Tag Archives ⇒ making money

How to write perfect web page titles

· Brandon Hann

Ok, so perfect might be too strong of a word, but the point is that most people mistake the title of a particular web page to be the same as the main title of their site. Unless ALL of your web pages have exactly the same content on them, this is not the case.

I like to think of it like this. Let’s say you’re a book publisher called Ledfrog Publishing. You want to publish three books with these subjects: ‘making money online’, ‘how to play the game of soccer’ and ‘how to make a website’. Now you want to title them, so naturally you come up with “The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”, “Playing The Game of Fútbol” and “Create a Website in 10 Minutes”. These are all great titles because people would know exactly what they’re getting into just by looking at the cover. What you wouldn’t do is name them all “Ledfrog Publishing”, right?

If that came so naturally to you, then why are you making simple mistakes when naming your webpages?! I’m not yelling at you, but I am here to help! For the record, the reason people make these mistakes is because they think of their website as being one giant book and therefore, as long as they name the site correctly, every “page” within should follow a natural order.

Well this is true if everybody who came to your site stopped off at your homepage and then navigated through it page by page from there. However, I can almost bet that most of your traffic comes from a search engine and visitors likely found it by clicking on a keyword they searched for. What this means is that they landed at your site on some random “page in your book” and unless they click on something else, they are completely unaware of your site!

So instead of your site being a giant book, think of it as being the publisher and all the books are the web pages within. This will help you think of creative (and valuable) titles for each page.

I found a great guide online for creating titles and I wanted to summarize the process here. Remember that search engine optimization is extremely important to your site and it will dictate how much traffic you get.

What is a title?

Go to Google, do a search on anything you want and when you look at the results, you’ll see the blue titles that provide the text that’s closely related to your search. Try a few searches and even switch the keywords around a bit. You’ll notice that the results drastically change based on a few changes. This is because one site or another has written a title that better matches your search query. A title rests within the HTML code and is often overlooked by a web designer.

How do I write an effective title?

Read your page before you post it online. Read it twice if you have to. Start extracting keywords that summarize that page and write them down. You can even write down the most commonly used keywords. Once you have a nice list, start creating 60 character titles that match those keywords. Don’t just list them. As a helpful tool, search for high-ranking sites that have similar content and see how they’re naming their pages. You don’t want to copy them, but get an idea of the format.

Remember that you will be ranked for the words you use in your titles. If you start adding words like: about us, contact me, home, etc. you’re going to be ranked for those words first and not for the content of your site. This is another reason not to name every page the same as your site’s title.

Why do some sites consistantly rank high?

As with all other SEO tips, no one trick works alone. You need a combination of great titles, original content, good keywords, backlinks and regular updates to keep your site ranking high. As a result, some sites hit the nail on the head for more than one SEO category and that usually explains why they’re always at the top.

There’s really not much to it once you change your thought process on what a title’s function is and how it relates to your page. The goal is to show the usefulness of the page to Google and your visitors. The last tip I can give you is take a look at your titles and ask yourself if you would click on your own site if you saw it pop up on Google.

What is Google AdSense?

· Brandon Hann

Fair warning: this is an extreme beginner’s guide to AdSense! You can skip this one if you know what it is.

Anybody and everybody who runs a website needs to sign up for Google AdSense. You’ve all seen the ads strewn across just about every site you’ve been to on the Internet, maybe you’ve clicked on them, maybe you just don’t even notice them.

It’s even possible that you’re under the impression that the people who run the site just put them there to try and offer you some pointless service or product in hopes that you’ll shell out tons of money. The reality is that these ads are not chosen by the webmaster and they do not make you pay large sums of money when you click on them.

The great thing about Google AdSense for both the webmaster and the company doing the advertising is that the ads are picked based on the content of the page you find them on. So as an example, if you’re reading a blog post about cars, the ads you’ll see are related in some way to cars. These can range from companies advertising car washes to car parts or to buying a car in general.

For visitors, this enhances the user experience in that they can view related offers, services, products and information based on the things they’re already looking into.

For webmasters, this enhances CTR (click-through ratio). What CTR simply means is how many times someone clicks on a link. Going back to our example about cars. If you posted a blog about cars and then manually inserted an ad about how to get a free trial of NetFlix, your visitors are less likely to click that ad because NetFlix has nothing to do with cars. This produces a lower CTR and that’s not a good thing when running advertisements.

Who pays for these ads?

Anybody wanting to advertise. Let’s say you sold car parts and you wanted an ad for your website to appear on search results and websites that are related to cars (and more specifically car parts). You would buy adspace from Google through another service called AdWords and you initiate a bid price for specific keywords. The bid price is how much you’re willing to pay for each time someone clicks on your ad. More on this in another post.

How much can I get paid?

This is a very large range that can be anything from $0.01 – infinity (technically) per click. The reason for this is that not every ad pays the same since not every keyword is worth as much to an advertiser. See more information on Google AdWords. So, you can paid every time someone clicks on an ad that’s displayed on your site. This money is then stored in your AdSense account until you reach a certain threshold and then Google sends you a check.

