Advertising is the the most popular way of getting revenue. There are many ways of choosing how to advertise, but which one? So far Google AdSense is the most popular way of getting in money but there are also several other companies that provide the same service such as:
- AdGenta
- Blogads
- CrispAds
- IntelliTXT
- DoubleClick
- Kanoodle
- Text Link Ads
If you decided that you do want to show up ads in your website then you’re ready to read the following list of forms of advertising which include banners, links, textual, and pop-ups. I’ve classified them into the following:
- Text-link ads - This is an incredibly efficient way to advertise. It doesn’t take space, its stealthy and highly accurate.
- Product-based advertising - These aim to promote specific products from retailers or auctions.
- Banner advertising - This is the most common way of advertising which are usually a traditional 125×125 banner ads that show up (most of the time) in your sidebar. These are recommended since they are highly visible and is more prone to get clicked.
- Textual advertising - These don’t have images, just a text and a link. These too are popular in the ad world especially when they are served up contextually. Google AdSense provides such service.
Types Of Ad Payments
Ads can pay for being present for a certain amount of time for ‘x’ per month. But there are other ads that have more strict guidelines. 3 to be specific that are more performanced-based.
- CPC - CPC stands for ‘cost-per-click’. Each time a user clicks on something, the publisher gets paid.
- CPM - CPM stands for ‘cost-per-thousand’ views and means the publisher gets paid per impression.
- CPA - CPA stands for ‘cost-per-acquisition’. This means that the publisher gets paid if the ad makes a sale, signup or generates a lead.
That’s all I have for you today folks, more to come later..
Wondering how to monetize your blog? Well, first you need to learn the strategies to do so. First up is monetizing your blog with ads. But this is tricky, you have to know how and when to put ads up. When is a question that is difficult to answer. As to how, this can be shown in several ways.
I’ll show you 2 ways if seeing it through this bulleted list (as you may have noticed this is my favorite way of blogging :)):
- Ads from the start - The objective here is to run ads since the day you start blogging.
- Readers hope - Sometimes when a reader first goes into your blog and you have no ads, that is an instant plus. People that see a blog with no ads believe they are either so successful they need not put ads up, humble (in a way), or maybe they just blog for the passion. So be careful with this, if you start putting up ads from the start you won’t cause any hopes of being a free ad blog which would cause your readers to get upset.
- Consistency - Running ads from the start make things go smoothly sometimes, but you also have to take in notice of your blog design. Change the design too much and your readers will be thrown off or have to go through the hassle to position correctly your ads again.
- Income - Putting ads from the start can help you in a great way, imagine if you put AdSense 5 months into your blogging, then start to see an immense income, something you could have been earning 3 months before.
- Get readers, then run ads - This is also valid, you can wait some time until you get your readership up and then put ads. This is a good way of showing that your blog is not a money grab or having your blog look too commercial. The idea here is to add advertising slowly but surely. Wait until you grow, your readership expands, gather some trust, etc.
At the end, the decision is yours and you’re the only one who knows what to do according to your needs. Neither one of the views I told you about wwill work for everyone.
Things To Think About
When you get your thoughts straight on deciding which approach to use, think about the following:
- How commercial is your blog? - Think carefully about this. Some blogs are very commerical making ads an asset to your blog. As for others that are not, you have to be lighter on putting ads up.
- Does it look like its worth it? - If you’re not gathering a considerable income from the start, remove the ads. Try other things while you get your readership up like putting up ads from friends to make potential ad buyers more interested, show affiliate links, etc.
- Will ads divert? - Think about the quality of the ads you put up, they may affect the quality of your blog too. Don’t break trust with off-putting ads.
So that’s it for monetizing your blog, tomorrow I’ll talk about monetizing directly with advertising. 
Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of updates. Life has been pretty hectic.
Today I’m going to show you guys a few blog posts on other blogs that are of great interest. Even though I haven’t been able to post on Outstanding Blogger for a while I did have the time to read a blog every now and then. So as I did that I bookmarked a few posts I thought are great, useful and efective.
