Learn To Build Cash

With the number of blogs on the Web now in the hundreds of millions, it is more critical than ever to ensure that yours is doing the most for your business and not merely existing in cyberspace.

Affiliate marketing has always been an effective method for increasing a blog’s earning potential, but it is just one piece of the puzzle. The most successful blogs are built on a multilayered revenue model in which affiliate earnings are just some of the key ingredients.

Below are the three main areas to focus on if you want to get the most bang out of your blog.

1) Your own expertise

The content of your blog will play a significant role in driving traffic to your website and creating exposure for your business, as well as in determining the potential for advertising and affiliate marketing revenues. Your blog is the gateway to an entire community of users that has shown some level of interest in your industry or niche, and the information and ideas you present to them will have a profound effect on how your business and products are perceived. This is why it is imperative to keep your focus on subjects that you are passionate and deeply knowledgeable about, whether it is your own products or services, other offerings throughout your industry that you strongly believe in, or additional topics of interest within the industry or niche in which your business thrives. It is important to never lose sight of the fact that your blog’s aim is to provide service and education to an audience of similarly impassioned visitors. Once your blog has developed somewhat of a following, invite guests within the community to share their own knowledge and expertise. This practice will serve your business by adding a fresh perspective to your own, as well as potentially opening the door to valuable partnerships and affiliate relationships.

2) Finding a sponsor

Building partnerships with other companies or websites that have a vision similar to your own can be an enormously beneficial aspect to a blog. The financial rewards are obvious, even if the relationship starts with your new partner or sponsor covering a small amount of your overall costs, but aligning your blog with a respected member of your industry’s community will do wonders for your business’ visibility and credibility. Once you have built a distinguishable voice through focused and informative posts to your blog, you can approach businesses and other websites in your niche to find out their level of interest in some kind of partnership. If you are having trouble making any headway finding a sponsor, try to entice one by offering discounted products or services to initiate the relationship. If you stand behind the integrity of your blog and your business in general, the partnership will undoubtedly grow, and additional sponsors may even come knocking on your door.

3) Filling in the gaps

This is the layer in which affiliate marketing and other advertising opportunities exist. Where affiliates are concerned, it is vital to seek out and limit your partnerships to those companies and products that fit directly in your industry and the subject matter of your blog posts, and to those businesses and products in which you sincerely endorse. If you treat your affiliate partnerships with the same integrity that you put into maintaining your blog and the rest of your business, it will only enhance your standing among the community of users. Seek out individual partnerships and programs that are best suited to the needs of your visitors, and do your due diligence wherever necessary. The remaining gaps can be filled in with a variety of advertising methods, but be careful not to turn your blog into a billboard that promotes products you’ve never heard of. Google’s AdSense and other targeted contextual ads are one good source of revenue, but they will generally earn revenues on a cost-per-click basis rather than impressions or views, and too many of them may scare away visitors.

Why not examine the earnings of your own blog and see how it compares? Is your product or industry expertise generating significant sales? Are you getting a substantial amount of revenues from your relationships with sponsors, or are affiliate marketing and other advertising vehicles your blog’s main sources of earnings?

Share This Page!

At the end of every interview, you will be asked if you have any other questions. Most candidates commonly make the mistake of saying “no” and don’t realize that this can be the kiss of death!

By saying you don’t want to continue the discussion, you could end up sending the wrong signal that you’re not really interested in the job or, worse, in talking to them personally. Yikes!

Remember that Hiring Managers aren’t asking if you have any last minute questions solely because they want to help get you more information. In many instances, this is a calculated move to see how you will respond. Here are some things a manager may want to test you on by asking if you have any final questions…

ARE YOU DETAILED?

They want to see if you are interested in digging deeper into the details of an important topic that was only touched upon lightly earlier in the interview.

ARE YOU SMART?

They want to see if you catch something that was brought up that warrants further discussion. By asking about these things, you demonstrate that you paid attention and could detect that this is something important to discuss further because of how relevant it is to this role.

ARE YOU PREPARED?

They want to see how much work you have put into this interview. Asking your own unique questions demonstrates that you took the time to study the website, job description and their product/service line to prepare a few thoughtful questions.

ARE YOU INTERESTED?

They want to see if you are interested in learning more about this job. Asking more questions says “This job intrigues me and I want to hear more about it.”

