How To Make Money Blogging by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs » marketing

The REAL Secret to SEO!

max — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:03:04 +0000

There’s a lot that has been done about SEO, there’s even online courses for godsakes for SEO but as a blogger/internet marketer who has been blogging for over 4 years now (and making a living online for 2+ years and growing), let me tell you the “REAL” secret to SEO.

The REAL secret to SEO isn’t about links at all really, it’s about knowing why SEO exists and why search engines are useful.

Truthfully, search engines simply exist so humans can easily find information on the web as if they were asking another human being.

So, what is Google doing? They are making the best search engine that will give their users the best “human” experience.

Simply put it, I don’t give a shit about SEO, SEO only exists after the fact that search engine rankings are all about giving humans the best possible answer that Google “humanly” can.

There’s a ton of companies out there I know personally that are benefiting from gaming the system and you know what, that’s only going to go as far as how much they spend on buying links and whatnot.

I wouldn’t go there ever, that’s a bad area to be if you have to try that badly to get your company’s brand noticed.

The better way? Don’t be a cheater, be a human being, make a great product, blog about your great product, and let the rest follow.

How do I get great SEO rankings?

I just blog about everything, blogging is at the core of SEO because I truly and honestly blog about things as I see it, as a human being.

That’s the secret, if you can be honest to the world about your own feelings about something, you will always have a ton of SEO to follow. It’s not the other way around though.

So, if you are going to spend a million bucks on your next SEO campaign, don’t, spend it instead on building great products and on companies like me who blog about it. And yeah, I don’t charge you for it, you can contact me for your next social media campaign at zedomax [at] gmail dot com.

I do love free products though, and yeah, I have to disclose that too by the way if you are sending me free samples or even for products for review.

Man, I love life, blogging about everything and being open/honest about everything. That, my friend, will get you further with SEO than the next thousand dollars you spend with another (black hat) SEO company.

SEO companies can suck my big middle finger rolling up slowly, they don’t do much other than trying to game what is supposed to be for human beings to decide, you and me.

Remember this as an analogy, it doesn’t matter if you show up #1 on Google for “Best New York Restaurant” if your restaurant makes bad steaks and customer service sucks balls. But, it does matter if your restaurant is indeed the best restaurant in New York and you give the best customer service in the world because you will eventually end up #1 on Google. THAT, is how you slice SEO for your company’s brand.

Yup, that’s the secret sauce baby and you should thank me because I told you my secrets to SEO.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

The REAL Secret to SEO!

How Many Domain Names Should You Own?

max — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:48:10 +0000

Here’s a question that might come up often for those of you in online businesses,
“How Many Domain Names Should You Own?”

Since I do own a number of domains, let me tell you that number, right now I own about 400 to 500 domain names.

Over 50% of them I actually don’t use but I register all the .com, .net, and .org domain names to shut out my competition.

Why?

Most search engines these days rank .com, .net, and .org domain names very high while domain names ending in .biz, .info, and others are pretty much worthless. (Not completely but it’s still hard to compete with a .biz or .info domain name.)

I know it’s ironic because this blog is a .biz domain name but believe me because I wouldn’t have done the same if I knew before.

So, how many domain names should you own?

It all depends on your goals. If your goal is to protect your brand and also your online business, my rule of thumb is to buy the .com, .net, and .org domain names.

Also, I would buy plurals/singular domain names too. For example, if you were selling “dog collars” and you owned DogCollars.com, I would buy up DogCollars.com, DogCollars.net, DogCollars.org AND DogCollar.com, DogCollar.net, and DogCollar.org.

This is mainly because other companies (or competition) can easily rank as highly as you can buy buying domain names that are singular/plural.

In reality, it’s all about protecting your brand, your company. If you don’t buy up all the extraneous, possible domain names that could mean competition for the future.

One more tip, I even buy up all kinds of variations too, I will leave that up to you but don’t “think” that buying extra domain names is a waste of money, it’s also buying up a whole bunch of internet real estate you can own yourself for the next 5-10 years.

I don’t care if you make money by blogging, PPC, or whatever, the rule of thumb is that you need to buy up all the domains, UNLESS you are willing to deal with competition or other annoying species that want to take a pie of your profits/branding.

So, just remember, don’t be frugal when you buy domain names, just BUY ALL OF THEM!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How Many Domain Names Should You Own?

How to Take a Bite Out of the Market!

max — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 06:35:34 +0000

You know the best method to make money online or offline is to take a big bite out an existing market.

My father does this all the time. He sees an really old, traditional market, monopolized by a really, really old company that has been selling XY widgets for a billion decades.

He goes in there, introduces YZ widgets that are 10 times better yet 10 times cheaper and starts taking a BIG bite out of the market. After couple years of that, my father has a big share of that market and the lazy traditionals are PISSED!

Yet, that is capitalism, that is what “benefits” the end consumers.

So, my point is that you need to do that do make money online or offline.

TAKE A BIG BITE OFF THAT BIG PIE, YOU DESERVE IT.

Sometimes, that little stubborn attitude of yours that you want to win will win over many many millions of hearts and dollars.

That’s what I do, that’s how I make money online.

You fight the big boys, forget the tiny ones.

Win a big fight, then another one, then another one, eventually, you will become the big boy.

Anyways, keep bloggin’ hard baby, that’s how you get it done.

Of course, there’s always that “FREE” pie too, find that “blue ocean” and catch all that free fish.

Remember, there’s more than million ways to cut a fish, pie, market, or whatever, just learn how to cut it so you get the big cut.

And yeah, don’t forget to subscribe, I will be hinting on more tips.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Take a Bite Out of the Market!

YouTube Viral Marketing!

max — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 12:22:24 +0000

Social media has been buzzing the world for last exactly 2 years, I think. Social media used to be called social networking back in 2006 when I started blogging. As more tweeples started twittering, there was more “social media” than you could ever imagine (perhaps because people have been tweeting about it!).

Anyways, for social media, YouTube is one thing you can not miss because it’s VIDEO and people love watching VIDEOS!

I know a lot of YouTube secrets and what they are worth, anyways, if you though I was going to tell you all the secrets today, you thought wrong.

But it’s okay, I am writing a new e-book called “YouTube Viral Marketing”. I’ve used my own YouTube viral marketing to achieve more things like bring web traffic to blogs, sell products over Amazon’s associate program, and a whole lot more.

You will be very interested.

Sorry, I cannot really give free copies for review but I will accept small donation of $20 (reg. $99) per “early” review copy and you will also get free updates as this social media and YouTube changes often.

If you’d like an “early”, never-disclosed secrets of YouTube, leave a comment with your e-mail and I will contact you when the first review copies are available.

Yup, I’ve even bought the domain name for that, it’s gonna be called YouTubeViralMarketing.com

Need a resume?

I’ve drove more than 2 million views to my YouTube videos within matter of 3 days for my last Android Tablet Prototype video in which it cost me zero dollars except for my time and video equipment. This video was posted on various different sites like CNet, Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired, IntoMobile, and ton of other blogs/websites.

That’s not all though, that’s just tip of iceburg. My new YouTube Viral Marketing e-book will teach you how to profit off YouTube channel time after time and also brand your business.

There’s a whole lot of communication on YouTube that most people miss out on, it’s like Twitter. Well, I don’t want to give out too many secrets now, do I?

And no, I don’t use ANY blackhat methods but using a simple but effective strategy and planning.

I upload videos all the time, check out my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/zedomax

Also, you can check out my previous blog posts on YouTube Viral Marketing.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

YouTube Viral Marketing!

How to “Really” Make Money Online!

max — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:06:26 +0000

Today marks my 3 and a half years since I’ve started my first blog. Of course, when I started, making money online wasn’t even on my agenda, nevermind that blogs would become such a big part of our online lives.

After 3 and a half years, I think I can tell you how to “really” make money online.

Whether you are trying to making a living online or you just need some extra cash at the end of the month, there’s a secret to making money online.

And yes, I am about to spill my brains to you so hold on.

First, I will tell you outright no matter how many “make money online” e-books and guides you buy, they won’t help you make money online.

I’ve read thousands of such “how to” guides. The problem with those guides is that you’ve got a million other people reading them, thus saturating your profit margins.

The real secret behind making money online is that you need to do something that no one else is doing.

For example, I am the only guy in the world who runs a tech blog, bed blog, bag blog, shopping blog, and other “niches” of blogs all together.

Of course, another factor is your “passion”. I’ve found over the years that the subject I am the most expert at and passionate about, I can garner more blog readers which in turn translates into higher revenues.

The fact of life and business is that you can’t really make money by trying something someone else has done or doing right now.

What you really need to do is find an “idea” that no one has ever done and really push through that route.

You also need to realize that you will FAIL most of the time but think of it this way, try to get 2 to 3 hits out of 10 swings.

Simply put it, you can’t succeed your first time then try to succeed your second time, third time, and so on until you are so tired of FAILING, then that’s when you will find your creativity and inspiration to accomplish the biggest.

Anyways, I hope you learn today that no matter what you do, if it ain’t different from your competition, you are not going to succeed.

Look at every business model in the world, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc…etc… They succeed because they’ve struck gold doing something someone else hasn’t been doing or took something and took it to another dimension.

Think about that. If you want to make money online, you better be doing something different.

And I assure you, I do something radically different than any other bloggers out there otherwise I wouldn’t be laughing my a** off right now at others who have failed because they were too stupid to be creative.

And yup, tomorrow is another day to try out my new ideas just like any other day.

Remember, the day you miss being creative and creating new business plans is the day you are going to be lagging behind your competition.

Don’t do that, START NOW, start doing something every second of your life.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to “Really” Make Money Online!

How to Turn Disaster into Opportunity!

max — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:56:08 +0000

One of the ways a “smart” entrepreneur makes his/her business profit even in times of economic downturn is the ability to turn disaster into opportunity.

For example, I know once my dad, who runs an international trading business, got into trouble when one of the biggest companies in the U.S. sued him for $300 million. If that lawsuit was pursued, my dad probably lost his whole company and ended up on the streets.

Instead, my dad made an “opportunity” out of that disastrous situation. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, my dad went to the company and made a deal. In fact it was a $30 million deal for the Intellectual Property that was being sued upon.

In the end, he sold that Intellectual Property for $30 million and was able to make a disaster into opportunity.

I can’t really talk about the “details” but the lesson learned here is that no matter what hits you, there’s always a way to turn it into an “opportunity”.

Or in other words, “think out of the box”.

Let me give you another example. Every year, near the holidays, people stop searching/browsing the internet less and less. That means less money for web publishers like me who run content-oriented web sites.

Instead of making less money on the holidays, I actually tripled my profits by gearing my content towards the holidays. For example, during New Years, people tend to get un-digitized and use the internet WAY less. I usually then focus on New Years sales events, which will bring me even more web traffic because that’s what people are searching for the most.

Anyways, there’s a lot of opportunities in times of Disaster. Just look at Apple! They are selling these useless iPads like hotcakes when everyone’s practically broke and they are racking in all the CASH. Seriously though, I can see iPads are great gadgets to have around in addition to my laptops but they certainly aren’t the next generation computers as typing is hard (unless you use an external keyboard) and doesn’t multi-task.

But Apple has done well to “market” their products as they always have with everyone of their other products.

It’s probably true that the best “marketers” make the money while the really “smart” people eat the leftovers. I know a lot of patent companies who produce some of the best inventions in the world and a lot of companies who pay them 1% of royalty to get their ideas to production/consumers (and make millions).

Well, business is like that I guess, just having an idea can’t make you rich but somehow making it profitable will.

Here’s some ideas how you can profit from a disaster (literally!):

For one, you can start a business that helps rebuild communities after an earthquake. Or you could start a business selling disposable umbrellas for $1 that can also be recycled easily for rainy days. Well, I will let you do the thinking, I am running out of ideas myself.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Turn Disaster into Opportunity!

Guy Kawasaki’s Key Note at #Swagapalooza – Top 10 Tips for Tech Entrepreneurs!

max — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:41:03 +0000

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I had the pleasure of attending #Swagapalooza yesterday, huge thanks to Alex Krupp for inviting me, and also met Guy Kawasaki for the first time. It was really random and anyways, good thing I brought my new Canon 7D camera to record his key note in 1080P HD.

Enjoy Top 10 Tips for tech entrepreneurs by Guy Kawasaki, some good tips for anyone starting a new business, my favorite is where he talks about “partners”.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Guy Kawasaki’s Key Note at #Swagapalooza – Top 10 Tips for Tech Entrepreneurs!

How to Make Residual Income with Instructional Blogs!

max — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:55:32 +0000

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Last year when Palm Pre the smartphone came out to the market, I happened to be one of the first to get it, also I registered PalmPre-Hacks.com. Well, for me, making blogs is fun but also it’s a way to make “residual income”.

Making money with blogs is hardly a new concept for me but while making the Palm Pre Hacks blog, I’ve begun to realize something, that is you can make very easy residual income with instructional blogs.

