Empty Streets Special: Top 10 Ways to Earn Through Blogging

I have gotten a lot of questions from my friends about how I started earning online and if I could compile them to the top ten best ways to earn through blogging specifically. This has had me thinking a bit and after sitting on this article for over a week of consideration and research I have finally come up with a list. However, as I have mentioned to them, earning online is not as easy as coming up with a blog and writing articles. That is just a third of the work that needs to be done - the most part one has to work on is marketing every single article you write to people that you might think would benefit or would be interested in what you have to write. That entails joining social networks and blogging networks to help you get started. It is only after you have ranked up so to speak will you start feeling the benefits of the online blogging business. One thing is for sure, patience and perseverance are the primary keys to earning in whatever field you choose to be in.

With all that being said here are the top ten ways to earn through blogging:

Google AdSense
Obviously Google AdSense is one of the largest online revenue sources for almost every webmaster and blogger, and for a good reason. AdSense is super easy to set up, and it is also easy to manage. All that's required for using AdSense is a blog that has been live for over 6 months and you have the opportunity to make money using AdSense.

There are downsides to AdSense, and the biggest one is that anyone who uses the free blogging service from WordPress is unable to embed AdSense onto their blog. That is the largest downfall of AdSense, and I suggest if you want to earn an income from your blog, I would suggest you consider Blogger for your blogging platform. Also, if you are confused about choosing WordPress or Blogger, or you want to learn the pros and Cons about both blogging platforms, visit this link: Blogger vs WordPress.

An alternative to Google adsense would be Adgitize, which works on similar principles but with less of the strict rules that Google would have.

ClickBank
ClickBank has been around for a few years now, and has become one very large source of income for many people. People actually become millionaires thanks to ClickBank, and the doors are wide open for you to jump in and start earning money with the best affiliate program online. Signing up is free, and all you need to do is find products that you want to promote.

I want to caution you though to never promote something that you would never use yourself, or that you would never buy yourself. Always remember to think about what your readers would want to purchase. And to never promote scam/spammy products.

Amazon
My good friend Amazon Associates is a great revenue source. With Amazon being one of the largest online retailers of literally everything, there is great money to be made by becoming an Amazon Affiliate. Also, the great benefit of Amazon, is that everyone knows about Amazon, people are not afraid of purchasing through Amazon, thus more people will be willing to purchase through your Amazon affiliate links.

Text-Link-Ads
Text-Link-Ads.com is a great 'other' alternative way to earn an income from your blog. TLA is a program that allows you to sell your advertising space on your website or blog. You can either choose to sell 'real estate' on one page, or all pages, and you can also choose to get paid by a one time fee, or through the CTR of each Text-Link-Ad sold. One site I strongly recommend would be Ask2Link

AdBrite - Other Owner Controlled Advertising
There are many owner controlled advertising options such as AdBrite, Chitika, BuySellAds, LinkWorth and many more. The great advantage to using owner controlled advertising is that you have complete controll over what space you sell, and how much money you receive from it. You can sell your space on your website or blog in form of text and or in banner ads. And you get paid a one time fee from an advertiser or each time someone clicks your ads.

Ebay - Ebay Affiliate
Another great way to earn an income online is through ebay affiliate marketing. Ebay is the largest retailer of new and used goods online, and with the downturn economy, people are looking for a way to get products for inexpensive prices. Thus, ebay is making a very large profit every month. So, you can either sell products on ebay, or you can promote other sellers products on your website or blog. Becoming an ebay affiliate is both rewarding and lucrative. Visit ExtremeWealthGuide.com for more information on how to become an ebay affiliate marketer.

Paid Blog Posts
Are you good at writing? Why not get paid to write articles for your OWN blog? Many sites such as IZEA.com offers its clients the ability to write posts about products and get paid doing it! All you need to do is sign up and write articles for advertisers and post it on your blog, then you get paid from that advertiser! In basic terms, you write, and you get paid.

However this is something that I would like to advise to do with caution as the Big G (Google) has penalized a lot of bloggers who have done this sort of thing and pulled their pagerank down to 0. A lot of people may say that this is probably not an important thing, but if you want to be on top of the SEO game and be attractive to advertisers keeping a good pagerank is quite vital if you want to earn a lot in the long run. (I have to admit even this is open for debate - you have to definitely do more research and finding what works best with you)

In Text Advertising - InfoLinks, Kontera, Vibrant Media
In-Text advertising is a great way for you to earn extra revenue from your site without having to sacrifice valuable real-estate form your website or blog. All you do is sign up for any one of those three programs listed above, and pase the HTML code into your blog template, and your text links will automatically be embedded into relevant keywords on your blog. And you get paid each and every time someone clicks those links.

Commission Junction (CJ) - Affiliate Marketing
Many people will be wondering why CJ is placed so low down on this list. But the true fact about CJ is you need a very large blog following to make any money at all. There is good money to be made, but you only get paid if you actually sell a product through banner ads, or text ads. You will not get paid even if the advertisers ads get clicked 100 times per day. You only earn money when your visitors purchase. That is one extreme downfall to affiliate programs such as CJ or LinkShare.

Quality Content!
Putting a lot of advertisement on one's blog is not always the best formula to getting rich. You need to have quality content on your blog to gain visitors and subscribers. You need to also have good content because search engines such as Google look for good content when choosing a site to be listed high on the first page.

This may be the last of the ten things to earn through blogging but is by far the most important of all. It is through your articles that people find you and is what will cause them to come back for more.

To help you even more here is a cool video that talks about the topic to further help you guys out.

Eventually, through time and perseverance am sure that you will make a niche someday in the virtual highway. Have fun with what you do and always be ready to adapt to change. Experiment, experiment, experiment is what my financial adviser would say to me - eventually you will find an accident that will bring you what you have been seeking.

