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ARTICLES ON BLOGS - GOOGLE MONEY- AND AD-WORDS A COMPLETE STUDY.

What is google adwords? It is a Pay Per Click (PPC) program of advertising on Google. The ads appear on the right hand side of the Google Search page on keywords / key phrases that you choose. AND What is blogs? Weblogs or ‘Blogs’ are personal Websites consisting of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. They read like a diary or journal, but with the most recent entry at the top. If you want to know more about them as well as how to make money from them read the articles or info given below. 

Important : More than that We create 1000s of auto updating feed based blogs with links to your web pages to increase one way link popularity, since our blogs are feed based self updating and they will top the organic results of searches due to the relevance of content feed - results is the thousands of  visitors will flow to your web site through these blogs - for free And the traffic to your web pages will be 100 times more.  We help you to manage your PPC /Adwords campaign for search engine marketing as well.  contact us. 

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1. HOW TO GET MOST OUT OF GOOGLE ADWORDS?

Are you one of the 150,000 Webmasters and advertisers using Google's AdWords Select keyword targeted text advertising to drive traffic to your Website? If so, you may be able to save a bundle by cheating Google! Okay, so it's not exactly cheating per se, but if you're not using all the tools and tricks that AdWords provides, then you're definitely leaving money on the table. And, when your competitors see your results, they'll think you've somehow cheated the AdWords system. 

This series of articles will systematically show you how to:


Generate the absolute best keyword list for your target market 
Use simple techniques to vastly expand your productive keyword list 
Create highly clickable copy for your ad 
Precisely limit the distribution of your ad to only those prospects who are most interested 
Beat the competition with creative bidding strategies 
Dramatically reduce costs of your campaigns while increasing clickthroughs 

The series has five parts:


Part 1 - Keywords (starts below)

Part 2 - Create your Google AdWords Ad

Part 3 - Ad Distribution and Bid Strategies

Part 4 - Results Tracking and ROI Reports 

Let's get started!

Generating Your Keyword List in 5 Easy Steps
In order to get the most out of the AdWords Select program, you simply must have a great keyword list. If your keyword list is not deep enough, you will be doomed to pay top dollar on only a few highly-trafficked phrases that garner top dollar bids. So, what are the steps to developing a great keyword list?

First things first: you need your core list of targeted keywords and search phrases. These are the terms that your customers will type in to find your goods and services. Let's say you have an online store that sells handheld organizers like the Palm Pilot. Take a minute and think about how you would go about searching for a personal digital assistant (PDA) online. Would you search on the term 'digital device'? How about 'PDA'? Maybe 'Palm Pilot' or 'Palm V'? Would you try 'personal electronics'? My point is that there are many, many different and distinct search terms that will get you where you want to go. 

SITEPOINT BOOKS The Search Engine Marketing Kit
By Dan Thies 

The Search Engine Marketing Kit will show you not only how to create optimized Websites, but also step-by-step how to market, present, and price your search engine services.

Download the free sample now! 
So, how can you determine which search terms to use when advertising your goods and services? Follow these instructions:


Write down the top search terms that you can think of that describe your business or service. I suggest keeping this list on a spreadsheet if at all possible -- this will make it easier to organize and submit later. 


Use the Overture 'Search Suggestion Tool' to get an idea of the popularity of each search term and enter this number under a 'monthly impressions' column in your spreadsheet. The tool is located here. 

When I searched on our example keywords, I found that those search terms were recently searched as follows:


Pda - 420,800 
palm pilot - 75,982 
palm V - 3,899 
digital device - 376 
personal electronics - 250 


Use the Search Suggestion Tool to lengthen your list of search terms. Not only does the Search Suggestion Tool reveal the number of searches for any given search phrase, it also displays any closely related search terms. 