What I did basically with the Palm Pre Hacks blog is to write-up very detailed instructions on how to use your Palm Pre as a WiFi router by installing an aftermarket WiFi app.

But the instructions weren’t mine, I basically followed someone else’s instructions, which is also linked on my blog post with credits to the right people. What is different with my blog post versus the instructions I used to make the blog post is that I’ve added “step-by-step” directions so even a 4th grader can understand, plus I uploaded a bunch of videos outlining the highlights of the instructions. (You can also read up on viral YouTube videos, how to drive YouTube traffic to blogs, and see my viral Palm Pre Hacks video here.)

After making couple blog posts about the Palm Pre, the “viralness” was pretty amazing as people/bloggers linked to many of the blog posts I wrote, even Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, linked to my post about how to install a Wordpress on your Palm Pre. That kind of links were unexpected but of course, I was exhilarated. The weirdest thing happened also, I actually met Matt for the first time couple months later by random at San Francisco airport!

Anyways, the point is that there’s a ton of instructional blogs you can make including about home loans, credit repair, home repair, plumbing, and a whole lot more.

The key is to write great “step-by-step” instructions that actually work and people can follow it.

If you can do that, you won’t have to worry so much about SEO. I find that somehow people find your content through Google and other search engines.

Another thing I’ve realized is that once you make this instructional blog with about a dozen great articles, you don’t need to keep making more blog post, the web traffic levels grow by themselves because you have so much (great) content. Plus, when you write such a “focused niche” articles, your Adsense earnings tend to be higher because your content is so targetted.

They key is that if you can make a bunch of these types of blogs, you could possibly making enough residual income to quit your job or earn extra money to buy a new car or a home.

I am sure everyone is an “expert” on something, I don’t care what it is, you should make some blogs and earn residual income on it. Of course, the point of this blog post is that even if you are not an “expert” on something, you can still make instructional blogs by actually learning something new yourself.

How can you apply this to Affiliate Marketing or Clickbank?

You can probably find a TON of items that you can use as affiliate links on your instructional blogs. For example, I put some Amazon widgets up on the Palm Pre blog, which converts amazingly well.

OR, you can write a instructional blog that teaches you how to get a second mortgage on your house. Then at the end, you can “refer” bunch of more great Clickbank Mortgage HOWTO E-books. (The main point is that you give out the information for free, don’t sell it. After that, you can refer other items that people can purchase. If people try your instructions and they like it, the viralness and word-of-mouth marketing is explosive than you can ever imagine, and why I am making a blog post about it now.

The possibilities are endless.

Recently, I have also made Nexus One Hacks Blog, which is similar to the Palm Pre Hacks blog. Not as successful as the Palm Pre blog but still growing by itself since day one.

No money is spent on SEO, PPC marketing, but just your time for writing-up a “dummie’s guide” on a topic is required.

I like these kind of projects because they are relatively low-risk. If you do well, it’s 99% profit, if you don’t do well, you can try another topic.

Even this blog itself, is probably instructional. I didn’t really give you step-by-steps though, maybe I will if enough people want it, leave comments!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Make Residual Income with Instructional Blogs!

How To Choose Highest Paying Affiliate Programs in 2010

max — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:47:30 +0000

*This is a guest blog post by Tomy from SelfTestEngine.com, you can send your guest blog posts to Zedomax [at] gmail.com too.

Internet has given us a lot of new opportunities for earning money and one among them are the very famous affiliate program. People who are involved in these affiliate programs earn a lot of money by affiliating themselves with famous online sites of the world. The idea is to advertise about a product or service of another company which in turn would get money on a percentage basis for the sale. As the affiliate program has gained a lot of fame over the years many companies and sites have introduced affiliation programs. But not all affiliate programs are very profitable; the trick of the trade lies in finding out the correct and high paying affiliate program.

Some of these affiliate programs even gives you a 50-60% of the earnings on a product or service, once you have attained a preset target. The affiliate program provide must have ethics in the organization, and there have been cases where the affiliation provider doesn’t pay the full commission amount and instead pays only a meager amount. They would make use of technology to take your links and take up your commission and one has to have an effective affiliate tracking program to stop this practice.

When choosing an affiliation, do look at the product that you are about to sell and look at its worth and determine whether the product could be sold to a consumer or if it is just a junk that no one would bother to buy. The health care field is an excellent field as far as affiliate marketing is concerned. This is because many people look at the net for getting solutions for their health care problems and by selling health care products more people would be attracted to your site and they would buy products from your site, thereby increasing your revenue.

About The Author:

Tomy is guest blogger and also IT Certification training professional currently providing Exams training via SelfTestEngine tool for exams like 70-290 and 70-291 for MCSE Certification.

People don’t know these days that how much money you can make via affiliate programs. Let me tell you that bloggers are not wasting their time but they are making thousands of dollars each month via affiliate ads. So, it is important to find out best and highest paying affiliate program related to your blog. In this article I tried to write a brief article about it.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How To Choose Highest Paying Affiliate Programs in 2010

How to Show Adsense Ads Only to Search Traffic! (and less annoying to your regular readers)

max — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:31:10 +0000

Over the years, I’ve realized showing ads to only search traffic is a pretty good idea, especially if you don’t want to bombard your regular readers with a whole bunch of ads.

You can also not show ads to image traffic as they don’t convert well most of the time.

But let me give you a simple javascript example that uses cookies to only show Adsense ads to your search engine visitors coming from either Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, or MSN. You can easily add more search engines if you want to by modifying the code.

Another thing I am doing is to show ads for about 60 seconds using cookies until they expire. (after visitors enter the site from a search engine) I think that is a good feature to implement. You don’t want to show ads just to the landing page to your search engine traffic, you want to keep showing it while they browse other parts of your site because search engine visitors are most likely to be interested/click on ads.

Now that we got the theory/concept out of the way, let me show you how to make your Adsense ads behave so they don’t annoy the hell out of their readers.

This can be great for either sites that are performing poorly (low CTRs, mostly image traffic) or quality sites you don’t want to bombard with ads. I don’t use this for my main site Zedomax.com but I use it for my other sites where my web traffic is high but my CTR is low. Using this code, I was able to bring the CTR up on those high-trafficked sites while improving regular user experience by showing ads only to search traffic visitors.

First Code

Put this code somewhere in your header file.

Second Code

Put this code where you are going to show the ad:

First Code Explained

Let me explain the code a bit. Basically the first part of the code will save a cookie to the user's computer if they come from image search or regular search. The cookie is set to expire in 60 seconds so that there's enough time for your Adsense ad exposure while search engine visitors are visiting your site and ads don't show after those 60 seconds to not annoy your new visitors so much. But you can change the value to shorter/longer if you want to.

This first code should be in your header file such as header.php so you can detect where your visitors are coming from, no matter which page they enter from.

Second Code Explained

The second code is the actual adsense code written in javascript, you will have to replace the google_ad_client and google_ad_slot value with yours. Change the pub-xxxxxxxxxx and yyyyyyyyy to the one you see when you generate your Adsense code. Don't touch the quote characters as that will mess it up, copy exactly and only change the variables I told you to change!

Does my code change the Adsense code and violate ToS?

No, my code doesn't change the Adsense code at all, it just translates it into javascript. The actual output code is exactly the same as code provided from Google. You can actually use PHP to do the same but the reason I use javascript is because my blogs use Wordpress Super Cache, which caches the PHP code. When PHP code is cached, it will cache the detection function also. In essence, PHP code used with Super Cache won't work because it will stay on the last PHP if statement.

In short, javascript works well along most platforms because it's processed in real-time by the browser. So that is why I used javascript here.

What you can get from this?

If you are reluctant to put more ads on your website, you can use this code to only show ads to search engine traffic. That way, you don't drive away your loyal readers.

For sites with low Adsense CTRs, it might be a good idea to show ads to only search traffic as your CTR will skyrocket if you do. Poor CTRs can be mostly from lack of content or image search traffic, both which don't convert well into overall revenue. Especially for those of you who get a lot of traffic, having low CTR can be bad, as it can lower your overall Adsense earnings due saturating overall CTRs.

Credits

I didn't create this code all myself, I built on top of the code created by Stephen Cronin over at Scratch99.com. Thanks for the code Stephen.

What I added is the additional cookie code plus expiration so your ads stay around for a minute before disappearing.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Show Adsense Ads Only to Search Traffic! (and less annoying to your regular readers)

Facebook Hack – How to Invite All Your Friends to your Fan Page in One Click!

max — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:39:08 +0000

I just noticed John Chow has posted a great Facebook hack that can let you invite all your friends to your new fan page in just one single click using some javascript code.

Go to your page and click the “Suggest to friends” link.

You will get a popup box with a list of your friends that you need to select manually. Simply copy and paste the following javascript code onto your URL box and it will select all your friends.

javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’);for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}
Cool hack!

via johnchow

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Facebook Hack – How to Invite All Your Friends to your Fan Page in One Click!

Adsense CPC Optimized Placement Heat Map!

max — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:59:15 +0000

For those of you who have trouble making any money with your Adsense revenues, you might want to try the above heat map. And to those who have been following my older Adsense heat maps from last year, you might want to update it with the one I am showing you here because through the years, I have gotten better at improving my Adsense revenues through better placements.

Now, this map can be seen on the single articles pages of my main blog Zedomax.com (such as this one).

Let me explain why I made this Adsense optimization heat map. It looks so simple yet there’s a lot of research and time I have put into this so please bear with me.

The best performing ads are (based on my 3+ years with Adsense and driving 30M pageviews) is the top left corner right after your blog post headline.

Why?

Because that’s where people’s eyes go first. Also, if you have a sidebar on the left side or you have sidebars on both sides of your website, that’s fine too. I have other blogs where sidebar is on the left side but people will still look for the content side, just make sure your ads are on the “left” side of the content side.

Also, you can embed your ads so they are integrated with the rest of your content but I usually don’t do that.

Why?

You want your readers to really focus on the ads first, just like TV ads. If you have content around your ads, this will cause ad blindness more often than not based on my testing. For some, it may work well, for longer articles.

So, have your ads clear of content. You can put your content above or below the ads. The main point is that you want to have focus.

If you think that will not look good for the design of your website, that’s fine too but just know that maximum revenues are achieved when you can make readers completely focused at the task at hand, that of reading ads first then content.

Why do I have no ads on this blog?

Ads are great for making money on sites with some good level of web traffic. If you aren’t getting at least 1000 unique users per day, you shouldn’t really aggressively advertise but rather work to get more web traffic and loyal readers.

Trust me, I don’t even like putting too many ads myself and if you put ads on blogs/websites that don’t even get 1000 unique visitors per day, you are mostly likely shooting yourself in the foot.

I know, I know, you want to make money right away but you still also need to focus on building a readership and web traffic to a level.

Plus, for example let’s say you put ads all over your website that gets 200 unique visitors per day, you aren’t gonna get that much clicks anyways plus your revenue will be a lot smaller because you have such small number of visitors.

I have found that having at least 1000 unique visitors per day is a good rule of thumb to go by before you even start putting ads. Of course, depending on your niche, this could be slightly lower, maybe 500.

This blog itself currently gets less than 1000 unique visitors per day, I will put ads on here someday but not until I reach the initial 1000.

Just use your common sense and don’t put ads on your site if you are not ready. Or at least start with ads after the content.

Now, let me go on with the Adsense map here. You will see that I have put a rectangle Adsense block, either of the sizes 336×280, 300×250, or 300×250. Try to use the biggest ad size that will fit as bigger sizes mean higher revenues.

You can also put “private” ads on the right side of the Adsense ad to “fill” the blank space if you want. But make sure you test and it doesn’t affect your Adsense CPC. Depending on your niche, this might differ. In my case, filling the space on the right sometimes will lower my CPCs or sometimes it will raise it. Just make sure to test both options and you will find the right combo.

Now, after the first Adsense rectangle block, I have content, perhaps 1-3 sentences. I have used custom code for my Wordpress theme to put another Adsense rectangle block after the 1-3 sentences.

Why?

Because if you want to achieve the highest CPCs and higher reader-attention for the ads, you want to place your ads as high as they can be. (if your goal is to make the maximum revenue)

After all the content, I use Google AdManager and Adsdaq to serve private affiliate ads or CPM ads. This is the worst performing spaces for Adsense so I put my private/CPM ads there. Don’t put more ads there because it will saturate your Adsense revenues. I try to stick with 2 big Adsense rectangles at most.

Don’t put Adsense rectangle ads on Sidebar

I don’t put any Adsense rectangle ads on the sidebar because simply they are the worst performers due to ad blindness. People can easily recognize that ads on the sidebar are ads and will simply ignore it. You can try testing it but I bet your results will be like what I said. One more thing, don’t put ads on your header either unless it performs much better than the first Adsense rectangle. I highly doubt it but you can always test it.

KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)

When it comes to user experience of actually browsing your site, you need to keep your ads to a minimum. Although I have a lot of ads on Zedomax.com, you will see that ads are “clearly” divided from my content. You need to make it easy for users to distinguish ads from real content while you place your ads where readers will pay attention most. This keeps your readers as happy as possible while letting you maximize your revenue potential.

So, that’s it, you just need two big square blocks for your main article pages. No need for any extra Adsense blocks because you want to place your ads where people will read the most. Otherwise you will saturate our own Adsense revenues because you are offering more ad spaces.

I used to have like a whole bunch of ads as seen in my very first Adsense heat map here but I am making more money now by having less ads but placing them higher on my blog.

Extra – Category Pages

Above heat map is for your article pages, where the actual contents are. Now, for category pages, you can place more ads and customize it.

For my Zedomax.com blog, I actually rearranged my blog theme to have 1 left side bar, 1 ad block, and 1 content block, which is 3 columns. You can see an example here.

Why a different layout for Category Pages?

I don’t want ad blindness so I have completely changed my theme so it looks “fresh”. Plus I have blended my ads so they are informational and offer more options for users since they are not trying to read just “one article” rather they are trying to find something. This means ads could potentially be more helpful if your readers don’t find the content they are looking for.

I won’t get into the details of how I did my category pages but it’s an example that you can make your website into different layouts for different sections. By having fresh look to your category pages, you can avoid ad blindness and also offer the readers more options to choose from.

You don’t have to copy my style but if your theme is same everywhere throughout your site, you might want to look into giving it a fresh look for certain pages such as the category page.

I can tell you that my category pages perform 2-3 times better than before, where it was the same as my article pages.

Should you use Chitika along with Adsense ads?

In my previous heat maps, I told you that Chitika was a great source of revenue. Based on years of testing, I have found out the opposite it true. You can easily saturate your own Adsense revenue when using both Adsense and Chitika because Chitika ads will sabotage your CPC. Just make sure to use 1 of them, either Adsense or Chitika but don’t mix them together as you will only be shooting yourself in the foot. You can read my full in-depth analysis of that here.

Well, good luck and if you are having trouble or you want me to review your ad placements, you can always e-mail me at zedomax[at]gmaildotcom, tweet me @zedomax, or leave a comment. I will be glad to help you as much as I can. (for free! hurray!)

Bonus – Show ad to search engine traffic only!

If you simply believe that above heat map will not make your website look good, here’s an alternative. Instead of putting ads where they “look good” but will worsen your Adsense revenues (such as the sidebar), just use the above map but only show ads to your search engine traffic so you don’t annoy your regular readers with ads, see more on that here.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Adsense CPC Optimized Placement Heat Map!

How to Target Your Niche Market on Twitter!

max — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:19:48 +0000

Twitter can be a great way to increase your online exposure, especially due to its rising popularity among the celebrities and masses. In year 2015, Twitter might be used more often than e-mail.

I am sure a lot of you have questions on how to use Twitter to promote your business or even what the hell is Twitter?

Twitter is simply form of online conversations. To do well on Twitter, you simply need to be yourself and “engage” yourself in the real-time conversation.

When you first join Twitter, you probably have no idea what to do next.

Well, here’s a great way, you can use TwitLi.st to find people with similar interests as you do.

Whether you are looking for entrepreneurs Twitter List, people interested in handbags, or even your fellow pinoys on Twitter, Twitli.st is a great place to start.

Do you already have/found good Twitter list? Get free exposure and recommend them here at TwitLi.st.

Here’s a word of advice from my friend Josh:

Well looks like Twitter is here to stay and continues to grow albeit a little slower now than shooting straight to the moon. One of my biggest grips with the whole Twitter community is trying to find people you actually want to follow. If I were a hotel I’d want to follow travelers and other hoteliers before I follow news accounts, ya know what I mean? You can do all of the searching you want and really all you find is a bunch of user generated lists on blogs that have links to perhaps 50 of the top whatever according to them.

So, start twittering. If you are already, you should follow some more people with interests similar to your target niche.

Also, if you are a blogger, see this post on how to setup your Twitter social media marketing for blogs.

Disclosure: I am founder of TwitLi.st.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Target Your Niche Market on Twitter!

Yodle Review!

max — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:53:09 +0000

As promised, Yodle did give my plumber friend Josh 2 months free after the first month failed miserably. It turns out that Yodle isn’t too bad at all if you keep working with them and keep trying. In other words, you still need to keep working with Yodle to get results, you can’t just throw money at Yodle and expect it to work.

In our first 30 days, that’s what we did, we just threw money at Yodle expecting to get lots of calls and e-mail leads. On the 2 month free trial, my friend Josh worked directly with Yodle (instead of me being the middleman who works for free) and kept changing keywords until the calls started coming. Josh and Yodle tried different things like targetting for cheaper keywords/jobs until a balance between revenue and clicks/leads were stable. On our first month, we were only targeting the high-paying jobs, thus leading to fewer calls and no conversions.

For the 2 month trial, Josh averaged 185 clicks and more than 70 calls/emails per month, a lot better than what we experienced in the beginning 1 call and 2 e-mails.

What impressed me the most about Yodle isn’t their results but they accepted my challenge and gave it their best. I think that says a lot about their customer service.

Another fact you might worry is that CPC (Cost Per Click) could be high with Yodle. Well, that’s not something to worry about rather how many conversions you make regardless of how much you spend.

For Josh, he made an average of $4000 for $800/month advertising with Yodle, that’s about 500% ROI in our 2-month testing. Josh plans on keeping Yodle to keep his campaigns going now and Yodle has been making money for his plumbing business while Valley Yellow Pages have been taking his money and running. (and that, we might have to blog about soon, why you shouldn’t advertise with Yellow Pages because they are dead. Seriously, when’s the last time you used YellowPages over Google? Probably never.)

After all of that, I think it’s safe to say you can go with Yodle for PPC advertising. Just make sure you keep changing things if you don’t get calls/leads in the first week and work with your Yodle contact so your campaign doesn’t stay stale. But once you got it set on getting a good number of calls and conversions, I think you have an unlimited potential for growing your business.

Thanks again to Court Cunningham, the CEO of Yodle, Victor Dolavale, and Joel Laffer for making this happen, you guys rock! (and I didn’t lose my face)

Also, one more thing, make sure you tell Yodle “Max Lee” sent you and they will get your campaign right.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Yodle Review!

New Business Cards!

max — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:53:09 +0000

I got tired of people asking me what websites I run so I decided to list some of them on the back of my new business cards. Well, these look pretty good I think, I might order 500 more for CES 2010.

Btw, I got these from OverNightPrints.com, they have the best deals and you can get glossy, rounded-edges like mine.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

New Business Cards!

Accidental Millionaire Review!

max — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:12:18 +0000

I tend to read a lot of business books and on my last trip to my local Borders bookstore, I noticed a new book called “The Accidental Millionaire”. Of course, I always enjoy books that are written by the actual entrepreneur and skip those writing about someone else.

Anyways, this is one of the best books I have read on business and life. The renowned photographer/inventor/entrepreur Gary Fong, the author of the book, goes into details of his life and how he came to be a millionaire through “accidents” in his life.

I can really relate to him in that sense that most of things I’ve achieve in life are by “accident” also.

In the book, Gary goes into depth of how he grew up with his Korean mother and Chinese father in Southern California. (and also goes into depth about his mother’s wig business in the ghetto of Compton where they witness killings of their neighbors by thugs)

The part I enjoy the most is the fact that Gary shares his marketing wisdom along with biography of his real life. I really like how refers to “zen” on how the less he tried to do, the more he accomplished, perhaps a good thought for anyone who’s been struggling to succeed.

I started reading the book 2 days ago and couldn’t really put it down but I did finish it in just 2 days, it’s really that good.

Also, I have been learning a lot about photography lately and “accidentally” came upon this book at Borders.

I won’t spoil you though with much more information though other than this is a great book and very inspirational if you are thinking about starting a new business (especially in photography).

Get your copy on Amazon here

or Amazon Kindle here

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Accidental Millionaire Review!

Efficiency and Logistics in South Korea

max — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:31:14 +0000

I grew up South Korea until I was 9 years old and also I went back for a year in year 2004 and boy South Korea probably has one of the best efficient logistics in the world.

South Korea is about 2/3 size of the State of California. Compared to the UPS/FedEx 1-day service we get here, since labor is much cheaper in Korea, they can ship good within literally matter of hours.

Especially if you live in Seoul, the capital, you can expect to go shopping at the mall and have your goods bought shipped within 30 minutes using Quick Delivery Service(퀵서비스), which is a form of delivery using motorcycles.

They have a similar service to eBay, an auction site. Well, before I came back to the States, I sold literally everything I owned in South Korea with that auction service. Average delivery time for most goods? No more than 2 hours and in return I got my money transferred straight to my bank account within minutes of the buyer receiving my goods.

Of course, the cost of labor in the U.S. makes efficient logistics like that nearly impossible and also the high-cost of insurance makes motorcycle delivery even more so.

(Image Credit)

One thing apart from lower cost of labor, one thing I see that we could be doing in the U.S. is the fact that there’s literally thousands of different delivery companies in South Korea, meaning they are all competing for your business.

For you to ship something from Seoul to Pusan (which is about 6 hours drive, about the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles), it costs you almost nothing, maybe $2-3.

In the meanwhile, in the U.S., UPS and FedEx has monopolized logistics in a way. I know there’s some other small companies who deliver locally but they are too, more expensive than the national delivery companies.

So what?

I am just saying, UPS (pronounced “OOPs” if they miss your package) and FedEx could do a little better here if they had more competition. There’s clearly more ground to cover for packages going over multiple States but clearly, there’s no reason why UPS and FedEx cannot do same day shipping for in-state deliveries. Even if they did already, we shouldn’t have to pay more for that.

I just wish we could somehow push UPS and FedEx to come up with new innovative ways to ship goods like their tracking systems. Recently, I’ve noticed nothing new from them other than sitting on their vans and collecting money. - Keep innovating, never stop, you can never be the best in the world.

Well, just sayin’, we don’t have the most efficient “local” logistics in the world, it could be a LOT better and cheaper, even with high labor costs.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Efficiency and Logistics in South Korea

What You Can Learn From Teenager Make-up Artists on YouTube!

max — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:46:42 +0000

I don’t know if you have noticed but teenager make-up artists have taken over the HOWTO section on YouTube, plus a lot of them are ranked Top 10 YouTubers.

What can you learn from these teenagers who can rack up more views on YouTube than companies literally spending millions to rack up the same amount of page views?

First, it’s not luck that these teenagers are becoming more popular on YouTube. By nature, the topic of “make-up” can appeal to most women in the world as it’s something that practically all women do, make up their face.

Heck, I wish I knew how to do make up, I would be racking up million views in couple days like some of these teenagers.

What they have found is a “great niche” and a niche that a large number of our population can relate/associate to.

Of course, I remember about just 2 years ago when the YouTube HOWTO section wasn’t filled with make-up artists but rather with electronic HOWTOs. Those days are gone, technology geeks no longer rule YouTube HOWTO section.

Perhaps, there’s still other hidden “niches” that hasn’t been explored on YouTube.

By the way, contrary to what some people believe, YouTube has really just hit the tip of the iceberg, YouTube I think will be the next “search” market. Even Google is just “starting” to roll out video search ads.

In 2-3 years, I believe this market will become very competitive sorta like how Google Adwords/Adsense is right now. So, what are you waiting for!

Find a niche that has not been exploited by other teenagers and go make videos and UPLOAD!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

What You Can Learn From Teenager Make-up Artists on YouTube!

How to Make Viral YouTube Videos and Drive Traffic to Your Blog!

max — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:29:26 +0000

In the recent years, I have been experimenting with lots of YouTube videos to drive thousands of people to my blog. I won’t tell you which blog it is but I will tell you that I have one of my seed YouTube videos which will air tomorrow nationally on TV.

Anyways, today I will be giving you very very “simple” secrets/tips on how to make viral YouTube videos and most importantly, “drive traffic” to your blog.

YouTube has been “overrated” by bloggers I think because they simply don’t use it enough or put out enough videos.

I am not talking about boring and dull instructinal videos but “viral” YouTube videos that can be very helpful to the YouTubers and exponentially grow over a period of couple weeks or months.

The most important part about making viral videos is that you “seed” your videos so they will grow over time.

Look at the How-To category of YouTube and you will see that it’s dominated by 14-year old makeup artists and alike. They are indeed doing something differently than companies who are spending millions of dollars to accomplish the same results. (hint hint…)

Anyways, good luck and watch the video on how to make a simple YouTube video that can easily go “viral” over time.

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Make Viral YouTube Videos and Drive Traffic to Your Blog!