If you have more suggestions or sites that could offer other bloggers on how to earn online please leave them in the comment box with your feedback. :) Let us all help each other out. :) xoxo

Empty Streets Special: Alexa Ranking

I have been doing everything in my power to keep my Alexa Ranking stats to move up for the past couple of months since the new year started. A friend has advised me that the best way to help my stats to move up is to actually write about the Alexa Ranking system. He advised this because of the following:

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

If you noticed, the rank is very dependent on the Alexa Toolbar users and unfortunately even if your number of readers may not have decreased but if they dont have the toolbar with their system you wont get credited. The only people that would ever have the desire (even the know how) to install the Alexa Toolbar would be webmasters and internet cyber geeks. What they are mostly interested in are data such as the one am writing about now about the Alexa Toolbar. That is the reason why my advisor recommended writing about Alexa.

I have done extensive research in the past and am ready to talk about it today and I do hope that what ever data that you find here with me is useful for you, especially those that are venturing into the market of the virtual highway.

Let us start with the Pros and Cons:
Pros

• It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
• Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity

• As opposed to Google's PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.


• It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the true marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they will be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.


• Personal pages or blogs are taken into consideration and ranked in the same manner as regular Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)


• Given that Alexa ranking offers you information about your Web site, it is a good tool to have in view of search engine optimization.

Cons

• Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
• Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
• Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.
• Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “played” to therefore show inaccurate results.

Here are some of the best ways to quickly improve your Alexa Ranking:

• Download and install the Alexa toolbar and then surf your own site.


• Place the Alexa widget on your Web site. It will entice the visitors to check it out, and you know, each click counts.


• Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote it on webmaster forums and on social networking sites. The idea is to get as many computer and Internet savvy people as possible to visit your site, since the probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed is high.


• Write posts on your blogs and articles about Alexa. You will get links to your pages that will help improve your ranking.


• Try to get your articles on such social networking websites as digg.com , del.icio.us , or www.stumbleupon.com


• Optimize your site for Alexa related keywords.


• Tell your friends about the Alexa toolbar, have them download and install it on their computers, and then tell them to visit your site.


• Use Alexa redirect. This means placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your Web site's URL. Thus, Alexa will even take into consideration clicks on redirected links even if the visitor does not have the Alexa toolbar.


• Whenever you post on webmaster forums, include your site's URL in your signature. It is very likely that most webmasters have the toolbar installed, and there's a great probability that they'll visit your site.

Finally if you still feel that you need more help on the Alexa Ranking Toolbar here is a video tutorial that has helped me a lot in my own quest to increase this rather volatile statistic.

By the way since I noticed that most of my traffic comes from those that use Firefox 2 - 3 I would like your help to help us as it is only now that Alexa has finally noticed and made a toolbar that was once only exclusive for IE users. With this toolbar you will be able to see the traffic ranking based on alexa of every website and link that you visit to see its popularity in more ways than one. :)

Please download Alexa Toolbar for Firefox here

Empty Streets Special: Free SEO Online Tools

I have decided to make a compilation of the Online SEO Tools that I used to help propel Empty Streets 1027 to how it is now with all of you. Each of these websites have their respective pros and cons of course and I strongly encourage that you experiment. Nothing really beats a good old fashioned trial and error approach for I believe that it is only through mistakes that we ever truly learn and get better. :) So with that being said here is the list to use and experiment with. My last piece of advice for those venturing into the field of SEO Marketing - Have fun with this and eventually things will work out and that the only true failure is when you give up.

