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Firefox is a great browser when compared to Internet Explorer. I know, the geek in me likes Firefox but most people are just rolling their eyes and saying

“Who cares about a browser with not much market share? My buyers don’t use it anyway”

Well there are good reasons to use Firefox, especially as a web business person. I look at Firefox as my portal to the internet as well as a research and content cration tool. basically I use Firefox as a very strong tool to build my business.

Here are some great extensions that you can use with Firefox to extend the ability that a browser can give you for internet marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

I have just today added a do follow plugin so that all comments that I approve will be adding quality to the sites of the comment posters. I get shit for traffic anyway and I think that anyone that adds content to this blog deserves to get something for it.

Dave Naylor was just commenting today that his blog has dropped a lot in the Google rankings and he figures that it was Google thinking that he is somehow gaming the system with his do follow on all comments. I am not worried although I probably am as paranoid as he is so this will be a nice fun experiment.

Feel free to comment.

I have been mulling over the last week how exactly I will increase my earnings from $2,000 in January and have a few good ideas that I expect will work but will of course take a lot of change on my part.

There are two keys to my making more money online in February and it is the same for any online business; get more pageviews and increase conversion rates. This is no secret but often people, especially people like me, get distracted by shiny things on the internet and go off focus and do a lot of non revenue producing work.

Increasing Pageviews

Increasing pageviews should not be too difficult. I had a pretty good month in January with 72,000 pageviews or so and the way I generally increase my pageviews is by creating content within all of my niches and by submitting articles to article sites, especially ezinearticles. Read the rest of this entry »

What I have learned from my 100,000 article views at Ezinearticles

A little while ago I hit 100,000 views of my articles on ezinearticles.com with a total of 138 articles posted over the last year and a half or so. The number is huge to me but of course ezinearticles gets lots of traffic so I should not be surprised. If only I got a dollar for every view…but maybe soon if I follow what I have learned. Here are some observations from my stats.

Headlines count for almost everything - I have found that writing an article is only good if the title is very specific to keywords. I wrote about six pack abs, Jenny Craig Diet and How to reload Windows XP and got thousands of page views but on the articles where I just described what I would write about it seemed I got very little traffic from the articles.

Most articles are only good for a week but some have real staying power - In all but a handful of articles I would get a lot of traffic for a week or so and then drop out of the serps completely. I wish I could see stats for all articles on a week by week basis but alas there is no tracking like that at EzineArticles. On the articles as above where I actually use good keywords in the title I would get lots of traffic and still do get lots of traffic for those articles.

Clickthroughs have everything to do with the bio box - In the early days I would just say “Bill is passionate about fitness, to learn more visit his fitness blog at XXXXX” I got about a 1% bio box clickthrough on that but now the last paragraph of my article is acutally in the bio box with a distinct call to action and the clickthroughs are around 15-20%. What a massive difference eh?

I have had bad conversions to sales as I still have been pointing at specific reviews on my blog but the “leak” from those pages seems to be terrible. I hope that over my next 100,000 article views that I will only point to actual review pages as Kyle and Carson have put on this site (I have only found them under downloads in the sitemap) and see if my conversion is better.

I am a fan of Twitter as one of the future ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate across the internet, but I am going to try this year to avoid Twitter completely. You may wonder why someone would want to avoid the future and the reason is not because I am some kind of technophobe, because I am not. You may think that I am being negative about the technology, which I of course am not saying that at all.

The reason that I want to avoid Twitter this year is becasue there are already a lot of technologies that I am trying to leverage and just adding one more does not help, in fact it hinders my businesses growth.

There are a multitude of ways to make money online and most of them can be narrowed down to some kind of payment for having the visitor to your site take an action. Some people will start a blog and add every single affiliate program link they can find and then add adsense as well. There is no money in not focussing and instead taking a shotgun approach to making money. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to build your traffic cheap and fast is buy posting in forums and making blog comments on blogs. There are two problems with blog comments for most people and these problems are actually an opportunity for you to be a commenting machine while at the same time getting ideas for new blog content yourself.

There are a few reasons to do blog commenting and the main ones are backlinks to your own sites (some nofollow blogs will not help but that is ok), getting blog owners know about you, and finally to have readers of blogs see you and get exposure to your site by clicking your website link on your name in the comments.

Finding posts to comment on

First problem is that most people doing internet marketing go to the classics, Problogger, Shoemoney, John Chow and others but these are crap blogs for getting traffic to your niche site unless you are in the internet marketing niche. If you are in any other niche then you have to hang with the thought leaders and then become a thought leader.

Do some searches, if you are interested in Organic Gardening then start looking for gardening blogs, environmental blogs, blogs about organic farming and of course your own niche or organic gardening. This is going to keep you on the pulse of your niche and also reading these blogs will give you lots of ideas to get new posts of your own out.

