Posts Tagged Web Design
How Bloggers Make Money Online
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Make Money Online on January 30, 2010
There are 5 ways to make money with your blog (or website). Might be others – I’m open for suggestions:
- Sell ad space on your blog
- Write articles for other companies/blogs/individuals
- Syndicate your blog posts to other blogs/Sell Blog Subscriptions
- Sell your own things on your blog
- Sell third party goods online
1. Sell ad space on your blog
One of the most popular ads is GoogleAds: https://www.google.com/adsense (although they pay you only when someone actually clicks on the ad) and the Yahoo Publisher Network https://publisher.yahoo.com/portal/login.php
Selling ad space is fairly easy to do; just create a section on your blog that describes the benefit for companies/individuals to place an ad on your blog.
One word of advice though: When you start this adventure, do not fill your blog to the gills with ads – it will not look very professional. Your readers need to see what you can offer first before they will buy anything from you or off your blog.
You can spot a newbie, right-away by the imense number of ads running on his/her site, trying desperately to make some dough. People do not respond well and they will leave your site fairly quick before you can even write about your expertise.
Here’s an example from the highly acclaimed blog called doshdosh (http://www.doshdosh.com/advertise)
Dosh Dosh Advertising Page
Same can be done for a website. The more traffic you have the more you can charge.
If your blog has low traffic you can always go to TextLinkAds or TextLinkBrokers. Even better connect with your network in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and let them know you are offering ad space on your blog for a minimum of $XX amount per month. You will be surprised of the response you get.
2. Write Articles for other companies/blogs/individuals
This usually frightens some people but you don’t have to be an expert in a particular field.
You’ll have to show proof that you:
- are a creative blogger
- have articles you wrote and published on your blog, ezines or squidoo lenses
- comment and are active on other blogs as well
- are proficient using social media, plug-ins and add-ons
- have a basic understanding of simple SEO rules
The best way of all is to show that you are a pro is creating, maintaining and actively contributing on your own blog. You should have at least 3-4 months under your belt and a minimum of 30-50 good articles consisting of 250-500 words each .
The core subject or theme of your blog does not matter as long as you write frequently and professionally. Obviously check for grammar. Write well and write often.
3. Syndicate your blog posts to other blogs/Sell Blog Subscriptions
If the information posted on your blog is in high demand you might want to think about syndicating your blog.
You can accomplish this through 3 easy steps:
a. Find out what your blog’s feed is (it should look like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/your-blog-name-here)
b. Customize your feed through the feed dashboard
c. Finally – publicize your feed to your readers.
Others have started blogging and got so popular that know they sell subscriptions. See problogger.com
Again, based on how popular your blog is, the amount of money you can charge can vary. Initially start small and as you add more value you can increase the dollar amount you can charge.
4. Sell Your Own Things
In the fortunate even that you already have something to sell on your own, you’ll have to have some additional tools along side your blog:
- If you are selling digital assets (e-books, art, photos, music, etc.) you’ll need an ecommerce shopping cart and a PayPal account.
The alternative is http://www.payloadz.com or http://www.payloadz.com
- If you are selling physical, tangible products you’ll need all of the above, a FedEx account and…lots of boxes.
The majority of bloggers sell their ebooks and books, usually directly from their blog using a simple PayPal account.
5. Sell third party goods online
This is the part where beginners make the mistake of selecting products that they enjoy disregarding their reader’s likes and dislikes. Chose the products your reader base enjoy and look for. If your site is about web design don’t post ads for MP3 players or mortgage adverts.
People that come to your site seek your advice in whatever you are writing about so offer them the things that augment your articles and the entire theme of your blog.
Look for products to sell by signing up as an affiliate. For instance I host my blog with JustHost. I love their customer service and I think it brings a lot of value to every webmaster out there; I therefore promote their company on my site, of course getting a little money for that.
Other sources where you might find good affiliate programs:
Clickbank: http://www.clickbank.com
Commission Junction: http://www.cj.com
Hydra Network: http://www.hydranetwork.com
Once you set this up, you’ll need to promote your blog so it increases in traffic and thus your chances of selling directly from your site. How can you do that? See below a list of articles talking about that.
Related articles by Zemanta
- How to Make $250 Online per Day (defactomind.com)
- Five Techniques That Can Create An Income From Your Blog (webmanmarketing.com)
- Generate Revenue Online With Top Blogging Websites *** (franklinbishop.net)
- How to Start a Blog in 5 Easy Steps (defactomind.com)
- How To Make Money Online (untreatableonline.com)
Design by Satori – Web Redesign – Part 3
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Web Design on December 27, 2009
End of the Year Blog Resolution
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Marketer's Schedule on December 14, 2009
Another blog project on Defacto Mind; there are only 18 days left until New Year and I decided to schedule 2 more activities and write about in the Defacto Mind blog.
