The primary way to earn from blogs is by putting up advertisements from different companies ranging from makeup to lawn mowers and tons of other things in between. Naturally, if no one visits your blog, no one will click the ads and you won’t earn any money.

But many usability studies report that even if your blog gets loads and loads of traffic from every corner of the world, only a small percentage will click your ads. This means that even the most popular bloggers do not make as much money as most people think, because their income is not stable and their blog conversion rate is not that high to warrant a sustainable salary.

More clicks mean more money, so here are 2 simple ways to increase your conversion rate:

1. Proper ad placement
Most bloggers make the mistake of separating their content from their advertisements. The blog posts are usually placed in one column while the ads are stuck in the side bar. If you want to increase your conversion, use template hooks and pull quotes.

You can place link ads in your content as well to encourage people to click them out of curiosity while reading your post. Readers won’t really spend extra effort to scan your side bar to click ads, but they will be more interested in your ads if you weave them into your blog posts creatively. Just make sure that they are not obtrusive enough to distract your readers while reading your post.

2. About me
The “About me” section of your blog can be used to increase conversion. Most bloggers use it to introduce themselves to the general public, thinking that this will help get a few more clicks from visitors; most online readers will tell you that they are not interested in you as a person, as much as what you say as a blogger. They would just dive straight to your blog posts if they want to know anything about you.

Thus, using your author box in another, more profitable way will be to your best interests. You can call your visitors to action; make them click a certain ad link. You can also use your blog’s multiple authors feature (if it has one) to change the message of your author box, each one with a different link. This way, you can see what works and what doesn’t without losing valuable time.

Setting up a blog is very easy, but being a blogger, especially an earning blogger, is not. Take these tips to heart to help increase your earnings.

If your introductory email is poorly conceptualized and written, then there is a very high possibility that people will not be encouraged to do business with you.

This is why you need to exert extra effort in creating an introductory email to set you on the right track with potential customers, instead of pushing them away. First things first: the subject of your email should clearly state your purpose and what company you’re from. Doing this, it becomes immediately clear who the email is from and what it is for.

If possible, add the first name of your subscriber in your message, since this can certainly make him or her feel like you’ve spent time writing your email specifically for him or her. From the very beginning, add that personal touch in cultivating customer relations.

Some companies offer thank-you gifts to encourage customers to subscribe. They make the offer visible in the website so as to increase the number of registrations. If you’ve done this, make sure to provide the download link of your freebie in your email message. Potential customers love this because freebies give them a taste of your generosity as a company. They also love special treatment that they don’t always get in other places.

Your introductory email should also contain helpful links about your goods and services, and if possible, feedback from other people. Also, do not forget to include contact details so that the customer will feel that you are easily reachable and that they will be attended to immediately.

Provide subscribe and unsubscribe links. You might think that this defeats the purpose of your email marketing campaign, but bear in mind that subscribers want to feel that they have control over what they receive in their inboxes. It makes them feel secure and comfortable, and it is wise not to deny them these things.

Invite your subscribers to invite other people! This is what they call viral marketing, and it definitely is free. Your subscribers might know of friends or family members who also want to hear about your product.

The closing part of your email must contain a warm goodbye and the hope of dealing with the customer again in the near future. Include your name, signature, and company logo for a more professional feel.

Finally, your introductory email should not be too pushy. That is, it shouldn’t sound too desperate. If in your first email you already sound like you don’t care about your recipients’ needs at all, then they would not feel the need to buy from you.

The trick is to come up with something that is both striking and relevant to get your market talking about your campaign.

However, coming up with something at random could end up irritating your base market. Here are 5 tips to help you foster mutually beneficial relationships with your niche market.

1. Invest in an e-book with private label rights
The best e-book choice would be something that is related to your product and is relevant to your niche. Use your site to announce the availability of the e-book, which is free for anyone to download. You can also spread the word through your mailing list.

It is important to make sure that your e-book’s focus is similar to the interests or concerns of your niche so that they can see the value of downloading it and spreading it to others in their circle.

