To make $1,000 with a blog, all you need is a few customers. Provide a few services, post a couple ad spots, and land a handful of consulting gigs. It’s not too hard.

To make $1,000,000 with a blog, you need to have a full-blown, legitimate business behind it. If you’re like most bloggers, this is your goal.

The good news is that it’s been done before. To learn from their successes, I’d like to spotlight three multi-million-dollar internet companies that were started by bloggers.

SitePoint.com Led to 99designs

99designs, now a 64-person company, was founded by Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle in 2008. Having paid out over $38 million to their users, they’re the world’s largest online marketplace for outsourcing graphic design.

Co-founder Matt Mickiewicz describes how 99designs got started through his blog, SitePoint.com:

“In 2006, some designers in the SitePoint community began challenging one another to games of ‘Photoshop Tennis’ — essentially coming up with fictional projects and competing to see who could create the best design. They did this simply to practice their design skills and because they were passionate about graphic design. Eventually, other members of the SitePoint community jumped in and started offering cash awards for work on real projects, such as logos and WordPress themes.

…

“After a while, when it was clear that this organic model had lasting power, we began charging each ‘contest proctor’ $10 to post a request for design work in our forums and we quickly started generating thousands in revenue. We chose to invest that revenue by hiring one developer and one designer to hack together some basic software and a user interface to improve the flow of the process and make it more user-friendly on all fronts.”

Takeaways from 99designs

Be profitable from the beginning. Since 99designs started as an offshoot project within the forums of Sitepoint.com, they were able to generate revenue immediately. Then they used that revenue to hire a designer and developer to build the first version of 99designs.com.

Create out of an existing community. One of the under-used benefits of having a blog is having direct access to a specific group of people. If you ask them and observe their interactions, you’ll find out what they want and what they’re willing to pay for. Then, when you launch, you’ll already have an engaged audience.

QuickSprout.com Led to KISSmetrics

Neil Patel published his first QuickSprout blog post in April 2007. At that point, Neil had been working on his startup, Crazy Egg, for a year-and-a-half and he had been consulting through his Internet marketing agency for a few years.

On his about page, Neil describes what it was like at that time struggling to make money before he had QuickSprout:

“Because we needed income to make up for the losses in Crazy Egg, we continued to run our Internet marketing agency. Although we were making millions from the consulting company, none of us really enjoyed what we were doing.”

So he started QuickSprout, continued learning through Crazy Egg (and a few other projects), and decided to start another business with his co-founder:

“With our new found knowledge, we decided to create another analytics company that would solve a much larger problem than what Crazy Egg solved. Crazy Egg was doing well, but it is never going to be that 100 million dollar company because the market size for that one product is very limited.

“The product that we happened to come up with was KISSmetrics.”

KISSmetrics wasn’t a direct spin-off of QuickSprout like 99designs was from Sitepoint, but Neil had written well over 100 blog posts on QuickSprout prior to starting KISSmetrics in May 2008. I can’t help but think that blogging had a substantial impact on the success of the now 27-person company.

In fact, while pulling together Web Domination, Neil revealed to us that between all three of his sites, he gets the highest return on investment from blogging.

Takeaways from KISSmetrics

Expand to software. Neil made a small fortune through his consulting business but didn’t start enjoying what he was doing until he got into the software business. As you build your blog, think about different software that you can create for your audience.

Blog for traffic. Neil Patel, perhaps the most sought-after SEO consultant in the world, says that he gets the highest marketing return on investment within his companies from blogging.

Copyblogger.com Led to Copyblogger Media

Before starting Copyblogger.com in 2006, Brian Clark was an attorney.

When TopRankBlog.com asked him how he made the transition from attorney to blogger, he said:

“Easy… I hated practicing law and I was fascinated by the Internet. The transition was extreme I suppose, but I always had a thing for writing, so I started creating online content over a decade ago. Now it’s just part of me.”

For four years, Brian and crew pumped out post after post, several times per week with a smattering of guest posts in between. With a network of other projects and partnerships brewing, Brian brought them together in 2010 to create Copyblogger Media:

“Over the last 4 years, I’ve launched several companies from this simple blog of mine. The idea that building an audience with content and letting the revenue-generating ideas, products, and services reveal themselves based on what the audience actually wants has worked out amazingly well.”

Today, with over 20 employees, Copyblogger Media is the parent company for a number of online services and properties including StudioPress, Scribe, Premise, Synthesis,, Authority Rules, and Teaching Sells.

In the Copyblogger Media press release, Brian continued to say:

“Any great company exists not for its shareholders or employees, but for the people it serves. And we’re aiming to be a great company.”

Takeaways from Copyblogger Media

Use your blog as a platform to launch other businesses. One reason Copyblogger.com does so well to attract an audience is that everything on the site is totally free. Despite one million monthly page views, Copyblogger.com doesn’t make a dime. Instead, all of their revenue-generating platforms exist on other domains and they use Copyblogger to make people aware of them.

Attract great people through blogging. If Copyblogger wasn’t on the upslope when Brian first reached out to all of his existing partnerships, they wouldn’t have been as willing to work with him. As it turns out, the blog gave him credibility and a tool to barter with. Not to mention, all of the great readers he accrued along the way.

My Favorite Companies have High-Profile Blogs

The purpose of marketing is to build an audience of people who love what you sell. And I think the best way to build and nurture an audience, especially online, is with a blog.

Here are a number of other companies who host great blogs:

• 37signals has Signal vs. Noise.
• DIYthemes has The Thesis Statement.
• SEOmoz has the SEOmoz Blog.
• Freshbooks has a freelance-oriented blog.
• Awesome Motive Inc. has WPBeginner and List25.
• Johnny Cupcakes has a photo blog as its homepage.
• Even Google has an Official Blog.