How To Make “Viral” Content!

max — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:59:06 +0000

I know my blog is sorta getting lost lately, I am sorry about that but that’s how my mind works, it sorta jumps everywhere all day long. I am not good at organizing things but I am good at putting things together. (Sounds like the same things but one is being more meticulous and the other involves using the creative side of your brain more.)

Anyways, today’s blog post is on “how to make viral content”.

What is viral content?

Viral content is something that can literally explode within days. For example, you wrote a post featuring the latest spy shots of the new iPhone 4G (and it’s real), you could literally be expecting millions of views within a week.

Viral content actually has not much to do with the content itself but the subject. (or title)

Whatever you want to make it go “viral”, it must be something outrageously funny, weird, or no one has ever seen before.

The opportunities for “viral” content are endless, they can range anything from stupid, idiotic videos to things like cracking computer passwords.

The point is, when you write “viral” content, you can literally succeed overnight. (if it goes super viral that is) Even if your viral content doesn’t land you on the front page of Yahoo News (for example), you can still get enough online exposure so much that your blog will catapult to another level.

I know I have emphasized that “quantity” rules of “quality” but you should also work on “viral” content, which is a completely different story.

In other words, “quantity” will always be your bread and butter whereas going “viral” can catapult your blog to another level by bringing in a flood of new visitors.

In fact, ONE SINGLE viral blog post can make you a multi-millionaire in 24 hours, seriously. That is how powerful viral blog posts are. I can’t really link to the examples here because I can’t give out ALL the secrets but you are free to subscribe to my blog and leave comments until I do.

I will try to give you a real-life example of a simple “viral” blog post (which I am currently working on) next time.

C YA! It’s 12AM on a Saturaday night AGAIN and I am working!

“There’s never enough sunlight for me to keep hitting balls.” – Ben Hogan.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How To Make “Viral” Content!

How Korean Ginseng Became Korean Ginseng! – Death Marketing Strategy

max — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:57:53 +0000

English is my second language, my family immigrated to America when I was 9 years old from South Korea. (just like every American family did at some time except for native Indians.)

Where I grew up, in Korea, ginseng has been used for centuries to cure all type of diseases. I don’t know if it cures everything but I know it does some good things for your body.

Anyways, here’s a story of how Korean ginseng became Korean ginseng. It’s actually a true story and if this didn’t happen, Korean ginseng would never be today’s “Korean ginseng”. There’s actually even a movie about this guy who sold ginseng to China back in the day.

He’s name is actually “Im Sang Hok“.

He’s probably the one guy who did “brand marketing” for Korean ginseng and till this day, Korean ginseng are the most expensive ginseng in the world, some of them more than $100,000 just for one ginseng root. (Yes, it is worth more than a lot of drugs out there, grams for grams.)

Sometimes in life, you need to do exactly the opposite in order to sell what you want, especially if customers do understand the real value.

I know, this has nothing to do with blogging but I thought I’d share with you some century-old Korean brand marketing wisdom, it can’t hurt.

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a little bit about his strategy on “Death” strategy:

백척간두(百尺竿頭)는 백척이나 되는 장대 위에 있다는 뜻이다. 위로 올라갈 수도 없고 밑으로 내려올 수도 없는 상황이다. 앞으로 가도 죽고 뒤로 물러서도 죽는다. 지금 임상옥의 입장이 그렇게 된것이다. 임상옥은 선택했다. 백척간두에서 살아남는 방법은 단 하나. 갱일보(更一步), 한거름 더 나가는것. 죽음(死)을 벗어날 수 있는 방법 역시 단 하나 필사(必死), 반드시 죽는것. 못팔면 도로 가져갈 것도 없다. “다 태우고간다.” 임상옥은 장작더미를 쌓아놓고 불을 붙힌 다음 가져간 인삼을 불구덩이에 넣기시작했다.

Well, translated, he basically felt that the only way to survive his “death” (not being able to sell the ginseng for the the price he wanted) was to basically bring “death” to himself. He decided that if he couldn’t sell the ginseng at the price, there’s even no need to bring it back to Korea. He started burning all the Korean ginseng to prove a point to the Chinese merchants.

이렇게 되니까 다급해진쪽은 중국상인들이다. 저걸 다 태우고가면 앞으로 수년간 중국에서 인삼을 구경하기 힘들다. 자기들도 인삼이 있어야 약점상에 팔아먹을 것 아닌가. 인삼이 저렇게 잿더미가 된다면 자기들 장사도 끝장이다. 상인들은 임상옥에게 매달렸다. 제발 불을 끄시라고, 그리고 인삼값은 원하는대로 지불하겠다고. 그날 불에 태우다가 남긴 인삼 모두를 태운 금액까지 쳐서 단숨에 팔아 치울 수 있었다.

As he started burning all the Korean ginseng, the Chinese merchants became “afraid” as it wasn’t often that they got to even see Korean ginseng. The Chinese merchants realized that if they don’t have Korean ginseng to sell in their medicine stores, they would also probably all go out of business too as they would have no Korean ginseng to offer. The Chinese merchants all started yelling to stop burning the valuable ginseng and that they would pay more than double the original asking price.

Im Sang Hok sold the unburnt Korean ginseng for more than his original cost. From that day on, Korean ginseng was exported to China at the price the Koreans wanted, not what Chinese people were willing to pay for, even till today.

The moral of the story?

No matter what hardship you face, there’s always an opportunity you can find if you think clearly and thoughtfully.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How Korean Ginseng Became Korean Ginseng! – Death Marketing Strategy

Google’s Ultimate Secret, “Relevancy”, and How It will Help your Online Business/Blogs!

max — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:08:12 +0000

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

For those of you who have been trying to promote your online services/products or website(blogs), you will have to understand first why Google has succeeded, taking over power players like Yahoo and MSN using “relevancy”.

Relevancy is the key to success in any online business. Whether you sell potato chips online or provide content on your blogs, being “relevant” in anything you do online makes you stronger, bigger, and better.

Look at Google’s Adwords and Adsense systems, the one single ingredient they use is called, “relevancy”.

Even you and me, constantly go in vicious search cycles on a daily basis because you need to find websites that are most “relevant” to the keyword you are searching for.

The greatest part about Google is that they base everything including their ads on relevancy, something Yahoo has a LOT of catching up to do. I am also a Yahoo ad publisher and one of the biggest reasons I cannot promote them as much as Google is because their ads not relevant.

Google also does not show ads if they do not have inventory of advertisers that are not relevant to the content. For example, when you do a search on Google and sometimes there’s no ads. That’s because either there’s no advertisers for that keyword or the ads simply aren’t relevant.

How can relevancy help your online business?

EVERYTHING, if you make your ads relevant to the sites you are advertising on, you will raise your online conversions or you will make your readers happy.

The worst thing is to put ads that are not relevant to your blog such as “buy a knife” when you have a blog about stopping wars and peace.

Whatever it is you are doing, you will gain much from making your ads relevant to your content.

Well, that’s my thought for the day. Build relevance into everything you do online and the people will come.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Google’s Ultimate Secret, “Relevancy”, and How It will Help your Online Business/Blogs!

Why Guy Kawasaki Uses Twitter Over Facebook and MySpace!

max — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:02:45 +0000

Well, I’ve been asked bunch of questions by my friends in the past why I don’t use Facebook too much and Guy answers it in this video, enjoy~

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

I think Twitter does make things simpler and faster (so long as the fail whale is kept at bay). Plus, I hate opening up Facebook because the website itself is slow, I don’t like slow things. I do enjoy Facebook however, when time allow me too and I have nothing better to do.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Why Guy Kawasaki Uses Twitter Over Facebook and MySpace!

Bloggers, z0o0 is coming soon!

max — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 11:09:06 +0000

z0o0, is a code name for one of my newest projects I am working on. It’s 3:40AM now here in San Francisco and I am in the process of planning out how the z0o0 will help you get more relevant visitors to your blog.

As some of you know, I have created many fun sites including SiteHoppin, rivaling against other sites like StumbleUpon. Well, I have given up on that model, honestly because the model sucks. Even StumbleUpon, I know their monetization model isn’t making them a lot of money as it should. “Stumbling” simply isn’t great model for making money because it isn’t “targetted” traffic, people are literally “stumbling” through sites and do not focus on content nevermind ads. Heck, if StumbleUpon implemented something more targetted like Google’s search, they’d be sitting on billion dollars of cash instead of just millions. That’s why Google is still Google and StumbleUpon will never get there. I have also given up being angry at SU people, why should I be, for who’s good?

Anyways, the new z0o0 codename site will allow bloggers to “exchange” interesting, relevant blog articles. I’ve studied the models behind BlogRush and Entrecard, both of which are great ideas but are missing some magic “parts”, which will be included in this new bloggers’ site. (Btw, I am calling you out John Reese, hit me up if you want to invest in my new site. Basically I have an idea that takes BlogRush’s model to a new level and make it work for bloggers, not internet marketers. As for Entrecard, it’s a great idea but miserable execution by Graham Langdon. Not customer service so much but Entrecard has way too much crappy blogs that have no value to visitors. No offense for people using that service now but tell me how many handful of A-list bloggers use Entrecard. None, that’s my point why it will never gain any more traction because either “quality” or “quantity” is missing. You can have quality blogs but they won’t do much without web traffic. On the other hand, even if you get a lot of web traffic, that won’t help either if they are not “highly targetted”. I have run a bunch of “niche” blogs for last 3 years and carefully analyzed web traffic on a daily basis, I know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blogging.

Well, this blog post isn’t to attack those previous services. After long battles and time, I have learned to forgive all those who have been foes and have learned to be at peace. I think life is too short to be angry about anything anyways. Controlling your mind is a lot of fun btw, you should try it. Now, I can focus myself to do practically ANYTHING!

With that said, z0o0 will be implementing features that were missing on those early-adaptor blog networking sites. Basically, we will build the z0o0 carefully and meticulously from ground zero, just like you would prepare a good meal of Korean food, by hand and care. Yes, it might even sound delicious when we are launching the new site.

As with Google or with anything successful online, “relevancy” is the key. If you can’t make that happen, things will eventually fall apart or never grow.

Think of it as a seed that you water everyday and it grows into a plant. When that plant flourishes, everyone who has helped water that seed will see the results of hard work and genuine creativity. That is what I am talking about it. I have tried a lot of new websites that have failed miserably and the great part is that I can use that knowledge and experience to build better ones.

Anyways, stay updated as we might be moving along rather quickly here.

Right now, we are only offering exclusive “memberships” to the new codename project z0o0. If you are interested, please e-mail me at zedomax [at] gmail.com as we are looking for regularly updated/established blogs with at least 1,000 unique visitors per day. Not all blogs will be accepted as the new blog network will be exclusive for the first 6 months or so and we will be reviewing each blog before they are accepted. But if you do partner with us, there’s a great chance you will benefit from more online exposure and more web traffic in the long run.

The only other person who knows about it is Josh from Unconventional Marketing, who is my partner in this project.

Anyways, I just finished up one of my friend’s projects that I am helping with but finally back on track to do my own thang here. More updates coming soon, slowly and carefully, just like how your mother raised you.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Bloggers, z0o0 is coming soon!

How to Turn “Nothing” Into Money Blogging!

max — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:32:42 +0000

Today, I’ve decided to make a short homebrewed video covering some of the topics I have blogged in the last couple days.

The topic is, “How to Turn ‘Nothing’ into Money!”

Why is this so important?

A lot of internet marketers will tell you that you can make millions of dollars with affiliate marketing, CPA, and whatnot. It’s true but what they don’t tell you are the costs involved.

For example, you’d have to spend at least $100 on Google AdWords to start “testing” your affiliate offers. Now, if you are a beginner, you are most likely to spend at least $1000 before you even get a hang of it. By then, you probably have lost most of your $1000.

If you have at least $5000, it might be a great way for you to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing.

But the point is, if you DON’T SUCCEED, you basically lost ALL YOUR MONEY.

Now, last time I talked about “residual income” and “residual blogging”, this is the ZERO-RISK way. It’s not the most efficient to make millions of dollar overnight but it is the most efficient way to make a good living because you could probably start out with just a hundred dollars for a domain name and 1 year of cheap web hosting.

Blogging is great because it’s ZERO-RISK investment.

Anyways, I will stop here, watch the video for more explanation and my 12 O’Clock rants.

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

(Image Credit – “Learn how to make money from nothing!”)

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Turn “Nothing” Into Money Blogging!