Some candidates just get nervous and draw a blank. Other times, they may have used up their good questions on the last guy they just spoke with. Always have some fresh questions stockpiled and ready to go. Here are a few good ideas:

“I noticed you mentioned XXX before when we spoke about your up & coming project. How would you see someone in this role getting involved with that?” (sometimes topics are brought up that would affect this new role but the manager purposefully doesn’t discuss those details. Show them that you caught this and need to know the answer since it will relate to your work)

“You mentioned XXX about the company’s strategic direction. I’m really interested in this. Can you tell me a little more?” (managers may bring up an important topic about the company and leave it as a bit of a cliffhanger by not really finishing the discussion. Show them you care about this type of big picture company information)

“I did some research and read about your new product line. Can you tell me a little more about how this works?” (managers want to know that you came prepared to learn more about the company, its products/services and the job itself. Show them you did prepare and are on the beam with questions that dive deeper into any of these areas)

“I understand you have been with the company for 10 years. That’s great! What do you like most about working here?” (at the end of the day, everyone responds to good old fashioned flattery and probably would love the chance to talk a little about themselves. Let them share with you why they like it so much over there and why their team is a great one to join)

“I’m sure you’ve looked at a lot of applicants. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s going to make you hire someone. What’s the most important quality you are looking for?” (hey…why not ask this? Not only is this a refreshing, conceptual and fun question for them to answer, it will give you an opportunity to sell yourself more effectively into this job)
Always ask a final question and use that last moment to make a great impression!

~Beth Gilfeather
Workbridge Associates
By Mike Cohen, *LION*, Open Networker, TopLinked.com – Lead Recruiter at Workbridge Associates

Share This Page!

Last week Google’s Matt Cutts gave an interview in which he revealed some things that will help webmasters to better optimize their websites. Here are the most important things that Matt Cutts said in the interview:

1. The more relevant links you have, the more pages of your site will be indexed

Matt Cutts said that the number of pages that Google indexes from your website is roughly proportional to the PageRank of your website. That means that more pages of your website will be indexed if your website has many inbound links.

Google does not have an indexation cap, i.e. they will index all pages of your website if you have enough inbound links. Remember that the PageRank that Google uses in its ranking algorithm is not the PageRank that is displayed in Google’s toolbar.

2. Slow servers can cause problems

If Google can only crawl two pages at any given time due to a slow server, Google can set some sort of upper bound on how many pages they will fetch from that host server. This can be a problem for websites that are hosted on shared or slow servers.

3. Duplicate content can cause problems

“Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that?s why it looks like it has less good content.”

As mentioned above, Google will index your web pages based on the PageRank of your pages. If you have duplicate content, some pages of your website will be discarded and you’ll waste ranking opportunities.

Matt Cutts also indicated that if you link from one page to a duplicate page, you can mess up your PageRank. Google also tries to pass the PageRank and other link signals from the duplicate pages to the original page.

If you use the rel=canonical tag on your web pages then the pages needn’t be exact duplicates but they should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related.

“It’s totally fine for a page to link to itself with rel=canonical, and it’s also totally fine, at least with Google, to have rel=canonical on every page on your site.”

However, Google does not always obey the canonical tag:

“The crawling and indexing team wants to reserve the ultimate right to determine if the site owner is accidentally shooting themselves in the foot and not listen to the rel=canonical tag.”

4. Affiliate pages don’t get high rankings

If a website is an affiliate website that is very similar to other pages (only with a different logo, etc.) then this page won’t get high rankings.

If Google detects an affiliate link than this link won’t pass any PageRank power.

5. Redirects work but they don’t pass the whole PageRank

If you change your domain name and redirect old pages with a 301 redirect from your old page to your new page then the link power will be passed to your new domain name but the overall power of the links will decrease. 301 redirects do not pass the full PageRank.

6. Low quality pages can cause problems

“If there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site, but that is independent of rel=canonical.”

If you have a lot of web pages with thin content then Google might stop crawling your website. Matt Cutts also suggested that it might help to be wordy:

“You really want to have most of your pages have actual products with lots of text on them.”

7. PageRank sculpting and website navigation

Google does not want you to sculpt your website for PageRank reasons. The best way to pass link power from one page to other pages is to have a good website navigation.

“Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it then trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links.”

“You can distribute that PageRank very carefully between related products, and use related links straight to your product pages rather than into your navigation. I think there are ways to do that without necessarily going towards trying to sculpt PageRank.”

8. You still shouldn’t use JavaScript links for your website navigation

“For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript.

I wouldn’t say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don?t execute JavaScript.

We do have the ability to execute a large fraction of JavaScript when we need or want to. One thing to bear in mind if you are advertising via JavaScript is that you can use NoFollow on JavaScript links.”

9. Google does not like paid links

Matt Cutts said they Google doesn’t want advertisements to affect search engine rankings.

They might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. Matt Cutts said that Google “does a lot of stuff” to try to detect ads and make sure that they don’t unduly affect search engines.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you should use search engine optimization methods that lead to lasting results. Don’t try to cheat Google.

Share This Page!