You’re on the Right Path

Maybe you haven’t cracked the code on how to make even $1,000 with your blog. That’s ok.

Take comfort in the fact that you’re learning how to build an audience through a blog. At the very least, you’re developing a skill that’s valuable to other people.

Do you know of any other companies that were started by bloggers?

Photo by: Brian Tomlinson

The post 3 Multi-Million Dollar Internet Companies that Sprouted from Blogs appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Santa.

That “stat” shouldn’t surprise you. Of course kids are going to open their presents. If only people opened their emails the same way.

Taking a closer look, I came up with four underlying reasons why all presents are opened and gathered ten relevant tips to help you improve the email marketing strategy for your blog.

The Likely Extent of Your Email Marketing Strategy

If you’re like most bloggers, you have an opt-in at the top of your sidebar. You have a couple dozen subscribers. And you consistently get a 20% open rate/8% click-through rate with emails that you send out sporadically every few weeks.

This is because you’ve focused on building a list without having a strategy for once you have one. I want to help you with that.

People Need to Expect and Anticipate Your Emails

Li’l Johnny is excited on Christmas morning because he expects to find a pile of presents. More importantly, he knows that those presents contain gifts that he’s been wanting for months.

1. Set Expectations in the Opt-In Area

Too many bloggers trick people into opting-in with a free gift only to barrage them with unrelated emails later. I don’t know about you, but I don’t open those emails.

If, however, you make it clear in your opt-in area that they’re also requesting to receive blog updates, then they’re going to expect and anticipate your emails.

Sure that might discourage people from opting-in, but there’s no value in having a list full of people who don’t want your emails.

See example:

Jay Baer, from ConvinceandConvert.com, makes it clear that you’ll receive a daily email with social media advice.

2. Remind Them Why They’re Receiving Emails

Once they’re receiving your emails, it’s important to remind them why they’re receiving them. Otherwise you run the risk of them unsubscribing or marking your emails as spam.

A good way to do this is to put their signup date and signup URL in the footer of every email that you send. These two reminders will jog their memory to answer the question, “why am I getting these emails?”

See example:

Pat Flynn, from SmartPassiveIncome.com, reminds his subscribers when and where they subscribed to his list in the footer of every email.

3. Send Your Emails Regularly at Consistent Times

What’s the best day and time to send an email to people around the world?

I schedule the emails for 6am EST so they’re at the top of the list when people open their inbox first thing in the morning across the US.

In the Income Diary Q&A, Josh Dunlop said,

I find that posting content at 9am West Coast time is best, because it’s lunch time on the East Coast and just after work in the UK, which are the biggest markets for my traffic.

People Need to Receive Your Emails Easily

All Johnny has to do to get his presents in the morning is wake up, climb down the stairs, and walk to the living room.

4. Create a Squeeze Page that You Can Direct People To

Having opt-ins in all of the popular areas (i.e. top sidebar, bottom sidebar, top of homepage, footer of post, etc.), is a good start.

You also want to have a page on your blog that’s dedicated to getting subscribers, also known as a squeeze page.

How come?

Because you and your readers can link to that page when you or they are recommending it to other people.

5. Link to Their Email System on Your Confirmation Page

After they fill out your opt-in form, they need to confirm their subscription.

This is the point where you typically say, “Before I can send you the information you requested, I need you to click the link in the email to confirm your subscription … yada, yada, yada.”

This page has one goal: Get them to open the email and confirm their subscription. Yet, few people ever optimize this small but pivotal step in the process.

How do you do that? Convince them to check their email immediately.

See example:

The confirm your subscription page on my blog, 14clicks.com, directs people to check their email immediately so they don’t forget.

6. Mobilize Your Emails with a Simple Text-Focused Email

According to Litmus.com, as of April 2012, 36% of email is opened with a mobile device and that number grew 80% in the previous six months.

You might fancy your 2-column, HTML email newsletters, but people who open them with their phones don’t.

To keep your emails mobile-friendly:

• Use a 1-column layout.
• No more than 550-600 pixels wide.
• Limit slow-loading images.
• If you link somewhere, try to make sure that the webpage is mobile-friendly.

See example:

The DIYthemes email is HTML-based but simple enough that it appears to be text-based so it shows up well on mobile devices.

People Need to Feel a Personal Connection

The moment Johnny unwraps a Barbie Doll, he’s going to be forever skeptical about whether or not Santa really knows him. He’ll think twice about opening the next one. Around the third or fourth Barbie Doll, he’ll stop opening them altogether.

7. Segment Your Lists by Interests and Activity

How do you personalize a mass-communication channel?

Every email marketing service lets you create multiple lists. Create different lists based on the interests and activities of your audience.

Consider segmenting lists for:

• General blog subscribers.
• Weekly blog subscribers.
• Potential customers.
• Paying customers.
• Etc.

See example:

WPBeginner.com, gives their readers six different subscription options based on their interests.

8. Use Your Welcome Email to Learn About Them

Aside from sending targeted emails based on interests, you also need to know who your audience is in order to build a personal connection with them.

One of the best ways to do that is to ask them to introduce themselves by replying to the first welcome email. Here are a few questions you can ask in that email:

• What are you struggling with right now?
• How do you expect me to help you?
• What types of content would get you to open every email?

See example:

This is Derek Halpern’s Welcome Email for SocialTriggers.com. Many of his subscribers reply to this email with their #1 struggle. This let’s him meet his new subscribers and gives him a better understanding of how to help his audience.