Are people really making thousands with AdSense?

Of course! However, these are people with websites that draw in many thousands of visitors. To give you an idea, take a sample CTR rate of 4%. This is a low rate, but for most sites, it’s considered normal. Applying some simple math assuming your site has 1000 unique visitors a month and you get about 40 click-throughs. If each click was worth $0.05, you just made $2.00! Of course, this number highly changes drastically based on how many clicks actually got counted, how much each ad cost, etc, etc. There are also many days when you don’t get any clicks. The most important thing to have on your site is traffic! Some websites have even written complete ebooks based on ways to increase you AdSense earnings. I read one in particular that helped me triple my returns in a matter of weeks.

How do I get started?

Simply go to Google and signup! It’s completely free to use AdSense and it does not cost anything to run it, but you do need a website to place your ads. Beyond that, you need content. Otherwise the ads won’t even show.

Is there anything else I should know?

AdSense revenue can now be earned through RSS feeds, search results, parked domains and mobile content. You can learn more about each of these when you sign up. In further guides on my site, I will explore these areas of interest.

Amazon.com Affiliate Program

· Brandon Hann

Give your visitors full access to all of Amazon.com while making commissions from every sale you generate! Everyone knows and loves Amazon and you may have in fact purchased from them before, so it’s safe to say that it’s a trusted brand. However, unlike most affiliate programs where your visitor has to click on your ad, visit the website in question and make a specific purchase, Amazon Associates network simply passes on a tracking cookie to your visitor when they click on your Amazon link.

What this does is make any and every purchase they make with that cookie get credited to you! Commission payouts start at 4% and can go to 6% (after you successfully convert 6 sales). This may not seem like much when someone is buying a $10 cd, but I can remember on more than one occasion when a user clicked on one of my links and ended up buying something completely different (and more expensive)!

Using the program is super easy. Once you log in, you can view all of your stats including dollars earned, current commission rate, number of clicks, API access, Amazon store creation and most importantly, the link builders. Here are some of the various ways you can create links and product ads for your site:

Better yet, if you have a blog system such as WordPress, you can download plugins that allow you to plug Amazon links right into your site based on content. Think of Google AdSense, but with Amazon products! Plus, if you have multiple sites that you want to run separate reports on, you can simply create new tracking ids (up to 100) and they all lead to your account. This way, you can track the performance of each site independently to see how you can maximize your exposure.

Here’s a bit of information about aStore. You are currently allowed to create up to 100 aStores in your account and what this does is allows you to create niche stores based on your desired content. For example, if you had the domain name, computerparts.com, you could create an aStore full of nothing but computer parts and accessories that Amazon sells! Of course, this is probably tens of thousands of items, so rather than add each item one by one, you’re able to add them by category. You can also add search capabilities. When someone goes to buy something, they click through to the Amazon site and make their purchase. You’re essentially creating a landing page related to your specific content.

Within about 5 minutes, I was able to create a sample store for you to see. This is a sample, but it’s still a fully functional store. You can purchase anything you want from this aStore!

You also get a 15% commission rate and link building tools for all products listed at Endless.com–Amazon’s new online shoe store! Everything is managed under your one account!!

There’s no reason not to sign up with Amazon. It’s free and very easy to use. Join today and start promoting more products than you can get anywhere else!

Day 1 – Signed up for first affiliate program

· Brandon Hann

March 2nd, 2010

This is technically not day 1 for the blog, but this is the first day that I started my project and it was a big day! I think at one point, I had about 15 tabs opened in Chrome!!

I want to start by saying of all the sites I’ve looked at in regards to free information to making money online, JohnChow.com seems to be the most honest. This is not to say that others are crooks, but John Chow appears to be in this industry for the freedom of it and not just the money plus he’s willing to help out anyone who needs it.

I’ll start listing the other sites that have been helping me out in this as soon as I get my links directory up. As I get further into this project, these daily reports will no doubt get more detailed, so stay tuned and follow me on Twitter or Facebook and the RSS feeds.

What I did today

I signed up for AzoogleAds today and expect my application to be approved (or not) within a couple of days. From what I gather, they seem to be the best affiliate network to start with. Previously, people were touting their referral payout system as being great, but I learned today that they have changed their payout from being a lifetime system to being only valid for 6 months.

I also made minor changes to the site including two subscribe links in the top right to allow visitors a choice between viewing RSS feeds in a reader or getting them by email. I then worked on some various SEO techniques on some of the older posts I had made.

The last thing I did today was setup an email newsletter account with Aweber. Newsletters is not all they do. This service is a monthly charge of $19.99 for the basic service, which is all I needed to begin with. Check out their website to see more details on what this service done, but basically it allows visitors to sign up on the site so you can send them newsletters, updates, free downloads, etc–email marketing.

Although I haven’t edited it completely, I did add a basic form on the sidebar for users to sign up for the newsletter. I plan to move this form up and make it fit in better.

That’s it for now.