30 Ideas on How to Get More Web Traffic to Your Blog!

max — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:17:51 +0000

Yesterday I talked about how I think of 30 new ideas per day to help my blog. Well, today I decided to think of 30 ideas that can help you get more web traffic to your blog, so here goes nothing:

Blog more blog posts per day instead of however many you have been doing.
Make sure your blog posts get “tweeted” automatically by using free tools like TwitterFeed. If you are not doing this, you are losing on web traffic from your Twitter.
Go to Twitter and make lots of Twitter friends in the same industry as you are and exchange “follows”.
Don’t twitter too much, maybe 1 hour per day may be enough, spend your time wisely and divide up your time between tasks. Twitter is great but that’s not ALL of it.
Go digg your best blog posts at Digg. Doing this on a daily basis will help you get residual web traffic over time and good SEO. Again, don’t spend more than 20 minutes on Digg, your “time” is EVERYTHING, let’s work effectively. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
If you have any blogger friends, ask them if you can do a “Friday” post featuring all of your best blog posts for the week and tell them you will do the same for them.
Go reddit your best blog posts at Reddit. Reddit can sometimes quickly go “viral”. One of my blog posts received over 20K visitors from 1 good reddit. Reddit also has lots of “niche” fauceted reddits, go to those if your blog posts apply to them.
Start a simple contest, give out something on your blog such as a Palm Pre or something worth a lot of money. I find anything below $300 don’t work well, people like something in the $300 or more range. You will still get contest entries but you get more when you put a big prize money. There’s a point where it’s effective and not. When you send out $100 prizes, it’s not worth your or their time.
Go to famous blogs where they let you put your website link and leave relevant, smart comments. Whatever you do, don’t sell anything and don’t spam. No one likes being spammed including spammers themselves.
Write a press release for your blog. Press releases can be great for web traffic and SEO, especially if you sell any kind of services or products. I recommend free PR services like PRFree.com. If you have a $100, I highly recommend PRWeb.com. It’s effective, affordable, and can go “viral”. Stay away from expensive PR sites like PRNewsWire.com. I find them expensive and they don’t work unless you pay like thousands of dollars. Remember, the more effectively you use your money, the more your business will grow. This is “guerilla” internet marketing, NOT “I work for a multi-billion dollar company and have millions of dollars to waste.”
Inter-link your blogs if you have more than 1 blog. Send traffic from one blog to another. This is a great way to send traffic from your own blogs to each other. Why not?
Go to sites like Neatorama.com, where they let you submit blog posts for free. If your blog post gets promoted to the homepage, that’s free PR.
Go make use of free guest blogger account at my Zedomax Network. Currently, Zedomax, Bedzine, and RingOBlog provided free blogging services. That’s awfully cheap PR for your services/products. ZERO! That’s about 30K eyeballs(pageviews) to your guest blog post for FREE! I will also set them up for rest of my blogs later when I have time so…
Go to relevant blogs that let you “tip” the editors. Send them your best blog posts and if your blog posts get published, you will get a lot of exposure for FREE. I’ve done this to my new blog over at Palm Pre Hacks blog and got posted on Lifehacker and many other top name tech blogs. The blog averages 1000 uniques after THREE DAYS since launch, that’s called “viral”. (and still does)
Go write a blog post about how to get more web traffic to your blog like this one. It will help people and you will get a lot of free web traffic in return.
Go pick your nose and think about more ways to bring more web traffic to your blog. (j/k) Learn to take a rest and take jokes while you work. I like to listen to explicited comedy on internet radio using WinAmp while I work.
Re-categorize your blog categories to feature your “best” categories. Don’t make more than 5 main categories as a general rule of thumb. Otherwise, you are diluting your pagerank EVERYWHERE and that will bring your pagerank down.
Outsource your blog commenting to outsourcing companies for pennies. Commenting your blogs grow your blogs also and bring back your visitors. You don’t need to do this yourself if you are super busy. (but I do it myself because I want my penny!)
Use blog commenting services like Disqus, where you can put all of your comments in one place and also integrated with Facebook/Twitter and other social networks.
Go to really, really crowded blogs like TechCrunch and leave relevant comments. You can easily get extra 30-100 uniques by commenting on those type of blogs. Mashable is great too.
Get your blog featured on KillerStartUps for free if you haven’t yet. (or you can pay a little for more exposure)
Find a relevant forum for your niche blog and help others. (Make sure to set your forum signature to your blog so you will get residual web traffic.)
Go make a sticker for your car and put it on your car, your mom’s car, your sister’s car, your brother’s car, your aunt’s car, your uncle’s car, your best friend’s car, put it EVERYWHERE!
Make T-Shirts for your blog and give them out to your family and friends. (And wear them yourself everyday like me!)
Make stupid, hilarious youtube videos and upload them daily. Trust me, there’s a lot of stupid people out there who would love to watch your videos, click through to your website, subscribe, and buy your services/products. Also read up on my blog posts on how to make viral youtube videos.
Everytime someone calls you (whoever it is) and they have a website, ask them to exchange links with your website.
Sign up for free blogger networking services like BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, both are great for creating small residual traffic.
Go leave comments on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, a lot of people read it including me. Plus, you might get some better advice than me.
John Chow has a great number of followers, especially internet marketers. If that’s your target market, go leave comments there or even order a blog review, they WORK!
Well, pick you nose more, you will think of more ideas. :,-) Is that a bugger I see? My dad told me that every human being in life has once liked to pick their nose, roll it, and flick it somewhere, the other day I found out it’s true.

(Even though this blog gets almost no traffic, web traffic growth has been reflecting the number of my blog posts. I will try to keep going to make this blog itself a case-study of how you can increase web traffic through pure will and effort.)

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

30 Ideas on How to Get More Web Traffic to Your Blog!

How to Get Free Links From Other Blogs/Bloggers!

max — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:59:52 +0000

Hi y’all!

Today I feel a lot better after taking 6 tylenols, taking the battery out of my Palm Pre, and getting a full 10-hour sleep.

Anyways, last post I told you how to slow down and not be a squawker. Well, today, let me change the subject a little bit to focus more on blogging itself.

Today’s subject is on how to get free links from other bloggers to your blog/website.

This is a pretty simple and basic method I use and works better than sending out spam-like link requests like some of you SEO companies do. (Btw, if you ever send me one of those, they end up in my spam box. Anything automated pretty much does so I never even see it. No hard feelings but anything you send automated will get an automated response, plus I get about a thousand of those daily, I don’t have time to read those.)

What I do is actually wait and sit on my ass until I get a complaint on one of my blogs for not linking to another blog.(or any other complaint) When another blogger contacts me and complains (whatever they are complaining about), I help them fix their problems and simply ask them if they want to exchange links with my blog. A lot of times, I make a lot of these complainers into my friends. (Making your enemies into your allies may be one of the greatest powers of an entrepreneur.)

Probably not the best method but it’s one of my methods of turning a simple customer service request into free link opportunity.

What you don’t want to do is contact someone and squawk about your problems, that will ultimately burn bridges and you might be missing out on “free blog link” opportunity. If you are going to complain, also find ways to make that into opportunities to get to know the person better, don’t just squawk!

Another way to get free links is to make personal “friends” with other bloggers by going to their blog and commenting, connecting on Facebook/Twitter, and other social networks. For example, I know Josh from Unconventional Marketing and have met him through many different social networks. We even met up couple months ago when he was in San Francisco. I don’t hesitate to link to him because he’s my personal friend.

When you become someone’s personal friend, it’s not a matter of business, it’s matter of friendship.

To sum up, if you simply make a lot of great friends online/offline, you will get a lot of free links from other blogs/bloggers.

Bloggers love to link to others, it’s THEIR JOB!

You can also find blogs out there that provide “Top Commentator Plugin” like this one but I don’t really recommend that method (as the only method) as it’s not a permanent link and you will lose it when you stop commenting.

Well, I hope these tips help you gain more online exposure with your blog/website and my advice is to stay away from any automated tools as they might help you in the short run but will “kill” your online business in the long run.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Get Free Links From Other Blogs/Bloggers!

How to Get More Traffic and Explode Your Blog by Copying Other Blogs!

max — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:47:57 +0000

One of the “secrets” to blogging and getting more web traffic/online exposure is by copying what other bloggers are doing.

In essence, you want to copy the “good” but not the “bad” of other blogs you are copying.

I don’t mean copying content here but copying great “ideas”. For example, when John Chow started using Top Commentator plugin way back in about 2007, I started using it. Of course, I think this plugin is great for attracting more comments because visitors are rewards for commenting on your blog.

I’ve actually stopped using that plugin on most of my blogs except this one because I feel comments should be “genuine” and people shouldn’t comment just to get something in return. (But for this blog, that is okay so…)

Anyways, back to the subject of copying other blogs, you want to copy the great ideas such as:

Wordpress Plugins – There’s a ton of new Wordpress plugins created everyday. If you want to stay ahead of the blogging game, you should be using the best Wordplugins that can enhance your SEO, look and feel, and more such as comments. Don’t simply copy and use what other bloggers are using. Try them out for yourself and test to see if they make your blog better. If they do, keep them, otherwise, throw them AWAY!
For comments, I highly recommend Disqus. Disqus lets you gather all of your comments from all of your blogs into one place. Plus, Facebook and Twitter are integrated, meaning you can easily “broadcast” your comments all over Facebook and Twitter.
Another advantage of using 3rd party comment system like Disqus is that it puts less load on your web server, bringing your overall server costs down.
Site design and structure is another faucet of Wordpress that can highly enhance visitor experience, loading times, SEO, and a whole lot more. You will probably notice that I tinker with my blogs very often including this one. The search bar at the top was actually one of my ideas that I created. I thought that blogs in general lacked an ability to search since many blog posts can be hidden and archived away.
Anyways, copy the great ideas you find from other bloggers. A lot of bloggers use free Wordpress themes and you can usually find the theme site by checking the footer of the blog.
Have you noticed that virtually every top blogger has a Twitter button now? If you don’t have one, go make one!

Well, there’s plenty more stuff you can copy from other bloggers without infringing on copyrights and whatnot. It’s out there, you simply have to search for it.

This process of copying other blogs’ ideas have been an ever-building process for me, I do it on a daily basis. I am constantly searching for new ideas that can bring more web traffic and make my blog even more popular.

I can go on and on about these things I find but the most important thing is to realize that some ideas may work for my blogs but not yours depending on the niche and target audience. So, go out there, find new ideas, implement it and test it!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Get More Traffic and Explode Your Blog by Copying Other Blogs!

How Staying Niche Will Make You More Money Blogging!

max — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:16:51 +0000

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers make when their blog grows is that they get too “broad”.

What do I mean?

Well, let’s say you have a blog about iPhones. You get so much web traffic you decide to include other cellphones. Well, that’s a no-no in blogging because you are essentially “diluting” your market.

However, what you CAN do is to make another blog about other cellphones and link to it from your iPhone blog. (You can see example here of how successful these Crackberry guys have branched out to other cellphones. Look at the bottom of Crackberry homepage and you will see the new blog/websites.)

Whatever you do, you can start out “broad” and go “niche” but never the other way around.

If you are going to start a blog about iPhones, stick with iPhones. In the end, your smaller web traffic will be worth 10 times more than a general “broad” cellphone blog that covers every cellphone out there because your visitors are “highly targeted”.

I too, actually made the mistake of starting “too broad” over at Zedomax.com. I have WAY too many categories and it’s probably the most inefficient way to make money blogging. If I started it all over again, I’d probably only concentrate on DIYs or just Hacks.

As a result of my earlier mistakes, now I try to focus highly on targeted visitors. (You can see an example of my new Palm Pre Hacks blog, which is highly targeted towards Palm Pre hackers and Digital LED Watches blog, which is highly targeted towards consumers interested in browsing cool digital LED watches.)

I am also working on a new membership blog that I will be releasing the “real” secrets behind blogging soon so watch out for that too.

C YA!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How Staying Niche Will Make You More Money Blogging!

Life Is Not Perfect, Being Mediocre could Make You A Winner!

max — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:14:48 +0000

Last time, I told you the “secret” behind blogging and how you can use your pure efforts to make money online blogging. Well it’s true, the most important ingredient to making money online and any businesses may depend largely on your hard work, not luck. Luck comes along with hard work. As Ben Hogan, probably the best golfer in our lifetime said long ago, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

Ben Hogan is one of my idols who really inspire me to beecome a pro golfer.

The point of today’s story is that like golf, life is not perfect. Golf is not a game of perfect but trying to reach perfection.

Let me get to the point. No one’s life is perfect, not even the world’s most wealthiest people. In fact, I bet you more rich people are miserable than others because they have achieved more than they needed.

Life is a progress of you trying to be as best as you can be, that does not mean you need to be perfect.

I want you to try something for the next 30 days.

Don’t try to be perfect at everything you do. Focus on the big picture and start “planning” more than “working”.

Working hard means you need to think smart, not working long hours nor trying to be “perfect”.

Let go of your blog design to be perfect, stop trying to get your bloggers to correct every grammar mistake you find.

Instead, focus on things that will get you ahead such as optimizing your ad positions to make the most money out of your ads or even schedule a meeting with your investors to talk about what kind of things will help your business in the long run.

You see, no one is perfect. Perfectionists are the people who don’t do well in business. Entrepreneurs are people who can put together a puzzle, not make the puzzle pieces.

That’s my advice for today and being “mediocre” may actually help you make more money and free yourself away from details and stress.

