Big Foot Web Marketing

The term is bit vulgar – I apologize. This is a term I use when I take a very popular post on a blog and completely pimp it out to squeeze every once of money and value out of it.

There may be better or more effective ways to do it but this is how my mind works and how I get from point A to depositing a cheque in the bank.

To Pimp Out Your Blog Posts

You MUST ave a popular blog with good, solid traffic and lots of quality content. If your blog is new or you don’t have many posts or readers then you will piss people off. You are taking a popular post and totally prostituting it so you better have some quality stuff surrounding it if you want to maintain credibility.
If your blog is new and you dont have a lot of good content- stop reading now and come back in a few months,

Figure out What ARE your most Popular Posts.

These change day to day depending on news and season. I generally just use something like Daily Top 10 plugin for wordpress You can also see what’s going on using Mybloglog or any analytics program. You basically want posts with lots of traffic. This method will also work very well on “Best Blah Blah Lists”, for example “Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” I may set this up as a test on the site a report back on result despite it not being a popular post (yet).

What Kids of Posts Work Well for Monetizing:

-Product posts work very well. This is why “top” or “best” lists work very well. I may have a popular post on how to stop page rank bleeding but will not get me a great return on any products. This is why if you are going to create “make money blogging” type site forget about the making any money part .
Take a look at your existing popular posts and see if there is a way to include products on the post- software? electronic something? tool? equipment? Beef up the post if you can with mentions of tools or utilities you use. Don’t be obvious about it- only add the info if it enhances the post.

Pimp Out Your Post

Throw every things you got at it -in an intelligent way.

1. Google Adsense – The Best Ad Size to Use for Highest CTR

What is the best Google ad size to use?
The BEST ad to use for Google Adsense HANDS DOWN no questions asked when you want a high click though rate is the 336×280 square. It is in your face but it does work. I wold not wrap your text if you to maximize. The first thing your reader should see when then land on your page is that ad- above the fold and preferably in the middle of the page.

2. Amazon Widgets

– I use a slideshow. I use the biggest size that will fit on my blog. I select 5-16 related products. Using my ” Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” scenario I would have in my slideshow all the albums listed and then some.
Place this bedside or under your large Adsense rectangle. Don’t embed it in your post. You want these ads above or as close to above the fold as possible.
Amazon recently added a widget for users to to listen to mp3’s- for this kind of post I would ad at the end of post and use some sort of call to action that will get them to listen, Like-” this is my favourite cut off the album- listen to it and tell me what you think” etc.
For the truly aggressive you could offer a contest or promotion and have readers write a review, or a post on their blog about a favorite memory that one of song invokes.

Add product images. If a long-ish post add some product images. Breaking up paragraphs create visual interest. Do NOT go too big and by all means embed and wrap into post text.

Text Affilate Links- Commission Junction, Amazon, etc.

Make sure you link your products to affiliates . I prefer Amazon for lots of reasons. I do a bit with Commission Junction for the really niche products . In a text link embedded in a post I rarely leave the anchor text untouched. I will edit to make it sound more natural and I almost always add nofollow tags.

You can also try linking to presell pages. Link to other posts on your site that review or describe the product in more detail and that pages links to affiliate.

Use Your Posts Popularity to Boosts Other Pages

Use your popular posts to encourage visitors to visit other related post that might be buried. A plugin like Related Posts is limited. With the ‘Best Christmas Jazz list” you could also mention in post that you have a list of “Best Fathers Day Gifts for Audiphiles” or whatever the season dictates.

Popular posts also are a good way to get readers to subscribe to your feed and newsletter- Make sure you are using call to action and not mamby pamby wording.

What NOT to Do to your Popular Posts

Don’t sacrifice integrity of your blog for some quick and easy money on a few pages. I do this to 10-20 pages on a blog where I have all ready established myself to my readers. My blogs are not littered with affiliate ads in sidebar and header. I will say this again you will PISS OFF readers if you do this to all your pages and lose all credibility .

Do not over sell a product or give too much information- This is directly opposite to the idea of linking to a pre-sell page where you go into greater detail about book/product/service. It is a bit fo trial and error.
If I use a popular post to links to pre-sell page then the person who follow the link is all ready pretty intersted and the pre-selll page can tip them over to buy the item. Sometimes.

Mentioning product in a post without giving away too much information may encourage reader to click on the affiliate link and a cookie is dropped and you will get cut of whatever they buy within a time period i.e Amazon is 24 hours and other affiliates can be as long as 30 days. There is no right answer on which is best- it is situational and you will have to test.
I will say during Christmas season getting a reader to click on affiliate link when buying trends are high is more effective then trying to “sell” one specific product.

You can really maximize a popular blog post and drive up its revenue by being aggressive with Google ads and affiliate links. It takes careful balance not to turn off your reader and should be handled with care.

If you want ideas for specific site then feel free to post site info in comments section.

Tags: Blog For Money, Google Adsense, Internet Marketing and Blogs by Lisa Stewart
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On Problogger guest blogger, Jeff from BuzzMyBlog- My Adventure in Internet Marketing writes an article that is funny, informative and heartbreaking at the same time. It is a that will appeals to both new and seasoned bloggers alike. Understanding the Blog Lifecycle To Prevent Common Downfalls documents the life cycle- or ups and down of a blog as it goes through its growing pains. he chronicle some of the typical pitfalls that most bloggers make when they dive into blogging in a serious way.

