Comment (1)By Ahson Rafiq in Blogging, Make Money Blogging on 6th June 2008
No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.
Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.
Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.
Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.
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Comments (2)By Ahson Rafiq in Blogging, Make Money Blogging on 21st May 2008
Expanding and growing is what it’s all about, making more money online should be your only goal if you truly want to keep making money online through blogging. If you are or aren’t doing good in your niche doesn’t matter because if you have minimum traffic that is making you atleast some money through your blog then expanding within your niche with products and services will not only get you more money overtime but instant traffic for those things as well, think about it, why would people come to your blog when there aren’t many things to look over. The more content you have on your site which is used in different ways, what I mean here is used by the end user like, read, bought, understood, learned, passed on to friends, researched or influenced by.Different type of content is used in different ways by various users, by offering products/services you are only reaching out to a bigger crowd.
Offering products or services isn’t as hard as people make it up to be, if you know alot about your niche and you can handle your own business well then that means you have enough knowledge to be able to sell that info to the people within your niche, for example, after over a year of blogging I’ve learned alot, such as content development, designing, analysis, marketing, advertising…the list goes on. I’m at a point where I can sell that information as premium services, that’s why I’ve made a Services section here at blueverse, it’s where i’ll be offering various sorts of services (right now only 4, more to come).
And now, on to the main tips, the products and services you can offer to expand within your niche.
Guides and ‘How-to’s
Offering complete detailed guides on how to be successful at a niche has always been a best seller topic, more and more people around the world are turning to the online world in order to make money, but it isn’t easy to make the shift from real life jobs to making money online, that’s why these ebooks and tutorials do so well.
Content Development
Every niche has its own form of content (articles, images, videos..etc) and if you have good knowledge of what people are looking for then you should definitely go for it, make content for the masses and either sell it for a solid price for full rights or you could go for PLR. Either way you need to cash in on your content development.
Web Scripts and Software
When myspace came out few months later a myspace adder showed up which enabled you to add thousands of friends to your myspace at a single click, now take this kind of thinking while making scripts and softwares for your niche. Every niche has a need for a new system or something that will make the webmaster’s life easier, in other words easier to make money and grow. If you know what kind of script would do well within your niche then go for it.
Consulting and Analysis
The value of a good analysis of a site is actually quite priceless, It’s like the ultimate stat in my opinion, to know your blog’s potential is a major fact that will definitely motivate you to work more on your blog. To get that confirmation from an expert is worth alot. It’s a fact, if you’re in the niche for a long time and still going strong you will obviously have analytical skills, using them you can easily estimate a site’s potential.
Web Design for the most used CMS
Every niche has its own legacy cms that everyone turns to if they want to make a site on that niche, like for most niches people turn to wordpress, atleast the users in my niche do, so I offer wordpress theme development, so that whenever someone wants to make niche site with wordpress they look for a unique theme and they find theme designers such as me. Just like that you can offer such design services within your niche (if the need is there, 97% of the niches need unique themes, so how can ya wrong here?)
Offering the products and services that I mentioned above will definitely get you a long way towards being an authority in your niche, it’s important to constantly expand your blog’s reach into your niche. I will continue research on this topic and will post more ways to expand your blog as I find them,
subscribe to my feed for constant updates.
Comments (3)By Ahson Rafiq in Blogging, Make Money Online on 5th May 2008
(pun intented)
Anyway, I think Lisa has done it big time viral with her backend advertising tactic after offering an ad spot on her lower back (way lower back) for a mere $100k, personally, I think models can get more for such advertising, body advertisements aren’t new to the media but this is more like Blog monetization that’s why it’s a new one even for long time bloggers such as John chow. Since there aren’t many attractive bloggers, I’m supporting Lisa and her cause here!
Either way, monetization tactics are always evolving so much that its hard to keep up sometimes.So, kudos to Lisa and let’s hope Kevin doesn’t get that spot for digg, that wouldn’t be much of a turn on having DIGG written at that certain place. (pun intended, again :p)
Comments (2)By Ahson Rafiq in Blogging, Make Money Online on 19th April 2008
Coming up with new ideas to blog is always hard, I know what I am talking about when i say writer’s block is the worst thing that can happen to a blogger. I came up with this idea when i had nothing else to blog about and nothing I did to remove the blog was working, when you have nothing to blog about its better to focus on monetization of the blog, If you are already with an Affiliate network, then you should browse their inventory to find something relevant to your blog’s niche, look through the site, then write a review about it on your blog filled with your affiliate links!
This way not only will you get more:
- Serps
- Content
- Indexed Pages
- Traffic
- Money
- Readers
…but you’ll also get another income stream from your blog, having affiliate ads are okay but reviewing a product often if not always makes a sale. I know that I’ve bought 80% of the things I read about in my feed reader. Its about the trust and authority that you have established with your readers that will get you tons of conversions through affiliates.
Comments (0)By Ahson Rafiq in Blogging, Make Money Online on 5th March 2008
This was posted by Daily Blog Tips earlier but i felt like i had a few thigns to say about that type of advertising..
Personally, I think its a bit like pushing the envelope if you are doing all the other methods of making money with a blog that I’ve mentioned but non the less its a good idea, it offers deep “inner” links to an advertiser’s blog, its more link text links but they run sitewide so it does have its own benefits, although i wish the best of luck to the guys at DBT, I am somewhat skeptical about this one because i see more cons then pros..
- The links are second last on the sidebar, so the visibility is shot..
- DBT might penalized for selling text links, its a 50/50 chance since those are direct links but they do have a nofollow tag on them so it puts them in the grey area
- Advertisers (55% of them) are usually looking for that icing (seo value - do follow) on the cake (normal links) so it might be hard to sell them that because of the nofollows..
- Irrelevant links might cause DBT’s relevance powered authority to get revoked, I’ve seen cases where despite the nofollow tag, sites got the penalty
As far as In-content text link advertising goes i would rather prefer adbrite’s in-content link, although its invasive since you have absolutely no control over the links in your content but you still get paid enough to not mind the invasion of links, since those links are generated by a javascript and go through a tracker rather then a direct link to the end-advertisers it helps you avoid any penalties but it hurts your reader’s interest.
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