People Need to Value Your Emails

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Johnny circles his favorite toys in the catalogs, creates a list of his favorites, and even visits Santa to tell him what’s at the top of his list. All of this to ensure that he gets exactly what he wants.

9. Include Subscriber-Only Tips through an Autoresponder

What reason does somebody have to subscribe if they can get all of the same content by regularly visiting or following you on Twitter?

To treat your subscribers to something special, set up an autoresponder series that gives them a comprehensive guide for information that they want.

See example:

Copyblogger.com offers an exclusive, 20-part autoresponder series to their subscribers that’s based on years of researching their audience to figure out what they need help with most.

10. Offer a Weekly Email Option

I don’t know about you, but I have a tough time keeping up with reading the posts from all of my favorite blogs.

To get around this, consider offering a weekly subscription option to your readers. That way they can get one email with summaries of that week’s posts and choose to read the ones that are relevant to them.

See example:

You’ll also notice that WPBeginner gives people the “WPB Daily” and “WPB Weekly” options because he understands that not every post is relevant to every subscriber.

How to Use Email Marketing

Email marketing has two functions.

1. To get to know your audience.
2. To send people your message.

Too many bloggers put too much focus on building their lists. Once they have a list, they don’t know what to do with it. So that list sits there and costs money.

I hope I’ve shed some light on this all-too-common problem and given you some ideas on how to improve your email marketing strategy. If I have, let me know in the comments.

As always, if you need help with implementing any of these tips, leave a comment and tell me which email marketing service you use.

Read more: ‘The Best Way To Grow Your Email List’

Photo by: Stuck in Customs

The post 10 Little-Known Email Marketing Tips for Bloggers appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I did a little research, wrote up a business plan, and figured I’d hire someone to build a website. Surely this internet thing would be a piece of cake.

I shopped a few web firms but couldn’t find anyone to build it for less than $10K. As a college student, I couldn’t afford that, so I set out to build it myself.

Sound familiar?

The Beginnings

When I started, WordPress was fledgling blogging platform. I didn’t want a blog. I wanted a website. So I built it in Joomla. Big mistake.

It got hacked. I fixed it. It got hacked again. I fixed it again. I later realized that the hacker added hundreds of pages on my domain with one goal, to sell Viagra. Fed up after a year and with only a couple hundred visitors, I migrated to WordPress.

That’s when I realized how much I had to learn.

The Learning Stage

In 2009, I found sites like IncomeSup, Blogussion, and Copyblogger. I subscribed to all of them, read their archives like a novel, and learned as much as I could from the people who I thought were doing it the best. I went from 409 visits in 2008 to 10,498 in 2009. It was a good start.

In 2010, I kept reading and learning, experimenting and testing, analyzing and strategizing. That year my blog had 52,611 visits. I was finally on to something. But I wasn’t making any money.

So, in 2011, I started a second blog. This one was going to be my money maker. I launched it in March and between the two blogs, I had 230,692 visits for the year. I learned a lot about getting traffic, but I still barely made enough to cover the costs of hosting, email marketing, CDN, etc.

Three Years is a Long Learning Stage, Huh?

I was doing something wrong. Even after three years, I still had a lot to learn.

Towards the end of last year, Michael asked me to create something for him … something that would teach me more in a few months than I had learned in the previous three years. I said yes.

What Did Michael Ask Me to Do?

Looking back, I originally met Michael when I interviewed him for a book we were creating in 2010. Through that project I learned a lot about the interview process and how to turn a conversation into something valuable. Michael knew that.

Here’s the email he sent me:

Two hours later:

Michael’s idea was to create the ultimate resource for internet entrepreneurs by gathering the collective knowledge of the top 20 Internet marketers in the world.

It was a tall order. So I asked 6’4” Nick Scheidies if he’d like to be involved. (Frankly, we couldn’t do it without him.) He said yes and we were off.

The Greatest Learning Experience of My Life

What started as a 26-minute Skype call turned into the most mindset-reframing, learning experience of my life.

We researched, we planned, we scouted, we targeted, we asked, we listened, we produced, we delivered, and today we’re bringing it to you.

The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online

Imagine going to a conference and seeing a real-life blogger who you’ve been following for years. You stand there, introduce yourself, giggle a little, have a 2-minute conversation, and walk away thinking, “That was sooo cool!”

Now imagine doing that a few times per week, except, those two-minute conversations are hour-long brain dumps resulting from questions that you spent hours crafting to make sure you squeezed every ounce of value from every second that you were speaking with them.

That’s what we did.

And here’s a tiny, step-by-step synopsis of what I learned.

Step 1: Make a Website

To make a substantial amount of money online, you need to have a website. There’s plenty of information out there about how to get hosting and set up WordPress, so we didn’t want to get into that.

But we had a few questions about the finer details of setting up a successful blog:

• What does it mean to have a good web design and what’s the best way to get one?
  To answer those questions, we recruited award-winning designer, Jacob Cass.
• What are the best practices for creating and running membership sites?
  To help us with this, we talked with Matt Wolfe who pulls in a steady 5-figures every month from his membership sites.
• What if you don’t want to build your WordPress site?
  We recognized that lots of people don’t want to bother with making a website, so we asked outsourcing-master Tyrone Shum to tell us how he finds, motivates, and manages a staff of full-time, outsourced labor.

Step 2: Create Content

Once you have a site, you need traffic. The preferred traffic source for nearly every internet entrepreneur we interviewed was a blog. To have a successful blog, you need to know how to create content.

I was particularly interested in this step because, despite getting lots of traffic through my content, I wasn’t attracting the right audience and I wasn’t doing a good job of connecting with them to solve their problems.

