Monetize those wasted searches!
As you start building up in the SERPs (search Engine Result pages) you often start to notice that a large number of the people entering your site are not looking for what you have to sell. Sad to say but with most sites over 90% of the people leave without having bought product from the site. Seems a waste of all your hard earned traffic building!
This is one reason why most webmasters would benefit from adding a few affiliate products to their sites. You have the visitor, don’t let them leave empty handed just because what you have to sell isn’t what they thought they would find. There are thousands of products out there that might be a great compliment to what you have to offer. Finding the right products and learning how to add them to your site without distracting your visitors from your primary product can be difficult.
The Affiliate Marketing Guide (http://www.affiliateprograms.com/) is one site that can help you find the right product to your site with its Affiliate Marketing Directory, as well as help incorporate the product seamlessly into your site.
Some of the major topics discussed are:
- Choosing an Affiliate Product, What to look for.
- How to get the most out of the product by creating Pre-sell pages
- How to promote the product.
One of the best features of this site is the directory of Affiliate Programs listed by category. This allows you to easily find products that will sell well on your website.
If you haven’t considered expanding the sale potential of your website with a few well placed affiliate products, you may be wasting your traffic and bottom link loosing potential sales and profit.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
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Tips For Getting Image Search Traffic
I’ve been lucky enough to work on a big website, with its own team dedicated to talking to the search engines directly to make the most of our SERPs. They once in a while give us a talk on what we underlings need to be doing.
Unfortunately, they’ve not given us a talk for a few years now – so a lot of the stuff has changed in the meantime (the importance of meta data being a prime one). However, one thing they discussed which can build traffic and is still underestimated by many webmasters is the importance of the image search.
I have a lot of photography on my sites, and for the past few years I’ve been following some simple rules for making my images nice and tasty for the image search spiders. It’s not rocket science, but I still see lots of webmasters neglect it.
Here it is: Name your image files with an apt and descriptive name and alt tag it the same. Make it relevant to the surrounding text and biff, that’s it. If you can throw in some relevant directory names as well, you’re laughing.
For example:
/images/wales/welsh-assembly-building-cardiff.jpg
Alt: The Welsh Assembly Building in Cardiff Bay, Wales./images/movies/johnny-depp-smoking-cigarette.jpg
Alt: Johnny Depp smoking a cigarette on the set of his latest movie.
Some of you will be scratching your head and saying, but that’s obvious. Well, its not to many people. I see lots of people naming their images like ‘man.jpg’ or ‘building.jpg’ – or worse still, something really vague like ‘malef05.jpg’ or leaving digital camera images – ‘DCFS004.jpg’ etc. For a little thought you can do your site a favour and get your images up there in the image SERPs. I have some sites that get major proportions of traffic from the image searches.
What’s more, it can be a way in certain markets of getting a higher placement in some keyword areas you wouldn’t dream of ranking high in with a text search. Often webmasters put so much effort into SEOing the main site they neglect the importance of their images. Snick in under their nose with an a good image search placement – I have a number I wouldn’t have dreampt of ranking on the first page for (or aimed at) after years of following those simple principles.
As to whether its good traffic is another matter – but traffic is traffic.
Why Use NoFollow in your Blogs?
One good way to get traffic to your website is by using the comments feature found with most Blogs. When you write well thought out comments on Blogs and add your URL to the “Website URL” box you give readers of your comment a way to read more of your ideas. This of course means writing useful comments knowing that spam will likely be quickly deleted.
One additional benefit that many BlogMasters like to give those that comment on their Blogs is that they remove the “NoFollow” attribute that is added to all comment URLs by default in most Blog software. By doing this they also allow their site to pass some PR to the sites of webmasters that choose to comment on posts in their Blog.
By hunting around you can find many Blogs that are no longer buying into the idea of using the “NoFollow” attribute. One that I recently stumbled on is a game site called Play New games. I’ll be using this site as an example to show how you can tell if a site is using the NoFollow or not. For an example first lets view one of the posts on this site, “Hello World”. After clicking on this link you will notice there are comments. Notice that one is from Mr WordPress.
Now right click in your browser window and choose “View Page Source” or “View Source” or just select that part and then view selection source on firefox. You are now looking at the source code your browser uses to build the page. Now search forMr WordPress. You will find the code that is used to display a link. It looks like this
href="http://wordpress.org/" rel="external nofollow
. This is an example of a link that is using the NoFollow. If it was not, you would not see rel=’nofollow’ in the link.
Now, does removing the “NoFollow” mean that you will receive more spam? No! Spam will happen with or without this attribute. Spammers would rather get a link, but they are more interested in exposure. The way to stop spam is to put in plugins that look for the telltale signs and by moderating your blog. It only takes a couple clicks to delete a spammy comment, making sure there is none in your blog will do more to discourage spammers than the “NoFollow” ever could. They don’t spend the time checking to see if you are using the attribute.
So, how do you get rid of the “NoFollow” and encourage your readers to comment? With wordpress that is pretty easy. Go to the wordpress site, find and download the plugin, FTP it to your plugin folder (after unzipping it) and finally go into admin and turn it on. Next be sure you have moderation turned on so you will be notified and you can delete spam if it comes in.
In short the “NoFollow” only discourages readers from commenting in your Blog. By letting other know that you are a “DoFollow” blog you encourage your readers to comment and continue to visit your blog.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Why Use NoFollow in your Blogs?