“Think like a painter, make different brush strokes to make your paint perfect, you don’t need a carbon-copy of reality. Color copiers exists for that.”

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Life Is Not Perfect, Being Mediocre could Make You A Winner!

How To Make Viral YouTube Videos!

max — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:32:12 +0000

Going viral on YouTube has proved to be an excellent method for getting more online exposure for your blog or business.

Even me, I started with “viral” blog posts in the beginning where those blog posts got a massive amount of pageviews and YouTube views.

So, how to go about making “viral” YouTube videos?

Whatever your niche, you need to be able to “WOW” your audience. You can do this several ways by covering the “top news” of the week or making a hilarious video that’d make anyone laugh.

Here’s a great example of a viral video FedEx has launched:

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

The greatest part about making viral YouTube videos is that you don’t need millions of dollars in digital camera equipment and marketing. All you need is a great idea, a decent digital camera, and start recording ALREADY!

Not all of your YouTube videos might go “viral” but if you keep trying hard enough, you will get there.

Here’s another video about Web 2.0 bubble that got millions of views within days:

Download latest version of Flash to view video!.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

These examples weren’t actually homemade as you can tell but that doesn’t stop you from making your own original “viral” YouTube video.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How To Make Viral YouTube Videos!

How to Learn Guerilla Internet Marketing SEO at Winner’s Circle!

max — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:45:20 +0000

Recently, I’ve joined the Winner’s Circle by Gyutae, who works for a top-notch SEO company and runs an rather interesting internet marketing blog where he shares some of his SEO expertise. I’ve watched Gyutae’s blog grow from nothing to what is is now and rather surprised at his success online.

Anyways, I am one of those people who think (or have thought) SEO is overrated. I will have to take that back now, there’s some good value to SEO and it can help your blog or web business grow much quicker.

Recently, I’ve been realizing that I must learn more about SEO and internet marketing concepts in order to take my blogs to the next level.

Well, I just joined the Winner’s Circle and learned one tip that is so valuable, probably worth $2000!

I am not going to tell you what that is, you will simply have to join Gyutae’s new Winner’s Circle where he will explain the SEO expertise behind the case studies he provides.

The Winner’s Circle is basically on-going blog posts of case studies that allows Gyutae to tell you his secrets. What I like the most is that Gyutae can actually tell the readers secrets since this is a member-only program.

Anyways, (that’s 2 anyways in this blog post) I don’t want to bore you with what Gyutae’s new Winner’s Circle can do for you, just don’t tell me months later you didn’t join and missed out on one of the best SEO secrets. And you know I don’t really promote many internet marketing offers so this one is the one to join.

You can join Gyutae’s Winner’s Circle here for $27/month before the rates go up.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Learn Guerilla Internet Marketing SEO at Winner’s Circle!

Pre-selling is Everything!

max — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:04:10 +0000

I am currently attending the Opportunity.com class by John Reese. I first heard about John Reese when he launched BlogRush.com. Of course, being the person I am, I criticized his BlogRush a lot and I feel bad for that since I didn’t really know who he was. (My sincere apologies for any harm my aggressive blog posts on your past business, didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. Hope we can start over from ground zero.)

Anyways, to make the story short, one of the things I learned from his online course is “pre-selling”.

It’s not something new for me as I have been “pre-selling” a lot of Amazon products I recommend over at Zedomax.com for my tech readers.

But I do realize the “importance” of that and pre-selling may be one of the most important keys to selling affiliates products on your blog.

Why Pre-sell?

Pre-selling is basically getting the user to buy the product in his/her mind before he really even buys. So by the time the user gets to the actual buy now page, he/she is already ready with credit card in hand to buy.

Now, pre-sell can be deceptive or even simply dishonest. (Which I see in most e-book 1-page marketing websites. They simply look too “cheap” if you know what I mean. There’s got to be another way internet marketers got to approach this…)

What I am talking about it the opposite, pre-selling with your honest personal experiences or any facts you can back up without hyping up whatever you are trying to sell.

Even my last blog post mentions how I will be offering a new book for people who are new to the blog market and want to make a living. That is an honest pre-sell of my product and I did it without even knowing or unconsciously.

Those are the pre-sell blog posts that will “sell” whether you are selling a product off Amazon or Commission Junction.

I think the next step is for probloggers is to focus on stable Adsense and focus on building affiliate income.

Of course, affiliate marketing has never been my expertise but I have been steadily making progress with Amazon and Commission Junction.

Anyways, that’s just my thought for the day after writing couple more chapters of my new book.

The new book will only be available as a physical book. I really want to write a book on blogging that will allow people to learn to make money blogging whether they read it in year 2009 or even year 2019.

A lot of E-books have big problems these days as the information they offer are either outdated/short-lived or simply not really the “right” way.

Well, enough about my life, please leave any “honest” comments on what you think of what I think. LMAO.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Pre-selling is Everything!

How to Integrate Clickbank Hop Ads on Your Wordpress Blog to Show Relevant Ads Based on Tags or Title!

max — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:48:28 +0000

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of making money with blogs is automating the process of ad serving.

A such, I have been a big fan and user of Adsense over the years, most of my revenue generated with Adsense. Adsense is great for most of my blogs except some of my niche ones where the advertisers on Adsense simply don’t fit that niche.

In a continuous search for the next “big” thing and a fix for my niche blog that doesn’t make any money with Adsense, I recently happened to stumble over some ClickBank ads.

As many of you know, ClickBank is the affiliate bank for many of the digital products on market today.

ClickBank recently introduced a new feature called the “ClickBank Hop Ad Builder”.

Basically, the new ClickBank Hop Ad Builder lets you build Adsense-like ads with ability to pull digital products from ClickBank based on the keywords entered.

Well, this is a great feature except if you have a blog with numerous different articles, this tool might fall short as you can’t really specify all of ads with a set of static keywords.

With a little coding and hacking Wordpress, I figured out how to make these ClickBank Ads to show “relevant” ads based on your Wordpress tags.

If there’s no tags within the blog post, it will use the title as keywords.

Now, this could possibly make you more money than Adsense, due to the fact that you get paid on commissions, not clicks. Of course, this could also make you less money too, it all really depends on your niche and testing.

Another great feature of the ClickBank Hop Ad Builder is that you can customize the size to your liking. I have noticed that something like 600×140 pixel ads do really well and Adsense does not provide them unless you are a premier publisher with more than 1 million pageviews per month.

You might have noticed that I have temporarily swapped out Adsense ads on this blog to do a 1-on-1 analysis of how the new ClickBank Hop Ads perform. (Yes, I will have the results in about a week.)

But you can do this easily with ClickBank Hop Ad Builder.

If you already have ClickBank account, simply go to ClickBank and log in.

You will notice this menu button, click it!

Then select the “Text Ads Builder” (I’d use this because the tabbed ads have proven to be less effective in a testing done by Chitika.).

You will come to a page where you can enter keywords (separated by space not comma!), your affiliate name, and add tracking ID. This tracking ID can be any word you want to use to track where your commissions later so simply enter the name of your website.

Click next and you will come to a new page where you can choose your ad size and various different options.

Don’t worry, you can easily edit the code itself later to change your ad so just click next.

Get the code and paste it on your blog for testing.

Now comes the fun part, you can change the values in the code to customize your ad.

For wider ads, (as seen on my site here) you can change the height, width, and number of rows values like this:

hopfeed_height=130;
hopfeed_width=600;
hopfeed_rows=3;

Now, you will get really wide, attention-grabbing ads like this:

Why so wide? Well, based on my extensive testing, I believe these are actually generate better CTRs (Click Through Rates) than sizes such as 336×280 or 728×90. These are also the ones used by the top sponsored ads on Google search.

The problem for most of my sites have been that I couldn’t get Adsense to show at my desired size, which is something like 600×130.

By having the ads wider, it takes up less space vertically and readers can more easily read the ad.

Anyways, onto the rest of the code.

For the line:

hopfeed_keywords=’my keywords here’;

Change it to:

hopfeed_keywords=’ $posttags = get_the_tags();
if ($posttags) {
foreach($posttags as $tag) {
echo $tag->name . ‘ ‘;
}
}else {
echo the_title(”,”);

} ?>’;

This will basically either use your Wordpress tags as keyword or the title of your blog post if no tags exist.
(Note: Please make sure you copy the correct characters when copying this code, sometimes they can get corrupted while copying and pasting.)

If you have tags on your blog posts, you will benefit greatly from this little code as it will pull real-time relevant ads from ClickBank, instead of based on static keywords.

There, I have just figured out so I don’t know how effective these ClickBank ads are but are pretty promising and I wanted to share with you before anyone else did.

If this helped you make more money with your blog, make sure to write a blog post linking to this blog post, I’d highly appreciated!

Okay, I gotta go back to writing my book, “How to Make Money with Blogging Business!”

You can catch me on breaks @zedomaxbiz.

P.S. Oh yeah, if you know any other “affiliate” programs that does something similar, please let me know!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Integrate Clickbank Hop Ads on Your Wordpress Blog to Show Relevant Ads Based on Tags or Title!

Jumping for Rebounds in Business

max — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:25:42 +0000

It’s NBA Playoffs and I have been literally glued to the front of my 42″ HDTV. Basketball at its finest reminds me of basics in business, especially when you are jumping for rebounds.

In basketball, the winner is only decided by how much a team scores but how many rebounds that team gets, these are basically “free” 2nd chance at the basket. Having more rebounds could mean double the points for your team.

Likewise in business, your success is counted by how much profits you can churn up at the end of the year but there are “many” free rebounds you can take advantage of. As for me, that’s simply blogging anywhere I go.

Strapped with a netbook and a broadband card, I can be anywhere, and blogging during my free time. Those are valuable “rebounds” which help me to boost my business. These could mean serious money.

How to get rebounds?

In basketball, you jump or dive for it, whatever it takes.

Same thing in business, you jump or dive. (and blog, your free time is your opportunity)

Next time you see a window of free time, make full advantage of that, use that time to make money online! Do not sit around and waste it away.

Likewise, I cannot goto sleep tonight and it’s 5:24AM, but I am rebounding on this very post.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Jumping for Rebounds in Business

Why Living the Dot Com Lifestyle Doesn’t Mean you work at Home!

max — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:56:09 +0000

A lot of times, I get comments like, “you are so lucky to work from home.” Well, what I’d really like to reply is, “actually I don’t work from home, my work can be everywhere.” Of course, that would be an a-hole of me to say that but dot com lifestyle doesn’t mean you work from home, it simply means you have the freedom to work “anywhere” in the world.

Strapped with an Eee PC netbook and Sprint broadband card, I can usually be seen at Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee, firing away at bunch of blog posts. Or sometimes, I will even sneak in to the outdoor patio department at my local Target store, enjoying the awesome laid-back lounge chair without even paying for it.

Unlike people who might make 10 times more money than me but still have to work in a cubicle strictly from 9 to 5, I have to choice to work anywhere I want, anytime I want. Being your own boss is priceless, having a boss above you will suck even if you make a billion dollars.

Of course, the freedom doesn’t come without a price, you need to learn to discipline yourself to work when others are not and rest when others are working.

For example, I enjoy going to the grocery store, getting a haircut, or any of those daily events during the day when everyone’s working and there’s no “traffic”.

My mom sometimes “worries” that I don’t get to see enough people everyday to interact with and I will become an introvert. On the contrary, it’s the complete opposite for me as I get to see “who” I want “anytime” I want. For example, my schedule is flexible enough to meet my friend’s schedules, most of whom who have 9 to 5 jobs. If I had the same 9 to 5 jobs, it would be very hard for me to take my free time to visit my friends hours away.

A 9 to 5 job would truly mean being “stuck”, seeing the same people everyday, that would lead more to boredom, I’d have to get a new job every 3 months. (which I completely did while I had jobs, I never like a “job” and couldn’t stay longer than 3 months on average.)

So next time you see someone working from home, he/she doesn’t really work from home but he/she is master of his/her life. Isn’t that our end-goal in life?

Make money, retire, and then control your life. OR, make money online, control your life, and never have to retire.

I hope this post inspire you to keep doing your thang online, whatever you do, affiliate marketing and blogging are all worth it in the long run over a corporate ladder that could fall over anytime during recession.

Whatever you do, DON’T EVER GIVE UP! That’s your moment of defining yourself, when you can go through the hardest hardships in your life.

If you give up, that’s something you will never find out how successful you could have been and regret for rest of your life. Trust me, I have done such thing before, internet marketing is just my second life, I am still regretting…

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Why Living the Dot Com Lifestyle Doesn’t Mean you work at Home!

How to Run a Blog Network!

max — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:50:02 +0000

As you probably well know, I run a network of blogs, hence my company’s name even includes “Network”, Zedomax Network LLC.

Running a blog network isn’t as hard as you think but most importantly, it takes time to grow your blog network.

Today, I will reveal the secrets behind running a blog network, it’s like running a basketball team.