• How do you maximize the distribution of your blog content?
  One reason everyone knows our interviewee, Pat Flynn, is because, by design, his content shows up everywhere.
• How do you create hard-hitting content that makes people take action?
  To understand the psychology of blogging, we asked Derek Halpern to share his closely-guarded secrets.
• How do you capitalize on the one medium that connects with people better than any other, video?
  Gideon Shalwick, widely considered the top video blogger in the world, gave us a list of the tools that he uses and how he optimizes his videos for search.

Step 3: Get Traffic

So you have a blog and you’re creating good content, but you’re not getting the traffic that you expect. Knowing what I know about bloggers, this is probably where you’re stuck.

Almost all traffic comes from search or social. To answer every question we could think of, we recruited three brilliant traffic masters.

• What are the best practices for building out a blog that search engines adore?
  For our SEO questions, we reached out to Michael’s SEO guy, David Sinick.
• What are the ins-and-outs of every social media platform and the little-known tips for maximizing each?
  We could’ve asked any of the 1,000’s of people who claim to be social media experts, but we chose to talk with someone who gets the results that the experts dream of (i.e. 100,000 Facebook Fans and 1,000,000 YouTube views in the first 3 months).
• How do you implement a Facebook Ad campaign that earns money with nearly every click?
  Few people understand the science behind Facebook pages and ads like our interviewee, Brian Moran from Get 10,000 Fans.

Step 4: Convert Traffic

Once you have more than a couple thousand visitors a month, it makes sense to focus on the details of converting that traffic.

This is where online marketing gets blurry for me, so Nick and I stockpiled an armory of questions that needed to be answered.

• What is the fundamental methodology behind website conversion and how do you implement your strategies?
  To give you a detailed overview of website conversion, we asked co-founder Ben Jesson of the most sought-after conversion agency in the world, Conversion Rate Experts.
• How do you write words that sell?
  With more than $15 million-worth of Internet sales, we asked the one and only Yanik Silver to spill all of his direct-response copywriting secrets.
• How do you balance an email marketing strategy that your audience embraces?
  David Risley has been forming, testing, and re-strategizing his email marketing philosophy for nearly a decade based on feedback from an audience that loves to get his emails.
• How do you use webinars to grow your list and business?
  To answer these questions, we recruited a gentleman who has conducted more successful webinars than just about anyone, Stephen Beck.

Step 5: Earn Money Online

Let’s recap. You have a website, you’re creating content, you’re getting traffic, and you’re converting that traffic into leads/subscribers. In other words, you have an engaged audience that has a common set of problems.

Lucky for you, there are plenty of ways to make money while helping your audience.

• What are all of the different routes to making money with a website?
  Upon my request, Michael Dunlop agreed to answer the questions for this interview.
• What is the full-circle strategy for selling digital products?
  To make sure that you know exactly how to sell digital products, we asked Lewis Howes to give you the step-by-step process that he used to amass a multimillion dollar internet business.
• How do you create a software product that sells itself while orchestrating a successful product launch?
  Josh Bartlett, the brains behind the multimillion dollar Easy Video Player software, sat down with us to share how he created and launched his product without touching a line of code.

Step 6: Build a Successful Company Online

Making money online is exciting, but it becomes more meaningful if you can create a company from it.

This is what appeals to me most about the internet. I’ve had questions backlogged for years and I was excited to finally get them answered.

• How do you design an online business with a loyal customer base that pays continuously?
  The king of continuity, Ryan Lee, shared his best tips for building and managing a multitude of programs that provide a steady stream of recurring income.
• How do you build an eager subscriber base that purchases everything that you recommend?
  James Schramko shared with us the lessons he learned from running a $100 million car dealership to build an exclusive audience of buyers through affiliate marketing.
• What are the ins-and-outs of roaming the world while running an internet business?
  Digital nomad, Cody McKibben, gave us a generous list of things that you need to consider as you take the plunge and move abroad to travel and work, simultaneously.
• How do you create a lasting internet-based company that sells to and services the largest brands in the world?
  Perhaps no one else is better suited to answer these questions than 26-year-old founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and QuickSprout, Neil Patel.

If You’re Struggling Online, You Have Two Options

One, you can continue stumbling through the internet reading random blog posts hoping to find a formula that works for you and your business (like I did).

Two, you can learn from the people who are the best in the world at what they do in a structured format that was designed from the outset to help you find success online (like I wish I could’ve).

I encourage you to do the latter.

If you have any questions about the 8-month-long project, the interviewees, or whether or not I think the ebook can help you, let me know in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer them.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

If every one of your posts isn’t getting anywhere from a few to a couple thousand search visits per month, then you’re doing something wrong.

Here are nine reasons why you’re not getting as much search engine traffic as you deserve.

1. Your Site Isn’t Indexed

If your site isn’t indexed, they can’t send you traffic. So, how do you get indexed?

Google (and other search engines) will index your site automatically, but here are a few steps to speed up the process:

1. Create an XML sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
2. Submit your sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.

As your site becomes more popular, Google’s spiders will visit more frequently and index your content more rapidly.

2. You’re Not Writing Something that People are Searching For

The first step in writing a blog post is figuring out what people want to know about. Ignoring this step is like starting a business without researching what people want to buy.

If you want search traffic, you need to conduct keyword research. I know I’ve said this before here and here, but being honest with yourself, how often do you actually do it?

It’s your job to create content around the keywords that people are actually searching. To help you figure out which keywords people are searching for, take a look at Ahrefs or SEMRush.

3. You’re Not Creating Keyword-Focused Posts

Along the same lines, once you know exactly which keywords that people use, you need to create content specifically for those keywords.