SEO Tools SEO Browser: See your website as the search engines see it. Lynx Viewer: Snapshot of what the search engine sees when it spiders your pages. Spider Simulator: Simulate how a search engine spider moves through your site. Spider Viewer: See what search engines see when they crawl your site. MonitorThis: This tool allows you to subscribe to 20 different serach engine feeds at the same time. Site Explorer: See which pages are indexed and who linkes to them. MindSet: Tweak your search results to be more or less commercial... in real time. Detecting Online Commercial Intention: How commercial is your query or web page. Find out here. SiteMaps: Submit your pages to Google, free. Also provides reports on kewords which delivered traffic and other stats. Webmaster Tools W3C HTML Validator: Validate your HTML to professional and search engine preferred standards. W3C CSS Validator: Validate your CSS to professional and search engine preferred standards. robots.txt generator: Generate a usable robots.txt file for your site. Color Blender: Online tool for color palette design and matching, thousands of color blends created by the user. Colorblind Web Page Filter: This tools helps select colors that will be easiest for people who are colorblind to see. Analytics and Statistic Tools Web Page Analyzer: Analyzes your website, providing stats on keyword usage, and estimated download times. Alexa Traffic Rating: Provides a rating on how your popular your site is compared to the rest of the web. Robots.txt Generator: Generates a Robots.txt file for your site. Webpages as Graphs: Visually see how your website links work. TouchGraph Google Browser: A free java application that shows connections between related websites. Domain Age Tool: Use this tool to see the approximate age of a website and what it looked like when it first started. Robot.txt Builder: Generate a free robot.txt file for your site. DomainTools: A good site overall with plenty of tools to help a webmaster. HTACCESS File Generator: Free generator that will make a htaccess file for you website. Create a .htaccess file: Another free ataccess generator. Copywriting Tools Copyscape: Allows you to see if your web content is being utilized anywhere else on the internet. Great tool to see if your copywritten material has been stolen. Juicy Studio Readability Test: Checks the readability of the content on your site. Textalyser: Gives detailed statistics of your text. Text Content Analysis Tool: gives you statistics about a text including unique words; lexical density; and the Gunning Fog readability index Keyword Research Tools Keyword Density Analyzer: Checks the density of selected keywords or keyword phrases. SEO - Term Target: Gives you a grade based on how well your keywords are used on a page. SpyFu: Download your competitors keywords and adwords. Search Based keyword tool: Google's search-based keyword tool that provides keyword ideas. Link Tools Backward Link Check: Checks all backward links from each of the major search engines. See how many sites are linking to you. C Class Backlink Analyzer Tool: Search backlinks to your site and know if you are linked from (or too) link farms. Online Broken Link Checker: Checks your site for broken or invalid links. No software to download, works live online. Link Popularity Analysis Tool: This tool allows you to analyze a page's link popularity. SEOMoz Trifecta: Measure the number of sites that link to you and number of times your brand is mention on the web. Visual PageRank: Allows you to view all the links alone with pageranks on a certain page. Site Link Analyzer:A tool that returns a table of data containing outbound links and related anchor text. Marketing Research Tools SEO/M Tools Customer Focus Calculator: Analyzes text on your pages to determine if your text is customer focused. WordTracker: Research actively searched-for phrases within your industry. WordTracker vs. Overture: View keyword search volume comparisons between WordTracker and Overture. Niche BOT: Keyword research tool that helps you find the terms that produce the highest amount of traffic. Lets you drill down to dig deep and find niche phrases as well. Metrics Market: How much traffic are you getting compared to your competitors? Yahoo Tools Keyword Selector: Allows you to retrieve Overture search volume for up to 50 keywords at one time. MSN Tools Search Funnels: See what people search for before and after your keyword. Demographics Prediction: Get democragphics of your target customer. Google Tools AdWords Keyword Tool: Generate potential keywords for your SEO/M campaign,provided. AdWords Traffic Estimator: Estimates Google search and click-thru traffic for any keyword. Ontology Finder: Type in a word and find other words treated as similar words by Google. Suggest: Start typing a search and let Google complete the phrase for you. Sets: Provides a list of semantically related words to the words you enter. Trends: Lets you see and compare search trends for seasonal (or any, really) search phrase. Search Tools Google Tools Google Power Search: Google Advanced Search Cheat Sheet

Enjoy :)

Marketing 411: The Evolution of Marketing

Below is a video about the changes in marketing realities based on a concept by German ad agency Scholz & Friends. According to Michael Reissinger, it took about 5 weeks for him and his animator Rafael Ahamad to make this shorty - including all the illustration, typo-art-works and the animation.

Scholz & Friends: "Dramatic shift in marketing reality" - aka "A short history of marketing" ... from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

Marketing 411: What are blogs

I have been asked this many times in my class. A lot people normally ask it because they wonder where I get my extra pocket money from. But aside from being deadly honest about how it has to be a passion before one starts to earn from it, one most first understand the basics of blogging most especially why it is fast becoming the major source of information now these days.

I have searched around for the answers and was fortunate enough to find a very good video presentation that does just that.

I hope that after watching this video it has shed some light into the power and reason why blogs exist and will continue to exist while fast becoming a highly influential source of information for a lot of people all over the world. Till the next time xoxo

Marketing 411: Top Online Advertising Networks

There are many affiliate and publisher programs out there that use bloggers and website owners in marketing their products. If you are interested in earning from your sites here is the list of the top ten.


1)Adsense by Google

AdSense is rated the best money making advertising network. AdSense is an advertisement serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll freely in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. You can sign up your free account at https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/. (check out our Easy Adsense Module For Joomla)

2)Adbrite

Right now AdBrite is considered the best alternative for google adsense and day by day it is growing reputation . AdBrite serves 372 million impressions a day on 82,606 sites, according to their published stats, and is the 10th largest ad network on the Internet according to Media Metrix .

(Note: If you want to find a cheaper and reliable place to advertise your website, you can read our Adbrite for advertiser review here to see why Adbrite is better than Adwords for advertisers)

3)Bidvertiser

Another alternative for adsense and it's lay-out is like adsense. Their minimum payout also small and everybody can make it in short time.
Some of features are

• Customize the layout of your ads
• Block any unwanted ad
• Always have the highest bidders displayed on your website
• Generate reports to monitor your ads performance
• $10 minimum payouts through PayPal

4)Clicksor

It is also good and pays good amount to the publisher. Participating sites must have 5,000 page views per day or 150000 page views per month and site must be in English written content.

5)Advertising.com

It operates the largest display advertising network in the United States and UK. They work with 200+ of the largest e-commerce brands across the world.

7)Commission Junction

Big advertiser and affiliate network available worldwide. Commission Junction is the largest affiliate network in North America, powering almost 50% of the top 500 web retailers affiliate marketing programs and operates worldwide. Along with being the world's largest Affiliate Network. It has over 1,500 customers including Buy.com, Home Depot, Circuit City, Experian and Yahoo!.

8)Linkshare

Another big affiliate network for publishers. LinkShare clients are Fortune 500 and prominent companies doing business online, and include Macy's, J.C. Penney,1-800-Flowers.com,American Express, Avon Products and many others.

9)Yahoo Publisher Network

Created to compete with google adsense. Publisher Network (abbreviated YPN) is a beta network, launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo. As the service is currently in Beta, it is currently only accepting US-Based publishers; it is believed that Yahoo! will expand this when the program comes out of Beta. YPN provides cost per click contextual advertising, similar to Google Adsense, as well as various tools and services to assist publishers in building and improving their websites.

10)Microsoft Adcenter

Microsoft-own publisher network. Still on beta. is the division of the Microsoft Network (MSN) responsible for MSN's advertising services. Microsoft adCenter provides pay-per-click advertisements.

