Experiments In Promotion #1 Update

I’m making a change in my first ‘experiment in promotion’ – instead of doing article marketing, which is very time consuming (of which I don’t have too much currently), I will be using eBooks instead. Same concept, different technique. I will write a couple of short, concise (and free) eBooks that provide good and relevant content concerning a subject that I can find a couple affiliate offers around.

The eBook will contain links to a one-page minisite that I create around the affiliate offers and information I wrote, and may contain direct affiliate links. I will then distribute my eBooks through various means. This is a test to see two things: how much traffic/downloads and how many conversions I can get. I will be keeping you updated on my progress and results.

If you have any tips or suggestions please feel free to comment! Also, if you have done this before, let me know how your results were.

Posted in Experiments | 1 Comment »

Promotion is Perseverance

Promoting your website is not something you do from time to time. It’s not something that you do until you start to see success and than stop. It’s an all the time gig and it takes dedication. Think about it this way – in school, you work hard to get an ‘A’ on that first math test. You get the test back and did indeed get the ‘A’, but you don’t stop working now. If you stop working with just one good grade all of your future grades will be low – you have to keep working, keep studying the whole school year.

The same is true about promoting a website. You don’t stop promoting after you start to see an increase in traffic. If you do, your traffic will not be sustained at that level, it will drop back down.

So here is my call to action: define a couple of daily/weekly goals for yourself, write them down, and then do them. Every day. You won’t become successful if you are lazy. For example, try something like this:

• Make 3 posts in 5 different forums targeted around your niche every day
• Guest post on someone else’s blog once a month
• Create one informational video and upload it to YouTube once every two weeks
• Read and comment on 5 different blogs targeted around your niche every day
• Write one concise but informative ebook and release it to the public once every month

These are just some examples of what you should be doing to really promote your website. The traffic (and revenue) is there for those who are willing to work hard for it.

Posted in Motivation, Promotion Techniques | 3 Comments »

Good Links, Round 2

It’s that time again – here are some of the best reads I have come across recently.

• 7 Reasons Why The Best Marketers Are Bloggers @WarriorBlog.net
• A fun exercise on “Could You Turn $200 Into $400 In A Week” at Cathlawson.com
• Stop Worrying About Google @Copyblogger.com – talks about how you can become successful by just focusing on the three “S”s.
• 3 Simple Concepts To Follow For A Successful Website or Business @DoshDosh.com

Remember, there is always more to learn!

Posted in Resources | 4 Comments »

Experiments in Promotion #1

I’ve decided to start experimenting with promotion techniques that I have read from different blogs around the web. I will catalog and analyze my progress, and at the end of each experiment I will release a case study ebook. So for my first experiment I will be performing article marketing on an affiliate offer.

1. I will find an offer through Copeac, Clickbank, or any other company that I can write about.
2. I will create a mini-website around the offer with affiliate links
3. I will write multiple articles around the offer-subject with links to my site or the the product itself
4. I will submit these free articles to all the article directories that I can find
5. I will submit to Craig’s list

This is a tentative outline. I’m not sure how many articles I will be writing, but I think at least a dozen. The article lengths will probably be around 400 words.

Any ideas / comments? I will keep you updated on my progess.

Posted in Experiments | 5 Comments »

Don’t Post Into 5 Different Categories

I read a lot of blogs and some of them have a habit that I find very annoying – they have placed each of their posts into four or five different categories. Besides from looking like they are trying to inflate their article count (by one article counting again for each category it is placed in), there is another reason why I think this is bad practice. I believe that if you are doing this than either your posts are too broad and need to be refined or that your categories overlap and need to be refined.

Remember the importance of choosing a niche? Well, writing articles inside of that niche is the same way. You want your articles to be focused and specific, not broad and attempting to cover everything. If you have been writing an article that is a thousand words long and fits into multiple categories of your site, then consider breaking it down into a couple of smaller, more targeted posts that each have their own, distinct category.

Why? It keeps the user focused and forces you to keep yourself focused instead of rambling off about all different subjects in your post. So next time that you’re tempted to place a post into multiple different categories, go back, break it up, and make it laser-specific.

Posted in Usability & Accessibility | 7 Comments »

5 Tips On How To Promote A Proxy Site

Creating proxy sites seem to be pretty popular these days. Thousands of people use them every day and there is certainly a proliferation of free proxy scripts available to webmasters who are looking to start one. But due to this fact it is pretty difficult to become a big fish in the sea of proxies. So let’s get down to the point – how do you successfully promote a new proxy site? Here are five tips that will help you beat the competition.

1. List your site on proxy.org and other directories. Proxy.org is the biggest proxy directory online and you can receive a sizable amount of traffic if you have yours listed with them. Don’t ignore the smaller directories, however, because you can still receive good traffic from them.
2. Advertise on game arcade sites. A large chunk of proxy users, like students and company employees, use proxies to play games on arcade sites or browse social networking sites, sense those are usually the type of site that get blocked. By advertising on these sites you are getting your name out to your potential audience.
3. Get a dedicated server. Proxies take up a lot of bandwidth and system resources, so most shared hosting providers do not allow their clients to run proxies. You do not want to start getting traffic to your new site only to have your hosting provider shut you down because of a violation of their terms. Do it right from the start.
4. Advertise using a MySpace profile. I know, you’re thinking ugh. But it works, and traffic is traffic. Create a MySpace profile and get a bunch of friends. Have your site link displayed prominently on your profile page and occasionally send out messages to all of your friends telling them of your proxy. Just remember to abide by MySpace’s TOS. MySpace promotion is a shady area, especially if you start getting into friend adder robots and such.
5. Make it simple. People come to proxies for one reason – to surf other websites. So make it easy for them to do. Have your form that takes in the URL that the user wishes to visit displayed front and center. There is no need to have a lot of clutter. Honestly, all you probably need is a quick blurb about your proxy, an adsense block above your form and one below it, and that’s it.