2. Write your own e-book
If none of the readily available e-books matches the needs and wants of your niche market, then why not just write one yourself? It doesn’t have to be hundreds of pages long. After all, you’re giving it away for free. An e-book you write yourself would definitely exude a personal touch that your market will appreciate. Your effort tells them that you care about them and that addressing their needs is of utmost importance to you.

If you can, it will be good for your business to have a free e-book available every month. Your market will have something to look forward to and it would give them a reason to keep visiting your website. Moreover, you’ll attract the attention of prospects who have heard about your useful and free e-books.

3. Give quality incentives for quality referrals
When you figure out whom you want to talk to and how to get them to listen, you’re on the right track. The next challenge is to figure out how to grow your existing consumer base.

Executing a rewards plan is a good idea; however, it is ideal to make your promo mutually beneficial. Make a short write-up about your referral-rewards program. Make sure to include the type of person you want them to refer, or a particular detail that matches the profile of your target market. You can give away e-books or coupons as prizes for every referral made.

4. Come up with a game
Online games are very interactive and if executed well, people could start talking about it and get others interested. Online games could be simple. The best games are those that can incorporate your product benefits and demonstrate how helpful your brand can be.

You can also use your game to collect customer or prospect details that you can add to your database so you can contact these people for future promotions that you may have.

5. Give consistent yet varied updates
If you run an email list, make sure you provide updates about your product and your website. Make sure to write about things that your niche will find useful. Skillfully incorporate your brand. Make sure that the recipients of your mailing list can forward your emails to multiple recipients so that they can get their peers interested in what you have to offer.

With every crisis comes an opportunity. When consumers become extra-careful with their purchasing decisions, use this time to shine. Make sure that the right people know that your brand is there, ready to serve and help them in their time of need. Below are tips on how to prepare your online business against recession.

1. Focus your campaign on maintaining customer relations
It is almost always more cost-effective to invest in keeping existing customers happy than to have to look for new customers all the time. The fact that you’re business is online already creates numerous opportunities to keep in touch with your best customers. Keep in mind the Pareto Principle—80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. These 20% make up your loyal customer base.

2. Always be in the know regarding shifts in market behavior
The lifeline of your online business is keywords. People won’t find you if they don’t know that you’re there in the first place. Successfully owning niche keywords depends on how well you know your market and how quick you are to detect changes in their behaviour and personalities. Apply the insights you have gathered to beef up website content and convert ad clicks into sales.

3. Make a promise and consistently deliver more than you promised
Knowing your strengths will allow you to determine what value you can offer your consumers, and what differentiates you from your competitors. Accepting your weaknesses will save you from the pitfalls of overpromising. However, mistakes on your end are inevitable. You have to know how to manage your mistake. Use mistakes as opportunities to further show your customers how well you can take care of them.

4. Use every opportunity to satisfy customers
Your opportunity to shine begins as soon as buyers think about you and the opportunity to please them never ends. Guide customers through every step of their decision-making process. Study your market and determine which landing page is most suitable. Where do you place your hotline? How often should you mention the warranties that come with purchases? The goal is to make customers feel smart and confident about their purchase. Follow through with after-sales service, and your customers will come back for more.

5. Lock on your target market
Build your entire online campaign around your target market. Knowing how they behave towards your product and category will save you money and increase your ROI. Localizing ads and limiting placements to select geographical areas can help you monitor the returns per ad and track which areas need more support. Timing the placements of your ads will also minimize cost and save you from paying for clicks that are nowhere near conversion.

6. Make sure your ads are seen only by those who matter
Raking in a staggering number of visits does not translate to the same number in actual purchases. Put your money where it can be recovered twice over. Figure out where and when your niche is on a buying mode and invest in that window

You have to give people more value with your website content. It is okay to mention your brand. After all, it is your website. However, it is ideal to write beyond the attributes of your product, and focus more on the consumers. You can try starting off your articles with a problem that is common to your target market; end it with a suggestion on how your brand could be of help. Most likely, your website will be seen as a helpful website (instead of just a sales pitch) and your brand as something relevant (instead of just another product).

