In continuation with the post that I had written regarding paid posts, lets us explore the opinion of our readers on the topic.

[poll id="2"]

A few days back I came across a poll at Problogger.com. It was a question, if the readers did paid posts on their blogs or, not.

For once I felt that it was the wrong question. But then I realized that it wasn’t. My memories went back to the days when I started blogging.

My blog was not an established one and like any other newbie blog, money was not to be seen in about a 100 miles from my blog. There were very few visitors and all my methods of traffic generation was getting only a trickle of visitors to come to my blog. And, I knew that with this trickle, I am not going to get any advertisements, nor am I going to get any worthy clicks on my Google Ads. But I had to earn some money. I had to pay for the expenses of my broadband connection, my hosting, my domain name etc.

This is when I took to writing paid-posts. Writing paid-posts helped my blog gain significance in the blogosphere. But after about 2 years of blogging, paid-posts are nowhere to be seen on any of my blogs. Is it the end of paid-posts?

What are paid-posts?

Paid-posts are sponsored posts, where advertisers pay you for writing a post on your blog in favor of their product, primarily to promote their products or, to build back links.

Payperpost, Smorty, Loudlaunch etc. are amongst the major websites offering such paid-post jobs.

Paid posts require you to write a favorable review or, at times just a post about a certain topic and embed a few links against some specific keywords that the advertiser provides you with.

Writing paid posts were a form of earning money from a blog, back in the early days of blogging. It was in vogue till about the late 2007 after which there was probably a decline in interest.

The poll conducted at Problogger showed that almost 77% of the readers at Problogger have never written a paid-post. Considering the fact that Problogger is amongst the blogs that have the largest readership base today, this figure is quite a significant one.

Should you write paid-posts?

What is the reason that you would not want to write paid-posts? Paid-posts are a good source of earning some good money. When I started blogging, I used to earn close to $500-$700 per month only by writing paid-posts on 4 of the blogs that I maintained.

When the earning potential is that good, why shouldn’t you write paid posts in your blogs? There are numerous other websites in addition to the ones that I have mentioned above that offer paid posts. With so many options available, you blog is sure to be accepted in at least a few of these.

If you are new at blogging, earning avenues are very few for you. You might be in the process of building traffic to your website. Less traffic means less income from your blogs. In such a scenario, if you are able to make a few quick bucks from writing paid posts, I do not think it is a bad deal at all.

Photograph courtesy Dani Simmonds

Chris Garrett, Daniel Scocco, Darren Rowse, Jack Humphrey, Jason Katzenback, Matt Garrett and Yaro Starak.

What is it that they have in common, other than the fact that they are all successful Internet Marketers?

Tried of guessing? Or, probably you might have had a couple of hundred guesses. But, you are wrong. Let me give your the answer.

They all play a character in an interesting book.

Surprised!!!

You ought to be.

Have you ever seen all of these people together at one place? It is unlikely, because each of them is an internet celebrity today and their names itself is a money-spinner. Is there a way, we can meet them all together and share their views and ideas about blogging?

I was surprised when I got to see all of them together in an ebook that was released by the MaxBlogpress group and written by Pawan Agrawal.

I was lucky enough to get a copy of this ebook and Pawan wanted me to review the ebook before it was scheduled to launch. The ebook is scheduled for a launch on Tuesday, June 23, 2009.

Review of $365K Blog Traffic Formula:-

I would be very blunt in this review and will want to tell you the facts because most of the ebooks that you come across these days are full of crap and unnecessary hype.

Rarely would you be able to see all the above said established bloggers at one place and rarely would you be able to know their view and suggestions. This book does that for you. For me, that in itself would be a PUSH to buy the book.

You can either download 7 different ebooks from all of these authors and read through about 400-500 pages of these books to learn the tactics and ways that they have been using to generate traffic for their websites. But it is a normal tendency to download an ebook and let it rest in your hard-drive especially if the book is a bit too large.

