Can you make money with Articles?

Simple answer, yes!

 

Write Articles & Earn

The good way to make money is by using your knowledge and write articles for blogs and websites that deals to finance; It could be the best and profitable way to make money online without any of the financial investment.
You don’t need to be a professional writer with special and unique skills; you can always get some research from the internet where you can find great articles related to business and finance for you to acquire and improve your knowledge about the subject. All of your articles will be paid well by financial internet sites because their buyers are eager to accumulate a lot of data from the internet site. Remember information is best selling product on the internet, These financial web sites need your articles on various topics such as insurance, retirement planning, saving and family finances etc at some  specific period of each year.

Article writing is not only the best way to make money it is also is the best way to improve your knowledge particularly in the field of finance. Some of the financial web sites also do contests for authors to publish good articles that could teach business and finance, money, insurance, and investments etc. The important thing you have to consider is to offer quality articles so that you make money, as you will also get good compliments.

 

Another great and profitable way is to earn money by flipping real estate (websites). You’ll be able to get more profit provided you have to do the repairing and improvement work by yourself in case you need to do it before selling. If you choose to take care of the project and depend on others to do the work your profit margin obviously will be very small.

You should be very careful, if you have decided to do the work yourself because any of the mis-estimation of judgment of the value of the property or any unexpected expenses could put you under some loss.

The best and profitable way which I like to make more money in flipping real estate is to sell it after some small repair and improvements, spruce up the site, make it look good.

 

Though you can easily find a lot of best and profitable ways of making money, it is advisable that not to believe much in getting rich by faster ways. Whatever you bring in these days is not sufficient to meet both ends. There are so many best ways available for you to make extra income so that you need not solely dependent on your main income. Your hobbies can earn money for you. 

Get Targeted Traffic to Your Blog

 

1- Submit your Blog to Blog lists and blog directories.

List of Free Blog Directories:

http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/

http://www.bloghop.com

http://www.2rss.com

http://www.bloghq.com

http://www.truthlaidbear.com

http://www.blogwise.com

http://www.globeofblogs.com

http://www.popdex.com

http://www.iblogbusiness.com

http://www.octora.com

http://www.gnoos.com.au/

http://www.blogmopolis.com

http://www.blog-watch.com

http://www.all-blogs.net

http://www.blogs.botw.org/

http://www.flookie.net

http://www.blogion.com

http://www.blog-search.com

http://www.blogcatalog.com

http://www.blogsearchengine.com

http://www.blogflux.com/add.php

There are many other free blog directories, Just Google it

 

2- Submit your blog to web directories.

Here is a list of free web directories

http://www.submitemnow.com/web-directories.htm

where I recommend to submit your blog.Its a best list of free web directories available on internet.

 

3- Bookmark it on top 5 Bookmarking Sites.

Bookmarking Site is a great and best way to get quality traffic now a days and not to forget it is one easiest method as well.Dont forget to bookmark your site on Digg.com , Del.icio.us , StumbleUpon.com , Propeller.com and Google,Not only bookmark your site but also make lots of friends and once they all bookmark it you will get big numbers of traffic every day by almost no work at all.This method will also increase your page rank in google and all other search engines. but try to write titles which people search on Google and other search engines .

 

4- Use Big Icon of RSS feeds,that way more people will subscribe to your feeds.

Go to your RSS feeder and download one big RSS logo and place it on your blog on your side bar or at any place where user can clearly see it.

 

5- Submit your RSS Feeds to RSS sites.

Its the easiest Back link formula may be on earth,Submit your RSS feeds to all the directories .Few good RSS directories are rss-network.com, rssfeeds.com, feedplex.com, completerss.com.rss-locator.com, feedster.com there are many other directories as well just go to google.com and search ‘ RSS directories ‘

Some RSS directory lists.

http://www.newsniche.com/rss-directories-and-submission.php

http://www.rss-tools.com/rss-directories.htm

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

http://www.dotsauce.com/2007/06/06/55-active-rss-directories-to-help-promote-your-feeds/

How to promote your blog by almost no work

1. Blog Submissions and RSS Submissions

There are so many blog directories and blog search engines where you can easily submit your blogs. A large list of sites allowing blog submission and RSS feed submissions you can found at  http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm.