2. Set higher standards for copywriting
Good writing is not tantamount to technical or “expert” terms, jargon, or ostentatious language. Effective writing means that the material is received by the correct audience and understood as it was intended to be.

In your case, the audience is your target market. The best way to make sure you will be understood is to get to know your market as best as you can. Make use of scenarios they’re comfortable with. Employ their humor. Use examples they can relate to. If you must refer to current events, make sure the issue is something they already care about. All these will make them feel good about your brand allowing you to nurture a mutually beneficial relationship.

3. Stock up on consumer insight
As mentioned, good copywriting requires you to know the personality of your market. This in itself is already information about how your consumers think. Another aspect of interest is how your market behaves towards other players in your category.

Get to know what the market thinks about your competitors and how much affinity there is between the market and the other brands. This information will give you an idea how the market receives your brand compared with others in your category.

Find ways to improve on weak relationship points and continue building on the strong relationship points that you already have. Make sure you consistently keep track of your market’s behavior as trends could vary periodically.

4. Build links within and outside your site
Building links within your site allows you to guide visitors towards pages that you think are more important. It could be the page that has your online catalogue or the troubleshooting page. Figure out which page your market will most appreciate and lead them there. However, don’t lose focus on creating information-rich articles because these are what hot leads will come back for.

The goal of building links outside your website is for you to build and maintain your credibility. The nice things that other sites or experts say about you will mean more to undecided prospects. Be careful on which sites you want to be affiliated with; make sure they don’t have a bad reputation.

5. Update content regularly
Take care of your best customers by giving them a reason to come back and visit your website. Continue giving them articles that they find helpful. Updating your website is also a good way to attract new prospects.

Updating tells people that you know your business and that you continue to make your product relevant to them.

WordPress.org
WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPL) allowing anyone to use it for anything, free of charge. The only investment you need is time and some basic system requirements to make sure that the software works after installing.

WordPress.com
WordPress is not exclusive to technically advanced people. The creation of WordPress.com allows anyone with Internet access to publish a WordPress software-based blog in no time, also for free. However, there are some functional limitations to a WordPress.com blog.

With enough knowledge, you can add WordPress to your online marketing mix. Below are 5 reasons why WordPress is cool enough to stay online for a long time.

1. Accessibility
The low-barrier entry that comes with WordPress is a delight for any online user. Usually, open source software is only made accessible to developers who are working on the software or beta testers who look for bugs. In this case, WordPress software and blog may be used and viewed by the public.

2. May be accessed by search engines
Online marketing solutions providers often have problems dealing with a client’s Content Management System (CMS). Unlike WordPress, most CMSs used by commercial websites make it difficult for search engines to crawl through the pages, rendering SEO efforts useless.

3. Supports plug and play
The WordPress structure welcomes customizations. And because WordPress is all about making online publishing easy for everyone, it accommodates plugins that are easy to install, maintain, and use. Developers and enthusiasts all over the world can contribute their plugins. WordPress users have a comprehensive menu of customizations to choose from, ranging from improving SEO techniques to embedding media files.

4. Themes galore
WordPress has supported a wide array of themes since version 1.5. Random people who are capable of web design have contributed to the growing number of templates for the consumption of anyone who uses WordPress.

Besides a delightful selection of professional and creative themes, WordPress assures that themes are detached from all content. Changing themes won’t put your content at risk of being deleted.

5. Unity in diversity
The structure with which WordPress is created makes it sustainable. There are 3 independent pocket organisations responsible for keeping WordPress running:

• WordPress engine
Comparable to the nervous system in human beings, the WordPress engine embodies the Open Source project per se. Driven by the simple mission of creating the best software, individuals who compose the WordPress engine create the code by which WordPress functions.

• WordPress Themes
Independent individuals contribute to the thousands of themes available for anyone to use. These people probably know nothing of the codes. This is why you can do as you please with the templates without jeopardising your data published through WordPress.

• WordPress Plugins
Other independent developers interested in adding customizable functions contribute to the huge number of plugins for WordPress. These people have no ties with WordPress engine or WordPress themes, such that failure to update your plugin won’t result to data loss.