Another excellent resource is found at www.wordtracker.com. At $199 for an annual membership, this service will reveal which terms are the most searched on the Web, and also give suggestions for alternative search phrases. Typing 'palm pilot' into Word Tracker also shows a list of search terms (suggestions), and the number of times the associated terms were searched at Overture in the previous month:


palm pilot software – 6,960 
palm pilot game – 5,486 
palm pilot free game – 5,478 
palm pilot free ware – 2,315 
palm pilot free software – 2,203 
palm pilot downloads – 1,995 
free palm pilot downloads – 1,931 
palm pilot accessory – 1,291 
palm pilot share ware – 985 

Add all the new relevant terms and monthly impressions to your spreadsheet list. Be creative! Type in any series of words that you think might lead someone to your product or service. Use a thesaurus and a dictionary to assist you.


Go back to your list -– it should be pretty lengthy by now –- and add modifying words that are relevant to your product or service, such as: cheap, discount, low cost, free, premium, authentic, etc. Check the Search Suggestion Tool to assess the number of searches conducted for those terms in the previous month. Enter the terms and data into your spreadsheet under 'monthly impressions'.

In our example, if you use the keyword 'Palm Pilot', why not consider using 'discount Palm Pilot', 'cheap Palm Pilot', or 'low cost Palm Pilot' if they apply to your business? The purpose of these activities is to generate the longest possible list of relevant search terms possible. Why? Remember, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your message. You pay nothing extra to simply list more keywords. Additionally, the more keywords you have, and the more specific the search phrases are, the more likely that your visitor will be truly interested in your product or service. For example: 'pda' is a very general search term. Anyone interested in handheld organizers might search using this term. However, 'Palm V' is a more targeted search term. These customers are narrowed to a particular brand and model. The search phrase 'discount Palm V' is even more targeted, and will attract price conscious Palm V shoppers.

A longer list of relevant search phrases also increases the likelihood that you will attract visitors to your site at a lower cost. That is because it is often possible to bid less for a click if the search term is less popular. More search terms, bid at a lower cost, mean more traffic to your site for fewer advertising dollars.


At this point in the process, you should have a fairly comprehensive list of targeted search terms and phrases. I suggest you sort the terms on your spreadsheet by 'monthly impressions' to get a sense of which terms are most popular. These are the terms that can end up costing you the most advertising dollars if you choose to bid for a high ranking. 

Congratulations! You have now generated a comprehensive keyword list that will get you ahead of your competitors. In the next installment, we'll look at some rarely used techniques to ensure that your click through rates are among the highest in your category.

More on How to Maximize Google AdWords

Now that you've generated a comprehensive list of targeted keywords and phrases with which to attract your customers, you must create an advertisement which will entice them to visit your site. Google adheres to a strict advertising format: all listings are text only, with a title line of 25 characters and a product or service description with 2 lines of up to 35 characters each. Your URL is also limited to 35 characters. 

It is critical that this message be effective, concise and descriptive, and that sales are driven for best results. 

Title Lines
The title line is the first aspect of your Google ad that a potential visitor to your site will see. Google also has an affiliate network that displays their search results, and some of these distribution partners display only the title line of your advertisement. At these distribution sites, the only indication of your site's value proposition will be the title description. But even when the full description accompanies your title line in a listing, it is the title line's job to catch the attention and interest of a prospective customer -- and to fluidly transition them into reading your full description and clicking through to your site. No sweat, right? Oh wait…you have to accomplish this using only 25 characters in total!

My process for creation of a title line is fairly straightforward. I open a new document in Microsoft Word, pick the first (most popular) search phrase on my spreadsheet list, and then write a description that really sells my product or service relevant to that keyword or phrase. Initially, I don't really worry about the exact length. I just try to get the most sales driven message I can. After constructing something I like, I highlight the phrase and use the 'Word Count' function under the 'Tools' menu in Word to ascertain its exact length. One caveat! Experience has proven one extremely powerful rule of a search phrase description: your description should contain the search phrase or a derivation of it if at all possible. This will increase the effectiveness of your title. Experience has also shown that if you are offering a compelling value proposition, listing a price will increase clicks. I also like to use capitalize letters in the title. Obviously the word 'free' increases clicks.

