Free Direct Marketing Resources

I wanted to take a moment to tell you guys about some inexpensive direct marketing resources that you can use to promote your blog. First of all, some of you may be asking “What is direct marketing?” Direct marketing attempts to send messages directly to consumers, without the use of intervening media such as flyers, business cards, mailers, etc.

Over the years I have done a lot of research on different means of affordable marketing resources. Today I am going to talk about a nice color postcard type flyer that is affordable as well as affordable business cards. How affordable you may ask? Well how about FREE? Can you get any more affordable than that?

Club Flyers.com
Club Flyers.com offers two unique essentially free marketing reources for you to promote your website off line. The first one is a very nice sized 4×6 color one sided postcard. You will place your full color ad on one side of the card, and allow Club Flyers to place their ad on the backside. They will give you 1000 flyers for only the cost of the shipping, which can ended up being between $18 - $40 USD. Here is some details on their free postcard offer:

The best way to advertise your business or event is with the premium UV Coated postcards and flyers.
Printed on 14 POINT C2S Cardstock, 4/4 (Full Color Both Sides), and UV Coated. One side has their advertisement and the other side is yours to promote your business. You must pay for shipping (no shipping on your own account). Production time is 10 to 14 business days. The shipping method you choose does not influence the production time.

Club Flyers also offers free business cards. You can get 500 business cards for once again only the price of shipping. Club Flyers will print a much smaller ad on the back of the business card. All Business Cards are printed on 14 POINT C2S Cardstock, 4/0 (Full color on your front side), and UV Coated. There is a limit of one time a month for both of these services.

Vista Print.com
Another service that I have used from time to time is Vista Print.com. Vista Print will allow you 250 color business cards on durable, premium grade card stock with a matte finish. You pay only for shipping and processing. They have 42 different design templates for you to choose from. Once again, shipping can cost between $20 - $35 dollars. It varies almost each time I make a purchase.

Any direct marketing like this can be a great resource if you have a powerful ad and ciruculate it well. Placing them on bulletin boards, in local shops and municipalites, and handing out to friends and new people you meet are all great ways to help promote your product, which is your website. A lot of these times, because you have made a personal connection with the person, these people will be return vistors to your site, as opposed to someone who randomly clicks a message board link and never returns to your site.

I hope you found this information helpful and informative. Please feel free to comment below.

Dan

Blogging: Pay Per Post Sites

Another popular traveling job is blogging. This job requires little more than a computer and Internet connection. Other than that, you can do this job almost anywhere. There are 3 main ways you can make money with your blog: 1) Pay Per Post 2) Advertising 3) Affiliate Programs

Instead of making this one long post which you will get bored of reading and give up, I am going to break this down into seperate posts. This one will cover Pay Per Post sites.

The two most notable sites that will Pay Per Post are www.today.com and www.payperpost.com. Let's take a quick look at each. By the way, if you are going to sign up to blog on www.today.com please click one of the links in this post as I am set up with their referral program.

Today.com

I stumbled accross this site and I must say it's pretty cool. Here is the way it works. You sign up on Today.com to create a blog in almost any category from Sports, to Television to Technology. Once you are approved for a blog, you will be paid 3 different ways. The way this program works is you sign up for an account and they pay you $1 per post per day, with a maximum of 1 post per day. You are set up this way for the first 30 days, and if your blog becomes popular in that time, they will continue it on a trial basis for another 30 days. There is a requirement of a minimum of 100 words per post.

The second way you are paid from today.com is per unique visits. They will end up paying you $2 per every 1000 unique visits for your blog. You make very little money via this method unless you end up with a big following.

The final way that Today.com pays you is via their referral program. With Today.com, if you refer someone to them, and they sign up for a blog, you will receive $5. There are a couple ways that you can promote this, but you have to be careful, because you can't just spam message boards and emails to people, as that will get you disqualified from the program. If you have some savy at promoting, you can end making an extra $20 to $50 dollars a month via referrals.


Pay Per Post.com

Pay Per Post.com is a pretty good site, but it's a little tricky. When you do a search for pay per post blogging on Google or any other Search Engine, this tends to come up with the top 5 or 10 spots. Basically, you sign up for an account, and submit your blog for approval. If you are approved, you will be a blogger for hire, and advertisers can hire you to write a post about any subject, related or unlrelated to your blog. You set the price for your pay per post amount. Typcially, you will be hired by an advertiser to blog positiviely about their product or service. You can make money this way, but you will have to work at it, and it will take a lot of time networking with advertisers, and increasing your way up the ranks as a blogger via their site.

I recommend reviewing both and seeing which one works for you. My later posts will include ways to make money if you already have a blog set up with a service like wordpress or some other blog site.