This 3-branch structure allows WordPress to transcend mandates on upgrades that could hold your entire online publication hostage. An entire community pitches in to make WordPress better for everyone.

The easiest way to go about multiple linking is to use the search engines and key in the niche keywords you’d like to be associated with. This will immediately give you the top sites that belong to the same category as your website. However, it is still recommended that you check out the top 3 search engine results and determine whether or not they are talking to the same people whom you want to visit your website.

Controversial sites, although high-ranking, are always attached to risks. Like a double-edged sword, controversial sites could work for or against you. It would be ideal to understand what issues are making these sites controversial and assess whether or not associations with these sites will yield benefits.

2. Establish your credibility
Write reviews related to your field of expertise and include links to your own site. Submit your articles to websites or blogs that you’d like to be associated with. Build up your relationships with specific websites based on information sharing.

It is important to note that niche readers can tell whether contributed articles are fabricated or not. Do not write a review about something you haven’t tried yourself for the sake of having something posted online. Doing so could give a bad reputation to the website you want to link to, and you’ll kill any chance of forging good relationships with this site.

Consistently contributing useful articles to a handful of well-chosen sites can make you a valuable part of the niche community, and your link will be noticed in no time. Eventually, your link will appear on other pages and blogs as people spread your articles and give you credit.

3. Highlight your site by writing about other related sites
Return the favour by writing about other sites relevant to your content. Not only does this foster better relationships with sites you are linked to, it also makes sure that your content does not talk about your product (yourself) all the time.

This also encourages other blog and website owners to visit your site and comment on particular articles which can boost your credibility even more.

4. Study the sites that your niche visits
Know which part of the site is important to them, which content they find most useful. Try to see how you can apply the same to your site to make sure that traffic is where it’s supposed to be.

Although external linking is already working well for you, it is still important to build links using resources within your website. Link your website contents to each other using strategically placed keywords.

The objective of internal linking is to get visitors to the pages you deem as the most important. However, you should still be careful not to hard-sell as this technique turns off consumers.

Below are 4 steps you can follow to help you maximize the advantages that PPC offers.

1. Know your niche
The alpha and the omega of every marketing strategy are the consumers. These are the people that make profits happen and so, these are the people you need to talk to. Allot time and effort to get to know who they are, what they think about, and how they talk. Understand how they interact with your brand.

Consumer knowledge is the best weapon to beef up your website so that you can immediately convert visitors (courtesy of your PPC ads) into buyers. Getting to know your customers in-depth will also make sure you come up with relevant PPC ad content using the right keywords.

2. Get your keywords right
You want only the best website associations with your brand. Be selective of the sites or blogs where you want your PPC ads to appear. Focus your branding and link-building efforts with niche keywords.

Your list of niche keywords will change over time, depending on your target market. Make sure you are always in the know of your market’s preferences and activities so you can adjust your website content and your PPC ads accordingly.

Owning and targeting the best keywords rely on how well you know your market. The best resources to spend time on are blogs and forums where your target market is given the opportunity to comment and talk back. This will tell you how they talk about things and issues related to your product. Consider having a comments section in your website so that visitors and good leads have the opportunity to give their feedback.

3. Write your PPC ad well
Good writing does not stop with your website’s articles. Your PPCs are essentially (very) short sales letters. Their goal is to lead your niche market into your website.

Good copywriting for sales usually has an offer, followed by a call to action. You might want to think twice about using freebies to lure visitors. This tactic will increase your site traffic, but these might not be the people you want to entice. After all, you’re after people who are genuinely interested to purchase and not those who are after free stuff online.

4. Learn more about PPC
The Internet is a rich source of information to help you understand better the technicalities behind using PPC ads. More than reading off related articles, investing a little to learn from SEO experts and well-written e-books will allow you a deeper understanding of PPC metrics and how particular data can help you decide when your campaign needs tweaking.

It would be helpful if you research on different PCC services. Each PPC service provider offers different PPC packages. Direct your focus beyond the pricing models—make sure you consider how each package can help your overall online marketing campaign.