SITEPOINT BOOKS The Search Engine Marketing Kit
By Dan Thies 

The Search Engine Marketing Kit will show you not only how to create optimized Websites, but also step-by-step how to market, present, and price your search engine services.

Download the free sample now! 
For example, if you are writing a title for the search term 'Palm V', your title should include the term 'Palm V'. Here are two 25-character-or-less examples: 

Lowest Cost Palm V - $100
Palm V's From Just $99

One great thing about AdWords is that it's pretty easy to change your message. I recommend testing several different approaches and finding the words and phrases that generate the most clicks. It's also smart to review the titles of your competitors in each category. I will type in the keyword or phrase and scan the title line to get a feel for what the main points of competition are. Some categories are very price driven, while others are service focused. There are no hard and fast rules as to what will work best, so continuous testing and refinement should be employed for all important keywords.

Descriptions
Descriptions are the heart and soul of your sales pitch. You've managed to get the attention of your potential customer -- maybe for only a millisecond. Now, you've got to deliver on the promise of your title. Finally, you've got to convince your potential customer that if they click on your link, they will be rewarded with the all the benefits described in your message.

A great description gives as much relevant information as possible to the potential customer. This serves 2 purposes: 


It will encourage qualified prospects to continue on to your site in search of further information, or to purchase your offerings. 
It will discourage random clicks by unqualified prospects who are not firmly in your target demographic. 

Your description should include any factors that clearly add value to the customer above and beyond your competition. Do you offer special products or services? A wider selection? Better credit terms? More flexible payment options? Hard to find inventory? These are the kinds of trigger points that can lead to higher clickthroughs. 

Another Trick - Where to Direct Your Link
The final step in the customer's journey is to successfully land on your site -- piece of cake, right? It is if you know that you need to land the customer on the portion of your site that is most relevant to the search term. Always link the customer to a page that contains the exact information, product or service that they were searching for. In our example, don't just land the customer on your home page. Land them on the exact page within your site that describes and offers for sale the Palm V! 

Never create a disconnection between the original search term and your landing page. Evaluate every keyword and search phrase to identify the best area of your site on which customers should be delivered. Use your spreadsheet to keep track of where you want each search phrase linked. Go to your site, find the correct page, then cut and paste the proper URL into your spreadsheet. This is absolutely necessary to maximize your conversion to sale.

One final note on landing pages and your links: Google will bill you for a click once a customer has clicked on your link. You will be billed for this charge regardless of whether or not your site is functioning properly, or if the customer abandons the process prematurely because your site takes too long to load. Make sure that your site loads quickly, and that the links you deliver are active. If your site goes down, remember to reduce your bids to the minimum amount to prevent spending money driving potential customers to a dead link.

Great! You now have titles and descriptions that stand out from the competition. You also know the power of a targeted landing environment. In the next installment, we'll look at some often overlooked techniques to further narrow your target demographic, and reduce "junk" clicks.

Limiting Your Distribution – The Key to Success
If there is one component of AdWords that's most often neglected, it's controlling the distribution of your ad impressions to only those prospects who are most targeted. According to the Google AdWords Website:

Each account is evaluated after every 1,000 ad impressions are delivered on Google. If the CTR for your account falls below a minimum required CTR (which varies by ad position, but is 0.5% for the top spot and slightly reduced for each subsequent position), we'll only show your ads occasionally on your underperforming keywords. (The status of each of your keywords will be clearly indicated in your keyword reports.) If your keywords don't improve, we may disable them. You'll then need to refine your campaign to improve its performance and effectiveness. After editing your campaign, you may restore full ad delivery to your account.