Blogging - Making Money With Google Adsense

OK, so this is part 2 to my travel jobs - blogging post. In the previous post, I listed 3 ways that you could make money while posting a blog, which is a great travel job. Once again, the three ways are via Pay Per Post, Advertising and Affiliate Programs. In this post, we will discuss Advertising. Specifically, Google Ads.

There are many ways to make money via advertising programs with your website other than Google, such as Widget Bucks, Adify, Feedburner, etc. but since I only have experience with Google Adsense, I will only dicuss that in this post.

In a nutshell, Google Adsense is a ad program that places strategic ads on your website based on the content of your site and or page. The idea is that Google scans your web page, and places ads based on the content of that page, via your keywords, that will hopefully attract your traffic to click through to one of the ads. There are 2 requirements in order for you to get paid via Google Adsense: Traffic and Clicks.

First of all, if your website doesn't have traffic, you are not going to get clicks. It's a general rule of thumb that people have to visit your site, before they can click an ad. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but they won't be covered in the scope of this post.

On each page, you can place as many as 3 Google Adsense ads, to maximize the amount of views on each page. I place 3 google ads on each page, which ends up being about 8 - 10 different links, or ad views. In addition, you can place 3 Link Units on each page, like the one located on the top of this post. This will then give you up to 6 total units per page/post. In order to make a couple dollars a day, you need to have between 100 - 300 ad views each day. On average about 1-2% of your traffic will click a link on your website.

That leads to the second part of the equation, which is clicks. If 1000 people visit your site in one day, and none of them click, you make $0 dollars (well, you might make like $0.10). People need to click on your ads in order for you to get paid. The best way to get people to click on your ads is through strategic placement of the ads. The best places to place your ads are on the right hand side of each page, the top of each post.

To give you an idea, in the last week (at the time of this post) I have had a little over 4500 ad views, and only 48 click throughs, which is a little over 1%, which equates to just about $2 a day on average. Now, let's look at the math of it. As I stated above, I place about 8 ads on each page. That means if 1 person views 1 post on my blog, that 8 ads are viewed. If you take my total of 4500 ad views and divide it by 8 ads per page, that means I have only had about 563 visitors in the last week. That may seem like a lot, but compared to a site such as www.today.com who gets over 10,000,000 ad views a day, it's not a lot at all. Ad remember, only 48 of those page views resulted in a click through, which means that about 1 out of every 12 people who visit my site actually click on an ad. Once again, that doesn't seem like a lot, does it?

So remember, if you take the time to develop a site (hopefully with a niche), build content, place ads, promote it, drive traffic to the site, and get clicks you may actually be able to make as much as $20 a week. This isn't enough to live off of, however if you are living in a country like Thailand, that's about 600 baht, which could be enough to pay for meals for a week. Not bad. :)

When I originally wrote this post, I was only making about $8 bucks a week, but in a matter of 1 months time, I am up to making over $30 a week. It took a lot of hard work and promotion, as well as having a lot of content on my site to allow people to click through my pages and stay there for a while.

This is not a get rich quick make money over night scheme, but if you continue to build content and gain a following with your site, eventually you can actually see dividends, and hopefully some cash. Top earners claim to make $5000 a week, but I think $100 a week is more reasonable for the average person after 6 months to a year of working at it.

Blogging - Affiliate Programs

Another way you can make money with your website is through affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are simple. You place ads/banners on your site to specific websites that you have an affiliate/referral account with. Here is an example of an affiliate banner ad:



The way it works is as follows. In this particular case, I have set up an affiliate account with Muay Thai Stuff.com by visiting their website and enrolling in the program. Typically the website will reserve the right to approve or deny you for an affiliate account, but in most cases they approve you. After that, you list your banner or ad links in your posts, or on varies places on your site or blog. You can also usually attach them in emails, as long as it is not a spam email.

IF people click on those ads, and then end up purchasing something during that visit, you will receive a percentage of that sale (typically 10%). In some cases you can earn higher percentages based on your overall sales for the month or year. This can add up to be a lot of money if you have a popular site and people are purchasing items directly from the click through.

A lot depends on the average price point of the items on the affiliate site as well. If the website has an average price point of $200, then 10% of that is $20, which is a nice amount for a one time purchase. A website like Rosetta Stone, which sells language learning CDs, has a high price point. However, if you are an affiliate for a website that sells widgets for $10 a piece, then 10% of that is only $1. It will take you a long time to make solid money through that site.

Now, you may be asking yourself, how you can find out which websites have affiliate programs? Well, I want to tell you about a site called Commission Junction. The link is here: Commission Junction. Commission Junction is a website were all the seperate affiliate program sites list there affiliate programs. In addition to the website address, they will also list certain specifics about the site, such as what they sell, what percentage you receive, and what the average price point is.