Marketing 411: Web Marketing by TJ Harris

I like exploring the internet and scouring for data that I found useful and effective in marketing my sites and so far when it comes to teaching the principles of Web Marketing and explaining them in easy to understand terms as well as ensuring that we are well supported with the knowledge required to accomplish the tasks - TJ Harris has in a way enabled that to happen.

So without further delay here is TJ Harris to further discuss more about Web Marketing 2.0

*Free* (Web Marketing) Training With TJ Harris - Watch today’s top amazing videos here
As you are watching this video I am sure that you would like to also pay a visit to the websites that TJ Harris has recommended to visit so for your convenience I have arranged them for you below:
TubeMogul
Facebook
MySpace
Orkut
Delicious
Digg
Propeller
reddit
Stumbleupon
Factory2Freedom

Marketing 411: Keyword Density

Keywords have a lot to play when it comes to SEO marketing. The density of the keywords including that of the meta tags and meta descriptions have its weight in bringing a persons site to the top of the search list. Defining one's niche is of course a necessary factor before you go and get yourself massing up on your chosen keywords. I personally use websitegrader.com to help me out with this aspect and coolest thing about it is that it is absolutely free.



My personal experience with using keyword density on my main site Empty Streets 1027 is that the more I use the my chosen keywords which is Empty Streets several times in my posts and the layout including the side bars and meta tags and descriptions has helped my site move up in rankings and is what helped my site reach the top link for the keywords -Empty-Streets-1027. though admittedly my new pagerank of 4 has a lot of weight too but prior to the new page rank Empty Streets has already started it's climb due to the overuse of the words Empty Streets :)



Aside from that you can also use the Website Grader site above to check on your competitors performance in terms of keyword density against your own site. The general rule is if your competitor has a greater density than yours you have to work on surpassing your competitors numbers in terms of density - even more so if the competitor site has a higher page rank than yours.



So far that is what I have been using but as always I like hearing and learning from others and so I found this useful video that is quite as informative and very helpful in further explaining this SEO marketing principle.



With that video and my own experience with Keyword density I do hope this gets to shed some light to your questions about the use of keywords on your websites and how this can help you get recognized overall. Till the next time. xoxo

Marketing 411: Blog Branding and Design

Everyone knows that a good branding and design is just as vital to the success of anything in the business world. It is just as crucial as the talent and the product being presented itself. Many people tend to over look this particular necessity and thus when they create a product that is though powerful as it can be on its own still fails to capture the market that it is trying to reach.

Branding and Design is what made the difference for a lot of products such as from the more popular brands that have become home icons like Coca Cola, Xerox, and Colgate along with the success through buyer interest made for products like Banana Ketchup and Margarine. Now with the later example consider these products in their natural state - Banana Ketchup isn't really red nor was Margarine really Yellow - However, their competition which were real Tomato ketchup and Butter already possessed qualities in terms of color that they are associated with, the product owners of Banana Ketchup and Margarine reconsidered replicating their competition since no one showed interest in their products in their natural condition. It was only when they did this that they finally broke into the market and caught consumer attention.

When there are so many products in the market that have seemingly the same qualities, the one that captures a consumer's attention is how the product looks and once that is accomplished it is only then that the consumer starts to get interested in what it has to offer. This principle is in fact the same for us bloggers and anyone that gets into the 2.0 industry. With so much competition out there it is of no surprise that we also have to compete not only in content but also to consider how attractive and user friendly our sites can be for the audience.

Here's a video to that also stresses out this point:

Marketing 411: Top Online Marketing Strategy 2.0

I have been scouring the net for a video that would best explain the power of Online Marketing and teach us about how to get on top in terms of getting on top. I have found the Videos of an Online Marketing Guru Demetri of whom best describes the most effective tools to getting exactly on top in this ever changing and challenging internet marketing world.

So without further delay here is what he has to say


I do hope you found his words enlightening just as much I found it informative myself. More to come as I get to learn more on Web Marketing. Till the next time. xoxo

The Top Ten Marketing Sins and How to Identify Them

There are many sites and companies that have spent so much time and effort along with money of course, but still are scratching their heads wondering why in the world nothing that they have done so far is making any difference. I have to admit that when I first started blogging and marketing my main site Empty Streets that I too have fallen prey to similar erroneous beliefs and because of it have caused me to loose out on the things that I should have gained in a short span of time. In fact I have to openly admit to these so called "sins" of marketing and be finally cleansed of them by sharing them here with you.

Here are the Top Ten Marketing Sins:

1. Your business is not Market Focused and Customer Driven: Your answer to who your market is shouldn't be "Everyone". Make it easy for your customers to reach you and your business either by phone, fax, or e-mail with inquiries, suggestions, and even complaints. You must ensure to respond quickly.
2. You do not fully understand your targeted Customers: Conduct consumer/user research - create polls, surveys, and interviews. Establish an efficient Customer/Client and Dealer/Publisher feedback system.
   
3. You have not been able to fully define and monitor your competitors: Do not focus on just your near competitors and miss the distant competitors as they may hold the keys you lack. Monitor new technologies and research on emerging techniques with regards to marketing your business. Conduct intelligence work and analyze what your competitors are doing right as well as what they may be doing wrong. Replicate similar practices you may have noticed with your competitors.
   
4. You have not fully managed your relationship with the people and resources involved: Be happy with what you are doing and ensure that the people involved will feel the same way.
   
5. You have demonstrated lack of time and effort in finding new opportunities: Set up a system that allows determine what efforts you have done so far is proving effective just as much as what you may be doing wrong. Experimentation is the key and being active in finding new methodologies is what will keep you one step ahead of the game. Observe the major marketing environments: Political, Economic, Social, Technological and Environmental - it is here that you will be able to narrow down the sources you would need to look into to find the clique you will need in gaining marketing ground.
   