So let’s start.
[...]1. thinking people will actually read the post. Jakob Neilson performed a study and found found that only 16% of people will read a post word by word … the rest only scan. The implication is that readers need to be able to extract the key message(s) of a post at a glance, and not have to work for it. This means posts must be made scannable. This also speaks to all the common mistakes found below.
2. using full paragraph format. Again, people don’t want to read. They want to scan. If you can peak their interest first, then maybe they’ll read, but almost certainly not if you present them with a mass of verbiage.[...]
This one is great for blogging beginners, new integrates to the blog world should read this article carefully.
[...]Bonus Tip #1 - Are Comments Enabled?
Some WordPress users restrict comments to registered users, or disable them entirely. While this may be appropriate in some situations, in most cases comments are a very beneficial factor, and a defining mark, of a blog.[...]
Love SEO? Want to super-charge your blog to its maximum potential? Then this article is for you.
[...]
- Validate that your feed displays clearly in major feed readers. Whether you’ve chosen to include full or partial content in your feeds, make sure your feed comes through clearly in major feed readers like Google Reader, Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, and Bloglines.
- Confirm that your blog is indexed by major blog search engines. Conduct a search for your blog in search engines like Google Blog Search and Technorati. If you can’t find it, your potential readers can’t either.
[...]
Shows you easy ways to increase your blog traffic, now I’m not saying the easy way is the best but they put in a way so simple and clean even the beginner blogger can execute the tasks easily.
[...]
- Clippings - If you find yourself typing information over and over again in web page forms or forums or in your email, you will absolutely love this extension. Just type once and save it to access it in 2 clicks from your context menu or status bar. Clippings Manager offers folders to organize your Clippings and an option to export and import your clippings between computers.
Tip: I use Clippings to store my frequently used blog post urls that I refer to or link to in comments. The bottom meta text in this post is from my Clippings.
- Copy Plain Text - When you are trying to copy text to quote someone or provide an excerpt from another blog post, it can be annoying to paste the text with all the original formatting. This simple extension adds an option to your right click menu to copy plain text.
[...]
If you love the browser that’s changing everything around the way people think about surfing, then you’ll definitely want to read these tips and add-ons for Firefox.
[...]So you have your blog out here in cyberspace and you just can’t seem to get any traffic. We all know what a bummer that is. Well, you are in luck because I’ve found a way to dramatically increase the traffic to your blog and it only takes 30 days, but the benefits will last long past your initial month long time investment. I’ve seen this happen on my American Idol News blog.[...]
This one is a little bit different, this is a very extensive blog challenge that I haven’t tried yet. So why post about it? I read about it, and I saw other blogs’s attempt at it. And their results were a resounding success.
I’ll be trying this challenge soon, if I’m lucky by monday I’ll start it. Wish me luck! I hope you’ll be there for support. 
So that’s it my people, those are it for today. I have many many more, but I’ll post them another day. So stay tuned.
We bloggers are always trying to attract people to our websites, and we want them to read all of our posts we’ve worked our behinds off for. But in reality we can’t show them all the posts at once, we can only direct them to do so. So how do we do this? Categories. There are a few people that say this is an unnecessary feature in blogs but it is very much the contrary.
Using categories can help users swim through your blog posts in an organized way. But you have to use them wisely, you can’t just pick any old category for each and every single one of your posts. You have to keep it generic but at the same time a bit narrow, try to find a happy-medium.
Things to keep in mind are:
- Keep It Relevant - Make sure you put yourself in the position of the reader. What would you be looking for if you were looking for ‘x’ post? Making the categories as accurate as possible can mean a potential new reader to your blog.
- Quantity - Keep your categories to a small range, putting too many categories can throw off readers and in effect they might just give up seeing its too much of a hassle for the person to figure out where the content is located.
- Don’t Over-Categorize - Inserting your post into too many categories is not a wise decision. Yes, the post can have more than one topic in it therefore you would like to put it in 2 categories but inserting it in, say, 4 categories looks unprofessional and spammish also. Try to keep your categories organized and with unique content in them.