Here is an example of an affiliate link that I got through Commission Junction:



Signing up for the program is a little complicated, and the website can be somewhat confusing, but it's a great resource to find affiliate programs that will fit in perfectly with the concept of your website. By the way, that is an important point that I haven't mentioned yet. Keep your affiliates specific to the topic of your website, that way your traffic will be more likely to visit the sites. If you have a website about Flowers, it is unlikely that someone that visits your site will visit a website about Cars & Trucks. So keep that in mind.

I hope that information helps. Good luck in your blogging efforts.

Blogging Tips: Link Colors - Try Variations

When you post Google Ads on your website, you have the option of changing the colors of the ads to just about any color imaginable. The default for the Google Ads is typical Blue and Green which is pretty generic and you will see on most ads.

If you know some basic HTML you can find the Hexidecimal RGB code for almost any color, to match the theme of your website. This way the ads can tend to blend in a little more, and it will seem visually pleasing. If you are not sure of the color codes this site should help: Color Chart

You should experiement with different colors in your ads over a course in time. A month is a reasonable amount of time to make an honest evaulation. After a month, if you are not seeing the results you want, make a color change and then monitor it to see if your click % changes or not.

Recently, I went through a couple of weeks where I was seeing very high numbers in traffic, but extremely low numbers in converting that traffic to clicks. My numbers were about 1%, and in some cases less than 1%. Right after that, as my numbers started to decrease in traffic, I decide to change the color format of my ads to the Candy Cane theme that Google has as one of their defaults. After that change, I saw my percentages change from 1% to somewhere between 2-3%. That small change seemed to make my ads pop a lot more, and into more clicks. So my advice to you is to experiement with your colors to make your ads stand out.

Best of luck. If you found this ad helpful, drop me a comment, or stop back often. Thanks.

Dan

Blogging Tips: Link Swapping

If you are a blogger, who is trying to generate income from your website or blog, then you may find this post helpful. Having a lot of back links to your site will help you rank higher in search engines and will bring more traffic to your website. There are some important things that you need to know about link swapping, or back linking to your site. There are several things to consider including making sure your links are being reciprocated and checking the page rank of your link swaps. In this post I am going to cover a link swapping site, manual swapping and a page ranking checking tool.

Link Market Link Market.net When I first started my blog, I read a lot of posts and articles that discussed how important creating back links to your site is. I naturally searched for link swapping sites and came across Link Market. I had to learn the innerworkings of this site via trial and error, and here is where I will provide my experience to you.

First of all, you should know that there are 2 options with this site. Option 1 is a free membership, however you can only receive link requests from people, and can not intiate requests of your own. The problem with that is you may receive a lot of links from people that are not relavant to the theme of your blog or site. The down side to that is that people that surf their site may not be interested in visiting your site. Although, this may be the case anyway as some of the sites that send you requests have link pages which are remote or hard to find. In that instance, you will not attract additional traffic from these links.

In option 2 with Link Market, you pay $25 for a 6 month membership with their site. Some of the benefits of the membership are that you can send link requests, sort pages by Google Page Rank and get free customer support. Obviously if you are making the link requests you can target sites that have content which is more relavant for your sites theme. You can also target sites with a higher page rank, which in turn will help your page rank. To me, this option isn't worth it at this time, because I am not really generating that much income from my site, but could be a decent option down the road.

Manual Blog Swapping This is one of the best ways to get relavant back links to your site, and also one of the most time consuming. The concept is pretty easy, simply do a Web Search for blogs along the same theme as yours and pay them a visit. However if you simply visit them and send them an email right off the bat, you may not see a high percentage of successful responses. You need to dedicate a little bit of time to reading the blog, maybe posting some comments to the articles on their sites, and actually building a relationship with the fellow blog writers. You will see higher percentages of link requests that way.

While you are at their site, some of the blogs allow html links when you post a comment, so write them a comment and post your URL in there. Just make sure it is something more than "Good Post". You can also link to them first and send them an email with a link to your link page showing them. And hey, if you happen to see an ad link on their site that you find interesting, I am sure they will appreciate it if you visit that link from their site. :)


Page Rank Checking Tool PR Checking Tool.com I am not going to cover the entire scope of Page Rank and what it means in this post, however I will provide you with this helpful tool to check Page Rank of sites requesting a link to you if you use a service like Link Market. With the PR Checking Tool, you enter the URL of the site you want to check, enter the spam checking code and click the submit link. The tool will provide you with the rank of the site from either 1, 5 or 30 different data centers. A site with a Rank of 0 is the lowest, while one with a rank of 9 is among the highest. Obviously, you want more relavant links from sites with a high page rank.

I hope you found this information helpful. Please feel free to surf through some of the other articles on my site, or post a comment below.

Thanks.

Dan