As a blogger it can be easy to become preoccupied with generating traffic to your site; most bloggers will tell you this is top of their priority list. However, this can sometimes be a very illogical approach. The first stage to maximizing your blog is to understand your objectives (though it sounds simple, it helps keep you focused). Your primary objective may be to make enough money from your blog to give up your day job. At least, that’s what a lot of bloggers have in mind.

The next stage is to understand how you make money from your blog. Let’s say, for example, that you make money through affiliate links on your site, eBook sales, Google AdSense and indirectly through emails sign-ups which result in more eBook and affiliate sales.

Very broadly speaking, there are two main stages to achieving your affiliate and eBook sales and generating AdSense revenue. The first is attracting people to your site which is probably what most bloggers spend the most time on. The second area is persuading those visitors to complete the actions which result in sales or newsletter sign-ups. Despite this having a huge impact on what you make from your blog, this area typically receives only a small percentage of most blogger’s time and effort.

Using an eBook as our example here’s how you can start to increase income from your existing traffic. Each time a desired action (in this case an eBook sign up), takes place it will be via a ‘call to action’, in this case the call to action may be a ‘download my eBook’ button on your blog. If every 100 visits to a page promoting your newsletter results in one sign-up, then you have a conversion rate of 1%. Improving this to just 1.25% would mean you make 25% more through eBook sales which may be much easier than increasing traffic to this page by 25%.

What is A/B testing

A/B testing is a method that allows webmasters to test different versions of pages on their sites or blogs to understand which version (version A or version B), results in the best conversion rate of clicks to the desired action (eBook sign-ups being the desired action in our example). You can learn more here about A/B tests and other forms of testing.

What to A/B Test

When you A/B test, you can either test two completely different versions of a page (perhaps with different colors, images or text), or you can change just one element each time. It’s often best to start by testing a completely different version of your page against the original to see which one performs best.

Once you have the best performing version from this initial test, the key to increasing conversions further is often to test changes to one element of the page at a time so you can work out which changes increase conversion rates. For example, try testing the following with our example of an eBook sales landing page: image used, size of image, placement of image on the page, size of the call to action button (e.g. the buy now button), color of the call to action button, placement of the call to action on the page and text used on the call to action button are just some of the elements on a page you can test.

How to run free A/B tests for your website

Thankfully you don’t need to spend anything to A/B test; you just need to invest some of your time. Google Website Optimizer is a free resource which offers A/B testing (in addition to more advanced forms of testing such as multivariate testing). There are useful tutorials on the Website Optimizer site to get you started, so if you have a blog and want to make more income from it, don’t put off A/B testing any longer!

Richard Patterson is a freelance online marketer and writer with an interest in all aspects of the online marketing mix, but in particular SEO, and website conversion testing.

Whether your business interests are in product development or service provision, TweetMeme can help you in three ways (i) monitoring your business perception, (ii) the success of your online marketing efforts and (iii) gain useful feedback.

TweetMeme is a service that aggregates links on Twitter, and as such, searching on TweetMeme for your brand name or product then sorting the links by “highest tweets” is likely useful to business users.

Twittering, particularly on websites that possess a TweetMeme button, is a way for users to voice their approval or interest over a particular article, and then share that article with their Twitter followers (usually one’s friends or networking contacts).

The “highest tweet” count for a particular search provides an indication of (i) how popular a particular website is (ii) how many people have read that article (iii) how influential that article was and (iv) user approval rating of that article.

Information provided by TweetMeme’s highest tweet count is useful in the following ways:

Monitor Your Brand – Monitor where websites are writing about your product or service. It may be useful to network with the most popular websites to encourage them to write more positive articles more regularly, particularly if it helps sales or brand perception.

Gain Feedback – Websites are an influential medium, in the event that you have launched a new product or service by monitoring TweetMeme “tweets” you can keep an eye on what influential people are writing about it.

Remember,  Twitter tweet counts is a aggregate metric – it  provides an indication of (i) how popular that website is (ii) how many people agree with the article and (iii) how influential a particular website is.

Particularly if written on popular sites within your industry, you should consider listening to feedback presented within the articles you discover.

Web Marketing - Using TweetMeme’s search you can monitor the success of your marketing efforts over time, how viral your press releases are, how viral they are and gauge how much influence they have.

Mail List – If a popular website or very viral website is regularly writing about your product or service, consider writing to them offering to add them to a mail list where you can inform them directly about your latest updates. The more publicity, the better right?

Daniel Offer of the Facebook Chat software, Chit Chat for Facebook, writes. Chit Chat makes it possible to send Facebook messages, accessing Facebook Chat from your desktop.

