I have been asked this quite a number of times - How does color affect people's choices online. I have been fortunate enough to gather a series of data that can summarize the answer to this question. But the charts that are featured below are but a few of the studies that have been conducted to show how Color affects Consumer behavior and should be taken with a grain of salt. People are still individuals and that there are still several other factors that could get tied into the play of what causes them to purchase something or not. Color is just but one factor that can have an effect on how people think and feel about a particular product. There are things such as pricing, demographics, economics, and much more that can influence a person's choice of what he or she should be spending on.
As you can see the charts presented here have varied information on how color affects people in various ways. Finding a way to merge this with other marketing and psychological data is important in creating that right blend in terms of consumer behavior and their buying results. Even the big companies are still continuously re-imaging themselves to reflect their current objectives and direction which means that you should always be constantly alert as to how people are affected by their senses. Overall if you can find a formula that engages the human senses, which means hitting most if not all of the 5 different senses, should guarantee product and service impact. How you'll incorporate all those is the question which could make or break your brand.
I have gotten a lot of questions from my friends about how I started earning online and if I could compile them to the top ten best ways to earn through blogging specifically. This has had me thinking a bit and after sitting on this article for over a week of consideration and research I have finally come up with a list. However, as I have mentioned to them, earning online is not as easy as coming up with a blog and writing articles. That is just a third of the work that needs to be done - the most part one has to work on is marketing every single article you write to people that you might think would benefit or would be interested in what you have to write. That entails joining social networks and blogging networks to help you get started. It is only after you have ranked up so to speak will you start feeling the benefits of the online blogging business. One thing is for sure, patience and perseverance are the primary keys to earning in whatever field you choose to be in.
With all that being said here are the top ten ways to earn through blogging:
Google AdSense Obviously Google AdSense is one of the largest online revenue sources for almost every webmaster and blogger, and for a good reason. AdSense is super easy to set up, and it is also easy to manage. All that's required for using AdSense is a blog that has been live for over 6 months and you have the opportunity to make money using AdSense.
There are downsides to AdSense, and the biggest one is that anyone who uses the free blogging service from WordPress is unable to embed AdSense onto their blog. That is the largest downfall of AdSense, and I suggest if you want to earn an income from your blog, I would suggest you consider Blogger for your blogging platform. Also, if you are confused about choosing WordPress or Blogger, or you want to learn the pros and Cons about both blogging platforms, visit this link: Blogger vs WordPress.
An alternative to Google adsense would be Adgitize, which works on similar principles but with less of the strict rules that Google would have.
ClickBank ClickBank has been around for a few years now, and has become one very large source of income for many people. People actually become millionaires thanks to ClickBank, and the doors are wide open for you to jump in and start earning money with the best affiliate program online. Signing up is free, and all you need to do is find products that you want to promote.
I want to caution you though to never promote something that you would never use yourself, or that you would never buy yourself. Always remember to think about what your readers would want to purchase. And to never promote scam/spammy products.
Amazon My good friend Amazon Associates is a great revenue source. With Amazon being one of the largest online retailers of literally everything, there is great money to be made by becoming an Amazon Affiliate. Also, the great benefit of Amazon, is that everyone knows about Amazon, people are not afraid of purchasing through Amazon, thus more people will be willing to purchase through your Amazon affiliate links.
Text-Link-Ads Text-Link-Ads.com is a great 'other' alternative way to earn an income from your blog. TLA is a program that allows you to sell your advertising space on your website or blog. You can either choose to sell 'real estate' on one page, or all pages, and you can also choose to get paid by a one time fee, or through the CTR of each Text-Link-Ad sold. One site I strongly recommend would be Ask2Link
AdBrite - Other Owner Controlled Advertising There are many owner controlled advertising options such as AdBrite, Chitika, BuySellAds, LinkWorth and many more. The great advantage to using owner controlled advertising is that you have complete controll over what space you sell, and how much money you receive from it. You can sell your space on your website or blog in form of text and or in banner ads. And you get paid a one time fee from an advertiser or each time someone clicks your ads.
Ebay - Ebay Affiliate Another great way to earn an income online is through ebay affiliate marketing. Ebay is the largest retailer of new and used goods online, and with the downturn economy, people are looking for a way to get products for inexpensive prices. Thus, ebay is making a very large profit every month. So, you can either sell products on ebay, or you can promote other sellers products on your website or blog. Becoming an ebay affiliate is both rewarding and lucrative. Visit ExtremeWealthGuide.com for more information on how to become an ebay affiliate marketer.