Like a basketball team, a blog network “scores” points not with 1 player but with multiple players. Some of your players might be MVPs and the others might just help that MVP to score well in a game. Whatever the strength of each player (or each blog), at the end of the day, it’s “whole” team that scores points, not just 1 player(or 1 blog).

Why did I start a blog network?

Unlike some of the more successful single blogs out there, I felt that it was a smarter idea to not put all your eggs in one basket(or one blog). My earlier predictions have paid off though, now most of money comes from a network of blogs.

The one single lesson I’ve learned over the years running a network of blogs is that some days, your poor players might step up and make bunch of shots while your MVP has a bad day. Over the long run, it’s your smaller “niche” blogs that will help your overall revenue, not your MVP blogs.

In other words, you can hit jackpot with your less-popular blogs on certain days while your more-popular blogs will keep your earnings stable.

If you only had 1 blog, you will live and die with 1 sword. That is great if you succeed but if you fail, you don’t have much else to rely on.

Much like basketball or even a portfolio of stocks, you want to diversify your investments, you never know that small investment in a no-name company might pay off 30X one day.

How to Run a Blog Network

You cannot simply start 30 blogs and expect you will make money from your new blog network after 2 years. It’s simply not that easy.

For starters, you want to actually start with 1 blog. When you can get 1 blog to become popular, you start adding more to it.

If you look at even the most popular blogs in the world like BoingBoing and TechCrunch, they are too, starting to diversify their investments, adding new blogs to their existing network as their main blog becomes more popular.

Likewise, if you want to start a blog network, focus on that one blog that you have high expertise and knowledge/passion. For me, that blog was Zedomax.com, it’s still the main blog that brings in the most revenue and its growth is the strongest.

Now, this is simply common sense but you want to diversify and make more “niche” blogs, sometimes it’s the blogs that only get 1,000 uniques per day but make as much money as the blog that gets 10K uniques per day.

With that said, I hope these “secrets” help you in building your own blog network.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Run a Blog Network!

Blogging Business Is Like Growing Grass!

max — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:42:13 +0000

Today, let me tell you another secret about blog marketing, it’s basically like growing grass.

I used to work at a golf course to plant sand/seed mixtures to divots that golfers leave after they “flub” their shots. It was a lot of fun work, you get to ride around the whole golf course looking for divots to fill.

Well, the greatest moment of satisfaction working at the golf course comes from watching your sand/seed mixture grow over the couple weeks and months.

What is the pleasure?

The pleasure is that you’ve put in the hard work of “seeding” new life into the ground and watching all your hard work pay off over the next couple months.

Like planting new seeds at the golf course, internet blogging business is the same thing. You must plant your seeds and keep watering it until it’s strong enough to survive on its own.

I am currently in the process of growing new grass btw, I will have an updated post with HOWTO instructions and pics.

Most blogs do not start profiting until end of the first year, and do not really bring in a good amount of money until the start of the second year.

As such, you should always plan your blogging business plan so you will have enough money to keep going for the next two years. (Yes, that means be ready to invest $12K on your blogs over the next two years if you planning to spend $500 a month. $500*24=$12,000)

Al Carlton is another one of those “hidden” blog marketers that make a ton of money with blogs like Coolest-Gadgets.com, I highly suggest you to check out his blog post on how he made $60K/month from blogging.

My last tip of the day, “Keep watering your blog, eventually, it will grow and take over the lawn.”

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Blogging Business Is Like Growing Grass!

How to Increase Your Blog Web Traffic Using Twitter!

max — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:49:49 +0000

Without a doubt in my mind, Twitter is definitely going to keep getting bigger and explode.

Even during my trial testing of twittering crazy for the last 2 weeks, I am glad to say that now, the major source of my web traffic to this site is Twitter as evidenced here on my Statcounter stats:

Of course, I still probably get 50% traffic from Google searches but it seems that Twitter has added additional 50%, meaning a whopping 100% jump in my web traffic.

Now, my prediction and theory is that as Twitter doubles in traffic every month, you can expect double the number of traffic received from Twitter, how cool is that?

Whoever isn’t twittering these days, is probably missing out on the biggest “free” pie on the internet.

How can you increase your blog web traffic using Twitter?

Simple, start twittering away, follow people who interest you, and keep twittering.

Twitter has proved to be an exceptional universe of conversations where people who wouldn’t normally find out about your company/products, simply will.

Think of it this way, I twittered to the John Daly of PGA Tour (@PGA_JohnDaly) the other day on my netbook from my kitchen while cooking spam/kimchi rice, you can’t really do that in real life. (and John re-tweeted back to me multiple times!)

Another advice, put a big Twitter button so your visitors who are twitters can join your conversation on Twitter.

Here’s my example here:

The important thing when putting a Twitter button is to put it on your “premium” position, which for me is the top-left corner of the blog. If you put it at the bottom where people can’t see, it’s probably not going to convert as well. (I mean getting more followers.)

Join me to ask me any questions about my Twitter experiement @zedomaxbiz.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Increase Your Blog Web Traffic Using Twitter!

What Google Doesn’t Want Yahoo To Know About!

max — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:50:58 +0000

One of the most important things a lot of bloggers and internet marketers don’t realize it that fact, “Everyone loves to search”.

Even I said before, Twitter is the possible “future” of real-time search engine, if it is not already.

Even marketing-fanatics like Seth Godin (Purple Cow) have pointed out the reasons why Google is taking a larger share of the “search” market every year over competitors like Yahoo, MSN, and others.

The reason is very simple and I have done months of research into this very subject (and this will become part of my new book called, “Search”), the answer lies in simplicity of Google’s homepage with emphasis on “search” and nothing else.

(Google.com screenshot on 4/22/09, Earth Day)

As you can in the above screenshot of Google’s homepage, there’s only really 1 thing Google wants the user to do, that is to search, and also end up in a vicious-cycle of searching all day long. Now, take 100 people and they do 100 searches a day, that’s already 10,000 searches!

Also note the fact that Google has the “power” to send MASSIVE traffic to the earth day search results on April 22nd, 2009. (It’s because there’s not much to do on the homepage other than click on the logo or search.)

Aside from the fact that “searchers” tend to click more on ads and do not stop searching until they “find” what they want, Google is really still the same-old Google it was 10 years ago, nothing has really changed other than small menu buttons at the top of their homepage.

On the contrary, let’s take a look at Yahoo’s homepage:

(Yahoo.com on 4/22/2009)

As you can see, there’s about 500 different things that the user can do. (or 500 different LINKS!!!)

Whatever is the exact number, search is definitely not the main feature of Yahoo, it only makes up less than 10% in terms of on-screen real estate spaces. When I ask my Yahoo-addicted friends what do they do on Yahoo, most of the time they are checking their Yahoo e-mail or reading Yahoo sports, not “searching”. When they need to go find something, they will inevitably end up on Google.

Yahoo and MSN are both losing “search” market shares every year mainly due to the fact that they have become merely information portals, not search engines.

Now with this theory, if I could be the CEO of Yahoo, I think I can definitely make an impact on the search market, where the most advertising money lies.

Less is More

Clearly, this isn’t rocket science but of course, it’s my theory and I am sharing with you all.

Now, why is this so important?

In my studies with search-engine styled blog themes, I have seen increases of CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of about 50 to 200%, depending on the niche.

You see, people are more ready to click and buy things when they are in “searching” mode, this is fact of internet marketing and many professionals I have talked to at various trade shows have confirmed the importance of focusing your content website on “search”.

Just take a look at the homepage of this site and think again on your next blog design with emphasis on search.

Next time, I will share with you a chapter 1 of my new book “Search” and this theory, that “searchers” make money, “readers” simply don’t.

You don’t get this stuff from reading any other book, these theories just kinda hit me when I get up in the morning so, be sure to subscribe and stay updated on the latest blog marketing!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

What Google Doesn’t Want Yahoo To Know About!

Promoting your Blog with Twitter!

max — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:35:14 +0000

Sorry for the lack of posts, I have been vigorously watching Masters this weekend and live twittercasting everything @progolferdigest.

Over the last week, I’ve had some really interesting things happen in my life including tweetering back and forth with Guy Kawasaki on Twitter(@guykawasaki). Thanks Guy for your replies.

I will be have an updated post with links to everything and new Twitter marketing methods you can use to promote your blogs.

In the meantime, you should really simply start twittering more or sign up for Twitter if you haven’t checked it out yet.

I hate to leave you without any tips here, at least buy this Twitter Power book from Joel Comm, highly recommended for bloggers who haven’t actively used Twitter.

Again, I will have bunch of great posts this week and I am also going to Disneyland! (I will be blogging live from the van where we’ve got a broadband modem and AC power setup.)

In the meanwhile all I can tell you is this,

“Twitter will replace E-mail in year 2010″

Call me a Twitter addict but yes, I have been checking my Twitter replies more than my GMail.

And one more,

“You don’t get addicted to Twitter until you ‘get’ it.”

Interesting post on WHY Twitter will replace e-mail next year or in couple years.

Why are every internet marketer in the world flocking to Twitter? Not Digg or StumbleUpon?

You can answer that question for me. Have fun studying Twitter.

Make sure to join my universe of conversations on Twitter @zedomaxbiz.

Okay one more quote and I will stop, I have all these new “quotes” I think of lately:

“Twitter is like a universe of continuous conversations.”

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Promoting your Blog with Twitter!

Instant Article Wizard for Helping you Write!

max — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:14:32 +0000

Well, I just purchased Instant Article Wizard to help me write blog posts, I find it very helpful since I really use it to get more ideas for my blog post. The program is supposedly for automated content but I usually simply get great ideas from the search results derived from the program.

For example, I have “blogger’s block”, meaning I sometimes cannot find the right words for my blog posts. The Instant Article Wizard program helps me get through my blogger’s block, which is simply finding the right “words”.

I highly recommended it so try it out yourself here.

Of course, my recommendation is to use it as such, a “recommendation” of sentences/ideas you can put into your blog posts.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Instant Article Wizard for Helping you Write!

Blogging Workshop – Setting Goals and Following Through!

max — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:50:44 +0000

To become a consistent blogger who also consistently makes money online, you need to learn to set goals and follow through.

It might sound simple to do but a lot of people lack this skill, the major reason behind why most blogs never succeed.

Even myself, I am guilty of not following through at times and watch some of my blogs fail miserably.

So how can you become a good blogger?

You need to set goals on how many blog posts you want to do per day and follow through, whether you are in your death bed or just got hit by a car.

For me, I try to do about 5-10 blog posts on each of the blogs that I am growing.

Usually, how much I make in 1-3 months is determined exactly by how much I follow-through.

Most of the time, I am too busy fighting hackers, doing daily chores, or simply too busy to follow-through but when I do follow-through, the cash flows.

So, here’s my suggestion to you as a blogger.

1. Set up your goal of how many blog posts you will write everyday with minimum number of words on each post.

2. Make sure to follow-through EVERYDAY. Of course, you can take the weekends off but do follow-through.

3. If you set the goal, at least START NOW and finish your blog posts for today in the next HOUR!

Now, I will be on my way to do the same thing, I’ve got about 30 blog posts to do.

The only thing that is stopping you from making money online blogging is the fact that you are not doing anything about it. If you do a LOT of blog posts, you WILL make money, it’s simple as that, take a lot at the TOP 100 blogs in the world, they are ALWAYS writing something.

“Those who outwork others will always win.”

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Blogging Workshop – Setting Goals and Following Through!

ThickBox Sign-Up Wordpress Plugin for E-mail Newsletter Sign-ups!

max — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:05:00 +0000

Well, I am working on a paid-version of Thickbox Signup I made couple weeks ago, specifically for Wordpress.

I’ve personally seen an RSS count from 1325 to 1741 subscribers in just 14 days since I’ve installed it on March 1st, 2009. It’s freakin’ incredible, I’ve never had that many new subscribers before in such a short period of time.

For the whole year before that, I was hovering around 800 to 1200, never got results but this thickbox sign-up form boosted my RSS readers 30% in just about 2 weeks. In comparison, my whole LAST YEAR increase was 50%. I wish I had made this plugin earlier, my RSS subscription rate would be near 20 or 30K by now.

I am expecting to break 2,000 within this month, something I’ve never done before.

Anyways, it’s available now and it works with your Feedburner E-mail so you don’t have to sign up for another service such as Aweber.

I will be adding more features this week but the plug-in version 1.0 is available NOW! Get it for just $25, I will be increasing the dollar amount when I add more features but you can get it now and free upgrades for the next 6 months.

I feel like a salesman now, trust me, this is worth $25, you can always do it yourself here too.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

ThickBox Sign-Up Wordpress Plugin for E-mail Newsletter Sign-ups!

How Traits of a Fisherman Can Be Applied to Internet Marketing and Niche Blogging!

max — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:11:18 +0000

(Image Credit)

Today, I am going to talk about how traits of fisherman can be applied to internet marketing and niche blogging.

