Grand opening of dotmedias - Online Marketing, Search Marketing, SEO, PPC, Web design
I'm pleased to announced I launched my own business ! An online marketing and advertising company.
Because I personnaly own many websites (all designed be me), I gained knowledge about the online marketing world because I had to advertise every one of my websites.
At dotmedias we offer mulptiple services; here they are :
- Search Engine Marketing (AKA "PPC management")
- Search Engine Optimization (AKA "SEO")
- Link building
- Website design/developpement
- Business card design
- First Impression (landing page optimization)
We know there are severals companies doing those same services on the internet, but a big bunch of those companies are cheap indians that just do crap of try to steal your money. Only big north american and european companies actualy do a great job. We decided to wait before starting the company because we wanted to acquire the necessary knowledge to offer you quality services.
If your interested in bringing more traffic to your website, we can certainly help you out !
Monetizing a blog; there are many ways to do it
A lot of people I know all want to find a way to make money with the Internet. Yeah, a lot of people do make money on the world wide web. There is severals ways to do it. Today, I'll focus on how to make money with a blog.
First, a blog has to provide something good to your readers. If you only rewrite articles you find on the web, you will not be able to attract readers, you will only have search engine traffic. Everyday readers are the key to succes, so when you offer something they like on a specific niche, they will subscribe to your feed and read your articles.
An important thing to respect is that blogs are by definition FREE, so never think about asking your readers to pay to read your articles; you will simply never get readers.
Before reading ways to monetize a blog, you need to always remember this : traffic, traffic, traffic. If you don't bring people to your website, you will never make a dime with it, even if you follow every tip you can find here.
1. Advertising
Advertising is simple, you place banners on your site and when people click on ads shown in those banners, you get money. Sometimes you get money only because ads are being shown (a 1000 of time).
The most paying advertising program is Google AdSense. You can also try Yahoo! Ads and Microsoft AdCenter. There is some other small companies that try to emerge in the world of advertising so you can give it a try but, for my personnal opinion (and experience), use Google AdSense.
2. Advertising for RSS feeds
Because your readers will probably subscribe to your feeds to read you everyday, they will probably never visit your blog again (or rarely), so that means the ads you display on your website will not reach your readers and you will not make money. The way you can display ads to your readers is by displaying them on your feeds. As far as I know, this feature is only available in Google AdSense (use with FeedBurner).
3. Donations
In addition to ads, you can provide a way for your readers to send you money when they like what you do. It's more common than you think to be paid by readers, so don't neglate it. It will never be your most money-generating feature but you don't lose anything by putting a simple PayPal donate button on your blog. Because you want your readers to be able to easily send you money, you have to use PayPal.
4. Affiliate programs
Like advertising, affiliate programs are banners that you put on your websites. Unlike advertising, you don't generally get paid when readers click on your ads but instead you get paid when the condition of the program is met. Conditions can be things like "when a user clicks and then create an account" or "when a user clicks and the buy something in the next 90 days". These programs are well-paying because they normally offer great commisions. For a simple account created it can be between 1$ and 10$ and for a sell it can be up to 50% of the total price.
There is one thing you need to be aware of... you need to redirect very well targeted traffic if you want to generate conversions on the other website because if you redirect people interested in dating on sites that talks about weight loss...
Blogs: What makes a post, a good post
Many people on the web write on their blogs. Some people have their own domain name they paid for (like I do) while some others decide to go with free or cheap blog hosting (like Blogger and TypePad) so they don't have to worry about the domain name and the blog engine hosting.
There is all kind of articles, ways to write and subjects so it is difficult to tell exactly what makes a post a good post. But, there is some general rules you should follow.
1. Create content
That is by far the most important rule to follow. You can't always create new stuff, but what you should avoid is to "copy" (or be too inspired by) an existing article. With Google, when someone writes and article about something, anyone will be able to find it, so writing the same thing that has already been wrote is useless.
2. Create valuable content
It's not because you write new content that you write valuable (good) content. The simple rule for this is read your article like if you were someone else. If you find it interesting and think you learned something then it is valuable.