Paid Blog Posts Are you good at writing? Why not get paid to write articles for your OWN blog? Many sites such as IZEA.com offers its clients the ability to write posts about products and get paid doing it! All you need to do is sign up and write articles for advertisers and post it on your blog, then you get paid from that advertiser! In basic terms, you write, and you get paid.
However this is something that I would like to advise to do with caution as the Big G (Google) has penalized a lot of bloggers who have done this sort of thing and pulled their pagerank down to 0. A lot of people may say that this is probably not an important thing, but if you want to be on top of the SEO game and be attractive to advertisers keeping a good pagerank is quite vital if you want to earn a lot in the long run. (I have to admit even this is open for debate - you have to definitely do more research and finding what works best with you)
In Text Advertising - InfoLinks, Kontera, Vibrant Media In-Text advertising is a great way for you to earn extra revenue from your site without having to sacrifice valuable real-estate form your website or blog. All you do is sign up for any one of those three programs listed above, and pase the HTML code into your blog template, and your text links will automatically be embedded into relevant keywords on your blog. And you get paid each and every time someone clicks those links.
Commission Junction (CJ) - Affiliate Marketing Many people will be wondering why CJ is placed so low down on this list. But the true fact about CJ is you need a very large blog following to make any money at all. There is good money to be made, but you only get paid if you actually sell a product through banner ads, or text ads. You will not get paid even if the advertisers ads get clicked 100 times per day. You only earn money when your visitors purchase. That is one extreme downfall to affiliate programs such as CJ or LinkShare.
Quality Content! Putting a lot of advertisement on one's blog is not always the best formula to getting rich. You need to have quality content on your blog to gain visitors and subscribers. You need to also have good content because search engines such as Google look for good content when choosing a site to be listed high on the first page.
This may be the last of the ten things to earn through blogging but is by far the most important of all. It is through your articles that people find you and is what will cause them to come back for more.
To help you even more here is a cool video that talks about the topic to further help you guys out.
Eventually, through time and perseverance am sure that you will make a niche someday in the virtual highway. Have fun with what you do and always be ready to adapt to change. Experiment, experiment, experiment is what my financial adviser would say to me - eventually you will find an accident that will bring you what you have been seeking.
If you have more suggestions or sites that could offer other bloggers on how to earn online please leave them in the comment box with your feedback. :) Let us all help each other out. :) xoxo
I have been doing everything in my power to keep my Alexa Ranking stats to move up for the past couple of months since the new year started. A friend has advised me that the best way to help my stats to move up is to actually write about the Alexa Ranking system. He advised this because of the following:
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.
The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)
If you noticed, the rank is very dependent on the Alexa Toolbar users and unfortunately even if your number of readers may not have decreased but if they dont have the toolbar with their system you wont get credited. The only people that would ever have the desire (even the know how) to install the Alexa Toolbar would be webmasters and internet cyber geeks. What they are mostly interested in are data such as the one am writing about now about the Alexa Toolbar. That is the reason why my advisor recommended writing about Alexa.
I have done extensive research in the past and am ready to talk about it today and I do hope that what ever data that you find here with me is useful for you, especially those that are venturing into the market of the virtual highway.
Let us start with the Pros and Cons: Pros
It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity
As opposed to Google's PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.
It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the true marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they will be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.
Personal pages or blogs are taken into consideration and ranked in the same manner as regular Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)
Given that Alexa ranking offers you information about your Web site, it is a good tool to have in view of search engine optimization.
Cons
Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.
Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “played” to therefore show inaccurate results.
Here are some of the best ways to quickly improve your Alexa Ranking:
Download and install the Alexa toolbar and then surf your own site.
Place the Alexa widget on your Web site. It will entice the visitors to check it out, and you know, each click counts.
Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote it on webmaster forums and on social networking sites. The idea is to get as many computer and Internet savvy people as possible to visit your site, since the probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed is high.
Write posts on your blogs and articles about Alexa. You will get links to your pages that will help improve your ranking.
Tell your friends about the Alexa toolbar, have them download and install it on their computers, and then tell them to visit your site.
Use Alexa redirect. This means placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your Web site's URL. Thus, Alexa will even take into consideration clicks on redirected links even if the visitor does not have the Alexa toolbar.
Whenever you post on webmaster forums, include your site's URL in your signature. It is very likely that most webmasters have the toolbar installed, and there's a great probability that they'll visit your site.
Finally if you still feel that you need more help on the Alexa Ranking Toolbar here is a video tutorial that has helped me a lot in my own quest to increase this rather volatile statistic.
