Paula and I have met and read about some very successful people who rely on paid advertising for an income.  And a very nice income many of them enjoy.

However, with Google Adsense making it easy for anyone with a blog or website to put ads on a page has this led to ad blindness by website searchers and consequently less click through rates?  

We have delved into the arena of Pay Per Click advertising but it is not a cheap exercise.  The bidding on keywords is quite competitive and the price on keywords has now become relatively expensive. It also takes a bit of work to get it working successfully as if you don’t do it right you could easily be up for $10 or more per click.

Nevertheless we have taken steps to give PPC a go since many have had a lot of success with it. We knew we needed help however so decided to purchase an ebook called Beating Adwords by well know internet successes Kyle and Carson from Wealthy Affiliate University.

In fact, we actually purchased this ebook some time back and although the ebook is excellent and we highly recommend it we never really got into giving PPC a really good go.

Now that we have a bit more time up our sleeves we are going to give it another shot.  We will update this blog with our progress.

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The other day I met a young mother who is home schooling her two young boys.  

While we were talking I introduced her to the world of blogging and making money from home.  She had never heard of blogging and she is not alone in this.  Hardly anyone I meet, including family on my recent trip to NZ, know about blogging and when you consider that there are around 98 million blogs on the internet and the number is growing daily, I find it incredible that people haven’t stumbled upon the term somewhere.

But then when I mentioned it to my husband he pointed out that he and our immediate family only know about blogging because I am so involved in it along with the affiliate marketing side of having an online work from home business.

Paula and I have been working with our various blogs for a little while now and realised the potential for making money from this medium in the early days. 

Of all the people that I have told about blogging, and I mention to anyone willing to listen, only one has taken up the challenge and that is my daughter Varinina.  My granddaughter Demelza started a blog but teenage angst has gotten in the way of her progression with it. 

Now we all know that it takes time to build up a blog that people want to read and keep coming back to, so it has to have something to offer that is interesting and/or informative.  The content needs to be well written and easy to read. 

If the blog is about a product such as our area rugs  or lingerie blogs then you are able to add Google and merchant ads that relate to your product and this will generate an income for you.  It won’t make you an overnight millionaire but as your online traffic increases you should be able to make a nice little income.

The next biggest single thing you need to do is get traffic into your site, so you will need to promote your blog to sites like www.spicypage.com, www.mybloglog.com, and any other number of blog directories and communities that can easily be found on the web by typing ‘blog directories’ or ‘blog communities’ into the search engine.

So we now know that:

• the content needs to be well written
• place Google ads on the page
• place merchant ads on the page
• actively promote your blog to get traffic

Blogging is not only a way to produce an income, it is fun especially when you are writing about things that interest you. Once you join a blog community and start to read other peoples blogs you will find some are personal diaries, some are humourous, some topic specific and most make great reading.  Sometimes you will come across something that clashes with your beliefs, simply move on, do not get involved in silly name calling or online arguments, remember to respect other peoples point of view, they have a right to their opinions as much as you do.

Squidoo is a website that allows anyone to add a page of content on any topic they like. It’s free to join and free to create pages and for those who have had no experience with websites or blogs then Squidoo is the quick and easy alternative.

Squidoo is made up of thousands of pages with each page called a lens. A user can create as many lenses as they like – in fact, Squidoo encourages it. Each lens is unique to a particular subject although it is not like Wikipedia where only one page can be created on any one topic. With Squidoo the same topic can be written about on multiple lenses by different users.

Each page of content, or lens as we will now refer to it as, is solely edited by the one user who is known as the lensmaster. It essentially becomes their lens to do with as they wish as long as it is within the boundaries of Squidoo’s terms of use of course.

Each lens is made up of modules, although to anyone looking from the outside in, the lens looks just look any other webpage on the internet. To a lensmaster however, modules are the building blocks of their lenses.

To create a lens a lensmaster needs to add modules to their page. Each module serves a different purpose. For instance, there are text modules, eBay modules, Amazon modules, list modules, Guestbook and Link modules, Youtube modules, just to name a few. The lensmaster can choose any of these modules from a huge list and when selected the module is added to their lens from which they can then edit to suit their needs.

Once a certain number of modules and content have been added to a lens it can be published for all the world to see.

How Can I Make Money with Squidoo?