In short, if your ads don't get a decent clickthrough rate (CTR) they will be disabled -- your ads won't be shown. Conversely, if you achieve a high clickthrough rate for a very general term, you will potentially be spending a huge amount of money. So, how do you get your ads more closely targeted to your audience? Here's the secret -- use the built-in tools that Google provides: 


Phrase Match 
Exact Match 
Negative Keywords 

Remember, the default setting for AdWords is "Broad Match". This will see your ad displayed when any keyword from your search phrase is typed in any order. So, if you target 'Palm Pilot', under Broad Match, your ad will be shown when someone searches for: airline pilot, auto-pilot, pilot light, palm reader, palm trees, etc. None of these search terms are in the least bit targeted! 

Getting Your Ad Targeted
SITEPOINT BOOKS The Search Engine Marketing Kit
By Dan Thies 

The Search Engine Marketing Kit will show you not only how to create optimized Websites, but also step-by-step how to market, present, and price your search engine services.

Download the free sample now! 
The first step in narrowing the audience to which your ad is displayed is to use the 'Phrase Match' feature in AdWords. This limits your ad to those searches that include your search phrases in order. To activate the 'Phrase Match' feature, simply enclose your search terms in quotation marks, for example, "Palm Pilot". Now, only those terms that include both Palm and Pilot in that order will be shown your ad, such as: free palm pilot, palm pilot software, and palm pilot V.

This may be a good first step for some, but I've found that it's necessary to refine the distribution of my ads even further by using the 'Exact Match' feature. This is particularly useful for increasing the clickthrough rates of poorly performing ads. The 'Exact Match' feature will only display your ads when the exact search phrase is entered. The 'Exact Match' feature is activated once you place parentheses around your search term. In our example, we'd use the term [Palm Pilot]. Now, only the exact search term 'Palm Pilot' will cause our AdWords ad to be displayed.

The third tool is 'Negative Keywords'. This feature simply excludes your ad from displaying along side the search results of any keywords you choose. If you're selling a product or service, you may want to use 'free' as a negative keyword, thus preventing your ad from displaying when the word 'free' is part of the search phrase. To enable negative keywords you simply place a minus sign in front of your search term. If, in our example, we wanted to exclude all searches for 'free palm pilot' and 'palm pilot software', our keyword list would include the following entries:


free 
software 

Use of these targeting features will instantly place you into an elite category of Google AdWords users who have clickthrough and conversion rates at the top of their categories. Now, let's look at how to set your bid.

Creative Strategies for Successful Bidding
There are many different approaches to the process of bidding for position within AdWords. A $5.00 minimum deposit is required to set up any AdWords account, but once it's set up, any of the listed bidding options are available to you.

The 'Always be #1, No Matter What it Takes' Strategy

This strategy espouses the view that being #1 is everything. It is true that the top listing gets the most traffic. In some cases, the top listing can generate much more traffic than the lower listings -- even the second listing. The top listing will also always be the most expensive spot for any given keyword or phrase, and, depending on the popularity of the search term and the bid required to secure it, the top listing may become very expensive to maintain. 

Also, as AdWords uses the clickthrough rate to weight your listing, it may simply be impossible to sustain the number one position at any bid price. Remember, too, that Google currently has a $50 per click maximum bid limit. The 'Always be #1' strategy is also prone to bidding wars.

The 'Never Bid More Than the Minimum Bid' Strategy

This strategy focuses on cost containment. Given a vast assortment of search terms, it is likely that some top bids will be only as high as the minimum bid. These terms will most likely be less popular terms that don't generate a significant amount of clicks. 

This strategy assumes that even where the top bids are $1 or more, some visitors will read through the entire list of advertisements, and click on much lower bids. As of the writing of this article, Google AdWords bids can range in price from 5 cents, to $50.

The 'Position Yourself Next to a Weaker Competitor' Strategy

The thrust of this strategy is to position your listing as high as possible, while looking critically at competitor's listings and offers. You then position yourself next to a competitor whose price is much higher than yours for the same item, or whose offering is in some other way uncompetitive with yours, thereby making your offering seem even more attractive. 

For example, if you mention a sales price of $149 for a Palm V in your listing, and the listing directly above or below yours displays a price of $99 for a Palm V, your offer appears overpriced. However, if there is a listing that offers the Palm V at $199, positioning your listing directly above or below the $199 price can make your price of $149 look more attractive.