Industry veterans agree that Google Analytics falls short in some major aspects that could put your investments at risk.

Below are three areas where Google Analytics has been found lacking, and recommendations on how you can make your current situation better.

1. Unable to give feedback on search engine spiders’ behavior
While Google Analytics does a great job tracking human visitors, it is incapable of tracking spider behavior. Google Analytics operates with page tagging—a program that only records information from browsers executing JavaScript. However, major search engine spiders do not execute Java Script in your site’s source code.

Tracking human visitors is useful, but this only tells you about individual behaviours on your website pages.

On the other hand, tracking spider behaviour will let you know how your website is being searched and which keywords are crawled over the most.

To track both human and spider activity, it is recommended that you avail of a third party program that accommodates monitoring options for both.

2. Unable to support log file analysis
For the serious Internet marketer, analysing the frequency of visits and searches is not enough. Getting to know your customers and building a relationship with them requires a database.

Log files transcend page tagging technology. They employ hard-coded server logs that are capable of mining visitor information. You are in charge of which data you need and the log file mines and sorts them for you. The most common file requests include IP addresses and the referral string—useful to know which backlinks work the best.

3. Google owns your analytics
Checking your analytics reports requires you to log on to Google. This means that reports aren’t readily available for you to refer to. The main function of analytical reports is to help you spot trends—both positive and negative—so that you can make quick and informed decisions any time.

Google Analytics does not give you an option to archive your data. In effect, Google has all your data.

Moreover, whenever Google decides to change the access interface or their method of reporting, you won’t be left with any choice but to adjust and work with it.

On the other hand, seeking professional help through third-party analytics puts you in charge of all your website’s figures and reports. You can access them anytime, print them out and refer to them whenever you like.

What you need to do
Google Analytics isn’t a completely useless tool. However, it is not an all-in-one tool that your profits can completely depend on. It is wise to learn more about other tracking and analytical tools and determine which reports are integral for the success of your online campaigns and invest accordingly.

However, having the same password for all your important online accounts jacks up the risk of having them all corrupted and taken over at the same time.

Working with multiple unique passwords should be made a common practice. Below are 3 ways to help you think of different passwords and remember them without having to write them down.

1. Come up with your own password system
Password systems vary from one individual to the next. For this tip, we’ll give you an example just to illustrate a system. Later on, you can tweak certain elements of the sample system to suit the way you remember things. Remember, alpha-numeric passwords are still the best as they are tougher to crack.

Step 1: Pick a common phrase. For this example, we’ll use the cow jumps over the moon.

Step 2: Take the first letter of each word from your phrase. This leaves us with tcjotm.

Step 3: Count the number of letters that make up your host’s or service’s name. If you’re making your password for Yahoo, then you use the number 5. Put the number between the letters from your phrase. You now have tcj5otm.

Step 4: Use the consonant letters of your service’s name and attach them at the end of your password. You can choose to separate this with a slash. This leaves you with tcj5otm/ym.

2. Use a password management software
A password management software keeps a database of all your passwords and their corresponding accounts. This beats listing down your passwords on a sheet of paper that others may easily see. Loose sheets of paper are also prone to getting lost.

However, it is still wise to make sure you have multiple updated backup copies of your password database.

Hard drives may crash while laptops and portable storage devices may get lost. Backups allow you to immediately change your passwords for all your accounts in one go.

It is important that you safeguard your password database with a strong master password. Having multiple unique passwords in your database is useless if your master password is a giveaway.

3. Have your passwords randomly generated
Randomly generated passwords are almost impossible to compromise. There is no pattern and there are no personal references involved.

Random passwords may be generated by an online service, by software, or by you. Using online password generators requires skilled caution—make sure the service is credible, so as not to put your accounts at risk.

Software and self-generated passwords require a password management software because it is challenging to manually keep track of multiple unique passwords.

However, it is recommended that your master password be something that you remember. Keep in mind that your unique passwords in your database are only as strong as the master password you come up with.

Again, make sure that you regularly update your database and back it up.