Likewise, there are many RSS feed directories and search engines like http://www.rss-network.com . – Be sure to submit your URL of your RSS feeds to the RSS search engines listed on RSS specifications website.

If you want your blog automated and RSS submissions use RSS Submit Software http://www.dummysoftware.com.

Like every website, it is crucial to choose the right category for your blog. Apply a clean-cut title that contain descriptive details but not very long and Search engine friendly. The Blog description should further expand on the aim and general theme of the blog. Incorporate important key-words related to the blogs theme in both the title and description. This will help you bring in big number of targeted traffic which genuinely are interested in contents of your blog.

 

2- Posting to Forums

Forums as well often have those sections in which you post announcements. If the application program is a niche product, better search for topic-specific forums in addition to general software announced forums. The best site I know and I often use is www.big-boards.com .They have huge list of almost every forum on internet.you can find your category forum and you can also see how many registered users are on there forum and how much traffic you will be getting from them. Make sure to post announcements in marked ‘announce forum’.

 

3- Write a good press release announcing your great blog to World.

Keep it real and submit release to the free press release directories. This will easily provide your blog incoming links to the new blog & get it started on its way to popularity. There are somany sites that allow press release posting free of cost. The releases on those sites are occasionally picked up by publishing sites which are looking for information or filler content. more side-benefits to these listings are increased link popularity, which helps you in search engine ranking. A big list of the sites that allow press release posting can be found  at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/pressreleases.html

 

4-Keep Bookmarking every blog and blog posts.

Bookmark your blog on Digg.com, Del.icio.us and Stumble Upon and See traffic coming in. not only bookmark your blog and posts but also make as many mutual friends as you can, once they bookmark it you will start getting better rank in google and other search engines.

5 “tricks of the trade” to increase your adsense income

1- Everyone hates low paid ads, See how to Filter all of them easily.

Free service from Adsblacklist.com is the answer which worth hundreds of Dollars. Go to AdsBlacklist.com, Sign up for your account then add your website to the list for which you need to filter all the low paid ads. Now when you received that list just copy it go to your adsense admin/filter ads and paste that list which you copied from AdsBlacklist.com. There are lots of other sites as well like adsblacklist but I like this one most.

 

2- Best Adsense Positions for your Blog to increase your CTR

People always ask me that how they can increase their CTR rate to boost their adsense income, It’s easy to increase your CTR no matter which type of blog you use. Try to use these Adsense Locations from now.

• Place Adsense Ads at Start of every post:

Wrap Text around your ads and place it in right front of your Articles. Don’t forget that your Adsense Links and URL color match your content text.

• Right After your post ends:

Place 468 x 60 banner after every posts ending. Dont place banner after comments or bookmarks button. If you want to increase CTR place it right where your article or post ends.

 

3- Always Avoid Image ads ( because they built to be ignored )

Always pick text ads and don’t go for image Ads until you don’t know which type of image ads will show up and you are sure that those ads are eye catchy and increase your CTR. Why did I said image ads are built to be ignored  because text ads work best most of the times.

 

4- Exploit Titles, Descriptions, meta keywords and meta description to improve your earnings.

Pick High Paying keywords and place it under Titles, Descriptions, meta keywords and meta description of your site. But don’t remove your Page rank keywords and use ‘ | ‘ sign to place High Paying Keywords. Now every time when site user will open your page he see high paying keywords in your site most of the time because when adsense start search which ads to show in your site it goes to Titles, Descriptions and meta keywords.

 

5- Your Ad Colors and Site

Try to use same colours in your site to match ads with your site themes and content to increase CTR. 