Think about it. A real “offline” business in the brick and mortar world would typically need a start up capital of at least a few thousands dollars. Yet, why are most people reluctant to apply the same mindset – for an “online” business, even though in most cases you don’t have to spend thousands to get started?

Free, cheap, and easy is not always the best

Yup, there is always strong demand for “free hosting” or “free domain.” I guess it’s the allure of FREE, EASY, and CHEAP. But what newbies are not told is the downside of free, easy, and cheap, which only becomes obvious months later, when these very same people wring their hands in despair and go complain at some board about their lack of results, or throw in the towel. Now that is a lot of time and energy wasted.

If you want a free solution to get started in an online business, I would recommend Blogger. But is a free hosting and NO domain of your own the best way to go IF you can afford to get a proper domain and hosting?

Buy a good domain name if you can

I still don’t understand why people get cold feet when it comes to spending money to get a decent domain for starters – unless they are really strapped for cash. There are lots of unused domain names for sale on domain broker sites (for example Namecheap Marketplace which I’ve sold hundreds of dollars worth of domains there) that are several years old, well primed, and I have seen many such domains having an easier time in the search engine rankings if websites were set up for them. Many of these shorter domains are easy to remember and many do get type in traffic – free traffic, if you will. A ready made bonus, in my book.

While you can ALSO conjure up a fairly decent domain and register it for under $10, but in many cases the only domains available to register are three word combinations which are not likely to have any inherent type in traffic – plus they will be brand new. With effort, you can make them work, though.

Think about the SEO factor

Here’s an SEO question. Will new domains fare poorer than old domains? I’ve seen some evidence over the years to suggest that old, keyword focused domains do better than new domains in getting ranked, all things being equal. Unless you’re really, absolutely strapped for cash, spending a few hundred or more to buy a good domain demonstrates your seriousness in what you’re doing – and I believe you will start on a better footing as well. But of course, if you are tight on cash, getting a long and relatively ugly domain is still comparatively better than launching a website on a free subdomain, sited on a free hosting.

While free, cheap and easy has its place, I cannot understand why people who can otherwise afford it would be prepared to skimp on spending on these essentials. I believe Google takes into account nuances like quality and type of domain, page relevancy, IP neighborhood, and the quality/diversity of links, among others, in ranking a page or a website in its results. Don’t forget spammers also love free and cheap stuff, so it’s hardly surprising if Google factors this into their algorithm scoring, but don’t expect them to tell you that.

With a zero or low budget, I think it is going to be extra hard in convincing a quality search engine like Google to take your blog or website seriously.  Yes, you can hope for fairy tales, but in today’s climate, it’s a little hard to imagine. So can you honestly expect to succeed long term when you can’t even commit a couple hundred dollars to “build” an “online business?” My thoughts.

First of all, can blogging make money online? The answer is yes. But can you make a lot of money online by blogging? The short answer is no. You might make some dough here and there to pay your bills, but forget about getting rich from this. According to statistics, 95% of bloggers don’t succeed (depending on how you define success). Be realistic, and you’ll be happier and healthier for it. Or, you can break your back trying.

Basically, making money online with blogs is all about traffic. Haven’t we heard that before? If you’re trying to make good money with a blog, frankly speaking, we are looking at a few hundred thousand to more than a million unique visitors a month. A few thousand (or ten thousand) visitors a month is what most bloggers get. I’m not talking about making a few hundred dollars a month here and there (which most don’t even make). There are better ways to make a buck besides PPC, but that’s for another day, and it doesn’t suit every blog, or blogger.

A lot of people seem to think blogs are the best way to make money online when they are not. Love them or hate them, blogs are ubiquitous; maybe the reason why the failure rate is so high. Anyone can start a blog nowadays, even kids and grandmas. But not everyone is cut out for blogging at a pro level. For every successful blog out there, there are so many thousands of unsuccessful ones. That’s not a very encouraging statistic, but it’s the truth.

How many blogs are started every day and how many are abandoned? It boggles the mind. In a lot of cases, blogs do not reach their true earning potential with the amount of traffic they get. Because most blogs rely on PPC like Adsense, they are going to need a lot of traffic just to make some coin, and there is only just so much (quality traffic) going around. In simple terms, people who are inclined to buy something, and this is not some bottomless bucket like many new bloggers assume.

A blog is but one of millions of other blogs. It takes a lot of work, talent, and luck to make a blog good. A blog needs to be updated regularly. Generating new ideas all the time is tough. The most successful blogs on the Web have multiple bloggers at the helm.

