There are 5 ways to make money with your blog (or website). Might be others – I’m open for suggestions: 

1. Sell ad space on your blog
2. Write articles for other companies/blogs/individuals
3. Syndicate your blog posts to other blogs/Sell Blog Subscriptions
4. Sell your own things on your blog
5. 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)

This is Part 3 and final of the complete redesign of my website – Design by Satori

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.

On the same token, every Thursday will be reserved for a small summary of a blog with information covering the same items mentioned above. I will call this “Thursday Blog Talk”.

At this point, I don’t know which blog or book I will review so I guess it will be a surprise for everyone. If all works well, I might continue this practice throughout 2010.

In the same time, I’ll continue with “Creative Friday” with articles about design resources for everyone who wants to improve their skills and craft.
In summary, my blogging schedule for the next 18 days will as follows:

Tuesday – Cool Blue Tuesday Book Review – December 15th, 22nd and 29th
Thursday – Blog Talk Thursday – December 17th, 24th and 31st
Friday – Creative Friday – December 18th and 25th

…and the madness continues…

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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!

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…

when you view a website on a monitor screen, the number of variables impacting the viewing experience rises exponentially. Here are some of them: screen resolution and size, browser characteristics, monitor calibration and operating system. All these variables distort the way the website is seen on the screen.

One of the most important issues for a web designer is deciding what the central or focal point of a web page should be and how much space should occupy.

In order to determine the middle of the screen (aka. The focal point of attraction for any web surfer), divide your screen in 8 rows by 10 columns. The area of intersection between row 5 and column 8 is your focal point.

Plan on putting there the most important piece of your web page. That could be a picture of a product you want to sell, a Call to Action of some sort or simply a block of text you really want the visitors to see and read.

Check out ibm.com or dell.com and you’ll see that all the action is happening exactly in this area.

Here’s what you can do to spice up this important area of your web page:

• Use strong, contrasting colors. This is the perfect place to layout a form with a strong call to action.
• Put a picture; lifestyles are best to be used here. Please stay away from the same dull executives shaking hands over the latest deal. Select one person instead, facing the action or the content. Never have the subject looking directly at the visitor; it will distract him.
• Use bigger text for headlines, bigger than usual or even different fonts. Make them stand out next to regular body text.

Some other quick tips to focus your visitors attention on your webpage while maintaining functionality:

• Have contact information on every page. Don’t let visitors wonder or search for that information, not even for 5 seconds. You risk on losing them. Even if you have a “contact us” page it is still better to post your contact info on every page without making them click on a specific page.
• Put testimonials on the right hand side of the page, where the eye is usually trained to look for this information.
• Use the right column to put newsletter links, registration options and other call to action.

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. During my career, I have heard many of my potential clients wondering what the big deal was about building a website. “My next-door neighbor’s kid can whip one in no time”. He can probably do it in 30 minutes or less too, but is this the right way of developing your digital image? Remember – this is what web visitors see before they even get to your place of business. Do you care how you are perceived by these potential clients? If the answer is “no”, I doubt you are too interested in growing your business.

What if your business card looked torn and full of stains; or your suit when you show up for a client meeting? I doubt the clothing manufacturer would spend 30 minutes or less to make everything you were wearing. Why would you compromise your “cyber” image and put something forth that would just not represent the true core of your business?  

In this day and age, a website is crucial to your image, to your brand. More and more people are surfing the web before they make a decision where to shop. Why would you jeopardize your chances of being selected just because you “overlooked” the web site “thingy”? In my opinion a decent website can be constructed, soup to nuts, in approximately 7 to 10 days, of course depending on the complexity of the project.

At least 30% to 40% of this time should be dedicated to the discovery process.
This includes but not limited to:

• Gathering all the necessary data from the client
• Conduct interviews with the client about the scope of the project
• Decide on keywords, color palettes, structure, internal and external links
• Draw sketches for the site and landing pages
• Collect art work, pictures, newsletters, brochures, etc.
• Decide what text gets included where

Once this is completed, the development work starts. For this you need to have basic understanding of HTML and CSS at the minimum. The more complex the site is, the more skills you are required to pour into this project. That includes but not limited to JavaScript, php, Flash, etc.

The point I am trying to make is that in order for a web site to be successful (effective and eye appealing) 30 minutes is just not enough time to even put a great website idea on paper let alone build one. I agree that “content is king” but a “good looks” is queen to the king and they should compliment each other. Let’s face it – unless you really need something badly, like renewing your car registration on the web for instance, you won’t stick around on these awful government sites. But you need it and you keep on digging for the necessary information regardless of how poor the design is. In that case content is more than king – it’s got supreme powers(!).

If you care about your sales team, you should include your website as part of the staff, in a digital way. You need to care about your website, grow it, promote and expand on it as much as you can. Today’s Internet web surfers are savvy shoppers and they know what a polished website should look like. They are much more likely to buy from the sites that look and feel professional. The same “keyboard cowboys” also know what a generic, unimpressive website looks like, so make sure yours is professionally done. You need to do this right and 30 minutes will just not cut it. You barely can cook a decent meal in 30 minutes; how will this work for your site?

The business of digitally projecting your brand and image on the web is a serious one and can only be done the right way. Unless you want to look like your competition and create the same cookie cutter site like million of other ones.

Final advice – look for a professional company that cares about your business. Look for a freelancer who has the necessary knowledge and understands your needs; develop a long relationship with him/her and you will have a successful website that will bring you traffic and profits. Leave the 30 minute for the ones who are not that concerned with their business and want to play “designer” on the internet.

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.

As a small business owner you have 2 choices:

1. Do it all Yourself (email marketing, web design, blog participation)
2. Partner up with a reputable company that can do all that for you without crippling your marketing budget. (visit my Web Design & Marketing Company that fits these requirements)

Let’s review one by one:

1. Do it Yourself
This requires that you learn all the skills necessary for you to create a powerful online marketing plan. As mentioned in the article “3 Marketing Must haves for Businesses”, they are: email, website, blog. You probably are proficient in email and maybe in doing some snazzy little graphics to insert into your emails. What about the website? How about the blog?

Here’s what you would need to cover the last 2 items:

• HTML editor
• CSS knowledge
• FTP – File Transfer Software
• Graphics Editor
• Statistics Reporting Software
• eCommerce software (if you are planning to sell anything on your web site)

Let’s say you have all of the above. My guess is that you are a web design & SEO company. No? Well – when do you have the time to do all this then?

2. Partner with a web design & marketing company
Your other option is to build a strong relationship with a company that can do all that for you. After all – time is money and you need to concentrate on your own business (unless you are running a web shop, and in which case disregard this option).

Wouldn’t you rather spend your time coding and twittering or working to grow your business?

If you are in need of surgery you don’t learn how to do it. You just go to a specialist. Find your specialist in marketing and stick with him/her until you see results in your business. Of course that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with one person or one company but remember that you also have to give some time until all works well.

Marketing is not a “build it and they will come” idea. There are millions of other businesses trying to do better than you and they compete with a strong marketing plan backed by a strong marketing team. Ca you, by yourself compete with that?

Conclusion:

• Create your marketing plan, including a budget and stick with it
• Make a list of things you can do without cutting too much in your time spent on your own business
• Calculate the ratio of lost time doing it yourself vs. paying someone else to do it
• Find a good design and SEO company that can relate to your needs
• Pick their brain and listen if they bring new ideas that can enhance your profits