Squidoo has internal money making methods which can be set up simply by adding a module. Once you add these modules you edit it them to add products.

Some of these modules include:

• Amazon module
• eBay module
• Cafepress module

You can also make money from royalties which are paid on a monthly basis by Squidoo. This won’t be much and I usually donate mine to the charities which are set up within Squidoo.

Another way to make money with Squidoo is by referring people to sign up. When they make $15 through their lens then you receive a $5 payment.

These methods will not make you a lot of money.  The big dollars actually come from adding affiliate links to your lens. This is what makes Squidoo so special as they allow you to add these types of links. You can use Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare or any other affiliate network to get product links for your lens.

We’ve put together a 7 Day eCourse that teaches you how to create a Squidoo lens from start to finish. It’s free so it’s not going to cost you anything and you can unsubscribe at any time. Sign up here…

Yahoo Answers is as the name suggests, a website created by Yahoo to enable people to ask a question and get a multitude of different answers from other people. The questions can range from ‘How do I convert 6 kilograms into pounds?’ to ’How can I make money online?’

Apart from the fact that Yahoo Answers is useful in that someone can get a question answered in super quick time (often within minutes) it is also useful for internet marketers to drive traffic to their blogs or websites. I actually use it to send traffic to one of my Squidoo lenses and also straight to a merchant using an affiliate link. Yes, that’s right, you heard correctly, you can in fact add affiliate links. Now you’re probably all going to rush on over there right now and starting answering questions but stay with me here as you will have more success if you go about it in the right way.

What Not To Do:

First of all, we are not here to spam Yahoo Answers. The site has been created to help people out by answering their questions so by just spamming them you are missing the whole point of the site. Only leave a response if it is valid and related to the question.

I see time and time again where someone has asked a question and the person answering either provides a totally unrelated response just to promote a product or they don’t provide a response at all and just include an affiliate link or a link to their website. This is not going to get them anywhere. You need to give a little in order to get.

You will also get a ‘thumbs down’ response from other users if you leave a response that is considered to be just spam. I learnt early in the piece after I had left a response that someone considered to be just a bit too close to being spammy and it got the thumbs down real quick, so keep this in mind.

Another common problem with Yahoo Answers is where spammers actually ask the questions themselves. They may do this for two reasons.

Firstly, they want to advertise their website in the question – now that’s okay if you have a legitimate question about your website but many just do it to get traffic to their site and nothing more.

Secondly, they may have two logins for Yahoo Answers so they ask the question under one login and then answer the question using their second login. This enables them to promote their product or website in the answer without having to wait for a relevant question to come up.

We want to avoid these techniques and focus on providing value. In the long run you will have much better success. So in order to use Yahoo Answers effectively and to drive traffic to your site you need to do the following:

Find relevant questions:

If you want to promote your website you need to find questions that relate to your website topic. There is no point answering a question about ‘how to train my dog’ if your website is about ‘making money online’. Use the category menu to find topics that relate. Of course if you have a valid answer and are also a dog lover then there is no reason why you can’t participate in answering a dog training question. I am just pointing out that if the purpose is to promote your money making website, then you want to reach the people that are interested in your topic.

Provide relevant answers:

Your answers don’t have to be long but they need to be relevant to the question asked. Don’t just provide an answer that focuses on your website or a product. Focus on the question being asked and answer it to the best of your ability.

Provide useful answers:

Ensure that the answer you provide is going to help the person asking the question. If it isn’t going to help them in any way then don’t bother answering. Go for quality rather than quantity. You will have much more success this way.

Add Your Link:

Yahoo allows you to add a link and you can even get away with adding an affiliate link but ensure it is relevant to the answer. The content that the person will see when they click on that link should be highly relevant to their question. In other words, it must help them in some way.

For instance, if someone asked a question about how to teach their dog to sit you could answer as follows:

I find that the best way to teach a dog to sit is by using food rewards. I taught my dog to sit in about 5 minutes using this technique. Basically you hold the dog treat in your right hand just above the dog’s nose and then move your hand back behind its head. Your dog will automatically sit when you do this right.I have created a video on my website that demonstrates how this works if it will help. The link is here:- http://www.a1-videodogtraining.com

(Note: this link is just one I made up to give you and idea on how to write a response).