The 'Steady State' Strategy

This strategy is similar to the 'Never Bid More Than the Minimum Bid' strategy, but with a twist. You calculate the amount that you are willing to pay for each qualified customer that lands on your site, and always bid exactly that amount. For example, let's say that you calculate that you are more than willing to spend $1.35 for each qualified customer who lands on your site. You simply bid $1.35 on your best keywords, regardless of what others around you bid. 

This strategy is often employed by bidders who take a "hands off" approach to their bids. They simply want to set the account up once, and let it run on 'autopilot', without much (if any) maintenance.

Of course, you can access your AdWords account as frequently as you like, and adjust your maximum bid to give the return on investment (ROI) you require. Measuring and maximizing your ROI will be the topic of the forth and final installment of this serie

Important: We create 1000s of auto updating feed based blogs with links to your web pages to increase one way link popularity, since our blogs are feed based self updating and they will top the organic results of searches due to the relevance of content feed - results is the thousands of  visitors will flow to your web site through these blogs - for free And the traffic to your web pages will be 100 times more.  We help you to manage your PPC /Adwords campaign for search engine marketing as well.  contact for details to support@casanads.com 


2.  BLOGSs- secrets of making money from Blogs. 

8 Secrets on How to Keep Yourself Posting Into Your Blog. Do you find it tough to stay motivated - like posting often and regularly into your blog? If you are like me, yes, I find it hard to stay motivated. But if we want to be really successful here, by all means, we have to keep going.

What I learned from successful people is that they have learned to master themselves well enough that they can inspire their own self to get motivated at all time. The key word here is to master ourselves. Know what can keep you motivated.

Motivation is something that inspires you to take action, gives you drive, nurtures enthusiasm! It spurs you on and provides an impetus to continue, an overall driving force! It helps you want to keep going when things are tough and one part of you wants to quit!

So I thought it might be worthwhile to post something here about how to keep yourself posting.

Break bigger goals into smaller goal and set up a reward system. Decide how often you absolutely have to post. Decide also your way to reward yourself once you've accomplished your goal over a certain period of time. (Just don't reward yourself with days off from posting!)

Encourage your readers to share feedback. Ask them what they want to hear about. You are better motivated knowing what you are about to post is what your readers want.

Stockpile posts in times where you feel so motivated. Save them for days when you're low on time and energy to write a post.

Setup a regular schedule as blogging time. Chances are you'll find it easy to get a post done when you try to stick to your schedule.

Blog about not feeling motivated to blog and you will get some resolution while writing your post.

Create an inspiring reason for your commitment. Perhaps get a notebook and write down the answers on how would you define successful blogging?

Make it FUN! Try to make the process of blogging entertaining and enjoyable. You don't have to force yourself to do something that you really like to do, do you? In fact, making fun your focus will insure that your way of blogging will become more fruitful.

Above all, take time to acknowledge and celebrate how your life has changed because of your daily commitment and your investment in yourself. Notice the benefits of being an active blogger and celebrating every stage of your blog's growth.


You may have your own way on how to keep yourself get motivated to post often and regularly. Care to share it with others. Help others get motivated. You are welcome to place your valuable inputs and insights in the comment area.

We all know that blogging requires consistent, day to day effort. But can you do blogging straight say for two or three months, then stop blogging and expect passive income for years? I guess, many of you will say No, but not me, I did my experiment and my experiment gives me positive result. The secret lays on the careful selection of blog theme.

Imagine you have uncovered the secret of knowing the kind of blog that gives you a lifetime passive income. You have 10 of them and each is giving you $30 monthly adsense income. Maybe, not big enough but remember, it is a passive income. Plus there is no one holding you to make just ten.

I started several blogs before at different times but after sometime I lost energy adding new content on them. But look, here is one that is still giving me some $30 adsense monthly. Sorry, I can't mention here the blog's name. Just be contented to the secret I will about to share.