Or, you can download this book where you have about 70 odd pages of pure information – to the point, with each of the above Bloggers sharing their ideas of generating traffic to your blogs.

The best things – There are quite a few very interesting things in this ebook and I find this very valuable -

1. The ebook is in the form of a Q&A with the bloggers. Hence it is precise and is free of all the normal yada-yada that authors use to fill up pages in their ebook.
2. The Questions asked are very precise and to the point and of value. Moreover, the questions are more or, less uniform. When all these bloggers answer the same set of questions, you can evaluate the various options that they suggest, thus arriving at about 6-7 different things that you can use for your blog. This will give you a juice of the best ideas from the best bloggers.
3. The ebook uses simple language and the steps explained by each of the bloggers are to the point.
4. The book focuses on Blogs only. Unlike other books that start with what blogging is and move into internet marketing, creating websites, hosting etc. etc., $365K Blog Traffic Formula, only speaks about blogging, creating content for your blogs and getting traffic to your blogs.
5. There are a lot of different and extremely useful strategies mentioned in the book – the ones that these successful bloggers have used to generate traffic. If you are able to replicate even 10% of these strategies, you should be able to get enough traffic to your blogs.

Not the best things -

1. The preciseness of the book makes it a bit too much to the point in the case of a couple of bloggers. A few of the strategies mentioned in the book required a bit more explanation, which could have helped. But a couple of these bloggers seemed to be short of time, because of which they were very precise, thus resulting in an incomplete discussion of a strategy.
2. The book could suffer from a too-much-of-information syndrome. When such big name in the blogosphere start explaining traffic-generation methods, people who are new to blogging, could get confused with so much of information.
3. The author has ensured that he asked the same set of questions to all the bloggers. This meant that some more questions that could have helped delve into details of certain strategies had to be kept out thus resulting in a blunt end to the discussion.

Conclusion -

Though there are a few things that could have been given more attention, the book, more or, less meets the expectations. The information in the book is extremely valuable and is worth the amount that you pay for the ebook.

At the price that the book is made available at, it is a steal of a deal. This book, I feel is a must-have for people starting out on their blogging journey or, the ones who are finding it difficult to get traffic to your blogs.

You can download the book here, once it is lauched on the 23rd of June.

Squidoo – A traffic monster was a post that I wrote some time back. It was about a traffic generation method using the ever-so-friendly and monstrous website called as Squidoo.

Squidoo was the residence of every affiliate marketer. I should rather say that it was the residence of every internet marketer. It is one of the easiest of methods to promote anything that you wanted – your blogs, you own products, your affiliate products, you adsense revenue generating websites etc.

Are you wondering, what has happened to Squidoo?

If you have been using Squidoo, I am sure you will have received an email from them by now. The subject of the email read – “Squidoo Newflash! A policy update“.

What is this Policy Update all about?

Let me explain the reason for the policy update, in the words of Squidoo itself -

We’re going to double down our efforts to help you make good stuff, via education tools, newbie programs, an ever-growing Giant Squids program, and constantly developing valuable new publishing features.

At the same time, we’re making the not so good stuff a little harder to create. And the bad stuff, the really useless, really wasteful pages, and especially harmful pages, those don’t stand a chance here.

Though they claim that 99% chances are you might not even notice the changes, I beg to differ here. You would indeed notice the changes if you have been active on Squidoo for some time promoting your affiliate products like weight loss etc. Wondering why? Let us first see the policy updates –

No Spam - Squidoo has always been against spam like a good netizen. So there is nothing new in it.

No more X-rated or Porn lenses - We are not in Squidoo to create X-rated lenses, so I am not bothered.

No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List – This is something that I am actually interested in. Now what is it that Squidoo calls “Junk Topics” and what is “SquiDon’t list”. We will talk about it in details below.

A new limit on overly promotional lenses – This appears to be a confusing policy at the outset. What does it mean by “overly promotional lenses”? What Squidoo has to say on this is as follows -

If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it.

Should I be bothered about this policy update? Yes, you should be, because your lens is sure to be affected, if you have been using Squidoo to promote your products.