6. Your Marketing plans and planning process is inefficient: Create a draft of what you are doing now and ensure that it is layered in such a way that you can determine what you have done so far and what you are planning to do next. I personally use a white board with a skeleton chart of what I have done so far and it includes the statistics I have gathered telling me what has been effective and what has not. This also enables me to Plot out what I should be doing next as I gain more knowledge and experience allowing me to eliminate on those that have not garnered the returns I expected and keeping those that have while at the same time play around with new ideas that I believe theoretically would work. In it's basic core I have created a cause and effect chart to help me analyze cause and effect situations giving me time to determine if my presumptions are accurate or not. I have also implemented the practice of SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
   
7. The product and services policies and procedures isn't clearly defined: Learn to streamline your product, diversity is good but too much will cause you to loose focus on the products that are giving you the $$$. Understand which product or service is being strongly received first and ensure that it is being continuously developed and only once you have had a strong handle on that should you try and experiment on diversifying without having to loose track on what people/consumers are coming back for. This entails that you should in a way develop a tracking system and evaluation method in order for you to determine which of the products and services your market is gaining on versus those that bring in nothing at all.
   
8. Branding and communication channels/mediums are weak: If your business/site is starting to look like all the others in the market you are sure to loose their interest and be branded by most as a copy cat. Learn to stand out without loosing track of what you and your business/site is offering. How you look in more ways than one should be able to reflect what you are offering. Learn to experiment on image and allow for time to examine which is being responded to well and which isnt. Take this as an example - if you were driving down the road and you see a cow that looked like any other cow on the road would you stop as compared to seeing a purple coloured cow? Being different is good but ensure that you dont over do it either. It is also vital at this point that you fully utilize the power of the publishers and the mediums you have at your disposal. Have a talk with them and discuss what they have found to be effective as they have more experience in regards to how the public sees a product. Investigate what is it about the top players in the industry of the niche you have chosen are doing that is effectively drawing in the market and where they are coming from.
   
9. Being unorganized: Planning is and will always be vital in any type of business. It is also the most important as this would be the backbone for your success. Learn to organize the days, the tasks, and the timing for everything you are to put your mind to. Allow your plan to be flexible enough for sudden change while giving a degree of predictability for your targeted market as you will need this to be utilized if in case a pilot study needs to be conducted. Set Goals and Expectations and ensure that your clients/consumers/users are aware of them. This will ensure that they wont be disoriented and wonder what you are upto and who you really are which will eventually cause them to loose interest.
   
10. Not fully maximizing the resources available in marketing your business most especially the technology available: How one utilizes the website is the most important thing to consider as this is the new era of marketing. You have to ensure that it is attractive, that it is well defined, and easy to use. Too much graphics may be pretty to look at but if the download speed takes to long then it is just as bad as having no website at all. To be able to do all this one should find time to do research on new practices and technologies and applications that would give you an edge in the market. Participate in Beta testing projects and programs as not only will you be able to benefit from it immediately and probably be ahead of your competitors but it also creates publicity for you with the companies asking for your help to volunteer.
    

After going through the top ten list of our marketing sins am sure that you would want to try some of it out, and I strongly recommend that you do. In short, always keep an open mind to the possibilities available around you. Business is a game that has to be played wisely and one that has to include calculated risks. The rest is upto Lady Luck.

More Marketing tips to come, till the next time. xoxo

Marketing Defined

Marketing Defined

I have been talking about how to market websites and blogs and SEO for the past couple of weeks but I have forgotten to define what Marketing really is all about not to mention it's key elements.

One thing to keep in mind is that Marketing is an ongoing developing process that is defined by how a culture progresses and will continue to progress as long as there are people that create/identify a need and of course the people that need it.

Marketing as a whole have 5 fundamental elements that it abides by regardless of how much it has evolved as a process.

* Marketing focuses on the satisfaction of customer needs, wants and requirements.
* The philosophy of marketing needs to be owned by everyone from within the organization.
* Future needs have to be identified and anticipated.
* There is normally a focus upon profitability, especially in the corporate sector. However, as public sector organizations and not-for-profit organizations adopt the concept of marketing, this need not always be the case.
* More recent definitions recognize the influence of marketing upon society.

As an added Bonus I would like you take your time to also exam how Seth Godin breaks it down for you in this 18 min presentation of which am sure you'll find entertaining as well as informative. and dont forget to have a pen and paper handy, you might want to jot down notes too :)

Advertising Tips: 5 Basic Ad Tips

As someone that has had quite an experience when it comes to marketing and am sure many of those that have been in the industry for quite a long time will agree that advertising is definitely a strong part of marketing a product and/or services. Undoubtedly there will and are many books out in the market that will teach you indepth secrets to marketing based on their on respective experience and fields. Knowing this I would like to help you get started though with 5 basic and easy to follow Advertising Tips that is and always will be a foundation to all the advertising advices experts on the topic would give.

1. Be consistent in your ad message and style including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, signs and banners.

2. Newspapers, radio and TV stations are helpful in producing the advertising that you will be running with them.

3. While word-of-mouth advertising has been around a long time, it usually falls short of being able to attract the number of customers needed to be successful in business.

4. Promote benefits rather than features. A benefit is the emotional satisfaction your product or service provides, or a tangible performance characteristic.

5. Know your competitors. Knowing everything about your competitors is just as important as knowing everything about your own business.

Most important of all though is to keep in mind that there is no solid theory on advertising and though now a lot of people are turning to a new medium called PR (Public Relations) Advertising when used properly and with practice has a powerful impact on how consumers view a product and thus influence their choices.