Consider the present time as well. Pre-2008, making money online was easier. You could surf and get paid for it. You could write sponsored reviews and get paid for it. You could sell crappy maps of your country and make loads from it. But times change. Even Google, the biggest company on the Internet, is having a tough time with the economy and all. While there were only less than a hundred million sites in 2006; today, there are probably more than a billion sites. And today we have Google Earth, so who needs maps?

It’s difficult even to get a nice domain name nowadays. If you’re serious on making money online, be willing to invest some money to get one. Buy it if you must. And get proper hosting for it. There are no more fairy tale rags-to-riches stories any more. So quit dreaming because it’s only going to get harder from here!

Think of making money online as a pie. This pie sure isn’t getting bigger. There are laws of supply and demand at work. Are we going to reach absolute saturation point one day?

Sure, new markets will open up, and new trends will emerge. New ways or methods of marketing will take over from the old ones. Maybe Twitter is one of these? But the days of successful mom and pop publishing are probably numbered, going by present trends. The difficulty quotient for the regular Joe-Web-success-wannabe has definitely gone up, not down.

A word of advice. Be wary of dubious schemes selling you easy money with little or no work. Just a little objectivity. There are no shortcuts, neither guarantees. That’s the bad news part. And it’s only going to get harder. There is no such thing as working an online business for 20 minutes a day, and spending the rest of the day playing golf or watching TV. Did I just say serious bloggers should treat their blogging like a second job, or business?

Now, the good news is you can make some money with the required effort applied. You need to have critical thinking. An online business is really no different than any brick-and-mortar business; all the basic rules still apply, albeit in a different setting. The same applies for blogging. Yes, it’s possible to make money online with blogging, but it’s just not as easy as you think! Sometimes, a reality check helps.

This is one of the most practical alternatives compared to paying for a full shopping cart or ecommerce type of account with companies like…. ZenCart, for example.

To add a Paypal Buy Now or donation button to your website, here’s how:

Log in to your PayPal account. The My Account overview page will open by default as always.

• At the top of the page click on the Profile tab. The Profile Summary page will open next.

• On the right you will find the Selling Preferences heading – click the Create new button link. The Create PayPal payment button page will then open.
• Follow the instructions on the button creation wizard. At the end of the button creation wizard be sure to copy out the button code that Paypal has created for you.
• After that, open up a new notepad document and paste the HTML code that you copied from PayPal into it. Save the notepad document to your desktop. You can call it anything you like.
• Open your html editing program.
• Open up the page file that you want to put your new Buy Now button on, in HTML view.
• Copy the whole piece of Paypal code from the notepad file. There should be several lines of code.
• Paste the code you just copied into the html coding on the webpage you opened in your html editor. Be sure to paste the code near the bottom of the page. Look for a piece of code in your webpage that says </body>. This is the very end of your webpage; the part that you and your customers can see anyway. Paste the code right before the </body> tag.
• Now when you switch your HTML editor back in design view you should be able to see your webpage again. It should look similar now to how it looks when you visit your site on the internet.
• You should be able to see the whole page; except for the fact that now, there is a PayPal button at the bottom of the page. Now you can highlight the Buy Now button and move it around the page like you would for any other picture on your site.

You now have a functional way to receive payments in Paypal.

One of the ways companies market is through the pay per lead model. Pay per lead is an online advertising model in which companies source for new potential customers through a non cash transaction event. The lead might just be an email address at the bare minimum, or perhaps involving submission of a little more demographic based information.

You could think of online surveys as another form of pay per lead advertising as well. I’ve known of a few people who made money online via taking part in numerous online surveys, but I wonder how many out there realize why companies go through all that trouble of PAYING people to take part in their FREE surveys!

Recently, I got to know of RevResponse, a division of NetLine Corp, which is a pay per lead company focused on providing free content and downloads from a large group of participating companies, including many major ones. My impression of them so far is quite positive, as they seem reputable and professional. Initially, I was a little skeptical about joining them, but got won over by their professional communication, and quality publications.

RevResponse offers free downloadable magazines and white papers in a large variety of sectors ranging from IT and Tech, to Health, Agriculture, and Food. If you’re a blogger specializing in a specific niche, I believe they might just have something that would be a good fit for your blog, seeing that they cover so many sectors.

RevResponse pays either by check or PayPal with a minimum of $1.50 per lead, according to a Net 45 schedule, meaning 45 days AFTER you’ve passed their minimum limit of $50. That might be a tad too long for some, but I think it is quite alright.

You can check out my co branded site here, and you’ll see a large array of free downloadable magazines or subscriptions which you could find useful. Learn more about RevResponse and its parent company TradePub in this FAQ. As for the companies using RevResponse, it includes the likes of Dell, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, VeriSign and many more, which is definitely a good indicator of their credibility.

Interested to know more? Feel free to drop me any questions about RevResponse today!