During your keyword research, create a list of keywords that are relevant to your audience and that are searched more than 500 times per month. Then write one blog post for every keyword.

If you need help coming up with good headlines, portent has a free tool to help.

4. You’re Not Putting Keywords in Your Headlines

Your headline is the most important part of your post for getting search traffic.

When you Google something, the keyword that you search is always in the headline, usually in its entirety and near the front of the headline.

So, if you want to start ranking for specific keywords, they need to be in your headline and near the front.

5. Your Posts Aren’t Thorough

Remember, it’s Google’s job to give relevant, high-quality search results. Ideally, the best, most thorough web page for each keyword will always hold the top spot.

For example, if you wrote a 100-word post on the “how to get search engine traffic” while someone else wrote a 3,000-word post that covers every nook and cranny of the topic with authority, Google is going to find a way to put the 3,000-word post at the top and drop yours to the wayside.

Your goal with each and every blog post is to create the ultimate resource for that particular keyword. 2,000-words per blog post is a good rule of thumb.

6. You’re Not Creating Sharable Content

A study by Branded3 confirmed that Google’s search results are at least somewhat based on the number of Tweets.

In the study they found a direct correlation between number of tweets and search result rankings. URLs with more than 7,500 tweets, on average, held the 5^th spot for their keyword.

This makes sense too. If people are sharing your blog post, that’s a good sign that it’s worth a bump up in the search results.

7. You’re Not Linking Externally and Internally

One way to create an ultimate resource for a particular keyword is to link to other resources within your blog post, both externally and internally.

This does three things:

1. It makes your blog post more valuable.
2. It makes other content on the subject easier for Google to find.
3. I’ve found that one of the best ways to get backlinks is to start by linking to other bloggers.

8. You’re Not Using WordPress

One of the benefits of using WordPress is that it generates easy-to-index pages. If your website is easy to index, then Google will rank it higher.

WordPress is widely considered the best website building platform partly because that’s what all the top online resources are built with. And the people who use it recommend that other people use it.

The key here is to have a well-coded website and WordPress takes care of that for you.

9. You’re Not Optimizing Your Images

Optimizing your images will help your search engine rankings in two ways:

1. You’ll likely get traffic through Google’s image search.
2. It’s another way to tell Google what your primary keyword is.

Here are the only three ways to optimize your images:

1. Save your images as [keyword-phrase.png] before you upload them to your site.
2. Add alt text as [keyword phrase].
3. Add title tag as [keyword phrase].

If you have any questions with optimizing your images, let me know and I’ll try to help you out.

The Last Word

Once you fall into the routine of conducting keyword research, choosing a keyword, and pumping out content it’s easy to put too much emphasis on writing for search engines.

Your writing becomes robotic. Just because someone can find it doesn’t mean that they’ll read it and love it.

The reason you need to go through these steps is because it’s the most efficient way to find out what people want to read and to serve it up on an easy-to-find platter.

Read more: ‘10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers’

The post 9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

If you want to get a lot of traffic, one of the greatest sources is StumbleUpon.com. Going from a couple hundred visits a day to a couple thousand visits a day is a common result of getting picked up by the social media giant.

The problem is that this traffic typically dies down after a day or two.

If you’re clever, however, and you implement these tips, you might be able to carry your traffic for weeks or even months. This is exactly how I got 158,000 Stumbles on one blog post.

Step 1: Create Content that StumbleUpon Users Like

StumbleUpon traffic is difficult to please – if you don’t grab their attention in a split second, they’re on to the next one.

They key is to create remarkable, witty, bite-sized content. Photos and videos do well. Every once in awhile, blog posts get picked up too.

For me, it was a list of 101 entrepreneurship quotes. That article has 158K+ stumbles which makes it one of the most stumbled articles of all time in the Entrepreneurship category (only 220K Stumblers).

Step 2: Get Someone to Submit it to StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon has made it clear that the tool is meant for social collaboration. They track everything that their users submit. If they see that you only ever submit your own content, you could be banned and your content could be penalized.

My post was submitted by a guy in Florida. After it got it’s first 20K Stumbles, I sent him a thank you package. I’m not sure if that helped my results.

Here’s a timeline of how my post got submitted and picked up by StumbleUpon:

• March 25^th, 2011 – Article published.
• July 28^th, 2011 – Submitted to StumbleUpon.
• August 21^st, 2011 – 1,000 stumbles in a day milestone.
• October 15^th, 2011 – StumbleUpon traffic became more consistent.

Ever since, the Stumble traffic has been fairly consistent because of what I did next.

Step 3: Keep the Stumbles Rolling

If you’ve ever gotten an influx of StumbleUpon traffic, you probably noticed that it all came over the course of a few days or maybe a week.

To keep my stumbles going, here’s what I did:

Added a StumbleUpon Badge

With the Sharebar plugin I added a StumbleUpon badge to the side of my content. This way, anyone who didn’t come from StumbleUpon could stumble the article.

Included “Tweet It” Links

I first saw this strategy on OnStartup’s 23 Tweetable Startup Insights from Seth Godin.

I saw that it worked well and I figured that people would want to share quotes just as much as Seth Godin’s insights.

There are two ways to do this.

1. ClicktoTweet.com

The easy way to generate these links is to use ClicktoTweet.com.

2. Hard-Coded Tweet It Links

Whenever I can, I prefer to hard-code my links because it gives me more control over the output and it’s generally more stable. In this example, hard-coding allows me to customize the tweet to use trackable links.

Here’s an example of the HTML for the first quote link:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=’There are two rules for success. 1) Never tell everything you know.’ – Roger H. Lincoln ” target=”_blank”>[tweet it]</a>

Direct People to the StumbleUpon Landing Page

This is the secret to the consistent Stumbles.