Remember, if your readers don't like what they read, they will stop reading you.
3. Write medium-length articles
A normal-length article should not make you scroll more than 3 pages. If you have long articles you will discourage you readers. I'm not talking theoricaly here. When I see long posts in my Google Reader I read the first lines and even if it's interesting I never read the complete article. Time is money, so people will not spend 30 minutes reading a single article when they can have about 10-200 articles to read per day (depending on how many blogs they read).
As opposed to this, don't make 2-phrases articles. Your readers don't want to waste their time but they want content so if you write a very small article, be sure you at least give some links for them to surf and read. There is time where little articles are welcome, like if there's a big announcement of something like this, then you can link to the main article with a paragraph or two.
In general, keep your articles readable within 2-5 minutes.
4. Be you
Don't try to write articles like you think people will like it. Write them like you are telling 3-4 friends about what you're writing. Just be you. If you try to be somebody else, you will have difficulties to stay constant and you will find it hard to write articles every day/week.
5. Don't associate every post you write with all the categories you defined
Normaly a blogger should blog on one specific subject, so his categories should be very specific. If you can associate more than 2 categories everytime you write a post, think about how you defined your categories; maybe you can delete some of them.
There's 2 reasons for that. The first is if you associate many categories, your post may not be very targeted/specific, making it not really valuable because it is too general. The second reason is because when someone browses your blog, clicking on each different categories, he always see the same posts so he will probably leave your blog because he thinks he already read all your posts.
Some people don't really know the distinction between categories and tags. You can add as many tags as you want to your articles, but don't do the same thing for categories.
SEO techniques to increase your website traffic
Everyone who tries to start a website gets the same problem : How to get traffic ?
There is many many paid ways to get traffic like using Google AdWords, referral programs like Affili.net, radio, television, newspapers, facebook ads and much much more. But you don't want to pay for every visitor you get on your website; you want people to find your site by the Google search engine (or Yahoo! and Altavista if you bother about the others). So, what to do ?
First, Google will find you site by itself some day, but you can help Google to find it by using the first technique.
1. Send Google a sitemap of all your pages on your website
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/AutresSites/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/NousContacterAccueil.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/CGU/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/FAQ.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Inscription.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
If your site is not 100% crawlable from the start page, Google (and all other search engines) will not be able to index all the pages on your site. In the same way, if you have dynamic pages, like single pages that accepts querystring parameters and display different content, you can add those complete URLs in your sitemap.
2. Use URL rewriting (relevant URLs)
The more relevant is your URL, the higher your rank will be on searches. Also, if you submit a sitemap (tip #1) with a lot of entries that all points to the same page with different querystring parameters, the search engines will not index all your pages and you will get warnings (on Google WebMaster Tools).
Check
my URL rewriting article to learn more about URL rewriting and how to include this functionnality in your existing website.
For the URL relevantness, if you have an URL like this one "http://www.onesite.com/article.aspx?id=25645151", you will easily be beatten by a URL like this one "http://www.shopcomputers.com/products/HDD/Western-Digital-HDD-WD3200-320GB-16MB-Cache.aspx" on the search results. If you think it does not really change anything because you think only the content of the page counts... your wrong. The URL is the most relevant part of the page. If the URL is long and explicit and have all the keywords you typed in the search engine query box, then the website will appear on the top results for sure.
3. Create links (linking sites)
If you want to be on the top search results, your website has to be linked by a lot of other websites. The more websites are linking to your website, the higher will be your PageRank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. In search results, your site will be shown before others that have lower PageRanks.