Make more with Adsense – not few cents, See how can you make thousands of dollars from adsense

I know lots of folks saying only about their low adsense profit, thats why I thought I should share few tips which I have discovered in last few years of earning money with adsense.

I will only share white hat techniques with your so feel safe to try this and you are not gonna banned to do this because its all white hat. Your results could be different from the results of mine, these tips worked for me I hope it works well for you as well.

 

1. Remove all the link units from your web pages or blogs, It is a good way to increase your adsense income. Why because Visitors have to click twice before you make some green. I tried link units on my blog once but it turned out to be not very good and I can clearly see some decline in my adsense earnings and CTR .So I decided to remove it.
2. Never try to hide your adsense Ads. Making ad blend with the rest of your website or blog don’t mean trying to hide it as part of your good content. Stick a large 336 x 280 Ad Block right under your H1 heading and see your percentage of CTR going up.
3. Clean up your web pages and blogs now. If you have 3 adsense blocks, remove all and the big one at the top. If you are displaying the maximum number of adsense blocks, link units, and search box on your web page you are pretty much guaranteed to make your visitor saying your page and site as spam and they will click away.  In very simple words, the more ads will be available to click on, the more likely your visitor will click on a cheap paid ad.  If you have lots of flashing banners and some other kind of crap, get rid of it now. People will just click away, they all dont convert to a commission, and never come back. If you are making good affiliate commissions, get rid of adsense and only show affiliate links on your site.
4. Try to Avoid 468 x 60 Ad banner sizes,better use 336 x 280.  Instead of 468 x 60 use rectangular 336 x 280.Using 336 x 280 is 10 times greater than 468 x 60.Because people are ad blind to this one and viewer judge it by far that it’s an ad.

Getting Keyword Density right

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. An unfront word of caution, keywords shouldn’t be over used, don’t overdo it, they should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

 

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected and you’ll end up in the Google sin bin as an artificial site or spam site.

 

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

 

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is derived by dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here is an example, I have 5 keywords divided by total number of works (100) = .05. No turn it into a percentage by multiplying the previous result by 100, in our example 0.05 x 100 = 5%

 

The accepted SEO norm for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you try to never exceed it.

 

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service.

 

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Open Office or Microsoft Word.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

 

Remember – The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

How to select a web host for your site

Web Hosting

Once you have your web site finished and you have selected and purchased a great domain name, you need to start thinking about what sort of Hosting Package will best suit your business needs. There are all sorts of things to think about; web space, data transfer, applications (PHP and MySQL), web statistics, mail boxes, the list goes on. But what are all these concepts and how do you work it all out so you can find out if a hosting provider supplies your requirements.

Web Space

This relates to the amount of disk storage space in megabytes (MB) that the hosting provider allocates for your web site / storing your e-mail and web log files on their server.

Data Transfer (Bandwidth)

This is the amount of traffic your web site is allowed to receive per month. Discuss with your hosting provider will your requirements and they should then advise you which package would best suit your needs.

Mail Boxes

A mail box captures and stores all e-mails you receive.  These in turn can be retrieved by traditional clients such as Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird. The hosting provider should provide all details required to setup your mail client.  This is done by attaching your e-mail address to the mail server. Remember, you may require a number of mail boxes, Ie. One for each staff member in your business. 

SSL – secure server access

This facility allows provides the ability to encrypt data between you and your customers, allowing you to accept data securely on your website, like credit card transactions, without fear of someone else getting hold of it.

MySQL

MySQL is a database server that stores information used in the construction or operation of your web site. Not all hosting packages provide this facility. Your wed site designer should provide requirements if this is needed, then check with your chosen provider for details on setup.

Web Statistics

These packages allow you to check how many visitors your website receives, what browsers they are using, the referring website and a whole host of other information. It’s a worth while addition to your website. Some hosting providers offer this feature for free. Check with them for information.