By the way since I noticed that most of my traffic comes from those that use Firefox 2 - 3 I would like your help to help us as it is only now that Alexa has finally noticed and made a toolbar that was once only exclusive for IE users. With this toolbar you will be able to see the traffic ranking based on alexa of every website and link that you visit to see its popularity in more ways than one. :)
I have decided to make a compilation of the Online SEO Tools that I used to help propel Empty Streets 1027 to how it is now with all of you. Each of these websites have their respective pros and cons of course and I strongly encourage that you experiment. Nothing really beats a good old fashioned trial and error approach for I believe that it is only through mistakes that we ever truly learn and get better. :) So with that being said here is the list to use and experiment with. My last piece of advice for those venturing into the field of SEO Marketing - Have fun with this and eventually things will work out and that the only true failure is when you give up.
SEO Tools
SEO Browser: See your website as the search engines see it.
Lynx Viewer: Snapshot of what the search engine sees when it spiders your pages.
Spider Simulator: Simulate how a search engine spider moves through your site.
Spider Viewer: See what search engines see when they crawl your site.
MonitorThis: This tool allows you to subscribe to 20 different serach engine feeds at the same time.
Site Explorer: See which pages are indexed and who linkes to them.
MindSet: Tweak your search results to be more or less commercial... in real time.
Copyscape: Allows you to see if your web content is being utilized anywhere else on the internet. Great tool to see if your copywritten material has been stolen.
SEOMoz Trifecta: Measure the number of sites that link to you and number of times your brand is mention on the web.
Visual PageRank: Allows you to view all the links alone with pageranks on a certain page.
Site Link Analyzer:A tool that returns a table of data containing outbound links and related anchor text.
Marketing Research Tools
SEO/M Tools
Customer Focus Calculator: Analyzes text on your pages to determine if your text is customer focused.
WordTracker: Research actively searched-for phrases within your industry.
WordTracker vs. Overture: View keyword search volume comparisons between WordTracker and Overture.
Niche BOT: Keyword research tool that helps you find the terms that produce the highest amount of traffic. Lets you drill down to dig deep and find niche phrases as well.
Metrics Market: How much traffic are you getting compared to your competitors?
Yahoo Tools
Keyword Selector: Allows you to retrieve Overture search volume for up to 50 keywords at one time.
MSN Tools
Search Funnels: See what people search for before and after your keyword.
Below is a video about the changes in marketing realities based on a concept by German ad agency Scholz & Friends. According to Michael Reissinger, it took about 5 weeks for him and his animator Rafael Ahamad to make this shorty - including all the illustration, typo-art-works and the animation.
I have been asked this many times in my class. A lot people normally ask it because they wonder where I get my extra pocket money from. But aside from being deadly honest about how it has to be a passion before one starts to earn from it, one most first understand the basics of blogging most especially why it is fast becoming the major source of information now these days.
I have searched around for the answers and was fortunate enough to find a very good video presentation that does just that.
I hope that after watching this video it has shed some light into the power and reason why blogs exist and will continue to exist while fast becoming a highly influential source of information for a lot of people all over the world. Till the next time xoxo
There are many affiliate and publisher programs out there that use bloggers and website owners in marketing their products. If you are interested in earning from your sites here is the list of the top ten.
1)Adsense by Google
AdSense is rated the best money making advertising network. AdSense is an advertisement serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll freely in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. You can sign up your free account at https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/. (check out our Easy Adsense Module For Joomla)
2)Adbrite
Right now AdBrite is considered the best alternative for google adsense and day by day it is growing reputation . AdBrite serves 372 million impressions a day on 82,606 sites, according to their published stats, and is the 10th largest ad network on the Internet according to Media Metrix .
(Note: If you want to find a cheaper and reliable place to advertise your website, you can read our Adbrite for advertiser review here to see why Adbrite is better than Adwords for advertisers) 3)Bidvertiser
Another alternative for adsense and it's lay-out is like adsense. Their minimum payout also small and everybody can make it in short time. Some of features are
Customize the layout of your ads
Block any unwanted ad
Always have the highest bidders displayed on your website
Generate reports to monitor your ads performance
$10 minimum payouts through PayPal
4)Clicksor
It is also good and pays good amount to the publisher. Participating sites must have 5,000 page views per day or 150000 page views per month and site must be in English written content.
5)Advertising.com
It operates the largest display advertising network in the United States and UK. They work with 200+ of the largest e-commerce brands across the world.