Now, onto tags. Why use tags at all? Well, we can’t just rely on categories to do all our work for us.
Here are a few ideas for using tags on your blog:
- Use precise tags - Search your posts, highlight the most important words and use them in the tags.
- Tag Cloud - Use a tag cloud, it helps people see which are popular, which aren’t and so on. Also, a tag cloud is easily scan-able so its a breeze for users to find content using the cloud.
These 2 elements are key to blogging. If you can’t let people see all of your fantastic posts, provide a way for them to search for it. Just find the right combination, be precise and find the technique that will lure your readers into searching for content on your blog.
Hey folks, I grew tired of usin free Wordpress themes. I used the ones that looked the most appealing but it just wasn’t enough. So I decided to go with a pro looking, efficient one.
This theme is brought you to us all by Elegant Wordpress Themes. They have 9 professional themes all avalaible for download for a yearly-subscription fee of $20. That’s a really good price for the excellent quality themes they bring (and remember, its 9 themes for under 20 dollars [$19.95]).
My friendly advice is to check the demos out now and see it for yourself. I’m satisfied, and you will be too.
Oh and, would anybody like to give me some feedback on the new look? I’d appreciate it. Thanks.
Hey guys, I thought I’d take out the time to post a little motivational article. All bloggers come to a point where they just need a reason to keep on blogging. Maybe its money, fame, family, education, information, whatever. And sometimes its none of them and you just can’t find any motivation at all. Check this out:
“Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime.”
That is what I want to accomplish in this blog. I want to be able to teach you guys to fish. And I’m not saying I’m the biggest blogging expert, but I will say I know where to get the information if I don’t have it and how to provide good solid content that is not just helpful but is verified truthful information too.
So what are we going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about as if we where going to start blogging from point zero.
So ask yourself this question? What do you want to do with your blog? What do you want to accomplish? What is your goal?
These questions are a way of stimulating your brain for motivation. I think I can, I think I can. No. I know I can.
Sounds awkward sometimes, but its a good way to determine yourself to what you want to do.
Why am I doing this? It could be a number of reasons, including:
- Money - You can decide that you want to blog to make money, this is what most bloggers of today do. But money isn’t everything, right? Try making your goal a bit more wide.
- Quitting your day job - Maybe you’re tired of your day job, it causes stress and you don’t enjoy it at all. You find blogging to be a great way to live off of by working hard on it and at the same time it gives you enough space to enjoy life.
- For the kicks of it - You blog just for fun, for expressing yourself, etc.
- You decide - You are the one that really decides at the end. Only you know why you really want to blog!
Now that you have your goal set in mind and you know why you want to blog. Its time to talk about your work ethic. You must know that if you were to quit your day job for blogging full time, its no joke when we mean full time. Blogging would be like any other job. You have to take it seriously and dedicate enough time for it.
It also depends on your writing habit too, though. Maybe you’re one that posts daily with short concise content, or you’re a weekly poster that puts up good thick and extensive posts. All in all, you have to dedicate time to your blogging.
There is no way you’ll ever get rich from blogging by just sitting around in your chair waiting for a cloud to pour money all over you. You have to act, search content, read books, talk with people, download material for your blog. Do all things possible to please your readers. Blogging is not a “get rich quick” strategy. It takes time and efforts.
Don’t be frustrated if your blog doesn’t pick up in 3, 6, 9, etc., months. Imagine, the other days I had 50 readers and the count dropped to 15-20 or so. But that doesn’t let me down. Not at all, I’m going to keep on blogging and finding new strategies to make all this work. Darren Rowse from ProBlogger said he had been blogging for about 3 years before he became truly successful. Of course there are people that do it in less time but the point is that it takes time. It takes time to blog and be successful.
In the end, it just comes to how much you truly desire your dreams. Never give up on them. And never let anything come in your way. Fight for what you want and achieve it, grab it, make it yours.
