“Free Stuff” – It’s Not Just for Site Visitors Anymore
There are many ways out there to make money off one’s blog or content site. Sure there are thousands, if not more, CPC, CPA and even CPM ad networks promising publishers everything from awesome converting ads to new robust revenue streams, but many simple fail to deliver. The reason for the failure is not so much because their ads are not as they promise them to be. As a matter of fact, advertisers are as hungry for new traffic as ever and ad rates have been healthily increasing with time. The reason is, many publishers out there inadvertently neglect, and sometimes upset, their site visitors by innocently pursuing their revenue goals. Let’s be honest, you too are a visitor, and are you not irked by the constant barrage of ads? Whether we’re checking our email, reading up on the latest news, seeing what’s the weather holds for us in store for tomorrow, we are constantly being nudged and badgered with an onslaught of “get this”, “click here”, “buy this”, or “try that”. Almost always the ads encountered by your site visitor are designed to make them part with their hard earned money, and very rarely can your visitor get something for FREE. Well that is about to change! Did you know that you can enjoy a nice new revenue stream and keep your visitor happy at the same time? This can be done simply by capitalizing on what the best of “Free Stuff” market niche has to offer.
By placing relevant “Free Stuff” offers, you will make your site a bit more attractive to your visitors and let them benefit from the freebies, trials or free stuff offers that speak most to them. However, you the publisher must act with care and choose the offers you with to display wisely. There’s always a tension associated with setting unrealistic goals of maximizing site revenues, since it may come at the expense of your visitor’s user experience.
Common sense can take one a long way. The main thing to worry about when placing any type of ads on your site is to make sure your action does not tarnish your site’s image or negatively affects your site visitors in any way. While this is a good starting point, it’s never enough. You must strive to offer your visitors something unique, something they will actually enjoy. “Free Stuff” has the possibility to help you with this regard. With the right formula in place there’s certainly a way to generate a nice revenue stream and make sure your visitors are not only ok with your site’s additional content, but are actually happy about it.
Here are three major points one must keep in mind when thinking about integrating “Free Stuff” as part of their site content.
1. Quality! Quality! Quality!
While everyone loves Free Stuff, you must be certain that what you are offering is legit and that users will not be taken advantage of. When choosing the types of offers you wish to display, you better be sure that the “Free Stuff” you present visitors with the highest quality offers. One questionable offer is enough to ruin your site’s credibility. While there are low quality offers that offer very high payouts, needless to say, this will only hurt you in the long-run. Such offers must be avoided at all costs. Remember, if your visitors are happy, you will be happy too.
So how does one make sure that the Free Stuff’s quality is on par with what’s expected? Well, one way to do so is to actually go out there and seek out and review every single free offer yourself. This can be very time consuming. There’s a much more reasonable alternative: Join a network specializing in freebies and trials that has a reputation for quality free stuff. This way everyone does what they know best: You can focus on further developing your site and improve its content, while the network does its magic, finds the right free stuff and weeds out the bad apples so that you only offer quality free stuff through your site.
2. Relevancy
Sure, everyone and their grandmother loves something for FREE. However, this does not mean that you need not worry about relevancy. Placing random free stuff on your site will most likely result in some additional revenues, but you will not even be coming close to your revenue making potential unless you make an effort to offer your visitors Free Stuff that’s relevant to them. Remember, your visitor came to your site for a reason, and in vast majority of cases it’s because of your site’s content. Presenting the visitor with Free Stuff that is related to your content can result in significantly higher revenues for you and a much more enjoyable experience for the visitor. Should a publisher decide to join and Ad network specializing in Free Stuff, he must pay attention the category of offers that can be used on his site. Incidentally, the network I work with offers seamless integration of many “Free Stuff” categories across the board to ensure that the “Free Stuff” publishers display are not only newest hottest offers out there, but are highly relevant.
3. Unique Content
And last but not least, you the publisher must always be on the lookout for new offers so that your free stuff content never becomes stale. Nothing smacks of unprofessional than having old, or even worse, expired offers on your site. If one is short on time, or is the type of person that would rather spend time on site content rather than scouring the internet the latest and greatest free stuff there is, then perhaps joining an ad network is not such a bad idea. A good “Free Stuff” network will have a team of experts whose sole responsibility it is to get the best possible Free Stuff offers out there and ensure that the offers never grow old on you.