7)Commission Junction
Big advertiser and affiliate network available worldwide. Commission Junction is the largest affiliate network in North America, powering almost 50% of the top 500 web retailers affiliate marketing programs and operates worldwide. Along with being the world's largest Affiliate Network. It has over 1,500 customers including Buy.com, Home Depot, Circuit City, Experian and Yahoo!. 8)Linkshare
Another big affiliate network for publishers. LinkShare clients are Fortune 500 and prominent companies doing business online, and include Macy's, J.C. Penney,1-800-Flowers.com,American Express, Avon Products and many others.
9)Yahoo Publisher Network
Created to compete with google adsense. Publisher Network (abbreviated YPN) is a beta network, launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo. As the service is currently in Beta, it is currently only accepting US-Based publishers; it is believed that Yahoo! will expand this when the program comes out of Beta. YPN provides cost per click contextual advertising, similar to Google Adsense, as well as various tools and services to assist publishers in building and improving their websites.
10)Microsoft Adcenter
Microsoft-own publisher network. Still on beta. is the division of the Microsoft Network (MSN) responsible for MSN's advertising services. Microsoft adCenter provides pay-per-click advertisements.
I like exploring the internet and scouring for data that I found useful and effective in marketing my sites and so far when it comes to teaching the principles of Web Marketing and explaining them in easy to understand terms as well as ensuring that we are well supported with the knowledge required to accomplish the tasks - TJ Harris has in a way enabled that to happen.
So without further delay here is TJ Harris to further discuss more about Web Marketing 2.0
Keywords have a lot to play when it comes to SEO marketing. The density of the keywords including that of the meta tags and meta descriptions have its weight in bringing a persons site to the top of the search list. Defining one's niche is of course a necessary factor before you go and get yourself massing up on your chosen keywords. I personally use websitegrader.com to help me out with this aspect and coolest thing about it is that it is absolutely free.
My personal experience with using keyword density on my main site Empty Streets 1027 is that the more I use the my chosen keywords which is Empty Streets several times in my posts and the layout including the side bars and meta tags and descriptions has helped my site move up in rankings and is what helped my site reach the top link for the keywords -Empty-Streets-1027. though admittedly my new pagerank of 4 has a lot of weight too but prior to the new page rank Empty Streets has already started it's climb due to the overuse of the words Empty Streets :)
Aside from that you can also use the Website Grader site above to check on your competitors performance in terms of keyword density against your own site. The general rule is if your competitor has a greater density than yours you have to work on surpassing your competitors numbers in terms of density - even more so if the competitor site has a higher page rank than yours.
So far that is what I have been using but as always I like hearing and learning from others and so I found this useful video that is quite as informative and very helpful in further explaining this SEO marketing principle.
With that video and my own experience with Keyword density I do hope this gets to shed some light to your questions about the use of keywords on your websites and how this can help you get recognized overall. Till the next time. xoxo
Everyone knows that a good branding and design is just as vital to the success of anything in the business world. It is just as crucial as the talent and the product being presented itself. Many people tend to over look this particular necessity and thus when they create a product that is though powerful as it can be on its own still fails to capture the market that it is trying to reach.
Branding and Design is what made the difference for a lot of products such as from the more popular brands that have become home icons like Coca Cola, Xerox, and Colgate along with the success through buyer interest made for products like Banana Ketchup and Margarine. Now with the later example consider these products in their natural state - Banana Ketchup isn't really red nor was Margarine really Yellow - However, their competition which were real Tomato ketchup and Butter already possessed qualities in terms of color that they are associated with, the product owners of Banana Ketchup and Margarine reconsidered replicating their competition since no one showed interest in their products in their natural condition. It was only when they did this that they finally broke into the market and caught consumer attention.
When there are so many products in the market that have seemingly the same qualities, the one that captures a consumer's attention is how the product looks and once that is accomplished it is only then that the consumer starts to get interested in what it has to offer. This principle is in fact the same for us bloggers and anyone that gets into the 2.0 industry. With so much competition out there it is of no surprise that we also have to compete not only in content but also to consider how attractive and user friendly our sites can be for the audience.
Here's a video to that also stresses out this point:
I have been scouring the net for a video that would best explain the power of Online Marketing and teach us about how to get on top in terms of getting on top. I have found the Videos of an Online Marketing Guru Demetri of whom best describes the most effective tools to getting exactly on top in this ever changing and challenging internet marketing world.
So without further delay here is what he has to say
I do hope you found his words enlightening just as much I found it informative myself. More to come as I get to learn more on Web Marketing. Till the next time. xoxo