Keys to Increasing Your Site's Traffic

There are many people and sites that talk about how to increase blog/site traffic, however just because of just the sheer number of them out there a lot of people end up getting lost and confused. I wouldn't blame you either and I know you've probably heard this before but I'll do my best to simply it for you here.

Here are 26 sure-fire ways to increase web traffic and site visitors to your website. Use some or all of them, and let us know which ones worked best for you.

1. Optimize your site (SEO).
   Win on the search engines when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   (More about search engine optimization.)
   
   
2. Get your site listed in directories.
   Submit your site to all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. That helps you win on Google!
   (More about web directories.)
   
   
3. Get listed in search engines.
   Submit your site to all the major search engines.
   (More about search engines.)
   
   
4. Get links to your site.
   Get people with complimentary sites to link to yours. You offer rental kayaks on the beach. Ask the local restaurant owners to link to you, and offer to link to them. Ask the local tour guides, the real estate agents, the night clubs, and everyone else. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.
   
   
5. Buy links to your site.
   Buy text links on other websites. That means more spiders stopping by, more people clicking through, and better search engine rankings.
   
   
6. Buy banner ads.
   Buy banner ads on other websites. It helps to build brand recognition.
   
   
7. Participate in a banner exchange program.
   It won't cost you anything, and will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place.
   
   
8. Participate in a WebRing.
   Connect your site with other sites in your niche.
   
   
9. Pay for clicks to your site.
   Pay for clicks or inclusion on the search engines so that people will see your site in the sponsored links section of the search results when they search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
   (More about pay per click.)
   
   
10. Set up an affiliate marketing program.
    With affiliate marketing, you can either pay per click, pay per lead generated, pay per sale, or pay per customer acquired.
    
    
11. Use smart public relations (PR).
    Get news coverage of your business and your site. Approach online and traditional media. This will often lead to others placing links pointing to your website, which leads to more clicks and also to improved search engine rankings.
    
    
12. Use E-mail marketing.
    Ugly, but effective for the cost. Blast out your special offers, but be nice about it.
    
    
13. Use off-line marketing.
    Promote your site. Put your url on all your license plates. Paint it on your car. Buy newspaper and yellow pages ads with your url. Put up flyers and stickers. Sponsor a little league team. Do anything and everything to spread the word about your website around your city.
    
    
14. Run regular promotions.
    Stage regular giveaways and spread the word about it.
    
    
15. Get published.
    Write articles for publication on other websites. The author profile will link to your site. The article will show that you're an expert.
    
    
16. Publish yourself.
    Write articles for your own site regularly. This will help you to win on the search engines and gives your visitors a reason to come back over and over.
    
    
17. Ask for reviews.
    Ask for reviews of your self-published articles on other webmasters' websites. Ask for reviews of your website, your products, your software, your services. These will usually include links to your articles.
    
    
18. Write briefs.
    Write daily or weekly news briefs focusing in on your industry or specialty area. This keeps your site "fresh" in the eyes of the major search engines and helps you to spread a wide net when fishing for top search engine positions.
    
    
19. Create a newsletter.
    Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products.
    
    
20. Post in chat rooms.
    Become active in bulletin boards and chat rooms focusing on your industry. Leave inciteful comments, and people will click on your profile, then visit your site.
    
    
21. Give away free stuff.
    Offer something people want at your site. Give them a reason to come back and get more. Offer free downloads and update them regularly. Offer coupons or discounts. Content content content.
    
    
22. Give awards for excellent sites in your niche.
    This builds more links back to your site and establishes you as a credible reviewer, an expert in your space.
    
    
23. Run a contest and promote it.
    Photo contests, essay contests, goofy contests, random drawings, anything. Example: Messiest Garage in America contest on OfftheFloor.com.
    
    
24. Join your local business organizations.
    Chambers of Commerce and other organizations will often add your site to their member directory. That's an added advantage over the obvious business-building and networking opportunities.
    
    
25. Create an RSS feed.
    Give people another way to interact with your content.
    
    
26. Be accessible.
    Build your site so that it is accessible to all browsers and to PocketPC and Palm Pilot users. Don't forget, people with disabilities buy things too. Make your site Section 508 complaint. Your competition probably hasn't.
    

With all that said I hope that in more ways than one this helps clarify in layman's terms everything you need to do in order for you to increase your site's traffic. I should know as I too am experimenting with them as we tweak around with this site's own traffic as well as our main site Empty Streets: it's a way of life which has a whooping 200++ visitors now daily. Like everyone else we started between 0 - 2 people a day. All it take is a lot of hard work and dedication too, so don't fret if you only get a trickle from the beginning - be grateful that at least you have people that have dropped by. Soon you'll find your niche as you get better at this playful soiree. :)

Optimizing the Position of your Adsense Advertisement

Many have had trouble figuring out where to best place their adsense ads to get the most hits and thus the most results. On a personal level I have found that embedding the ads within the post particularly that end of every post and on top of the fold have in more ways given me the kaching I've been looking for in terms of hit rates. And for additional options for optimizations here is a video tutorial to help you figure it out.



Particularly it is always best to place something where most traffic heat is located and so in the long run try and and understand your viewers as they hit your site and what are the things that attract them the most and once you figure that out you'll know where to put the ads. Think about it this way too, where do people look when they are driving down a busy highway - it's the same for blogs - how something is packaged is also yet another thing but that would be all together a completely new topic so till the next post. ;) xoxo

Starting a Blog? Tips to help you get started - Things you need to know before you start to EARN $$$

Image Courtesy of Veblogs.com

Starting out a Blog isn't something one should do haphazardly if one intends to earn or get people interested in it. There are a few basic principles that one should follow and as one goes through these principles one can start to see that blogging is actually a real business venture.

