This post might be the most important one so far on Marketing Online 101 because it will outline and explain in some details how someone without any marketing experience or budget can use the free tools on the Internet to generate a steadily growing income on the Internet. This is a 100% free method to make money online, I am not charging for it and the whole process doesn’t involve paying for anything.
First I’ll explain the theory about this idea. There are 4 factors involved in this theory:
1. With almost all of the affiliates under the sun had their Google Adwords accounts suspended, Google is left with corporate companies that use Google ads to build a brand awareness rather than direct response. These companies care only about the eyeballs that will see their ads and nothing else. And they have the budget to spend on those ads. This also means that they don’t care about the keywords or your site content except from the legal point of view.
2. The way taught on Clickbank ebooks and on forums and blogs is that the best way to make money with a blog is to build it around a certain topic and be extremely targeted. This is good for direct response marketing, but not for this method. In this method your main focus is to build a blog around anything and get tons of traffic to that blog.
3. Google provides the tools that you can use to know what is it that people are searching for right now, so that you write about it and get exposure from this buzz to your blog, on which you’ll be posting adsense ads as a starter, later you’ll switch to other advertising platforms so that you don’t get under Google’s mercy.
4. People are people, and people treat an authority person in a different way than treating a friend. With authority people get their needs done and they don’t want to know that authority person anymore because of the negative feeling they’ll have as being inferior to that authority person. With friends, on the other hand, people tend to be loyal to their friends, and they visit and go out together without holding anything back. We want people to feel that the person behind this blog is a friend, not an authority. This can get them to come back, especially if they agree with your views.
So what we need to do is to get you a personal blog, then you need to blog about what people are searching for right now from your own personal point of view. Get your blog exposed to the searchers. Install Google Adsense on your blog and and start making money.
But hold on. You need to understand one concept: You got to be personal, be yourself, and blog freely from the keyword oriented traditional blogging that makes money. Just forget all about money for now. Your only focus is to be yourself on the blog.
There is one condition though. The main theme or subject of your domain will be something you truly love and can keep writing and providing content to your blog for a long time. The reason you need to write about something you’ve experienced and you have passion for is that you want to write without any fear of being right or wrong. You’re being yourself, that’s all. Write from the heart if you want to reach the heart of your readers. Just don’t post information you are not sure about because you might hurt someone or get hurt this way.
Now let’s take action on this basis and explain with the example how to apply this plan. And it starts with you and our passion. If you want this project to be a long term one then treat it as such.
Pick up a pencil and a blank sheet and write down the top 3 things you have passion for and have some knowledge about. This condition is in place to help you pick a subject you can write about every day all day without being bored or exhausted. You need to keep blogging about your subject for a long time.
If you need help on deciding what you are good at ask your friends and people you just started to know or deal with recently and get their impression about your abilities.
These are the top 3 issues that you can work with. No matter what you are going to write about, as long as you are going to be personal and write from the heart you are ok. And keep in mind that if you are interested in this issue them there might be a bunch of other people interested in the same thing.
The second step is to get yourself a blogger blog for free from Google. This will be your personal blog but with a personality of it’s own that goes with your audience.
I don’t really like it and would never do it myself because Google deleted one of my blogs before. In the process of trying to get it back I realized that I could have saved more money in terms of the hours I spent on the issue valued at the minimum wage if I started with my own domain hosted on my own. But for the sake of keeping this method 100% free I’ll stick to blogger. Just be warned that having your blog on blogger is risky. You could be at the top and making tons of money from it when Google decides to delete your blog because of a false spam detector or a complaint from a competitor. By the time you’ll get it back you would have lost your audience and would have to start allover. If you want to play it safe scroll down to the bottom of this page and get yourself a reliable hosting from the same company hosting this blog.
Write about anything and everything as long as you have passion for it there is a big chance that some other people in this world share your interests.
If you don’t have an adsense account apply from within your blogger from a tap called “monetize”. If you already have one use the same tap to insert Google Adsense codes in default places.
Please also note that a personal blog is more likely to be accepted in Google adsense program than any other blogs because you don’t seam to be planning on using it as an affiliate, which you are not.