To get link you have several ways. You can...
a) Add you website URL to your signatures so when you write on forums or blogs, you website URL is put on the site everytime. This has not a real big impact because Google knows that it is not as relevent as a real link placed intentionnaly by the webamaster. But, it has an impact so do it.
b) Write an article about your website on Wikipedia (if it is big enough because Wikipedia will delete your article if your site is too small).
c) Submit your website to many internet directories. Those services are not really used by people to find websites... they used to be popular but now the reality has changed. Those services are mostly used to help you get links to your website.
d) Ask webmasters that have similar websites to add a reciprocal link (you add one, they add one).
e) Write articles of your website on your personal blog (if you have one)
f) Do social bookmarking. There are a lot of websites that offer you a simple and easy way to do social bookmarking for about 20$-50$. Every different services offer you to bookmark to about 100-300 social sites like Digg.it, Technocrati and kick.it. You can check
SocialMarking.com. I personnaly purchased SEO from them and I got my links.
g) Any other idea !? There are a lot of ways to get linking sites...
4. Don't write text on images
Write your text directly on your website pages. Text on images doesn't get indexed; plain text gets indexed so at least 99% of your text must be plain text. Your logo can be an image, but be sure that your brand name is written aa text on your pages too.
5. Stay tuned, check your current indexation level, and linking sites
When you work hard to index your website, and create link to increase your PageRank (AKA "PR") you might want to see if you techniques are working so the best way to check this is by adding the Webmaster tools to your Google account. Those tools gives you the chance to check directly on the Google's database the number of external links pointing to your site as well as every URL indexed by your sitemaps. Without using the Google Webmaster Tools you can check how many URLs of your site are being indexed. Just do a simple Google search like this : "site:www.iseduction.net". The "site:" prefix tells google to show results only for the specified website. You can also type a phrase to search in this site, but if you only type the URL, you will get every URL indexed for that website.
6. Add quality content in your website
If your website is community driven, the content is probably not a problem as the members continuously add stuff in it. But if your site is a dating site (for example, because I currently have 2 different dating sites,
www.iseduction.net and
www.quebecsexy.net), you have to add quality content in your pages around the user profiles. Have enough text with high density keywords to help the search engines really know what's in your site. The more content you have, the more the search engine will have something to index you with.
It looks easy but, if I take my personnal websites I own, only my blog has real quality et quantity stuff. My dating sites only have about 8-10 different pages. All other pages are in fact the same aspx page that displays members' profiles.
7. Optimize the title of your pages
Don't have the same boring title for every page you have on your site. You should have a different title for every page on your website. You can have a fixed part like your brand name followed by a dash and than a dynamic part. When you search with one or two different keywords, the webpages that has those keywords in the title will appear on top of the list. The page title is as important as the URL relevantness so don't neglate these parts. On search results, the keywords that are in the title of the pages appears in bold.
8. Optimize your META tags
Even if Google does not care about this, it should be a good idea to have good META tags on your HTML of every pages on your site. Old web page crawlers maybe still using the META technique to index your pages so, even if you don't really care about other search engines, it may be a good practice to do so. META tags must be placed in the <head> tag in your HTML pages and looks like this :
<head>
<meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization." />
<meta name="keywords" content="top 10 seo tips, what is seo, resources, seo software, seo ebook, search engine optimization" />
</head>
9. Use heading tags (H1, H2, H3)
This is important. If you all define you own classes and always use SPAN or DIV tags, the analyzer part of the crawler will have difficulty to know which part of the page is more important than which. Using header tags makes defining relevancy more easy because H1 is more important than H2, and H2 is more important than H3 and so on...
10. Assign ALT attributes to all you images
This will help indexing properly your images on your website. Images are not easy to index because there is not always a descriptive text near the image and that text is not always placed at the size position relative to the image. Using ALT tells exactly what the image is all about so it is very important for image indexing.
11. Include a robots.txt
This file needs to be placed at the root of your website. It contains information about what is allowed to be indexed and what is not allowed.
12. Validate the HTML and CSS code of your website
You can do this with the free tools provided by the W3C.
13. Add an analytics link in your pages
If you want to see if your SEO strategy works, you have to track any traffic change. The most powerful (and free) analytics tool is the Google Analytics.
14. Be patient, wait for results
The process of indexing a website is not really fast. The bigger your site is, the faster its new content gets indexed. By the time your site gets as big as CNN or Microsoft (if it happens one day) you can wait 1-5 weeks to see something on your Google Webmaster Tools.