You’ll notice that all of my “Tweet It” links link to 14click.me/equotesu. Rather than sending people directly to the article, this link sends them to the StumbleUpon version of the article.

So everyone who shares the quotes on Twitter leaves a link that sends their followers to the su.pr version of the article with the StumbleUpon toolbar, which makes it easy to Stumble.

A good friend of mine gave me this tip while I was working on a project here for IncomeDiary. You’ll hear more about this project in a few weeks.

The Final Word

StumbleUpon traffic typically consists of people who are looking for a few seconds or entertainment or insight. It’s synonymous with flaky, one-time visitors. I found different, however.

With the entrepreneurship quotes article, the average time on page for that post is 19:07 (150% higher than the site average).

I encourage you to try out these tips, especially the “Click to Tweet” links. Just remember, that if you follow all of the advice here and you don’t get any results, it’s probably because there’s a problem with the content.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

Image by: Robert Lane

The post How I Got 158,000 Stumbles on One Post appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

But if you take your blog seriously and you want it to visually stand out, the first step is understanding the principles of design. Once you understand what makes a good blog design, you can work on it yourself or find and qualify a talented designer.

Here are 13 expert-level blog design tips that I’ve gathered from three years of being a freelance web designer. To help illustrate these tips, I’m going to use HelloBar.com’s design as an example.

1. Make Goal-Driven Design Decisions

The purpose of design is to get your website to convert towards your goals. That’s it. Everything else comes secondary.

How do you do that?

You need to have a visual hierarchy that leads to a call to action. In simpler terms, feature a headline or a series of headlines that end in a call to action. Then put this headline/call to action duo in the places that people see the most (i.e. top of homepage, top of sidebar, bottom of posts, etc.).

The goal of Hello Bar’s homepage is to get you to “Sign Up” or “Try it Out” and their design makes that obvious.

2. Use 2-3 Fonts, Max

At most, use one font for your logo, one for your headlines, and one for your body content.

Any more and your blog’ll look messy.

Hello Bar has a distinct logo font, Pacifico headline font, and a sans-serif default body font.

3. Use 2-3 Colors, Max

Your blog should have a primary color, a shade of grey, and a call to action color.

The primary color is the first color you want people to see and the last color you want them to remember. For Hello Bar, it’s light blue.

The shade of grey will help you subtly emphasize and de-emphasize certain aspects of your design.

The call to action color will be used sparingly as, you guessed it, the color you want people to look for when they’re deciding what to do next. For Hello Bar, it’s orange.

Hello Bar uses light blue, various shades of black/grey, and a bright orange to draw your attention.

4. Pick Perfectly Matching Color Schemes

Along with limiting your color scheme, your primary and call to action colors should complement one another.

To find scientifically matching color schemes, start with your primary color and find supplementary colors with ColorSchemeGenerator.com.

Hello Bar’s blue and orange are perfectly complementary.

5. Cherish Subtlety in Gradients, Shadows, and Textures

Web design is like makeup, less is more. With your gradients, shadows, and textures, make them so subtle that you have to look closely to tell that they’re there.

Subconsiously, you’ll notice that it looks good. But you’ll have to take a closer look to realize why.

If you’ll look closely, there’s a texture in the background, the logo has a shadow, the headline has a shadow, and the buttons have a subtle gradient.

6. Apply Global Light Angles for Gradients and Shadows

A common goal with art is to make it seem as life-like as possible. Web design is no different. One way to do that is to maintain a global light angle across all gradients and shadows.

Think about it. If the sun is shining on a table full of buttons and raised letters, they’re all going to have the exact same gradient-effects and shadows.

Hello Bar uses a 90 degree global light source. The logo shadow, headline shadow, and button gradients are consistently at 90 degrees.

7. Embrace White Space

Aside from effectively using padding and margines, the best way to embrace white space is to simply get rid of everything that doesn’t contribute towards accomplishing your goals.

Do you really need that tag cloud? No, you don’t. Nobody uses those.

Hello Bar uses “white” space to eliminate all distractions and draw attention to their call to action buttons.

8. Separate with 1-Pixel Borders

Borders help to clean up your design and to visually separate different sections. Use 1-pixel borders because they’re clean and crisp.

Hello Bar uses a bunch of dashed and solid, 1-pixel borders to separate their content.

9. Implement Grid-Based Alignment

This is one of the more complicated tips. Jacob Cass, from JUSTTM Creative, introduced me to the 960 grid. It’s a Photoshop template that helps you align your design perfectly and precisely.

Whether or not you use the 960 grid, the different sections, parts, and text blocks in your design need to line up vertically.

I’m not sure if Hello Bar was originally designed with the 960 Grid, but everything aligns perfectly all the way down the page.

10. Implement Subhead Hierarchies in Your Content

If you want to communicate a series of thoughts or a process (i.e. a blog post), use subhead hierarchies coupled with short body copy to make it easy to move down the page.

From a design standpoint, subheads break up the content but they also make it scannable and easier to consume.

Hello Bar uses a series of well-designed subheads in the “How it Works” section of their homepage.

11. Design with CSS

The process of taking a design and putting it on your website is more complicated than you’d think. In essence, you take the images from your Photoshop file and set them as the background of certain areas with HTML and CSS.

If you have lots of intricate background areas, then this means that you website will need to load lots of images which will lengthen your loading time.

One way to get around this is to design the simple details with CSS. Here are a number of design elements you can add with CSS:

• Borders – {border: 1px dashed #CCC;}
• Frames – {border: 1px solid #CCC; padding: 1px;}
• Text Shadows – {text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #CCC;}
• Box Shadows – {box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #CCC;}
• Rounded Corners – {border-radius: 5px;}

You can also use CSS to create gradients, transitions, animations, font-faces, etc., but these start to get complicated and don’t show up in older browsers.