I particularly enjoyed this line:

To prove to the world that they have seen the light, they vow to focus on quality content and avoid time consuming gimmicks. Traffic decreases further.

Traffic decreases further. How many times I have written a 100+ masterpiece convinced it will turn the blogosphere on its head… and then a week later see that 3 people saw it :-).
Oh the PAIN!

Jeff has some good, solid advice, You can easlily see he has been at the game for a while. He serves up the usual advice- content is king, have a blog schedule, etc however his suggestions also have some meat on them and his article is unusually well written and comes with lots of snazzy graphs. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Jeff has some great ideas for linkbait and increasing loyal readership- including his own Weekly Buzz promotion, where you can get a Free Ad Spot on BuzzMyBlog.com.

You can read more from him on his own blog and I encourage you
BuzzMyBlog and follow him on Twitter
. Remember its not who follows you- but who you follow!

Tags: Blog For Money by Lisa Stewart
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Using Predictive Analytics For Long Tail Search

If you are working at building your blog traffic you have to have a solid understanding of how people are finding you. You can use that information to develop content, generate more traffic and make more money. There are many tools that try and take the pain out of analytics for you. One tool is HitTail which not only reports your top search terms goes one step further and predicts what terms people will use to find you.

Analytics are fantastic for coming up with ideas. When I am stuck for blog post idea and realize then playing Peggle endlessly is just avoidance I will often do is turn to my analytics. When you look at your stats using analytics program like like Google Analytics, webstats or MyBlogLog ( I use Clicktracks ) you will start to see patterns. You can use those patterns build a better site.

If you are blogging for money then you will find that a handful of your posts make you the most money. With a closer look at your revenue you find that while some post make you a lot of money they do not make up ALL of your income stream.
It is also true when you look at your stats that you may have a handful of keywords that are always at the top. These are your prime keywords- you rank well in search engines and you may even think they are the bread and butter of your site. You could be wrong.

Look at your earnings. If you have you are an Adsense publisher you probably have a page or post or blog that does really really well. The shining star of your blog revenue. I suspect the amount still only accounts for less than half of your total blog income. I have a blog that outpaces all my other sites- however my other blogs combined still make more money than that one blog.
The same will be true with your keywords. You will have terms that bring about 20% of your traffic. You may focus a lot of time and energy on those terms. If you run an AdWords campaign you may be dumping all your money into those terms – however- its the other 80 percent you should be looking at. You will get more traffic for less effort and/or less money.
Do not bend over backwards chasing after the hard keywords- go after the ones that are easy. If you write blog posts using keywords that are based on user behavior and current content and you may get more traffic and make more money.

I have been using HitTail from Connors Communications for about a year on all my blogs. They have both a free version and a pro version. For most users the free version is more than adequate. You get search results for your site in real time and find out which keywords people use to find your website. Based on the keywords people are using right now to find your site- it will suggest what other keywords you could be using. I found this to be extremely useful.

How To Use HitTail

You need to put a script in your pages. You can add manually in your body tags or use plugin to do it for you.
When you login you can look at multiple blogs and various windows. At a glance I can see my top performing keywords in graph form. It will tell you what percentage of searches come from your top 10 keywords and what come from long tail search. All of my blogs have a split of about 20/80. Interestingly my worst blog is 10/90 split and my best is a 25/75.

It will also show you search hits from major search engines and what keywords strings were used and most valuable information for me has been suggestions which give suggested keywords based on current search results. Admittedly some of the string are odd , however often there is a little gem of an idea or a combination that works very well.

The best ideas for your blog posts I believe still come from instinct- watching news or seeing trends and writing about what you know or what your are working on. The best advice I ever heard about writing a blog came from Greg Jarboe- he talked about a blog in terms of a news source. That you need to brand yourself as an expert in your field and become the “news hub” for that niche. Wonderful advice. Using your expertise along with stat tools can be a powerful combination.

Writing for search engines is a a slippery slope and getting tangled in keywords can cause more problems than it solves. NOT looking at your keywords and seeing what keywords are performing is a huge mistake. You must use the information you have stored in your logs to build your traffic and to make your blog more profitable.

Tags: Blog For Money, Blogs and Blogging, Internet Marketing and Blogs, Tuesday's Tool by Lisa Stewart
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Want to pick up some great blogging tips quickly? Shoemney is runnng a series on his blog. The most recent post in the make money blogging series latest is Q&A Round 5 – The Answers

He accepts 50 questions from site visitors and locks the thread.. then he answers them . Some terrific info and solutions to problems you may not know you have. I am totally loving this series. I hope he keeps it up. A little gem of an idea from marketing great.e.g.

One of my sites (http://WinScrabble.com) has proven difficult for me to promote through my normal methods.

It’s a site to help people cheat at Scrabble, by taking their letters and generating valid words for them. Once I hook a user, they tend to convert to long-term, direct traffic easily, but the problem is there is a very strong incentive for them to not share the site with their friends. So, word of mouth is next to nil.

Can you think of any way that I could motivate people to share that site with others? Going with 100% CPC advertising has felt like an uphill battle, so far.

ShoeMoney: Well aslong as you can grow and make a profit then pour on the CPC. Eventually your site will not just be the hush hush it will be the bare minimum if people want to compete.

Tags: Blog For Money by Lisa Stewart
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