I try to investigate how come this one blog give me passive income while others are not? And I come to a conclusion that producing passive income from blogging is greatly influence by the proper selection of its theme. The secrets are

The theme must be timeless making the post timeless also.

The keywords used to optimized the blog must be timeless also as your blog will rely mostly to search engine traffic.

The traffic demand from the keywords your blog targeted must be timeless, not seasonal.

The information of the industry your blog belong must be very stable, not very fast nor dynamic so much so your blog post will be valid for years without update.

The blog must be serving a micro-niche to enjoy a greater share of search engine traffic by default.


Generally, blogging as I said requires consistent, day to day effort. And while posts that were posted ages ago do continue to work, it's the compounding effect that really ramps up your earning power. Blog that I've let go continue to make money, but it's not very much in comparison to the blogs that I work on consistently.

So, who say, you cannot make passive income in blogging? You can make passive income from blogging. Just be guide but the tips stated above.

You may agree or disagree about what I believe or what just I said. But if you think your ideas will be fruitful for my blog readers, maybe you got some ideas that can add value to this content, feel free to place it to the comment section.


Important: We create 1000s of auto updating feed based blogs with links to your web pages to increase one way link popularity, since our blogs are feed based self updating and they will top the organic results of searches due to the relevance of content feed - results is the thousands of  visitors will flow to your web site through these blogs - for free And the traffic to your web pages will be 100 times more.  We help you to manage your PPC /Adwords campaign for search engine marketing as well.  contact for details to support@casanads.com 


3. HOW TO MAKE MONEY FROM BLOGS?-STUDY 

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

blog publishing software 
HTML/CSS 
blog comments (and comment spam) 
RSS/syndication 
feed aggregators 
pings 
trackbacks 
full vs. partial feeds 
blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic) 
search engines 
search engine optimization (SEO) 
page rank 
social bookmarking 
tagging 
contextual advertising 
affiliate programs 
traffic statistics 
email 
Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog for free. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising) 
Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check) 
Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month) 
Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click) 
Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books) 
Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer) 
Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: VegFamily.com advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment. 

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my test failed and even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in under and hour and then just wait a month and see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs VegFamily.com, a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity usually yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can. 

Important: We create 1000s of auto updating feed based blogs with links to your web pages to increase one way link popularity, since our blogs are feed based self updating and they will top the organic results of searches due to the relevance of content feed - results is the thousands of  visitors will flow to your web site through these blogs - for free And the traffic to your web pages will be 100 times more.  We help you to manage your PPC /Adwords campaign for search engine marketing as well.  contact for details to support@casanads.com 

More articles and info will be added soon  


OUR PRODUCTS- LIST OF OUR PRODUCTS ARE BELOW

Software Tools On Advertisement: We have best software tools for do-it-your self - in following including  SEO, Articles submission, Mass Mailing And Desk Top Auto Responder  etc. 
Try them for best results.
..Know-More...

Digital E books-Guides And  Tutorial Courses: Our online tutorial courses/ digital e books and guides on advertising and promotional subjects are available for you to study. ..Know-More...

E mail Data Base- Sales: We sell  email data to advertisers. You can send emails directly to them with out spamming as they are double opt in emails. They can be useful for quick promotion of business. You can use mass mailer software from us. ..Know-More...

Soon You can expect more products from us.


OUR SERVICES - HERE IS THE LIST OF OUR SERVICES

Solution Providing Service: Do you have any problems in promoting or marketing your products/business/websites or placing ads on or offline . Here is the finest consulting service to solve them. Email us with the problem, your contact info, web site URL if any etc. E Mail to support@casanads.com 