Hello Bar uses padding, borders, and a box shadow to add fast-loading CSS styling to their testimonial photos.

12. Speed Up Your Design with Small, Repeating, Background Images

If you use images to create your backgrounds, make them as small as you can so that they load faster. Then use CSS to make theme repeat-x/repeat-y.

This is the actual background image that repeats horizontally in the Hello Bar background to make the site load faster.

13. Maintain Consistency in Your Calls to Action

My final tip for you is to maintain a consistent design in your call-to-action buttons. This helps people find what they’re looking for. Plus, if they see the same button three times on a page, they’ll notice it and think, “I should probably click that.”

Hello Bar has three primary call to action buttons on their homepage and they’re all styled exactly the same.

If you’ve never checked out Hello Bar, I encourage you to do so. I use it on my blog and it seems to be working well.

The Final Word

If you’re not a designer or coder, I don’t expect you to implement these tips right away.

But once you want to upgrade your design, you’ll be able to ask your designer questions like, “When you convert your PSD to HTML, which design elements do you recreate with CSS so we don’t bog down the site with a bunch of bulky background images?”

On another note, the only rule here that’s unbreakable is #1. The rest are based on best practices and my personal thoughts on design. Bend them as you wish.

As always, if you need more guidance with any of these tips, leave a comment below and I’ll try to help you out.

Read more: ‘What to Put on Your Blog’s Homepage’

The post 13 Expert-Level Blog Design Tips for Beginners appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

If your homepage simply features a list of your latest blog posts, you’re making a big mistake.

It’s important to get your homepage right because it’s going to be one of the most viewed pages on your blog, but people don’t view it in the way that you’d think.

Who Visits the Homepage?

Before you decide what to put on your homepage, you need to understand who views your homepage and how they got there.

First-Time Visitors

You likely think that your homepage is the first page of your website that somebody sees. That’s probably not the case.

The only way your homepage will be the first viewed page is if another site links to your homepage, if someone tells somebody to go to www., or if you have a well-known brand.

On my blog, 14clicks, only 3.9% of my traffic starts on the homepage.

Second-Page Clickers

What’s more likely is that someone will first see a blog post, then click over to see the homepage. This person has already interacted with your site and they’re curious enough to click over to the homepage.

On 14clicks, the homepage accounts for 28.1% of the second-page traffic, which is 3.6 times more than any other page.

Returning Visitors

If someone found your site once, liked it, and wants to go back to it, they’ll do one of two things.

One, they’ll go directly to the domain. Two, they’ll search for the name of your site. In either case, returning visitors will probably start on the homepage.

On 14clicks, 58% of the homepage traffic comes from people typing in the domain directly or from Google (with some variation of “14 clicks” being 5 of the 6 most popular keywords).

In general, people find your site through a blog post. If they like the post, they’ll click to the homepage. If they return, they probably start on the homepage. Therefore, most people who see your homepage have already interacted with your blog and you need to adjust your content accordingly.

Your Homepage Needs to Answer Their First Question

“Why should I stick around?”

To answer that question, you need to communicate what your site is and who it’s for.

Eye-Catching and Concise Headline

The headline should be the first thing a new visitor sees. It needs to answer the question, “what are the benefits to me personally if I cruise around this blog?”

Put your headline front-and-center so it’s first thing someone sees when they visit your homepage.

Eye-Catching Image or Video

On the side of or below your headline, you need to put an eye-catching, trust-building, benefit-depicting image or video.

The purpose of this image/video is to elicit a positive emotional response while visually communicating what your site is all about. If you have a personal branding blog or a company that’s tied closely to your personality, put a photo of yourself on your homepage to build trust.

Good Example: JustCreative.com

Jacob Cass has a picture of himself and his headline featured above the fold. He also uses his headline to direct people to his portfolio and blog.

Tell People What You Want them To Do

After you tell people why they should stay on your blog, you need to tell them what to do next. Underneath your headline and image, put your call to action. This could be one of four things depending on the purpose and goal of your blog.

Request a Quote

If you have a service-based business and you want to use your blog to collect leads, the homepage is a great place to put a button or a link to your contact page.

Subscribe

If the goal of your blog is to get email subscribers, put an opt-in box at the top of your homepage.

If you’re worried that the opt-in box will annoy your existing readers, don’t be. In the same way that you tend to gloss over ads, once they’re subscribed, they’ll subconsciously scroll past it to the content.

Register or Login

If you have a membership site and your number one goal is to turn readers into users, place two buttons as your call to action: “Register” and “Login.”

Purchase Something

If you want to skip the whole email marketing step and go directly for the sale, not what I’d recommend, then you can make the homepage call to action “See Our Featured Product” or “Shop.”

Good Example: SocialTriggers.com

The sole purpose of Derek Halpern’s site is to turn readers into subscribers. So he puts opt-in boxes everywhere, including at the top of his homepage.

Add Credibility and Social Proof

Once a visitor knows how you can help them and what you want them to do, it’s up to them to make that decision. The best way to help them make that decision in your favor is to demonstrate your credibility through social proof.

Social or Subscriber Counts

People are a lot more likely to subscribe if they know that lots of other people are already subscribed.

If you have more than 1,000 subscribers, show that number directly below your call-to-action. If you don’t, you can show social proof with your number of monthly readers, Twitter followers, or Facebook fans. If none of those numbers are over 1,000, you need to get to work.