Here are the things to consider:

1. Take your time to understand what you are getting into - No one should get into something without doing some homework first. Do your research and understand what a blog really is and you can do this by looking for the most prominent bloggers around. One of the coolest thing about the blogging industry and finding it's key players isnt hard. Just simply type making money online and viola you get to see the key players off the net. How do you know that they are the key players - they are on the top page when you type in the keywords and that is more than enough to get you convinced that these are the people to get to know(CarloCab is an example). Also check out blogging communities and get to see if there are any successful people in your own area that you can talk to and get some pointers from, every country has them(in the philippines my personal favorites are Bloggista and Yugatech).

2. Set and prepare your Foundations - Where are you going to start, what are your interests. These the questions that need to be answered when you get into this industry. Another would be to ask if you are unique or if you have similar competitors that you have to play with and probably partner up with - going against them may not be a very good idea especially since they have already established a good long term reputation of content. Are you willing to spend for a domain or are you happy with what is freely given such as those provided for by Blogger or Wordpress. Do you feel comfortable with the articles you are going to write and is this something you can start on your own or is this something you need a staff for. Though normally for that last question it is always answered by one person and that person is the only staff which isnt bad just as long as one learns to manage their time appropriately. Once you have decided on all of these questions you are almost ready to begin.

3. Define yourself and your business - Decide on what niche you are going to take and learn your limitations. People can get so many ideas and they tend to act on them all at once failing to realize that this gets really cluttered along the way and eventually tend to confuse your clients or clients to be. Sit down and start planning what you want to write about and how often you are going to do write these topics. Make sure that your readers understand this fully so they know what to expect. Act on one idea at a a time and this will make your articles more conducive for your audience. How your site looks also defines how one views your content. All in all this would add up to how you and your words are received by those that drop by - as this would in more ways than one make them stay and come back for more.

4. Constantly Evaluate Progress - keep a log book or track record of who or what catches your market. Monitor the type of clients come and visit, where they are from, what they are interested in, who referred them, what did they do to get there, what is it that they liked about the site, what is it that they dont like, and much more... All these questions the good and bad of it have to be constantly analyzed and interpreted to ensure that your efforts are being rewarded and that the things are going as planned. Every time you make a change on your site, an article is written, a picture is changed, a layout, anything at all that you do check and see if there is an effect and check if it is a good one or a bad one. Isolate the changes and monitor them individually, doing this helps you understand how each one plays a role in your overall blogging business. In other words MONITOR EVERYTHING AS OFTEN AS YOU CAN.

5. Keep on Trying - this is the one thing that distinguishes a successful blogger to one that doesnt get a single dime. Blogging is a business and just like any it is a gamble, luck plays a role in anything one ventures into and a lot of hard work too. No one can earn a million dollars a year over night and just the same there really isnt a cut out formula for success. What one has is instincts and passion to do what one loves to do. For the most part you will find that the one quality that all successful bloggers have in common is determination to get what we want to say to the people that need to hear it. So what if you dont earn a single dime on the first couple of times, So what if you have a lot of competition and your a new blog just starting out to get a niche in the market. Eventually, through time and dedication you will find your spot and people will find you. Perserverance and Passion, the Power of Commitment, so many names have been given to what one has to do but overall you just have to keep on going at it no matter what anyone else says. I started my Empty Streets: It's a way of life and i didnt even know that I would be earning from that, neither did i expect that people would be very interested with what I had to say but from a personal blog to an all around blog magazine, even i surprized myself. 156++ articles from now and I'm still dishing out topics one after another, not to mention I myself have experimented on trying out other blogging topics and many of them have failed yet it only takes one success to make all the effort worthwhile. I may not be earning 5 digits in dollars yet every month but I have to say I am getting there - I am confident you too will be just as passionate. As a true believer in the power of "THE SECRET" by Rhonda Byrne you are not just here for nothing and you reading this article proves without a doubt that there is a reason. So as you make your decision on this let me be one of the very few if not the first to welcome you to the world of WEB 2.0 - Web logs also known as blogging :)

Keyword density and Search Engines

The Basics of Keywords Density is best simplified in a way that all you have to ensure that in order for your site to be on top of the crowd is to make the word that you wish your site to be searchable on is to contain the keywords in more of your posts and meta tags to help you become highly searchable and tagged by the search engine bots. To get more into detail here is an excerpt from The Site Wizardto help get things into a better perspective.

What is Keyword Density?
One of the simplest ways to improve your site's placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page, which was what I did.

For my purpose here, I will refer to a "keyword" as a word that the user searches for when using the search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

If a particular keyword has a higher density on your web page, then the likelihood of your page obtaining a better search engine ranking increases. Note that not all search engines bother with keyword density and indeed even those that do have their own algorithm for computing the density of a keyword. However, the principles described in this article is general enough to help your page improve its ranking in the engines that take keyword density into account.

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
How do you improve your keyword density?

When planning a page, think about which search terms a user is likely to use when searching for the information your site provides. For example, a visitor who is looking for information on "Search Engine Ranking" may search for things like "search engine positioning", "search engine ranking", "search engine placement", "keyword density", "top ranking", and the like.

After you have collected your list of keywords, do NOT simply dump those keywords into a senseless list on your web page. I've seen some websites do this in an attempt to influence search engine listings. This may not work with all search engines. Some of the engines attempt to be smart when processing keywords and if it sees keywords occurring together in a senseless sequence, it may penalise your website.