Do you have a Google account? You should as this is how you get access to a Google tool called Google Reader. Google Reader is an RSS reader and when you are using an RSS reader all you need to do is to copy the link location for any site and simply add the subscription to Google Reader and then you will get updates every time that this other blog makes a post. Add all of the blogs that you have found for your niche, and although you may be struggling a bit with Google Reader you will get the hang of it in a matter of hours if not minutes and have a nice easy way to access 100s of blogs if you want to all at one website.

Commenting tips

OK, this is the second problem, writing blog comments that will be read in the shortest amount of time. Now you have found lots of posts in your niche to do blog comments on so go ahead. The nice thing about blog comments is that once you have made one the site will remember your info for the next time that you comment. There is such a short supply of comments to smaller blogs that as you make a couple of comments the blog author is going to notice you and link back to your posts.

Anyway the blog comments themselves should be a couple of sentences long and should add to what the post is about. If you are leaving longer blog comments then try to write down the gist of your comment so that you can create a post out of your blog comment for your own site. (I just copy my comment into notepad for later viewing). The worst thing that you can do is leave lots of blog comments saying “I agree” or “You are right”, these comments add nothing to the conversation and will not be supported by the author and are not insightful enough for anyone to click your link to see your site.

How much commenting to do

I think that devoting 15 minutes or a half hour a day to blog commenting is great. I know that Yaro Starak says that as he was starting he would at the end of the day just leave comments as much as he could but I think that it is great to do this before you are tired. Get the blog comments in, get some ideas for future blog content, and move on to the rest of your work for the day.

Robert Scoble wrote a piece yesterday that advertisers are starting to look beyond just pages views and visitors to the value that traffic is really worth. In the end he asked the question

“How can I take my art further?”

I used to get obsessed about my traffic but you are right and the thing that I have started to look at is how the blogs that I have and the blogs that i follow are a bit of an echo chamber.

There is no reason in this day and age of the internet to just make incremental change but instead I have been looking a lot more at how I can really expand what people would expect to see from a blog. Over the last year we have seen blogs become communities a lot more than just commenting, Arrington at Tech Crunch and Problogger have job boards, many people are starting to build on forums and the blog is just a start to building a community with new articles as being the start.

There is good reason why we are doing what we do and for internet marketers we are looking for more traffic always but we should also be looking at what our traffic is worth to an advertiser. I have one page that converts almost nothing on 200 pageviews a day as the people are seeing the content, liking it and moving on.

What is more important than a pageview? There are a few things behind that visitor.

How many pages is that visitor looking at?

How long is the visitor hanging around for?

Is there a good chance that the visitor is going to come back?

How much chance is there that this visitor will trust you enough to buy?

These questions are stepping stones in the value of your traffic. As you get visitors you want to move your visitors through these questions to the point where your visitors are loyal to your positions on subjects within your niche.

Building content on a daily basis is important but more important still is doing what the big hitters and opinion leaders are doing and that is to add tools and features to build community amongst your viewership.

When you are looking at your traffic everyday, hopefully from Google Analytics,  look beyond the pageviews and visitors and instead look at how deep your visitors are going and start quizzing in your blog about what people would like to see to build up their experience and stay on your site.

The old SEO or great content debate. I fight this one myself all of the time. I will of course post to blogs everyday and let other sites that I have given up on languish for moths without any new content but what is the most important thing to do?

I can spend a couple of hours tweaking the SEO on a blog to see if I can get a few hundred posts to rank better or I can add one more post and see if that post will get me more traffic.

This has always been tough for me as I have no problem at all with the tweaking of the PHP, Perl or HTML code on a site and see instant changes in a look or at the outside wait a month or so to see the efforts of my SEO work to see if it makes the difference. The other thing that I do at times is the external SEO where I will post to forums (with a good signature link) or post to blogs (automated name, email, and website) and just add comments. Here is what I currently look as good valid work.

1. Content - I will add content everyday but from now on I am going to be a bit more focussed. I will do some keyword research using WordTracker and other sites to get good ideas for posts that will sell well in Google, I will also start writing more reviews so that at least the pages views can convert ot something instead of adsense.

2. SEO - I have tweaked my wordpress on another blog and am waiting to see the whole follow, nofollow, index, noindex and how well they will work but I am going to actually implement these changes on all of my sites to see if there will be a big change. I will be posting soon enough about my WordPress plugins that work for SEO and pageviews but for now just know that I am doing some of that.

3. Content fixing - I am going to surf through all of my blogs and improve my internal SEO as well by making sure that all my posts are keyword rich and  that I am using H2 and H3 tags to the best that I can.