Remember that your answer will not only be read by the person asking the question but potentially by hundreds of other readers as well. Yahoo Answers ranks well in Google so just one answer can bring you quite a bit of traffic over a period of time. So make it a relevant useful answer and you are more likely to get people clicking through to your website.

When one of our blogs started out as a Blogger blog, we had a page rank of 3.  Over time the blog evolved and we bought a domain name for it because we thought it more appropriately fitted the direction. 

Paula followed Googles instructions in putting in the redirect to the new domain. We thought misguidedly that the PR would transfer over to the new domain name.  Unfortunately that didn’t happen and we lost our page rank of 3.

So the question here is, did Google penalize our site for duplicate content since we had both the blogspot and the new domain name running concurrently? If so then Google really needs to do something about it since they have so kindly provided the option for blogspot owners to use their own domain name. At the very least Google should advise users on what they should do to reduce the duplicate content issue.

Since the duplicate content issue was a concern we transferred the blog to WordPress and trashed the old Blogspot blog.

Can you honestly say that your blog provides value?

In other words, are you regularly providing information to your readers that improves their life, their reading pleasure or business in some way or is it just full of ads with very little useful content? For anyone who has a blog it is sometimes useful to sit back, read it through and see if it is actually worth the paper it’s printed on or in this case the computer screen it’s displayed on. Even a personal blog needs care and attention if it is to hold the readers attention.

So how do you know if you have a blog that provides value?

Do you regularly add new content?

How many times a week do you add new content? If you want to maintain regular readers then you need to post on a regular basis. When you post infrequently your readers soon realize that they are not going to find anything new and it won’t be long before they decide not to return, especially as there are so many other interesting and informative blogs available. Generally you need to post at least three or four times a week to add variety. Your readers need to see that you care enough about them to provide something of value and interest on a regular basis.

Do you spend time researching your content or do you just throw something together?

A good blog post is one that you have given some consideration and thought to the content and has taken a little bit of time to write up. Of course, that’s not always the case as sometimes things just flow off the top of your head and you can write a darn good post in a very short time, but in general a quality post is one that has taken some time and research to develop. We learnt long ago that it is pointless putting up content just for the sake of it. You are better off adding 4 really good quality posts a week than 7 posts of questionable quality content just because you want to get a post up every day.

Is your content unique?

Do your write up your own content or is it just pages of content picked up from article directories?
Google dislikes duplicate content so this is a big no-no if you want to win with Google. This isn’t to say that you can’t use someone elses article if you they have something good to say, just as long as you give them the credit for the article and you don’t do this too often. Your blog should really reflect your views and personality so you should be writing your own articles as often as possible.

This applies also if you are just copying and pasting from someone else’s blog. Apart from the fact that it is plagiarism and won’t make you many friends, your readers will pick up on this real quick. Remember that many readers will read multiple blogs and if they see the same article on your blog – even if it has been reworded slightly they will be turned off real quick. That’s not to say that you can’t write about the same subject that some other blogger has recently blogged about, just make it your own unique article.

Do you have more ads on your page than content?

A blog that is just one big ad farm is very unappealing and will turn away visitors real quick. I know that when I come across a blog full of ads I simply hit the back button. Yes it is true that some of the top bloggers have a multitude of ads on their blogs but they can get away with it as their quality content means readers are willing to put up with the ads. These top bloggers also have the readership numbers so they don’t really have to worry.

If you are in the process of trying to build up your readership then you don’t want to turn readers away so make your ads unobtrusive, or better yet don’t have any at all for at least the first few months and then introduce them slowly over time.

Do you have a professional looking blog?

You don’t need to buy expensive templates to make your blog look professional. If you are using WordPress or Blogger then there are a multitude of free templates that look as good as any paid template. Choose a basic template that you can easily change and add your own header, to make it distinctly your own. Stick with a template that has a white background for your blog posts. This makes it easier to add an image that will blend with the background and studies have shown that black text on white is just a lot easier to read.

Du u yuse a spelcheka?

This is such a simple thing but it is so often missed. A spelling error here and there happens to the best of us but there is no excuse for consistent errors when we can easily run any article through a spellchecker. It does reflect poorly on your blog when every second word is yet another spelling error. A lot of people can be turned off by this and you can lose the opportunity of a repeat visitor. After all it shows that you don’t really care about your content if you can’t take the time to make sure everything is spelt correctly so why should your visitors care to read poorly written content.