Though the first two parts of the policy update will not concern you and you will hardly notice, as rightly said by Squidoo, the later two are something that you need to be concerned about.

How does this policy update concern me?

If you are an internet marketer and you have been using Squidoo to promote your products, the following two things hold good for you -

1. You Squidoo lenses will have quite a few links pointing to your domain name on which you have your squeeze page or, product sales page. As per the 4th policy update above, Squidoo will lock any lens that has more than 9 links pointing to the same domain. So if your lens is one that has more than 9 links pointing to a single domain, it is likely to get locked.
2. If you are an internet marketer, you are sure to have a few lenses on reviews or, information about the products that you are selling. For e.g., if you are promoting a weight-loss product, you might have a review page on the weight-loss product, at Squidoo. All such lenses will be locked by Squidoo. A list of such topics can be found at http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont

So these policy updates in a way will affect me as I am an internet marketer. But, I would not want to look at it the negative way.

Let’s take a look at it this way – there are numerous absolute rubbish and crap lenses all over Squidoo that are reviews (though you will find nothing in terms of a review in those pages). These lenses often tend to divert the information seeking internet surfers to themselves, thus rendering good informative lenses absolutely useless. These new policy updates will mean that only good quality lenses will persist and the rest will perish. So in a way, that will improve the quality of the information found on internet and if you are one who can offer good quality information, you will win the “Survival of the fittest” contest.

About the backlinks – Why should I be bothered? A good internet marketer can grab the attention of the reader with just one link in the content. Here, you still have the option of building 9 links to your website which is more than enough and which if used wisely can help you build good amount of traffic to your blogs or, sales pages.

What is the SquiDon’t list?

Squidoo maintains a list of not-to-be-made lenses in their directory called as the “SquiDon’t List“.

This list give you a broad idea of what should be a topic that you should choose and what topic should you avoid. You will get more information on this at the SquiDon’t page at http://www.squidoo.com/squiddont.

P.S. :-Read through the information given in that and you might also get a few ideas for lenses.

This effort of Squidoo is to make the internet a better place and to give people providing good information (like you and me…Obviously) an equal opportunity. Let’s make the most of it.

You know what to do it your lens violates one of these policies?

It is absolutely simple. Just delete the lens or, better edit it. Editing will not take to much of your time, give the user-friendly interface of Squidoo.

It is important to remain updated with everything that is happening around, in order to catch up with the changing world. Whatever the field, be it Fashion, Information Technology, Entertainment etc. you need to know what is in vogue and what is happening. So, when we are talking about everything, then why should we set blogging aside.

Your success as an internet marketer depends upon how well you are able to provide products and services to the hungry crowd in your niche. The crowd in any niche is hungry for information and that information has to be current and up-to-date. Hence it is imperative for you to know what is “Current” in your niche.

Internet marketers get so much busy with everything that they are doing, that they form a shell around themselves. They are engrossed in their daily activities and do not bother to learn or, know about what is happening in the rest of the world. This is the reason why quite a few internet marketers fail in their businesses. They fail to keep up with the pace of the changing world and just fade out.

Whatever the niche you are into, you have to keep pace with whatever is happening. You might be working hard everyday, but the information that you are providing your readers, if you are a blogger, would be obsolete and of no use to the readers. What use is it selling VCRs, when it is the generation of the DVDs?

How will you stay updated in the Internet Marketing business?

There are thousands of websites and blogs providing information on almost every niche that you can think of. In addition to this there are thousands of news websites that cover almost every topic in the universe.

With content being made available in forms like RSS and ATOMs, the need to continuosly follow up on information is no more there. All you need to do is subscribe to information in any of the above forms and the information is delivered right into your inbox.

Whatever your niche is, ensure that you are subscribed to alerts in your niche. I recommends Google Alerts, which has a very good service. All that you need to do is subscribe to alerts from your niche by signing into Google Alerts and Google will deliver the latest in your niche everyday right into your inbox.

