Marketing is the great variety of products and services at your disposal. To help you with your Affiliate Marketing, there are lots of training materials that will help you enhance your Affiliate Marketing capabilities.

Due to the large number of products and services that are out there in the market place, it is advisable to choose products and services that interest you. This will help you to effectively advertise and promote these products or services. Do not select products that you do not know or are not familiar with. The main reason I say this is because your interest and passion for a product or services will prompt you to be creative.

The most popular benefit of Affiliate Marketing is the small matter of being able to earn money while you do other things like go shopping or while you are sleeping. We all like the idea of making money from doing nothing.

Is it really that easy? Well, the answer to that question is Yes and NO. For you to earn a lot of money, you MUST drive traffic from your website to the providers and this is easier said than done. The most common reason for failure is putting up a website with nothing but Affiliate Links. Lets think about this. Why would anyone come to your website? How would they find your website? The most popular sites on the Internet are those with content, things people can read. What do we really use the Internet for Research. On the Internet today, CONTENT IS KING and with so many subjects to talk about, it should be easy to fill your website with content that people will want to read.

Choosing subjects that interest you will help you keep the site interesting. You can always tell when someone has a real passion for the subject they are talking about. Not everyone will agree with your point of view and that’s OK too. Anything that keeps them coming to your website will help you make sales from the products and services you promote.

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