First of all, most fishermen get up very very early to catch fish, usually around 4 or 5 am. I have not yet seen a fisherman who gets up late and still catches a lot of fish.

My grandfather used to be a fisherman too in a small island in Korea, he used to have a big-ass boat he’d use to go catch some of the most delicious fish in South Korea.

So, number one rule, again:

Early Bird Catches Fish!

That’s right, I keep repeating myself but I have seen over and over that successful people in general do one thing everyday, they get up early, even Tiger Woods.

If you think you can accomplish everything by getting up late, think again, you simply can’t.

By getting up early, you have about 90% more chance than the others to succeed, simply you have a lot more resources to work with, and that’s TIME. TIME is an under-used, over-rated resource you need to take advantage of, especially internet marketing.

Another trait fishermen have is intelligence.

A fisherman doesn’t just go to the random places and throws his net, he “knows” where what kind of fish lies in the ocean.

Of course, sometimes a fisherman must take a chance to explore uncharted waters where he “could” find a LOT more fish.

Likewise, as an internet marketer, you need to know where the money is, you need to learn which “niche” makes money.

However, you can’t always study and predict where that “niche” is. Like a fisherman, you must take a chance into the uncharted waters and hope that your prediction of a new “niche” will find you many dollar bills.

So, like a fisherman,

You need to throw your nets at random uncharted waters.

If you want to catch the biggest fish of your lifetime, you need to keep throwing your nets at random uncharted waters where no one else has gone before. You need to do this consistently to test out the new waters.

In contrast, you need to make your ideas into websites as a internet marketer, or try new things if you are an affiliate promoter. Once you find the “big” fish, all the benefits you ream but until you do, you need to keep testing out the market, throw money at it.

There you have it, be like a fisherman and you will increase your chances of success on the internet.

Even me, I still haven’t caught the “big fish” yet, but keep throwing my nets.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How Traits of a Fisherman Can Be Applied to Internet Marketing and Niche Blogging!

Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke!

max — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:17:01 +0000

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn about internet marketing and making money online blogging is,

“Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke”

Probably the same goes for your golf swing too, especially while you are on the golf course.

Recently, I changed around my Adsense ads for testing although I was making some good revenue. For 5 days, I lost about $500, which isn’t much, but clearly my testing had not worked in my favor. I reverted back to my old ad setup and revenue came back up to normal.

Sometimes, we all try too hard to become better, make better, and whatnot. And if it doesn’t work, go back to what worked.

A lot of times, you can break things by trying to fix it. So if your campaign is working pretty good, don’t fix it.

Yesterday, I went into US Bank to open a new business account for my new LLC. Well, I’ve been to US Bank couple years back when I opened a business account for another business. The computers they used then were old CRT monitors and Windows 2000. It turns out they are STILL using CRT monitors and Windows 2000.

I think US Bank is probably the only bank using technology from the early 90s. Well, I can’t blame them since WaMu went out of business while they are still in business.

I am sure US Bank’s productivity of workers might have gone up if they changed their computers but then there would also be people doing “nothing” during the day, surfing the web or IMing their friends.

By having crappy computers and internet connection, US Bank is smart, forcing their employees to focus on work whenever they are in front of the computer, instead of installing IM software.

I guess they will have to update their computers someday but to me they are simply not fixing what ain’t broke.

Even if you don’t follow my advice, just don’t fix your golf swing on the golf course, do it on the practice range.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke!

How to Make Money Blogging with Amazon Affiliate Program!

max — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:15:32 +0000

Well, today let me give you a little insight into how you can make money blogging with Amazon’s affiliate program.

I have been steadily increasing my income by mixing in relevant Amazon products into my blog posts. (not on this blog)

This guide is really for newbies out there who have no idea what Amazon affiliate program is or simply don’t know how to optimize your Amazon campaigns.

To start out, go sign up for an Amazon affiliate account here.

Once you sign up, you are ready to begin.

There’s bunch of widgets, banners, and whatnot, but I have found it’s better to directly link to each product and blog about it.

Find your affiliate ID, which will end in -20. For example, mine is zedomax-20. You can also make more affiliate IDs for tracking different blogs and products.

Now, go find a product you want to sell, let’s say you want to sell this iPod Touch, which the URL is:

http://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPod-touch-1st-Generation/dp/B0012JCYPC/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1236632820&sr=8-1

Now, here comes the fun part. Instead of using the Amazon redirect function, just add your affiliate tag like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPod-touch-1st-Generation/dp/B0012JCYPC/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1236632820&sr=8-1&tag=zedomax-20

You will notice that &tag=zedomax-20 has been added to the end of my Amazon URL.

You can also verify if your URL is working by using Amazon’s link verification tool.

Here’s an example of a sentence in a review post:

iPod Touch on Amazon

That’s it, just make sure to link any keywords or product reference to your Url with the affiliate ID added.

Why use direct linking?

This is great for SEO since you are linking to the actual Amazon product URL. If you use URL shorteners such as CozyURL, it won’t be as effective for SEO.

All you have now left to do is search for products on Amazon that could be helpful to your readers and write a review of it.

The beauty of Amazon affiliate program is that you get paid commissions even on products you didn’t link to but went through your affiliate ID. In other words, if someone clicks on my iPod Touch link and goes to Amazon but buys a Sony Walkman, you will still get paid commission on the Sony Walkman.

Next time, I will show you how to carefully watch your Amazon affiliate commission growth. Make sure to subscribe to my blog and get the latest on internet marketing!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

How to Make Money Blogging with Amazon Affiliate Program!

Best Adsense CPC Niches

max — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:29:24 +0000

A lot of people have asked me which “niche” has the best Adsense CPC return and I can tell them to go use

I can tell you that looking for the best Adsense CPC niche is right in front of your nose, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which tells you exactly how much people are bidding on certain keywords.

Did I baffle you? Of course, the best CPC niches are already known public, the most important thing you need to know is that making money online doesn’t soley depend on CPC, it also depends on the average CTR of your niche. Without the CTR, no matter how great your CPC is, you won’t make money.

I’ve had niches where CTR and CPC is high and makes as much money as other niche blogs that have 10 times more web traffic.

So, in all, don’t waste your time looking for the best CPC niches, there really isn’t one. If someone knows about, he/she probably won’t tell you. Think about it, why would people want to reveal their great CPC goldmine, so everyone can make a blog about it and inflate that niche? Lol…

What you should really focus on is what you are passionate about first. Check out my post on free ideas for blogging niches.

BUT, if you really want to find out how to find the best CPC niche, I can tell you how to go about it:

1. Pick couple niches that you think would do well and find out how much CPC is on Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

2. For every niche, try finding a blog about it on Google simply by typing. If there’s already 100 blogs about that niche, it’s probably not a good idea to go that route even if CPC is skyrocketing high.

You simply need to research and find out how much competition you have. For some competitive niches such as techonology, there’s “never” enough blogs about it. (another secret)

On the other hand, if there’s no (or little) blogs about that niche, you could probably do well making a new blog.

Well, there, I told you my secret, I hope you go find your best CPC niche now and make sure to subscribe to my blog as I got some more cool stuff coming.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Best Adsense CPC Niches

Blog DIY – How to Make a Lightbox RSS E-mail Subscription Sign Up Form!

max — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:40:32 +0000

UPDATE: I’ve developed this DIY into a Wordpress Plug-in, you can get the ThickboxSignup Plugin for $25. It’s like you paying me to custom-install it on your blog so not a bad deal!

I’ve been noticing more and more internet marketers have been using lightbox sign up forms to increase their RSS readership. John Chow recommends using Aweber but I just don’t see the benefits of e-mail lists over my current “free” feedburner e-mail subscriptions.

Since I don’t really like paying for stuff (that should be free anyways), I’ve decided to make my own code to hack Wordpress and of course, a nice lightbox RSS e-mail subscription sign up form as shown here:

Basically, I couldn’t use Lightbox library since it doesn’t support iframes. I found a better solution, which is a similar open source library called, “Thickbox“.

First, download all the files and install it on your server. In this example, I will use /js and /css directories for simplicity. Also, try to use the compressed versions of the javascript files, they will load much faster.

Second, you will need to create a simple PHP or HTML file for the sign-up form.

Here’s my code I made for this Zedomax.Biz blog:

//store cookie for about 1000 hours or about 40 days

?>

Sign up for FREE e-mail delivery for daily newsletter on the latest internet marketing!

*Your e-mail will not be shared with anyone and you may cancel at any time by pressing on “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of your newsletter.

Enter your email address:

Now, you will see that I simply copy and pasted the feedburner e-mail subscription form from feedburner.

Pretty simple right?

Well, save this code as filename, “signup.php” and put it in your root directory. Try opening up the file in your browser to make sure it works. (example: http://zedomax.biz/signup.php)

Once you got the sign-up form page right, you are ready to hack your Wordpress theme and get the lightbox working. (or thickbox)

Now, copy and paste this code right before the tag in your header.php file:

Make sure the paths are correct to where you’ve installed your thickbox js and css directories.

The readCookie functions are to store cookies so your lightbox sign-up form doesn’t annoy your regular readers everytime they come to your blog.

The function thickBoxPopup() is the actual function that checks for a cookie named, “zedomaxbiz“. (You can change it to anything else if you’d like) If such cookie doesn’t exist, it will create one to expire 1 year later. This is to NOT annoy your readers, the lightbox will only show up once per visitor. I could also store cookies only to those who subscribed but this would annoy those readers who never subscribe but like to visit your blog.

One more step and this lightbox (thickbox) RSS e-mail sign-up form will be done.

Add (or replace) the following tag to your tag:
(This should also be on header.php file)

Basically, this will set off the function thickBoxPopup 5 seconds after your blog has been “completely” loaded onto the browser.

Make sure to clear your Wordpress super cache (if you have it installed) and re-load your blog and wait 5 seconds. You should see a nice lightbox sign-up form.

Now, the lightbox sign-up form will only be activated once so if you want to see it more times for testing, simply clear your browser cookies and load your site again.

I’ve been testing this lightbox sign-up form on my Zedomax.com blog and have noticed dramatic improvements in daily sign-up numbers. It can be annoying to your regular readers but it’s very light-weight and doesn’t freeze your website like the Aweber lightbox sign-up form does. (I have noticed that John Chow’s or Shoemoney’s blog will freeze if you scroll way down before the sign-up form appears)

Of course, you are not limited to feedburner sign-ups here, you can probably use this for anything else you might need, even an e-store that needs lightbox/thickbox effects.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the read and make sure to subscribe to the blog!

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Blog DIY – How to Make a Lightbox RSS E-mail Subscription Sign Up Form!

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Blog/Blogger Transparency and Privacy

max — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:06:06 +0000

A lot of bloggers are very transparent about their life on their blogs. Today, we will talk about some of the issues of transparency and privacy, both of which are important to understand as a blogger and internet marketer.

Basically tranparency is like see-through part of your blog, this can include any personal information about you including your real name, phone number, address, social security number, etc…etc…

And privacy can be like the infomation you want to protect such as your social security number and your readers’ e-mail addresses.

Apparently, some people are very “open” about their personal life and I do admit to being like that too.

But what I’ve found over the years, is that you must protect your personal information. For example, you don’t know that in the future you will make couple million bucks and someone comes to kidnap your only child AFTER the fact that you revealed you have a kid.

I know, I know, what comes around goes around and God is out there somewhere to protect you. But you still need to take pre-cautions to protect your life online. Your identity may easily be hacked otherwise.

On the other hand, there are some people who are “overprotective” of their personal information. These people use fake names, fake pictures, and a fake identity online. It’s up to you to do that but I think that’s going overboard.

You want to be as transparent as possible without being stupid basically.

So, here’s some tips for protecting yourself when you do business online:

1. Always do private registration with domain names. There’s no reason not to. Aside from anonimity, private registration can protect you further from domain hackers. The less information for them, the harder it is to hack your domain name.

2. Never put your home address online, there’s no reason to. If hackers get hold of your credit card, all they have to do is Google your home address to use your credit card. DUH~

3. Use a separate password for un-important logins at websites. A lot of people fail to have a different password for Facebook versus their bank account. I know Facebook won’t be hacked but heck, if it does get hacked, you better be relieved that they can’t hack your bank account.

4. Never put your kids information online. (unless you have a blog about kids or a Mom/Dad blog) Why do you want to put your kids in danger of being exposed to thousands of hackers online? You know the internet ISN’T all that safe if you think about it. Especially, if your kids cannot type for themselves yet, you should take ADVANTAGE of privacy.

There, I just gave you handful of tips for protecting your life on the internet in the long term. (Just in case, like insurance)

Here’s a sentence I made up for the day:

Anything you don’t say online cannot be used against you.

Post from: I Make Money Online by Creating Free Content for the World with Blogs

Blog/Blogger Transparency and Privacy

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