In addition to subscribing to alerts, you should also subscribe to a few good blogs, that gets a good amount of traffic. You will get a fair bit of idea about the popularity of the blog from the Alexa Rank of the blog. Blogs with good traffic will always be up-to-date, else they would have lost the traffic and consequently the popularity.

Such subscriptions not only helps you to keep yourselves updated with the current trend, but also gives you ideas for your blog posts and affiliate marketing products.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds so that future posts are delivered right into your mailbox.

Photograph courtesy iriann.

How easy is it to download and install so many plugins for your WordPress blogs?

I understand this is a question with an obvious answer, but still I thought I would ask it. Whenever I identify that I need a plugin for my blog and when I think of downloading it and installing it, I get a low BP. But WordPress made that all simple for us with its release of the 2.7 version and now the 2.8 version with quite a few changes in it.

Still, there is a lot of work that is required, if you are to maintain all the plugins that you have installed in your blog. There are constant upgrades that are required. You have to manually upgrade these plugins as and when these upgrades become available. In addition to, there are other things like configuring them, checking for conflicts, researching better plugin options etc. But since these plugins enhance the functionality of your blogs, you just can’t do away with it.

Is there a solution to all this work that you have to do?

There might not be a complete solution to it, but there is a solution that will relieve you partly of this hard work involved. In addition to this, it will also help you in building traffic to your blog and thus help you in making more money from your blog.

The Solution :-

Most of the plugins that are installed on your blog is for one most important reason – Search Engine Optimization. I should rather, say that these plugins are to get more and more traffic to your blog.

Plugins like SEO Smart links, All in One SEO etc help you in getting this work done. But because of the work involved in maintaining these plugins we often ignore the configuration of these plugins, thus under-utilizing their capability.

There is an all-in-one solution to this – The Free Traffic Getting SEO Plugin, by Jeff Johnson.

What is this plugin?

This plugin is specifically designed to get traffic to your website and as the name says, it is an SEO plugin. The plugin is easy to install and configure, thanks to the clear instructions provided by Jeff.

This plugin applies certain tweaks to your blog and helps you install the required plugins like the ones that I mentioned above. After application of these tweaks, your blog is optimized to get more traffic.

This plugin also tells you what is it that is stopping your blog from getting even more traffic so that you will be able to make the necessary changes. It automatically applies the tweaks and also tells you which all plugins are more important and which are not.

Check out the plugin and you would be amazed at its functionalities.

Photograph courtesy Kriss Szkurlatowski

There are quite a few blogs that I continuosly follow because they are informative. A few blogs out of these have quality posts every week and is an inspiration for any blogger who is new in the blogosphere.

I have been following these blogs since the time I came into Internet Marketing and these blogs have been the source of knowledge, inspiration, motivation and everything for me. These blogs not just help you in your blogging but also in everything that you do in Internet Marketing.

The reason that these blogs have been on top for the past 2 years is, the quality of content they have been producing. Their count of RSS subscribers keep on increasing and I can see a trickle of traffic from the comments that I make on these blogs.

The major ones among these blogs are -

1. Shoemoney.com
2. Problogger.net
3. Copyblogger.com
4. Carlocab.com
5. Entrepreneurs-journey.com

All of these blogs have been excellent in the information that they have been providing and hence they are not in any order.

When there are so many successful blogs and you are following a few of them, you tend to make these bloggers your ideals. Then, how would it feel when a guest post of yours is accepted at one of these blogs.

It is a sense of achievement and content that you experience. It gives you a good feeling that you content is of good quality and is being accepted in such high-ranking blogs. It gives you the courage and motivation to keep going and keep posting to your blogs.

One of my guest post has been accepted at Carlocab.com and is published. This post was on “how to keep going and make the most of your unproductive days”. You can read that post here.

Photograph courtesy Steve Woods

Making money is easy. If you think making money is not easy, then you are at the wrong place. Because I believe that nothing is difficult. All that is required to look different and distinct is a bit of thought – thought at doing things differently.