What is good content? This is hard to explain because good content is like asking something like What’s a good movie to watch? What’s a good book to read? It all depends. Each person sees content in a different way and thus, you must find a way to provide direct content while making it wide, general and unique at the same time. Each blogger has his or her way of providing content, but is it any of the latter?
It all depends on your users needs. Know your reader, use tools to find out what they are searching for (this will help you find what your users are looking for) and more importantly relate with them in every single way you can.
Content is a very open word, but let’s narrow it down to a few categories which can guide you to good content:
- Educational - Readers like learning about specific things, provide them with powerful, factual knowledge and not only will you be respected by your intellectual capacity of a given topic but your readers will enjoy your content and thus become loyal readers.
- Humorous/Entertaining - You can use your blog as an entertainment portal. Popular topics like gossip, celebrities, jokes, satires, etc. are getting popular in the blogosphere and people every day enjoy it even more.
- Discussable Content - Today Internet users love to debate online, what better way to provide them their discussion satisfaction by providing them debatable or controversial content? All in good heart of course.
- Informative - Inform your readers, bring them news and updates on what interests them most.
Use the SezWho plugin to check out what blogs are users commenting on. What type of blog is it, and what kind of response they did on the blog.
Another thing to note is to be unique. But how? Well, one step closer to being unique is to find your inner blog character. Find your tone, voice and style. You’ll find that many (at least the dedicated and/or successful ones) bloggers today have uniqueness in all the latter.
Let me tell you a bit about tone, voice and style.
- Style - Your style provides the way you are. In other words your personality. There are a few writing styles you should know about.
- Expository - writing in which the purpose of the author is to inform, explain, describe or define his or her subject to the reader.
- Narration - ‘storytelling’ in the most obvious sense, as found in short stories, novels, drama, and personal accounts; but also intrinsic to any piece of writing in which chronology/time is a factor, as in cause/effect
- Persuasive- the writer tries to persuade the reader to agree to a new belief or to take a course of action.
- Description - the writer uses sensory details to show the reader what is being written about.
- Tone - This is the writer’s attitude towards the topic he or she is writing about. You don’t want to throw off your readers by talking in an arrogant tone but at the same time you want that firmness that keeps your readers captivated and focused on what you’re writing about.
- Voice - This is what distinguishes you from the rest of the bunch. This is your actual writing style and therefore you must come across your obstacles to accomplish this. Having a strong and confident voice can be the thing that keeps your readers loyal or getting left by them.
Bring yourself together, get in character, be confident, follow the tips I have you so you’ll be one step closer to a successful blogger.
I’ve scouted the web and I’ve found some of the best themes for Wordpress, premium and free.
I’ll list them here in no preferential order:
CMS Themes:
Bundled with more than 50 strategically designed & coded custom static page templates, the theme enables everyone to publish a small sites in minutes saving weeks of time, maintaining top notch standards-compliant quality.
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VibrantCMS is our first theme targeted at small to large businesses. The design incorporates some recently popular usability trends (like the featured info scroller on the homepage), which should propell your business into the new online space, whilst creating a new market for your goods.
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Premium Themes:
“As a storefront for small retailers / artists etc it’s fantastic”
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Using our Ecommerce Theme and the free WordPress software, you can create and manage your own ecommerce store and sell your products.
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Mimbo Pro is a full-featured magazine/ news theme for Wordpress. Already familiar with the original Mimbo? Imagine no more manual template editing, no more Photoshop, no more image-cropping or FTP’ing. Plus a built-in contact form, image gallery, custom archive pages, breadcrumbs, ad management, Feedburner and Google Analytics options, and more. Enjoy using Wordpress like a CMS, now more than ever.
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Free Themes:
13 color combination’s, business and brochure-type ready.
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WP CODA is a theme created by modifying several already-existing code snippets and implementing them with its own design. The result is a wordpress theme that mimics the functionality of the very popular Coda website that is the object of so many developers envy. Every aspect of the Coda website was duplicated and this theme works in every major browser.
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Miscellaneous:
