The purpose of this post is twofold in terms of blogging.  First I wanted to introduce to you two plugins you might not have ever seen.  Secondly I wanted to talk about professionalism for designers.

Plugin One is an affiliate publishers best friend.  Adrotate is every bit as good as Max Blog Press’s Ninja Affiliate.  Not only will the last several versions of this plugin provide you with quick affiliate masking slash redirect through your own site, it keeps track of your banner impressions and click throughs.  Version 2.4 even has a feature to block banners when they reach a certain number of impressions or clicks. Unlike Ninja Affiliate version 2.3.1 of AdRotate works quite well in WorPress Mu.  There are things to be aware of though.  If you use the banner wizard you can not later make the link an auto redirect link, you will have to stop rotating the banner and make a new entry.  Secondly in version 2.4 he automatically sticks a link back to his site in your meta information links, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop this short of editing the code that I can see which is in direct violation of wordpress.org rules for plugins.

The second plugin I wanted to mention this week is Stumble for WordPress.  This is basically your very own blog version of Stumbleupon.  You can edit the settings to decide what percentage of stumbles are for pages on your site and which are for network wide.  I use this on most of my blogs and find different ratios better suit my purposes on different blogs.  I recommend using the defaulkt setting as traffic will start coming in from other sites the more that goes out from your site.  This is a fine plugin that will really help you build exposure from other sites.  I highly recommend it.  I also recommend that you leave the optional link back to the plugin site intact.  People who provide a great product deserve some credit.

Now on to the second part of this post, professionalism.  i wok up this morning with a ping from a website I didn’t reconize, Making The Web.  This is the Stumble for Wordpress designer’s site.  I was quite pleased that my site, Brad’s Tiny World had served up more network stumbles by a large margin over the next nearest site.  Brendon didn’t go out of his way to get backlinks or praise from me, he simply made a post and said thanks, good work, here are the leaders.  He makes fine plugins and doesn’t try and take over your blog with links and garbage proclaiming how great he is.  This is professionalism and not what you get from Arnan who makes AdRotate.

Arnan has a long history of not only being unprofessional when you question the quality of his plugins and showing some incompetence as a designer. Truth be told he is quite an asshole who seems to think if you don’t love his plugins or say anything bad about them, it is some sort of attack on him personally.  By extension if you read some of his rambling not directly related to his plugins but on the same site you will find he he also takes any lack of enthusiasm for Apple products as personal disrespect towards him as well.  I would like to say the behavior is typical of all mac fanatics, but he suffers from some additional megalomania, he also seems like the type who would preorder a Mac Book Wheel or voted for Scott MacIntyre on American Idol had he been listed as an iScott.

BTW if you choose to use AdRotate make sure you use the call on website for theme insertion.  If you use the call in the readme file which has been told is wrong repeatedly nothing will show up.  Use <?php echo adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> not <?php adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> which is what the readme file still says several releases after it quit working.  Now that he has been called out let’s see how long it takes hime to fix it.

There comes a time in every bloggers career they have to make a choice about monetizing their blogs. Monetizing isn’t the right thing for every blogger, surprisingly enough. There are plenty of vanity bloggers or those who blog to support a separate business venture. You can rest assured that when I finally get my novel in print there will be absolutely no ads other than products on the corresponding site/blog.

Just as not every blog is meant for monetizing, not every blog should be monetized in the same way.  Most people recommend starting off with adsense, which for sure is (was) the easiest program to get into.  As I understand it from a great many noobs plenty of sites are getting rejected these days and many more are getting their accounts cut within the first couple of days of going active with Google’s normal no explanation given email.  If this has happened to you, don’t get worried over it since it happens to a lot of bloggers with no rhyme or reason.  Also don’t get bent out of shape over it since there are alternatives to Adsense, which usually work a lot better for most bloggers.

The one thing most bloggers have a hard time with when it comes to adsense is actually getting enough traffic to make any sort of money.  With the maximum allowed banner load you need something in the order of about 1000 page views a day on a low pagerank site to pay out every month.  When you covert this to the traffic the average blogger gets you might get paid once a year by google.  This is the sort of thing that causes most bloggers to give up.  Fear not though, once you discover if adsense is right for your site, and I encourage everyone to try it, you an move on to bigger and better things.

The program i want to tell you about today is one I have been using for about six weeks, Amped Media.  Unlike Adsense. Amped Media is an affiliate marketing program letting you pick and choose whcih ads you want to display based on your blog’s niche.  They have a wide range of programs and once you are accepted into the program you can always shoot a message to your affiliate manager to help you find the right ads.  In affiliate marketing, an Affiliate Manager’s pay is usually based in part on your performance so a good manager will be willing to do whatever it takes to find you ads that make money.

There are a couple of ways to make money with an affiliate program, email, banners, social media and referrals.  It is the referral income which makes most of the big name bloggers, the bulk of their income in truth, and one you shouldn’t necessarily discount from your own repertoire either.  Not only do you have referral income, something that you will never get from Adsense, most affiliate programs pay out at between $25 and $50 monthly.  I know what you are thinking, $25, I still only make a $0.02 a day with adsense.  The difference between adsense and affiliate programs comes back to you choosing your own ads based on the sort of traffic you get.  Take these three ads for example:

This ad for Cool Aid is something you might see on adsense. If you had it on your site and someone clicked on it, you might get a penny or two from adsense no matter what the person did with the page on the other end. As an affiliate ad you aren’t getting paid unless some action is take after the click.  This might seem a bit unfair since you are displaying the ad and getting nothing for doing so.  That assumption is however completely wrong.  The chances are if someone sees the ad and clicks on it they want what is being offered.  If you smartly picked ads readers are likely to click on, then you are going to make a lot more money.  This particular ad takes you to a form and they want you to fill it out, in my experience about 1 in 4 people will fill out a short form on the first page of an ad click.  At most you are going to $0.20 from adsense and more like half that with this sort of ad getting 4 clicks.  With an affiliate like Amped Media it pays out more than a buck and a quarter for every form fill out.  At that rate it is also on the low end of payouts.  If you do the math and I think you will figure it out which is more profitable.

This isn’t the only type of offer available either there are also offer that are sales based and incentive offers.  I will go more into those types of offers in the next affiliate program I review for you.  Stay tuned for next weeks review, MonetizeIt.

This is not only Brad The BlogBoy’s one year aniversary this is the first day of our relaunch and I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed with comments and ideas over the last year.  I really wanted to take the time to tell you about what to expect over the next year.

1. I will promote one new theme a week here.  With any luck, I will be able to create one new theme a week to also hand out.
2. I want to do some in depth plugin analysis as well.  With any luck I will be able to get a few of the popular plugin authors, especially those I use a great deal to pimp their own wares to you.
3. Last but not least you are going to see a lot more of me here and over at Blogging For Noobs.

Attracting Traffic with Banner Ads
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nowshade_Kabir]Nowshade Kabir

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business. Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years, we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era, banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of online marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In search of good feature and content filled websites visitors were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are totally different! Over using of banners on the web pages forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more. Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean the banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison
to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner
advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are
used today, either for creating brand recognition or for
bringing in more traffic to the website and consequently
generating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place
banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted
on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether
they click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards
and TV advertisements – it helps you building consciousness
to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among
members of American Online who saw an ad of a product
as a banner on the website and on TV commercial. The
result indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembers
the static banners and 41 percent remembers the TV
commercial at the time of the poll conducted a few days
later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison
to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60
percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in
order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your
online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a
prolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality traffic
for your website if you manage your banner ad campaign
wisely. If your main purpose of the campaign is to generate
more sales by attracting traffic – which is any way should
be the main goal of any e-commerce site – you have to select
sites to post banners where you target audience frequently
visit. Pay per click search engines like Overture or Google
Adwords are good options for your textual banner ads. Since
the visitors are already looking for a website like yours
by searching for the keyword that you have selected to
place your ad, you get highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign.
You have to learn the program works best for you by trial
and error. The principal idea behind any advertisement is
to grab viewers’ attention, ignite their curiosity and
motivate them to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better result
from your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is so
limited in a banner – same like newspaper headlines – you
have to come up with something that really gets viewer’s
attention. Since you have to do it in one or two sentences,
try using something funny, outrageous but intriguing.
You can also use pictures, which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tell
them what to do such as “Click here” or “Go to the website”.

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry one
single message. By including several offers in one ad,
chances are you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner will
fail to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colors
and texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignore
this type of banners. Animated banners should have less than
four frames.

6. Don’t use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner file
size is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how your
banners will look with different browsers. Verify that the
banner link URL is correct and linked to the right page on
your website. Whenever, you make changes to your website,
make sure to double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a text
has 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.
So use text banners to increase efficiency of your banner
ad program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for many
websites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is no
doubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

By Jason Hulott

With more and more experts and search engine enthusiasts claiming the right way and the wrong way to handle link swapping, link exchanging or reciprocal linking!

You can tell something is important when there is more than one name for it! GRIN!

There are also two schools of thought on the reasons link swapping.

The first reason for link swapping has always been to carry favour with Search engine rankings. Have a good site with lots of links and this is seen as a good thing and therefore Search Engines will rank you higher.

Sadly, like all things in life, this system can be abused and taken to the extreme. Sites are buying in hundreds if not thousands of links trying to “boost” their ranking artificially. This is fine in the short term but we are starting to see a fundamental shift in Search Engine algorithms.

My last article of link swapping , If Content is King, then surely relevance is Queen! explains my personal view of relevant linking which is still follow.

There is now a second and perhaps more disturbing reason for swapping links.

To build a useful link resource or directory for your visitors.

With working with similar themed sites, swap links to build a directory service which can share and drive traffic to sites within it. Some have even claimed this can drive more traffic that a Search engine ranking.

So how do I create this vision of loveliness.

Simple, build an on topic directory of your major site content.

There are a couple of great tools you can use to automate this process.

http://www.j2-squared.com/linking-101.htm

http://www.j2-squared.com/power-linking.htm

These tools will add new sections, manage your directory structure, and allow you to add links or even allow others to add their own links which you just approve.

This can all be run from a web browser so you can be swapping links sat on the beach or in fact from anywhere.

They are so simple to use you could get family to help out too! GRIN!

In terms of places to find links try:

www.linkpartners.com

as a good start point.

Remember, Search Engines change their algorithms all the time and you could fall out of favour at any time.

Your visitors are also getting more sophisticated and demanding at the same time. Give the visitor what they want first and let the search engine sort the rest out!

Good Luck!

By Dennis Francis

Many people set up websites and hold their breath for the thunderous traffic to reach them. After a few weeks of

loneliness, they contact their web designer to find out why no one has visited them. The usual answer is that it takes a while for the search engines to find you and index your pages.

What you never seem to hear is that the web designers are correct and wrong at the same time. The biggest mistake made by people who want to promote their business on the web is to do the promoting last.

If you are going to build a website that people are interested in, start by identifying your audience. a great way to do this is to blog. Setting up a blog takes a fraction of the time it takes to build a website and you can begin adding content immediately.

Blogging is a great free website promotion tool but it’s also a great way to test a market. You can ensure your efforts will not be wasted if you test your content and business model with a blog first.

Let’s say you had a plan for an online flea clothing business. You figure that pet owners who raise fleas will want to give them the best of everything. As a flea owner yourself, you know how happy your fleas are when they are warm and cozy.

Rather than start an online store, first get connected to the market. Create your blog, promote it and work your way up the search engines using article marketing. This will allow you to build readership and provide useful content for your website when you are finished.

If you can build traffic to your blog in a month, you know that you have a viable market. Create a few videos to promote the blog and offer to sign up subscribers to an email list. You can give them exclusive information on flea clothing and flea care before your website is finished.

If you take the effort to build your audience and build your online credibility, you will find it very easy to build traffic to your site once it is completed. You find it easier to increase website traffic and build targeted traffic to your

website once you are able to use blogging as a point man for your web project.

Internet traffic is not easy if you make it the last thing you do in site construction. You will need some measure of website optimization and promotion after you complete your site, but you will find it a whole lot easier if you establish a few blogs first to quickly establish your keyword SEO strategy.

This free website promotion strategy can make the difference between a costly failure and online success.

Let the total in your bank account spur you on to greater enthusiasm. Free web traffic is not really free; it can be costly if not executed consistently

By Sharif Aly

Technology makes our presence lively. So maintaining an online identity is a necessary thing in this biz-world. In this scenario, where everything has been made online, it’s essential for you to make the readers hooked up on your site. There are millions of pages that are available online and your site has to stand out from the rest. So what makes your site more unique? Is it your design; or the content which make your site attractive? Absolutely not! Of course your design should match with your prose. But beyond these aspects, there is a term called Traffic. So, how can it be done? Its quiet a meticulous thing that has to be done with at most care. To traffic a site is something tricky. This can be done in many ways. Every site owners follow their unique ways to traffic their site.

The most general way which is followed by many users is Site Engine optimization. Popularly termed as “SEO optimization”. Though it’s a common term, yet it can be done in numerous ways. Now a days, lot of soft wares are available in the market which can make this work done in minutes with just a few clicks.

We can summarize the methods which are adopted widely by the users around the world.

In order to make your site listed in popular Search Engines, you have to submit your site in the respective search engine portals (like Google, Yahoo, and MSN). This is a simple thing. But your job doesn’t end here. Its just a formal procedure. In fact it’s a laborious process and it takes lot of time for your site to get listed in top search engines. This way is called as Organic traffic.

The most widely used method is by introducing attractive advertisements in your site.

It can be done by placing an attracting add related to your web contents. There are lots of scripts available in market to enable this option. So it’s all about purchasing the apt one and placing in the right place in your site. In fact, this is the most efficient way to earn trough CPC (Cost per Click) concept.

You can customize Pop-up Ads in your site which will make the visitors more interested to click those, if it is something they are looking for.

Another way is to place Search engine bar in your site. This will avoid the chance of the users to switch over to a new window for search option. This can be customized with a script, so that your contents will be given more priority and gets a better page rank when the user search from the search box placed in your site. This will fetch you further traffic to your site.

Placing recent updates, and interesting news articles will make more traffic. There are numerous sites available which are providing news articles free of cost. So it’s easy for the users to customize the script in their site from the article providers.

Making more In-bound and On-bound linking mechanism fetch you a great way to make traffic.

We can make use of popular social networking portal like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut or Linked In, to familiarize your site. Also there are various “Ad pasting sites” which are available for this purpose. We can make use of these sites too. And make sure that, too much of traffic will lead to complications. As some Pop-up ads will annoy some users. So its is necessary to use a genuine method to traffic your site. Lot of reliable Soft wares is available in the market today. So get a genuine one and enjoy he maximum benefit or else go for organic traffic procedures.

By Mark A. Abrahams

In order to continuously stay on top of traffic building to your site, your website needs to be kept shiny and fresh, just like a new car.

Imagine sitting in a traffic jam, you just spent the entire day at work. You can’t wait to go home and find whatever the pleasure is that’s awaiting you. You look over and you see your dream car. For everyone it’s different, it’s that black, sexy sports car, that hugs the curves of the road. Or it might be that brand new gray pickup truck, that can tackle anything you put before it, mountains, sand-dunes, heaps of mud. Whatever it is it catches your attention and you’re hooked.

You want that same response when the “traffic jam” visitors, your desired web based traffic, comes to your site. They might be bored and doing a web search while waiting at a coffee shop, or they could have a received an e-mail from a friend telling them to look at your site. While wishing they were at home, waiting for their happiness after a long day, now, they’re focused and hooked on your site.

You drew them in through your well designed website, and you kept them looking through it as they’re engaged in reading your interesting articles. Perhaps you even introduced them to something they had not known they wanted, or needed, but they do now, because you know how to market. You keep them interested after they signed up for your promotional newsletter, and you make them keep wanting more, by not bombarding them everyday with offers.

They’re hooked on your site, because there was something about becoming a part of your site’s traffic that reminded them of that fine car that always keeps their attention.

By David A Robinson

I’ve just had a meeting with a potential client regarding their website. They launched into a list of things they wanted including, videos, animations, 360 degree images etc. What they hadn’t thought about was the whole purpose of the site. Who is was for, what it was for, who the stakeholders were and what success looks like.

Building a website is a time consuming and costly exercise. There are many component parts to a website, the look and feel being only one of them. The problem is many people only focus on the pretty pictures and Flash animations, only stopping to think about SEO once the site’s live. This is a recipe for disaster.

SEO starts before a single line of HTML is written or a single pixel has been added to an Illustrator canvas. SEO can be used to help you figure out some of the BIG questions you should be asking when developing a website.

SEO will help you better understand your market, SEO will ensure you understand what your potential market is searching for, SEO will help you understand the competition you are up against. In extreme cases SEO may even help you decide if your proposed enterprise is worth pursuing at all!

Leaving SEO until after your website is live is a big mistake and one that will ultimately cost you dearly. You will be left scrambling around desperately wondering why your site isn’t attracting customers and why Google and the other search engines are not listing your site when people search for what you offer.

Get SEO sorted from the get go and reap the benefits.

David A Robinson – Red Evolution (Aberdeen) Ltd

Specialist advice on all aspects of SEO

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_A_Robinson
http://EzineArticles.com/?SEO-Shouldnt-Be-a-Retro-Fit-Add-On,-Its-Way-More-Important-Than-That!&id=1973114

By Tarun Gupta

SEO Content Writing is quite an integral part of web designing and development. However, unfortunately, this concept is valued by only a limited number of design companies and thereby, countless SEO firms undertaking the task of website maintenance and creation remain deprived of experienced, efficient content writers staff. It is important for all webmasters to realize that the contents presented on the site must have the power of captivating visitor’s interest and offering them useful information.

While searching something, visitors have a tendency to go through various sites, so that they can pick up the best from the lot. And when they are visiting a myriad of websites, it is natural to expect that they would not give much time to any dull site. Moreover, they often do not feel the need of reading full content, and jump out of the sites after reading tag lines. Hence, we can say that tag lines are considerably important for the site and thus, should be created with lot of concentration as they tell the visitor what is the key topic of the web pages. For this reason only, webmasters should keep in mind-the fact that, in all the pages, the title and Meta tags should be distinctive to achieve performance. Ensure to highlight important words with the help of CSS and define terms using h1, h2 and h3 tags on the page. All your tags should austerely be topic related and the hierarchy should be defined by you, keeping the relevant importance of your web page and the search term targeted.

On the other hand, keywords should be added logically along with the insertion of semantic terms to explain your topic or concept in an appropriate manner. Nowadays, the key word density is not much of a big deal but if you can augment the keyword density naturally to five to six percent to be genuine with search engines ranking tricks. While talking about some abstract requirements, make sure that each of your web pages comes up on the screen with something new, fresh and useful offer for the visitors. The URL and Title should describe the topic clearly. In most of the cases, URL does not have topic related keywords. Hence here, webmasters make efforts to rename the resource URLs and utilize redirect to direct the old URL to new URL provided the substantial back links point to it.

Moreover, try to design your content in attractive manner with smart use of well defined blocks and set the pattern for all web pages as the same. You may also provide your customers with additional information about the product and service concerning its technology, market position etc. In addition to all these techniques, you can also try adding one or two out going links to site that offer functional added information on terms which are not elaborated on your web pages. And if all this is done in a balanced state, it will surely boost up the value and uniqueness of your website content reasonably efficiently.

In order to gain more information on the same subject, interested readers can browse through the trusted source of seocontentwriters.

SEO content Writers (SCW) is a division of BrainPulse Technologies (India), a leading SEO company is equipped to deliver various types of Content Writing based solutions.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tarun_Gupta
http://EzineArticles.com/?Basic-Requirements-of-SEO-Content-Writing&id=1981605