I can see that frustration and anger on your face, because I know you might have seen quite a few of these teaching and preaching at a lot of other blogs. You might have also bought a few ebooks that promise that you will become a millionaire and yet you are fighting to find that first dollar drop into your PayPal account. So let me tell you about a very simple way of making some extra money. If you are wondering as to why I have boldened those words, it is not an SEO trick. Rather, it is to tell you that this will only be some extra money, not a full-time business, though a lot of people are making sustainable income ( This obviously includes me).

Making Money with Minisites :-

For people who do not know what “Minisites” are -

Mini-sites are small websites with a few pages, creating keeping in mind a particular niche with the intention of selling related products and services or, making money from advertisements.

I once heard somebody telling me that minisites are not for making money from advertisements. But, I do not agree to it. Minisites can take any form of money making channel.

Michael Rasmussen is a pioneer in “Making money with minisites“. There is a collection of tools that he has made available in case you wish to make money from minisites.

P.S. :- In case you order the package from the link above, I will give you an additional $15.00 in discounts. Write to me to know how.

Creating a handful of Minisites :-

Can one minisite make enough money for you? Of course, not. You will have to create a handful of such minisites, in case you wish to make a respectable income from it. Michael Rasmussen’s collection of tools helps you in creating many such minisites in a few minutes. I recommend it in case you wish to create such many minisites.

If you are good at HTML and don’t want to spend money, you can always create your websites using any HTML editor.

All that you need to keep in mind is that you have done your niche research well. This is because, the success of these sites depend upon how good the niche is. Minisites made for generic products will not fare well because of the competition. So the better a niche, the better the response you will get.

An alternative to minisites :-

There is no denying the fact that Adsense can help you make money, if you take the right approach. If the niche is good and you are able to generate enough traffic to your websites, you can make a decent income from the minisites that your have created. Just slap a few adsense codes in the “Red Hot” advertisement areas and you will be able to generate a few clicks and a few dollars.

But, you will need to create quite a few websites, if you wish to make decent money from these advertisements. All said and done, the question still remains – how will you create so many website and how will you write the content required for so many websites.

Here is a solution to this problem of yours – Instant Video Sites

What is Instant Video Sites?

This is a cool script that creates a minisites with videos on any topic that you choose. This script, on installation generates pages with videos (These videos are from Youtube) for the topic you have chosen. Select any niche topic and you will find that there are thousands of videos on Youtube. So you will never run out of content.

After installing the script, just put a few Adsense codes here and there and a few banners for the products that your want to promote. Just drive some traffic to these sites and then wait and watch as the dollars start rolling in.

Wondering, if that is so easy?

Yes, it indeed is. The script installation takes less than 4 minutes and your website will be up and running in about 15 minutes. And the best part is that you do not even have to know HTML or, anything.

Get the script here right now.

But you will require the following things -

• Hosting – You can get a cheap hosting for as little as $20 for a lifetime here.
• Domain name – Order a cheap domain name for only $9.00 here.
• FTP Client – Get a free FTP client here.

In case you want to see the script in action, juts check out, http://anti-aging-secrets-videos.info/.

All the best to make money from your minisites.

Don’t forget to tweet the post and subscribe to my RSS feeds. Leave a comment in case you need any help.

Photograph courtesy svilen mushkatov

Should Twitter be amongst your blog promotion strategies?

I am sure, Twitter would not be a jargon for anybody. It is a household interest these days. Everyone from Barack Obama to my gardener is a part of Twitter. Even if they don’t tweet everyday, they still are a part of the revolution called as “Twitter”.

Are you still unaware of what Twitter is? Haven’t heard of it yet!!

For people who do not know what “Twitter” is let me explain it again -

Twitter is a micro-blogging service, where you get to send text messages called as tweets as a response to the question, “What are you doing?” and create a social network by inviting your friends and colleagues to be a part of it.

For more about Twitter – read this post of mine here.

Is Twitter a tool for business?