After you start seeing traffic coming to your blog start writing about the buzz. Here is how to know:
Go to Google trends and you’ll see what people are searching for now on the Internet. If you have passion for a certain topic or keyword go ahead and write about it immediately.
To start sending traffic to your blog you are going to stay in the mode for a while, write some articles on this particular word or issue. From those articles link back to your original article. Start publishing those articles on the web over a period of a time. Such buzz words or subjects are not all going to be within your strength area. But that’s alright. You are not required to write about anything unless you can do it and know that you will enrich the Internet community with your articles and your personal opinion about what is going on around and share some of your wisdom with the world.
Since your posts are talking about the current buzz and the news, then it’s justified to use free press releases. These are able to show on the first page of search results and stay there for a while, long enough for your blog to start getting traffic. After that use dig, stumbleupon, reditt, and delicious to bookmark your article.
Now about the articles that you’ll be using to market your blog, there is a difference here between what you post on your blog and what you write for publishing. On your blog you be yourself, but the marketing articles need to be in a formal language to get accepted for publishing. Also the well-written articles get picked up by other publishers and give your website the link juice that help with the ranking process.
The marketing articles can be linking to the corresponding page on your blog if you are rewriting your blog post. This is one way to go.
Another way is to write about something else that’s hot right now. Your author bio box can be just an introduction to the reader about yourself and a link to your blog. A well written article, especially if you are giving valuable information or a controversial point of view about a publish issue, the readers will want to learn more about you and will visit your website to do so.
As I said above and I repeat it here again, you want to give your readers something valuable to read (or watch). You are not trying to sell anything or get them to take any action out of the ordinary. Just keep them coming by posting new posts and publishing new articles.
The best way to get exposure from article marketing is to submit your articles to ezinearticles.com. This article directory gets tons of traffic and you can get yourself some decent traffic directly from your bio box. The other advantage is that they are picky on what to allow for publications. That’s why they are the number one option for publishers who want some valuable material for their websites.
A lot of marketers differentiate between direct article marketing as a method of sending traffic straight to the website, and link building where you want to attract publishers to pick up your articles for republishing. For the purpose of this method don’t follow their advice.
Your goal is to provide value and get LOYAL visitors who will come back often. If you pitch them in your bio box to click on the link and visit your site most probably that will be their only visit to your site.
Of course your valuable content is one way to get their loyalty, but there are other things you can do. For example, make your posts highly controversial. This will please some of your readers and displease others. On the comment section they will start either upraising or insulting you, and that’s fine because they’ll soon forget about you and start arguing with each other, which means coming back every now and then to add to continue the conversation.
Another thing to do is to add a poll about this controversy and let them compete on who’s side has more supporters. Sometimes the readers will do the email marketing for you to get more votes to their cause.
Now let’s move on to the monetizing process
Google ads are the first option because they pay well. Google adwords are very expensive and are getting more expensive every minute due to the competition. Being on the advertiser side was a real pain in the you know what, but as an adsense publisher it’s all working to your advantage.
One way to go if you are using blogger is to let Google decide where to put their ads. They want to make money as much as you do, so they will display the ads where they think is profitable. That’s usually a side bar and a 300×250 box at the end of the post. You can also experiment with a leader board adsense widget on top of everything.
From my personal results, which could be just me, is that when the side bar with the ads is to the left it gets a higher click through rate. That’s because English language readers start from the left to the right and they spot the ads more quickly when they are at the beginning of their reading before they give their attention to your writing.
Also when you set up your adsene blocks keep it open to both image and text ads. Images work better for branding and this is what big corporations want. And they pay per 1000 impressions rather than clicks. Besides, if order for an image ad to take a full block that’s supposed to serve 3 more text ads, that image ads bid should exceed the next highest 3 bidders in order to take this spot. That means a higher revenue per click for you.
I hope this post isn’t too boring. I wrote it while half asleep, and when I woke up in the morning I found a lot of nonsense about learning how to cook and stuff. So if you find something odd like that please use the comment section below to tell me about it. When I have time later I promise to come back to it and revise it, or maybe organize it a little bit to make it easy to follow.
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