There are lots of other features that come with web hosting packages and this information can usually be found on the provider’s website.

Control Panel

For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. If the site is for any sort of business, this is an absolute must.

 

Customer support

Web site hosting service isn’t just all these technical things. Based on personal experience, even a top-notch service with all the bells and whistles is worthless without customer support. If you own a business website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.

Availability guarantee and service monitoring

Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; but having a business website go down can be a serious matter – lots customers, potential revenue etc. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today’s companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:

1. You should check if there is an availability guarantee offered. A true customer service focused provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won’t put much effort into the service.

2. I definitely wouldn’t go with a company claiming 100% availability, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don’t perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.

Acceptable use policy

Web hosts may have 200-300 or more different clients (and more actual web sites) per server; there is no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each hosted web site has different resource usage. There always is a possibility that a few of those customers host illegal content. There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting in all websites going down. I’m sure you don’t want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same server together with illegal material and software sites, so check host’s acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes care of what’s hosted on their servers.

Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server’s IP address will be blacklisted and you’ll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails. Use the “Spam database lookup” feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check if a web hosting company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so having one or two red records isn’t that bad; but, if there are more, it may become a problem later on.

 

Differences between Free or Paid Hosting Providers

Some hosting providers offer free hosting packages but there are usually terms and conditions attached to them. They could include the following:

Free

1. The URL or website address could show signs of free hosting like www.freewebhosting.myhost.co.uk. These sorts of URL’s are not very professional and you loose your company image and identity.

2. Web space and Data transfer are both usually low. Your website could be taken offline until the following month if bandwidth is exceeded or you could be charged for any bandwidth used over your allowance. Always read the terms and conditions.

3. Hosting providers offering free packages usually place banner or pop up advertising on your website. This can be very confusing and annoying you and your customers and drive them away from your site.

4. Advanced features such as PHP, MySQL databases, sub domains, SSL secure server access are usually not available when using free website hosting.

Paid

1. You can use your own domain name (URL) with the hosting package. You can also usually purchase them direct from the provider.

2. You can usually get 24/7 support, see my comments below.

3. Server availability or uptime is the amount of time the web hosting servers are online. Sometimes maintenance work can mean their servers are offline for a short while.  See my comments below.

4. You can choose a package that supplies the correct amount of web space and data transfer.

5. Lots of advanced features are usually offers. Check with the provider.

6. A control panel is usually offered so that you are in control of managing your hosting package.

Top 10 Website Gotchas – Guaranteed to Send Your Customers Elsewhere

When you build your web site you need to have a plan what the target audience is, where is the site going to evolve to, what are the steps involved. The reason for this is if you do not have a plan you will likely make mistakes, overlook including information, and overall have an un-organized and not a well thought out site. You might read the site and completely understand the layout and the content, but remember that your web site visitors did not design the site and need a little more direction. Read the following 10 website gotchas that are common and will make your visitors head to another site quickly.

Gotcha #1 Contact Information

You need to provide your contact information, phone numbers (if the site is attached to a physical business), e-mail addresses, and physical address. The reason for this is if a potential customer wants to contact you for whatever reason they can!

Gotcha #2 Poor Structured

Make sure your website is well structured and that all links are obvious. You should even use sub-headings to make it even more clear where content is on the site. You don’t want to have to make people search.

Gotcha #3 Checkout

Make the checkout process straightforward and easy. Too many times people get to the checkout and it is tricky, asks for a lot of pointless information, and generally takes longer than the potential purchaser wants to spend buying the product. As a result, the customer (think of the shopping trolley left in the aisle!) leaves your site to buy the product or service elsewhere. Don’t let this happen to you; make your checkout fast and easy!

Gotcha #4 Typos

If your website has typographical errors, it will be noticed by your visitors. Many people consider this a sign of a greenhorn, not a professional who is in business trying to make a living. If your website is full of typos, people are not going to believe that you take your site seriously and as a result they won’t either.