4. Site optimization - I have done this on other blogs. Not on this one yet but I will get to that over the Christmas break. This includes making sure that I have good affiliate products and that people can notice the affiliate links, Adsense is optimized and that I can get as many RSS and newsletter subscribers to my posts.

5. External links for traffic - Blog post comments and Forum comments can be good for backlinks but I believe that  most of them are nofollow so Google will not notice them. I will do more of these kinds of posting though for other blog owners to notice my sites as well as for other readers to notice my sites as well.

I think I have kind of captured everything that is in my mind but I have a bunch more stuff in my head that I want to post about mostly around processes and planning that I do well sometimes and badly at other times.

I have a blog that I decided to setup a newsletter and mailing list for and over the last year I have gotten my subscriber numbers to over 1000 subscribers without having to spend any money on advertising. I think this is pretty good even though I know others may be doing lots better.

So here is how I built my list so far

First I decided that there had to be a good reason to have people sign up and so I made a 21 day how to type list that made it a no brainer to sign up, this is often not the case though and maybe I need to pump up the offer a bit.

Now that I had a reason for people to sign up I needed info and a place to have them get the autoresponder and the newsletters from. I setup the autoresponder series with past articles from the blog and every few weeks now I just send the newsletter to all of the inactives, that is the people that are no longer getting those messages. I had a fear that people would receive two emails from me in a day and that is a bit much for anyone to receive.

Using Popups to Capture Email Addresses

Next I setup a signup form on my site. This got a few signups but I have experimented a lot over the last year and no matter what I do I can never get the same response from a form on the page as I do from a popup on the page. I have never had a complaint about the popups and I have not been able to correlate any reduction in pageviews to the popup but it is probably about 300-400% more effective then a signup form anywhere on the page. I am keeping my popup.

There are other ways to utilize popups and that is obviously to sell people something directly from the popup. I beleive that this is short sighted and very ineffective, look no one kows who you are so how good would that popup need to be to sell them something that they are immediately going to be distrustful of. No, I believe that once you have built some credibility in the minds of your readers then you will have a much better chance of selling them.

Intro and Monetization

As for monetizing my newsletter and autoresponder traffic I have not done much. One thing that I do with the first three messages that I send is offer nothing of salesmanship and everything of content. I want my readers to love my content and trust me more before I offer them something to buy.

I currently have a couple of messages where I mention and send people to one of two affiliate programs but not much more. This needs to be a higher priority but really I want to lower the churn and keep my people on my list and trusting me.

All My Traffic is Organic…So Far

I have relied on Google for all of my traffic and by putting up a blog post every day I have been steadily building my traffic, this of course has it’s drawbacks, I am sure with some pay per click or some banner ads I could get more traffic and thus more signups but I really would need to know how much a signup is worth. Here is a simple way to figure out the value of a signup to your newsltter over a year:

Average number on list Divided by total revenue over the year from list equals revenue per list member

This is accurate but there are a few variables that we can look at that would change this. I will link to that article after I write it.

Also I have not used any coregistration programs. At this point I have not paid for traffic at all and just try to optimize posts and write posts that would be interesting and keyword rich and let Google do the rest of the heavy lifting for me.

Conclusion on the list building process

This process has worked for me to get up to 10 signups a day and over the last year gain over 1000 people on my list without having to worry about losing people to my marketing message. The real feeling that I have about my list and listbuilding in general is that a list is a real asset, traffic on the other hand can come and go and is fleeting. If you are not good at capitalizing on your list you can always learn more and experiment. But start to build that list now.

Publishing Your eZine – the Pros
There are several advantages publishing your own eZine can offer to you. Thus if the pros appeal to you, then publishing your own paperless newsletter can be ideal for you.

The most obvious reason publishing an eZine can be the most ideal business to you is that it is so easy to start that any individual can do. There is no need to invest in starting a brick and mortar business or even staff and heavy machines for that matter.

In fact, you can do this from the comfort of your home as the most important thing you will need is an auto responder equipped with broadcast feature. Auto responders such as GetResponse.com and aWeber.com are highly recommended when it comes to publishing your own eZine.

In spite of the low start up cost and monthly fees, you can make money from several profit centers within the spaces of your eZine issues. You can make money from selling advertising space, just to name one.

Most importantly, you get to build your own personal media and spread your marketing influence, making you more valuable to product and service owners thus do not be surprised if you receive Joint Venture proposals every so often.

Given some of the best reasons in the world of Internet Marketing, publishing your own periodical eZine can one of the best money vehicles you will ever acquire or even build.

Publishing Your eZine – the Cons
As with any other types of businesses, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One obvious challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer and that you run out of ideas every so often that your publishing schedule is threatening you.

A way of taking care of this problem is to create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights conveyed.

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.