5 Compelling reasons WordPress is superior than other for blogging
WordPress was started as a standalone blogging platform but now a days it is not only fixed in blogging, its now covering every aspect of your need through WordPress CMS from blog to directory to custom website to eCommerce every aspect it’s giving footprint.
The purpose of their blogs vary from promoting their products and services, to building a community in their niche market, podcasting, profiting from contextual advertising, and generating additional traffic and exposure to their target websites.
Close to 50% of those who began their journey into blogging with free blogging services such as those offered by Blogger.com, a division of Google.
Over time, many respondents report a lack of features and control that influence their search for a platform that offers them choice, control, convenience and comprehensive features and capabilities. Enter WordPress into the scene.
WordPress is known for its open-source blogging platform, which means a host of developers have contributed their time and programming expertise in molding it to be the best it can be for the community at large. This also means you can begin blogging with WordPress today free.
You can download the files from WordPress.org, or simply install it from your hosting account’s control panel (cPanel) through a feature called Fantastico.
Here are five compelling reasons that set WordPress apart as a superior blogging application.
Choice and control
With WordPress, you own your own blog. Your blog is not dependent on a blogging service’s hosting or publishing service. In fact, you can install as many WordPress installed blogs on your host accounts, across as many of your domains as you want, and you enjoy full ownership and control over them.
Here’s a shocking but real-life fact. Google has the authority to close your Blogger account if they dislike your blogging practices, or find your blog crossing the lines of their Terms of Service.
I’ve had numerous discussions with Internet marketers who have had the bad fortune of having their Blogger accounts shut down, thus losing thousands of dollars a month in contextual advertising revenue. Even with repeated attempts to discuss the matter with Google/Blogger, they receive no follow-up regarding their account cancellations.
Now these Internet marketers are all advocates of blogging applications like WordPress, because they have full control and accountability over their blogs.
Cost effective
As mentioned before, WordPress is open source, which offers you a free blogging application to use today. As a result, you can install multiple blogs across your many domains without any concern of incurring costs.
Compared with other blogging applications like Typepad or MovableType (owned by SixApart) that charge a monthly fee for you to blog, WordPress is a free to use application.
Community
WordPress has a strong user and developer community, with comprehensive support and documentation.
With a strong user base, many of the “bugs” get worked out very quickly with revisions. Plus with so many users, there are many guides and workarounds featured on blogs created to help others in the community.
These developers create modules of code, called “plugins”, which offer enhanced performance and functionality for your blog. There are many plugins available for free downloads from developer blogs.
Capabilities
Here are a few of the unique features that WordPress boasts:
a. Convenient 1-click install
Installing a WordPress blog is a cinch with its 1-Click Install feature offered via Fantastico in a cPanel hosting company’s control panel.
b. Convenience in customizing templates, themes and colors
Easily edit a WordPress blog’s templates and colors via cascading style sheets (CSS), that work aside from the blog’s main code, so that a change to the CSS enables those changes across the entire site.
In addition, there are many talented creative developers in the WordPress community who create themes or design layouts that enable you to switch your blog’s theme with the ease of 1-click. Simply upload the designers’ theme, and activate it in your WordPress blog’s Presentation Theme control panel.
c. Customize blog directories to “ping”
Pinging is a notification to blog directories that your blog has a new page addition, and encourages them to visit your blog and index it into its database.
Blogger sets a default ping to only one blog directory. This limits your automatic notification for pinging.
In comparison, WordPress offers you a Notification Panel that you can insert additional blog directories to “ping”. This offers you a wider base – you’re indexed by a host of blog directories – which helps in one-way links to your blog, and expands the exposure of your blog.
d. Connection times
When you’re blogging with Blogger, you’re dependent on their servers for publishing your posts. Because of the vast number of bloggers using their network, publishing times can slow down to a crawl.
However, publishing with WordPress is reliant on your own host company’s server – which is typically much faster. Blogging with WordPress offers almost no wait time, and speeds up your blog publishing.
e. Categories and sub-categories
Categories offer you the links in the side navigation to provide sections that your visitors can click on.
One major frustration with Blogger is a lack of a categorization or sub-categorization feature. To offer links in the sidebar navigation, one has to wade in code to add it manually.
With WordPress, categories come standard. Simply add categories and sub-categories for easy organization and usability for your blog.
f. Comment capabilities
A comment is a feature that encourages your visitors to offer feedback or participate in a discussion about your postings. This feedback gives you an immediate connection with your visitors, and this platform helps you to determine how to serve the needs of your audience more effectively.
With WordPress, you can choose to either receive comments or not. Plus, there are features to help filter comment spam, which is a nuisance when comment spam software or services automatically enter irrelevant comments on your blog to receive links back to their blogs.
As a result of comment spam filtering, you can spend your precious time on productive activities instead of dealing with blog comment spam.
g. Cash-generating flexibility
Marketers and business people consider tools such as the WordPress blogging application with respect to how well these tools serve them to reach their desired outcomes – one of which is to generate profit.
With WordPress, you can easily add contextual advertising like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publishers Network ads. In addition you can add links to affiliate merchants, and also promote your own product and service offerings.
In summary, this report proves that blogging with WordPress is cost-effective, offers you choice, control, access to a community of users, support, and gives you a host of capabilities to help you save time, save money, while helping you generate revenue.
I encourage you to give blogging with WordPress a test drive on a test domain, or try it on one of your main domain’s sub-directories. If you’re using cPanel hosting, try the 1-Click install of WordPress. Be courageous in playing with it – it’s fun and can lead to a very productive activity.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: 5 Compelling reasons WordPress is superior than other for blogging