Regardless of whether you decide to outsource and let a network provide your site with the best “Free Stuff” offers one can find, or you’re a do-it-yourself publisher who likes getting his hands dirty and want to get those offers by yourself, “Free Stuff” offers is definitely the way to go.
FreeDirect Media is a trusted performance-based advertising network of Freebies, Samples & Trials, where innovative technology meets outstanding customer service. Publishers get access to unobtrusive high quality “Free Stuff” offers that add value to their site and generate high eCPM Rates. FreeDirectMedia.com offers many integration options, letting Publishers integrate offer content into any section of their site, launch a new offers page using a fully customizable template or display free stuff offers in an expandable customizable toolbar.
Authorship Stats in Google Webmaster Tools
Well, it’s been a while Google started to show author statistics in Google Webmaster Tools. This new feature shows the search statistics for the pages for which you are the verified author and shows up only when you have verified your authorship.
The stats that Google provides for verified authors are quite good actually and very detailed. It tells you how many pages Google indexed you as the verified author, how many impressions those pages got in organic search as well as how many clicks they received when showed up in organic search.
That was just the first row; the second row is a graph with daily details of impressions and clicks. The third row of data shows details of each page where you are the verified author. It shows how many impressions a page got over the selected period of time, how many clicks that page got, CTR and the average position in serp along with the percentage of changes in all those metrics.
The only catch is, you must use the same account for both Google Profile (Google Plus) and Google Webmaster Tools, otherwise, the author stats will not be able to gather data unless you have somehow connected (yes, it’s possible to connect two Google accounts to share data) your accounts.
If you have already verified yourself as the author of the websites you have in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can access the statistics under Labs > Author Stats. If not, go verify your authorship and test with rich snippet testing tool to see if that’s working.
Obsolete Link Building Technique 2012
In recent years, link building has emerged to be an integral part of internet marketing services. Good links linking back to your website adds value to it as search engines count those links when it comes to determining the ranking for your website. As online business owners are realizing the importance of links, more and more innovative techniques are being researched out. Newness in link building techniques is a must for success in this field. With time, techniques tend to stale out and hence innovation is required to keep the strategy flowing.
However, lack of proper information sharing has led to a gap and some obsolete techniques are still in vogue. Practicing them is not beneficial neither in terms of money nor time. Hence, it is better to have a know how of the techniques which are now ‘obsolete’.
Experts have pointed out that nowadays seeking one way links are way better than reciprocal links. According to them reciprocal links are not effective anymore. In comparison, quality one way links are much more valuable. If investment is not a concern, then the simplest way to get one way links is by purchasing some on exchanges.
In previous times, it has been considered that the faster the number of links are obtained, the better are the chances of it getting a high rank in the search engine. But things do not work in that manner. The truth is that rapid link generation is something that is marked negative by Googlebot. If a paid service is being put to use, then it is important to keep a track of it so that the increase in the number of links can be traced and checked that the increase is not unjustifiable.
Another obsolete link building technique happens to be the use of IBLNs. IBLN stands for Independent Backlink Networks and these are often considered to be expensive apart from being counted as a popular black hat SEO practice. Sites found out to be part of any IBLN network is strictly banned by Google.
Keywords are an important ingredient behind your website’s success. It has to be used judiciously and in the right places. As stuffing keywords in the content turns it worthless, so is the use of keyword for each instance of anchor text on the pages is a bad tactic. On the contrary, keyword synonyms can be used in the places of the keywords.
Site wide linking is counted as another technique which seems to have lost its charm to gain backlinks. Google counts multiple site wide links as one and hence is not considered useful.
Content plays a vital role in improving the page rank of any website and hence scraping content from a website and then slightly remodeling it with stuffing words and phrases in the middle of it to make it appear as new is counted ominous by Google. Those who do must realize that Googlebot is smart enough to pick the difference between original and duplicated content.