There was a report that I read somewhere that said, that the search in Twitter was even more powerful that Google. Try it out at http://search.twitter.com, in case you wish to try it. So Twitter is not just a social networking site, but a powerful search engine as well. But how will you use it for your business promotions?

Twitter as a list-builder (promotional tool):-

Twitter is a place where you will find a lot of people who are looking for information and services. Such people are on the lookout to connect with others who can provide them with that information or, service. Since it is not difficult to find like-minded people and people who can provide them with what they are looking for, it is very easy to create a huge list of followers.

Such a followers list is a huge asset. It is a list waiting to be harnessed. If you know what to tweet and how to tweet, then it would not at all be difficult to promote a product you have, thus finding a few buyers in the process.

Twitter as an idea-generator:-

There are thousands and thousands of people whom you can follow on Twitter. These people send out numerous tweets on things that they know or, they wish to know, things that they have and they wish to acquire, things that they have learnt and wish to learn and numerous other things. If you keep a tab on the tweets in your group you are sure to find quite a few ideas, that could trigger a new business thought for you. It might even be something that you can use to improve your business.. Twitter as a tool to generate ideas has worked wonders. I had developed a niche website on one such idea that I came across in Twitter tweets and this website earns me about $300.00 in adsense revenue per month.

Twitter as a feedback mechanism:-

Every business has to have a feedback mechanism. Customer feedback is the most important thing for a business that has a vision to grow. Customer feedbacks give you a picture of how your products are faring in the market and what are the improvements, if any, that are required. Companies spend thousands of dollars in customer surveys and consumer feedbacks.

Can’t Twitter be used for this? Twitter is a place where people vent their heart out. So, what better place than Twitter to get a feedback for your product?

Twitter as a customer-acquisition tool:-

Do you still have any questions in your mind, if Twitter will be able to help you in customer acquisition?

If you are able to present your product well in front of your customer, (rather, Followers) Twitter can become the best place to get a lot of customers. Throw in a special offer for people on Twitter and you will get many more customers and followers.

There are many more things that Twitter can be helpful in and it is worth exploring. Twitter is still in its childhood stage and is waiting to be harnessed. Businesses that learn these different ways in which Twitter can be used, will be able to grow multiple folds, because of the model of Twitter.

Finally Microsoft, it seems is ready for the competition posed by Google, with its launch of “Bing” – the search engine.

What is ‘Bing’?

From what the email that I received today,

Put simply, Bing is a decision engine that offers consumers a way to make informed choices fast. From shopping and travel to healthcare, local and more, Bing delivers great results in a rich, well-organized experience to help consumers easily accomplish key tasks.

Why should I be bothered about ‘Bing’?

I have been suing PPC ads since the beginnning of my Internet  Marketing days. In the first few days I had lost so much to Google Adwords that the sight of it was a terror for me. I was badly bruised by the experience with Google Adwords, most of which was because of my ignorance and PPC-Illiteracy.

But I learnt one thing from this experience and after so many am sure of the fact that a small-time affiliate marketer cannot use Google Adwords or, withstand the competition offered by the established and bigger advertisers, advertising their products on Google. Else what is required is huge amount of time spent on Keyword Research specific to Google, so that you can dig throught those thousands of keywords and come up with one low competition-low cost keyword.

This is when I switched to Microsoft Adcenter, because I felt the competition there was far lesser. The results were amazing! I could advertise on Adcenter for 10% of the cost for the same keyword on Google Adwords. My ROI was much, much better that Adwords and I knew I could make a living using Adcenter for my ads.

SO, when I heard that Microsoft is launching, “Bing” as a competition to Google, I am overwhelmed becauseI know taht now my ads will reach even more audience. No doubt I would be seeing some competition in the days to come, but my ads and keywords have been so refined since the past year or, so that the competition would not be too much to take for me.

So “Bing” is a breath of fresh air for everyone who is hurt with Google and its Adwords PPC marketing.

Try out Microsoft Adcenter for your ads and Bing for your searches.