Off Line Ads- Set up Hoarding, TV, FM Radio News paper ads, Notices etc: We will help you to set up offline ads in news papers, on hoardings, in FM radio, TV Etc. Plus help to create stunning written/audio or visual ads to increase impact on your ads 10000% more. ..Know-More...
Online Ad and marketing cum promotional set Up: We help you to create stunning ads in words or blazing banners and help to place them in apt online traffic sources to pull virtually millions of traffic to sites. We will undertake complete set up from study online market to setting up of ads...Know-More...
Business Advices  on How to start business:  If you want expert advice in setting up business on or offline we can guide you that. This is a free service from us. We like to guide you often to set up better and successful business online than offline. ..Know-More...
Setting Up Online Entity for an existing offline business:  If you have an exiting offline business, we shall help you to establish that business in online as well. We will guide you to set up web site for that business and promotion/marketing  for that web site. ..Know-More...
Analyzing The existing  Business - market study- advices:  This service is to help you to study existing market and competition you have to face once you enter yourself in to market with your product. This will help to prepare you better before facing real hot and open competition. ..Know-More...
Suggesting the best Hosting- Designing packages:  Where to register your web domain and where to host that.. Which are the best services and what all additional  benefits you will get? A complete study. ..Know-More...
PR Work and brand Promotion:  We will help you to make great brand awareness and PR work for your brand. We are grandmasters in brand promotion. ..Know-More...
Direct Marketing And Email Marketing- e zines etc: Help you to promote your products through e zines, e mails, safe lists   and opt-ins. This is the best service you can ever have. You will produce very successful income stream from biggest flow of visitors to your business sites almost immediately. ..Know-More...
Links & Banners Set up in Free and Paid sites: We will help you to set up free and paid links as well as banners from other web sites and blogs to your web sites, to get flow of huge traffic your web pages. We will analyze the sites / blogs to get useful links with exact key words. ..Know-More...
SE Optimizing  And related works: We  will optimize your web pages both internal and external  ways and create its value, to get them top of the organic search results (engines). This will produce amazing amount of traffic to your web pages from organic search results. Subsequently more income will be produced from your site. ..Know-More...
SE Pay Per Click promotion and management of sites: One of our best service is that we can analysis the market, key words, search numbers and key word- cost to opt best key words or sites for your pay per click or pay per show ads in search engines including Google, we also help to set up stunning ads to pull people to your site and for high CTR. ..Know-More...
Press Release and follow up to notify your business: We can set excellent press releases , editorials etc to boost your sales over night. Amazing number of visitors will flood your sites and your sites can be at the top of the search engines news columns. ..Know-More...
Articles Submission service to promote the site: Submit your articles to hundreds of article directories ,with your links back to your sites. Articles will be picked up by web masters and place in their sites - content management -and you will get one way links plus traffic from many resources around the internet- absolutely free. ..Know-More...
Setting Up Affiliates to Promote: Get thousands of sales people online to sell your products. We will analysis your products and will arrange hundreds of affiliates around to sell these products. This is very useful service. ..Know-More...
Create Blogs And promote through Blog Directories: We will help you to cerate 1000s of blogs with news and RSS feeds and Auto content updating - complete auto pilot system This will help to get link popularity and lot of incoming traffic either. ..Know-More...
Promote Through Forums-Message Boards:  We shall help you to place the ads and promotional messages in  apt message boards/ forums. We will create stunning messages for   message boards as well as placing them. Very useful service. ..Know-More...
Creating XML- RSS And News Feeds- To promote : We will create RSS, NEWS and other XML feeds for your site and blogs, we will place them in proper resources including directories of feeds. This will help to pull lot more traffic with in days. ..Know-More...
Viral tools set up for  high volume of traffic  : We shall set tools to promote your site through viral way. This will explode traffic and visitors will flood your web pages. Viral marketing is the fastest and best as well as simplest way to promote any thing . All major sites are  ( including Yahoo Google MSN Hotmail) are popularized through this way.  ..Know-More...
Tracking and analyzing of improvements Plus Planning: We help you to track visitors and page viewers plus ads. The effectiveness of a particular ad, creating successful ads and messages plus everything including future plans to create more successful promotional and marketing plans to your business both on and offline with in your existing budget. ..Know-More...
  More services will be added soon. 

 

 

 

 

 

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