For the next 3 weeks I will write a book review every Tuesday and I’ll call it “Cool Blue Tuesday Book Review”. There is really no reason why Tuesdays would be blue or cool for that matter but I just thought it sounds catchy. So, every Tuesday, after reading a book about SEO, marketing, design or social media, I’ll share with you my impressions about a particular book and recommend it (or not) to you – the reader.
Read the rest of this entry »
5 Steps to Methodical Web Design
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Web Design on November 3, 2009
Before you venture into design territory and build your website make sure you have all the necessary tools and mainly a plan. Without it you will go back and forth from coding to Photoshop to Dreamweaver to CSS files in a merry go round while wasting a lot of your valuable time.
Methodical Web Design
Instead plan every step by following these 5 steps:
- Map out the structure of your site
Decide the pages, titles, and the folders where you’ll store them. Establish parent directories and subdirectories. For instance, I am currently working on redesigning my web design & marketing site for Satori Solution Inc. I know I will have a public-html directory on the root of the website so I have created several folders under this that will store separate files. It is easier to keep track of everything. All my css files I have them stored into a css folder. All the images (jpg, png and gif) are under the image folder, and so on. - Use Logical Names for Files & Folders
Stop using the same old “contactus.html) name coding. This will not score you brownie points with Google. In fact that is lame and web surfers will not even know that this particular page even belongs to your website. Instead, use a meaningful name like yourcompanyname-get-in-touch.html or contact-us-yourcompanyname.html. Your webpages will be indexed in no time by search engines and they will make sense when they are posted on the web. - Replace spaces with dashes for your webpage titles
That’s right – spaces are automatically replaced with that ugly “%” symbol every time it finds a space in the title of a webpage. That is why you should even replace the title of a pdf file that you might want web visitors to download with something like that: http://www.designbysatori.com/how-to-promote-your-business.pdf - Test, test & test again
Once you are finished with the entire site, start testing. Test it from different computers, different resolutions, and different browsers. I have made the mistake back in my young designer years of launching a website without fully testing it in Mac based browsers and after uploading it I was asked by an advertising shop (who of course was a Mac shop) how come they are not seeing the website correctly. Some other time I designed a site as if 800 x 600 was the only resolution available. Of course it looked great to me, but when I switched to a wide screen laptop with a 1280 x 768 pixels, everything looked tiny and very unappealing. So test links and menu items. Take your time and test everything. - Publish only when done
Once you have completed the testing stage, let the site “cool down” a bit. Go back and revisit to make sure you have everything in place and you are ready to upload. DO NOT put an “Under Construction” sign on the temporary site. This is something you’d do back in the 90’s. It doesn’t fly anymore and it looks silly. Leave it as is, with the splash page provided by the hosting company. Usually GoDaddy or JustHost (I am sure many others do the same) have an already splash page letting people know that particular site is hosted with them.
Of course there is a lot in between, but here I just wanted to give you 5 easy pointers that you might forget. I hope that helped and hopefully you’ll get them done right.
Happy webbing!
Think Before You Design
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Web Design on October 26, 2009
3 Marketing Spices Every Business Should Have
Designing good web pages is a very challenging process. That is in part due to the fluidity of the medium the design is constructed upon.
In other words, just because you want something to look a certain way doesn’t guarantee it will. When you design a brochure for print, you know that everyone has pretty much the same capacity of seeing the design as it was constructed.
Not the same for the web. Why? Because…
Web Design – The Right Way
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Web Design on October 16, 2009
Designing a web site in less than 30 minutes?
Every time when you conduct an internet search for web design and/or development you get hit by an avalanche of software packages, web experts, design companies and freelancers. All hard at work, trying to impress you with their portfolios, creativity and willingness to go the extra mile to build that perfect website for you.
That is all fine; after all – I belong to one of these groups. What is disturbing for a designer like me is the existence of so called web design packages that claim to be able to build a website in 30 minutes or less. But truly disturbing is the actual existence of a professional company that would consider buying one of these packages and claim they have an effective web presence. Read the rest of this entry »
Howdy, Marketing Partner
Posted by Claudiu Geanta in Small Business Marketing on October 2, 2009
Marketing Partners
As a business owner you are probably very good at what you are doing. One thing you should probably let the experts do is marketing – especially online marketing.
Why especially that? Because the image of your business is present in front of your customers even when you are sleeping. Because that’s where the trend is and you need to adapt to survive the market.
Without trying to emphasize the obvious let’s just all agree that in order for any business to succeed you HAVE TO BE ON THE WEB.