Proxies tend to come and go fast. Take yours into the big league by building a solid, simple site hosted on a dedicated server and promoting the hell out of it. You may initially be wary about having to plunk down $99 to $140 a month on a dedicated server, but it won’t do you any good if after a month your hosting account gets shut down.

If you follow the tips above you will get lots of traffic, fast, so you’ll quickly need the power of a dedicated host. And with traffic comes revenue potential. Stay tuned for my next article which will show show you how to beat the notoriously low click through rates of proxy sites and make a profit!

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 22 Comments »

Forum Promotion 101: The Basics – Monetization

First of all, before I go into any depth about forum monetization, let me say that if your main objective is to make money online then a forum is not a good choice for you. Forums are notoriously hard to monetize. But, if you are just looking to make a little cash on the side to cover your hosting costs and maybe some promotion, then read on. That is not to say however that you can’t make good money off of forums – you can, you will just work ten times harder.

So, onto the good stuff – money! In this article I will be talking with you on how plan a future income stream from your forum. Since I have already talked about the importance of topic, audience, and design, which all tie into monetization, this article will not be as lengthy.

We can break forum monetization down into three parts:

1. Deciding what kind of offers our audience will be interested in
2. Finding appropriate companies to sell through
3. Implementing those offers

Basically we need to know what they want, who has it, and how to effectively sell it.

Appropriate Offers

The first step should be pretty easy since you have already pinpointed your audience and have designed your forum based around their interests. You want to show them ads that they will be interested in, based around what your forum topic is. Continuing my previous example, if your forum is about the XBox 360 game “Gears of War”, then showing your members ads to buy that and other video games is a good choice, while offers to “lower your credit card debt” most likely are not. This is probably common knowledge to you, but it’s an important part of forum monetization.

Finding Appropriate Advertising Companies

This part can be somewhat hard if you choose a really obscure niche. Otherwise, you can almost always find offers relevant to your topic. Google Adsense is a perfect example, although let it be known that generally Adsense has poor performance on forums. Amazon associates will always have relevant items for you to sell and you should be able to find at least a couple good affiliate offers at CJ, Azoogle, Clickbank, or Copeac. Look around, be creative.

Implementing Advertisements

This is probably the hardest part when it comes to monetizing your forum – how do you implement the ads so that they will get attention? You can’t just place a banner in the usual header position (try it if you want but you’ll see how blind your users are to it). You have to be creative and test things out. It may take you a while to find a offer/placement combination that has any success.

Some of the best placements I have seen are inserting the ad after the first post in a thread how it looks like another post between the first and second posts. If you are running vBulletin, check out this thread at vBulletin.org (you’ll have to validate your license first) or this thread at vbseo.com. If you are using phpBB, check out these two posts.

Also, some people have success with placing the ad at the very end of each thread, before the quick reply box. This way the user is not in the middle of reading the thread, like they would be in the above example. Another way is to implement ads into the category and thread listing view – this is a little more difficult but I would imagine that the results are better. For example, make it how the first thread title in each forum category is actually an affiliate link or an Adsense block.

One more idea is to find sponsors for each category. Each sponsor gets a small image and tagline right next to the category name on the forum homepage for $x a month. Check out the forums at Rapmusic.com to see what I am talking about (just the first example that came to mind ;)) Branching off of this idea, try selling sponsored sticky posts. If you are creative there are a hundred possible ways to monetize your forum.

Try searching for forums that are in your niche and see what kind of advertisements they are pushing and how they incorporate them. Remember, if you just stick a leaderboard at the top of your forum you won’t get but a few cents. Monetizing forums takes a lot more creativity and testing than it does to monetize a regular website. Also, don’t expect big results anytime soon – like I said above, if your main goal is to make money, then a forum is not for you. They are hard to profit from and take a lot of time and effort. But building one can be a very rewarding experience!

Posted in Forum Promotion | 48 Comments »

FeedBurner Feed Stats

A lot of people take the number that is displayed in your FeedBurner dashboard as the actual number of RSS subscribers you have. It tends to fluctuate a lot from a day to day basis, which is confusing – are people really adding and dropping your feed at that rate? After a little look around the help section, I have found some clarification.  It turns out that the number is only an approximation of your total subscribers calculated based on how many times your feed was requested in the last 24 hours.

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Now you know :)

Posted in Question / Answer | 3 Comments »

Namecheap October Coupon Code

The Namecheap coupon code for October is ROCKTOBER.  It works for new registrations and transfers and is valid until October 14th.  I am not sure how much discount you will receive, but now is the best time to start that site you’ve always been thinking about!

Posted in Industry Watch | 1 Comment »

Have Your Readers Work For You

Your readers are your biggest form of promotion. If you write great content your readers will unknowingly do your promotion for you – by spreading the word. Think of it this way: two people visit your site. They each like what they have read, so they each tell two other people to check it out. Each of those four other people tell two people. Each of those eight people tell two people. Each of those…etc.. Before you know it a ton of people know about your site, and all you had to do was write great content ;)

Consider this video:

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 7 Comments »