Gotcha #5 Hidden Content

Do not hide content. You as a webmaster might not think the content is hidden, but if it is easy to find or visible it might as well be hidden. Make all information obvious and easy to find.

Gotcha #6 Personal Information

Do not ask for personal information, and if you do explain why and make it optional (unless required for delivery etc.). Many times customers will want to buy your product and get to the checkout page only to have to answer lots of personal questions that don’t relate to the product or service nor the actual sale. This will send people to other less inquisitive pages.

Gotcha #7 Too Many Forms

Keep it simple (KISS – Keep it simple stupid!). If you are asking for memberships, checkouts, or anything that requires information, do not use a lot of forms. Figure out what questions you really need to ask and keep it short and sweet.  Also, only ask the question once, don’t keep re-asking for previously captured information.

Gotcha #8 Customer Focus (You, not We)

Focus on your customers, their needs and desires, and what you can do for them. Your customer is not going to your site to find out about you, but what product or service you have for them. Remember this and if you have to put a web history about yourself (Vanity!), then do so in a special section where people can opt to read it.

Gotcha #9 Guide the customers decision making process

Potential customers might not know what they want when they go to your web site, sounds like my shopping experiences. So, guide them, make suggestions about products, and provide backgrounds and uses for different products.

Gotcha #10 Site Theme

Make sure the focus of your site is obvious and clear throughout the site.

Sometimes Paying for Your Traffic can be a Smart Move

There are so many success stories you will hear about businesses making it good in the internet. The disconcerting thing is, there are maybe a tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories conflicting to these success stories. Many people have unsuccessfully launched a business enterprise that is internet based but only a handful of those succeed.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the enthusiasm to succeed and the willpower to learn and the eagerness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

 

The absolute basics

Like Neo, traffic is “The One”. Without traffic, all your efforts would just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people would be able to sell your products to.

But like any business regardless of being virtual or physical, not everyone that goes into your store (hits your site) will buy, but the greater of number potentials that do come in to surf your merchandise, the greater number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

So how do you get traffic, traffic large enough that could make a small proportion of eventual buyers enough to make a good income? Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and a meager ten to fifteen percent actually buys anything, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories from web site owners get their traffic from paying others. Yes, that’s right; you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people that know that your site exists; the more potential customers would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, these methods take time to generate the same high volume as those methods that are getting paid. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

 

The Value of Searches

Searching is the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet, so much so, “I’ll Google It” has become part of our normal speech. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and straightforward to use. With this popularity, they lots more visitors and clicks that they are the most other sites that people go to. It is easy to comprehend why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide a targeted selection of links to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pops up in early in the ranks of the search results page, you get a good opportunity that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheap and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will always be on the top ranks, even in keywords your content is not rich with.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like a poor idea, but the payoffs would tell a different tale. When you pay for your traffic, you are assured of a dependable traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day (assuming you have your customer conversion strategy right!).

 

Paying for your Traffic

The usual method is you will be charged with the number of click throughs a link on your ads, this is called pay per click, PPC. For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is vital that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment which is targeted at your customer base.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an notable boost in traffic which will also result to enhance your potential sales. Paying for your traffic can be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer if you implement it correctly with other strategies from this site. 

The Importance of a Good Site Design

Your web site is the hub of your on-line business; it is the virtual depiction of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are conducting business on-line, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an off-line company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers (online presence – look and feel). This is where a good web site design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an off-line company. Would you allow your sales staff to be dressed in scruffy or informal clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear clothes suitable for their role, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality and services. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your web site. If your web site is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute knock up job, you are literally screaming to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

However, if you have a entirely professional looking web site layout, you are giving your visitors the view that you have given thorough attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business. 

You should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to sales letters to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit is important. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business; your customers continuously refer to them. Once again, think of the “sales staff dressed shabbily” analogy, and you will get my point.