Instead, try to form sentences that use those keywords. If you are a good writer, you may have to kill some of those good habits you previously used in writing documents: for example, many good writers have an aversion to repeating a particular word too often, choosing instead to use alternative terms that mean the same thing. This makes for a more pleasant reading, but it will not help you get your site listed with a top rank in search engine results for that particular keyword.

For instance, if you want your page to have a high ranking when someone searches for the phrase "search engine ranking", keep repeating the phrase "search engine ranking" in your document instead of substituting with pronouns like "it" and the like. Do likewise for the other keywords that you want a high density on the page. You'll of course have to use your discretion with this, or your page will be unpleasant to read.

You can see an example of how this is done by examining this article itself, and see how often I have repeated keywords and phrases like "keyword", "keyword density", "search engine ranking" and "search engine positioning".

In days of old, some people tried the trick of having a very short page for a particular keyword. For example, the page may only have the following one sentence: "Keyword density is important in search engine ranking." Since there were so few words on the page, the page was actually easy to draft and the keywords "keyword density" and "search engine ranking" have a very high density on that page.

This method is not very useful nowadays. For example, at the time I wrote this, it no longer appears to work with Alta Vista, which seems to rank pages that are bigger than 4K more favourably.

Keywords play a vital role in search engine optimization especially now and learning to understand how it works if far more vital now than ever before with so many websites and blogs coming up with content after content and fighting to be on top of the organic click list. to help you with all this above is a video that talks about SEO and Keywords.

5 Tips to Marketing Your Website: Courtesy of Hubspot

This video about Website marketing rocks for a lot reasons.

1. It explains that principles in 5 easy to understand steps
2. It is easily applicable
3. They have recommendations as to where to go and how to do it.

Just to summarize what they have discussed here are the 5 steps to Marketing your Web (also found in our main site Empty Streets: It's a way of life:

1. On Page SEO - give search engines the right clues to help them understand what your website is about and what types of people should find your website

2. Off Page SEO - Each link into your site is a “vote” that tells the search engine that your site is important.

3. Blogs - Blogging is a great way to get more traffic from the right audience

4. Convert Visitors to Leads with Forms - you need to capture more of this traffic through lead capture forms

5. Analyze - Marketing is all about measurement and optimizing your activities based on the previous results

Short and sweet, easy to comprehend - above all doable... Those are the reasons why you should take your time to sit back, listen, and take down notes. What is even cooler is that you start to realize that the principles taught here can in more ways than one be applied to your regular business ventures.

To find out more about the author simply point your clicker to Hubspot.com

5 Tips to Marketing Your Business

Image courtesy of: brandautopsy.typepad.com

Many have heard of the word marketing and probably know it's theoretical definition but when it comes to it's application have caught many speechless. So for your convenience I have compiled these simple marketing tips to help you get started on the road to Business Marketing.

1. Know your Customers - The foundation of all good marketing is to know your market. That means your customers. The well marketed business is completely customer focused. They identify what the customer wants or needs, and then supply it at a price the customer is prepared to pay.

The customer is always right. That is the classic saying which has fallen from favour in recent years. However it is true. The customer is always right, provided that they are the right customer.

2. The Four P's of Marketing - The four P's of marketing are:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

Product is what you are selling. Not just the physical product or the actual service, but all the customer benefits and values that the product represents. It is usually not important to have the best possible product. Cutting edge and feature packed products cost more. The key is to have the most valuable product in its price range.

Price is the amount that the customer must pay. This is the acid test of whether the features you added to the product were really valuable, or whether you might have been better to cut a few low-value features out and so be able to offer a lower price.

Place is sometimes thought unimportant to online business. However, many deals still go best with a handshake. Services can only be cost-effectively provided within a fixed travel-radius. Shipping costs matter. Place is still a vital concern. With the internet, all online shops are on the super-highway and equidistant to any customer, and yet people still look for local and regional suppliers. Financial and legal issues are still mostly set by place too. Where will you place your distribution centers? Would better placement of your business let you ship faster or more cost-efficiently?

Promotion is the P that everyone knows Marketing is about. Of course, we are not only talking about advertising in promotions, but also sponsorships, public relations, special offers, viral marketing, and so much more.

3. Get your potential customer's attention - Image means everything. Packaging attracts and appeals to a person most especially if it hits the right nerve and that means making use of a person's senses and engaging them to feel the product. This has proven to bring in results more so if there is a lot of competition for the same market niche and in the blogging community that can be quite a lot.

4. Motivate them to participate/buy - Promotions, interaction on a human level and incorporating a welcoming attitude towards your visitors have in more ways than one proven to be quite helpful in not only bringing in people but it encourages those that you get to stay and continue to use the service. Focus on listening to what your clients want and you'll find that this will guide you to where your industry must and should go. Don't forget to also get leads from your satisfied clients as their referrals will be easier to capture in terms of interest.

5. Analyze - Keep on continually monitoring and testing new ideas and old ones and see how each one affects your numbers. Find a good resource for information and experience to help you improve on those that you are good at and to help you avoid practices that may be nasty for your goals. Ask for advice from experts and keep an open mind when approaching a venture, sometimes things that could improve your business can come as a flash inside of your head and that is something you have to be ready to catch.

Overall Never Give Up - Keep on Trying new things - for as all marketers know that sometimes even with all the numbers and statistical data luck and providence do play their part in any industry.

Marketing 411 Born today - Empty Streets' Family

Today the 19th of October marks the birth of Empty Streets' Marketing Guide page and it is here that we shall begin the process of sharing the marketing secrets and tips that we have found and learned through time. Best practices and all that.

It is here where we teach you how to Market stuff from your business to your online website. We will even present to you business ideas that you can use and apply the marketing tips that we shall teach you here. So stay tuned as we start warming up and we'll be zipping through to your neighborhood in a bit. :)