SEO services can do wonders for a website, provided it is done correctly and ethically. Link Building as a part of search engine marketing in USA and over the world has emerged as a strong feature. In good hands, it can take websites places.
Get The Most Out of Your Broadcast Messages
Open rate and the CTR are definitely two of the most important elements of concern for every email campaign. If you are into email marketing, you might noticed that getting open rates above 25% and CTR above 50% is very tough even if you are offering interesting content.
Let me tell you something here, CTR is not based on your number of sent emails. It is the ratio of the number of clicks on the link within the body of the email and the number of opens. For example, if 5 of your subscribers open your email but only 2 of them click on the link, your CTR is 40%.
I was playing (Split testing, to be more specific) with my broadcast emails to find what type of emails get the most opens and the number of clicks. I was amazed by seeing only one of the 4 emails (for the same campaign) got a wooping 65% opens and 92% CTR. Really nice, isn’t that?
Here are the four lessons that I learned from my test
1. Keep The Subject Short but Attractive
The subject line of the email plays the most important role in opens. If you use a common subject, your email most likely to be land in trash as soon as the subscriber sees it. So, keep it short, but attractive.
Example of a bad subject line is “Reebok Shoes starting from $200. Offer Valid for 24 Hours”, where as “Reebok Shoes 50% Discount Inside (24 Hours Left)” could have brought more attention and thus more opens.
2. Use Plain Text rather than HTML
Though HTML can produce beautiful email body, but plain text brings more clicks. Most email service providers (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) disable the display of image in email body and the subscriber have to take an extra step to view images on the html email. Also, a link looks more prominent in plain text but the drawback is you cannot use an anchor text for the link.
The best practice is to use HTML email with no extra design at all. You can use anchor text for a link and make it bold to get more attraction.
3. Place Call To Action Wisely
Put the Call To Action (the link, in most cases) more than once. I have seen the first call to action (the one just below the first few lines) gets most of the clicks and the next is below the main texts. So, you should put your call to action more than once.
4. Keep the Email Body Short
Do not send the whole story, rather send only the teaser. That makes the subscriber grow curiosity and click on the links to find out more.
If you are using Aweber, you can use the preview or the test broadcast to check how the email looks like in different service provider and that too is for free. If you are getting started with email marketing, you can try Aweber’s all the features for just $1 for a whole month.
How To Balance Your SEO Campaigns
Okay, it is not so hard to understand that every effort needs to be well balanced to convert into success, be it in a soccer match or a formula one race, no balance in your efforts and you are out of the game. Search engine optimization is no different. If you want to get top rankings on search engines, you have to find the right balance between onsite seo and offsite seo.
Let’s have a look at both of the factors, starting with onsite SEO.
1. Onsite optimizations are those you can control on your webpage. There are so many of them, but I am going to tell you the six most important points.
- The content on your website
- How often your website is updated with new content
- The number of keywords present within the content
- Proper HTML tags
- Internal linking
- Source HTML of your website
2. Offsite optimization refers to the factors that are normally out of your control and perhaps the most important factors for a high ranking. They are including, but not limited to, backlinks (links pointing to your website), anchor text of the backlinks, social media sharing etc.
Balancing between the Onsite and Offsite optimization
When you start optimizing your website, or even planning for a new website, where do you start? Keywords, right? Yes, that is the way to start your optimization campaign. Then there comes the other onpage optimization factors.
When it comes to balancing between your tasks, you should follow the SEO Pyramid, which helps you to do the right things in right order. For example, if you start building links before you actually put on content, you will be wasting your time.
Onpage optimization or Offpage? Or, both?
Lot of people spends most of their time on onpage optimization. It makes your website crawler friendly and helps search engine to find the important parts on your webpage. When you put the right elements and the keywords in right places, you are helping search engines to know what your website is about and rank it accordingly.
Others strongly believe that offpage optimizations (for example, backlinks) are the only way to get a top rank. This is not entirely true. What’s the point if you have tons of backlinks but search engines can’t parse your website properly and extract the original content out of it?
The fact is, high ranking is only possible with proper combination of both the onpage optimization and offpage optimization.