Show a Testimonial, Preferably from a Well-Known Source

Another way to build credibility is to feature someone else’s opinion of you and your blog. Ask your most active readers to give you a testimonial and tell them that you’re going to put it on the homepage.

What’s even more powerful is a testimonial from someone who everyone knows. This builds authority by association. But don’t coerce testimonials from people who wouldn’t otherwise read your site.

Press or Customer Logos

If you’ve gotten a lot of press or have worked with well-known brands, put their logos on your homepage. Again, this builds authority by association.

I’m torn whether or not you should link the logos to the articles, though. On one hand, it could build your credibility even more if people read those articles. On the other hand, you’re driving people away from your site right as they’re about to take action. What do you think? Comment below.

Good Example: Conversion-Rate-Experts.com

Ben Jesson and Dr. Karl Blanks, from Conversion Rate Experts, have worked with the largest companies in the world and their blog has been featured on a number of prestigious media outlets. They make that clear with client logos and press logos (which aren’t linked, by the way).

Regularly Updated Content and Deep-Linking for SEO

From a search engine optimization perspective, there are two important things to consider with your homepage.

One, your homepage should update at least slightly when you post new content. Google likes to see fresh content. Two, every page on your site should be two-three clicks away from the homepage to make sure it gets completely indexed.

Links to Latest Blog Posts

New content on the homepage, even if it’s just the headlines, is important for search engines, but it’s also important for your readers. When people come back to your blog, they’re expecting to easily find your latest content.

This doesn’t mean that your blog needs to be on your homepage. You can choose to use a Recent Posts plugin to display the headlines and excerpts from your latest blog posts.

Deep-Linking and Sitemap Link in the Footer

The best way to make sure that every page on your site is within three clicks of the homepage is to subtly link to your category archives and sitemap in the footer.

This also helps from a usability standpoint if people are looking for posts on particular topics.

Good Example: IncomeDiary.com

As you see, Michael showcases the latest posts on the Income Diary homepage because his goal is for you to consume as much content as possible. The more blog posts you read, the more likely you are to subscribe and buy something from him. In the footer, he links to the sitemap, category archives, a few popular posts, and author archives.

The Final Word

Blogs are different from traditional, static websites because almost everyone who sees your homepage has already seen a different part of your blog.

It’s important to adjust the content of your homepage knowing that they’re already interested in what you have to say. Whether it’s leads, subscribers, or sales, the homepage is a great place to convert people to whatever goals that you set for your blog.

How does this help you see your homepage in a new light? What are you going to do about it?

Read more: ‘7 Quick Tips to Make Your Blog Design More Readable’

The post What to Put on Your Blog’s Homepage appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

The point of that post was two-fold. One, to interact with you on an individual level. Two, to better understand how I can help you with your website right now.

All of your struggles seem to fall into one of six categories: setting up your website, creating content, getting traffic, converting traffic, making money, or remaining true to foundations of internet success.

With that, here are 33 common online struggles and my best advice for handling each.

Setting up Your Website

Most of you seemed to have your sites set up, self-hosted, and otherwise running properly, which is great. There are still a few common problems that I saw.

1. Who is this site for and why does it exist?

If the homepage doesn’t answer this question immediately, people are likely to leave. Communicate this with your logo, tagline, header area, or featured area.

Michael answers these two questions with his 5-word tagline, “How Pros Make Money Online.”

2. Creating a Custom Blog Design

If you haven’t at least upgraded to a premium theme, I would start there. Spend $50-$100 and your site will look drastically better. Michael started Income Diary with a $70 WooThemes template. Within a few months, he paid someone to update it.

Custom blog designs start at $1,000 and run up to $100,000 or more.

3. Cleaning Up the Blog Design

If you have a logo or an opt-in box, make sure it matches the colors in the design. If you include post images, make sure they’re all exactly the same size (here it’s 345 pixels by 180 pixels). If you start adding widgets to the sidebar/footer, make sure you can answer the question, “how does this improve the site for my readers?”

Simply using colors that match is a great start. You can find matching color schemes with ColorSchemeGenerator.com.

4. Blog Excerpts vs. Full Articles

All major news sites and big-time blogs, with the exception of a few, feature post excerpts on the homepage. They do this to make their content more consumable and to help people find what they’re looking for. Plus, it makes the scroll bar smaller.

To enable homepage post excerpts within WordPress, put the Read More tag at the end of your excerpt.

Some premium themes automatically create and show post excerpts on your blog page.

5. Choosing from a Sea of Plugins

Before you start adding every five-star plugin that might improve your site, you need to understand that plugins are little pieces of software. Once you install more than 5-10 of them, there’s a good chance that they’ll conflict with one another, which could crash your site.

The only plugins that are absolutely necessary are Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Forms, and WordPress SEO by Yoast (unless your theme has SEO options built-in).

Creating Content

After getting your site set up, the next step is writing content. All of us can improve on this.

6. Writing Well

Writing is like painting. Anyone can pick up a paintbrush and make a few strokes, but it’s immediately obvious when you can’t do it well.

Simply writing content without spelling or grammar mistakes doesn’t make it good.

If you don’t have a command of the English language, you have three options: become a better at writing in English, hire a writer, or write in your native language. Even those of us who speak primarily English need to work on this, a lot.

7. Creating Exceptional Content

Exceptional content talks about things that people are actually interested in. It educates and entertains. Most importantly, it uniquely solves a problem.

If you tell me that your content is exceptional, yet you’re not seeing the results, your content isn’t exceptional.

8. Crafting Headlines

The headline is the most important part of your post. If it’s bad, no one will notice it, click it, or read it.

To write better headlines, make sure they are keyword-focused, benefit-driven, and power-word ridden. In the eight hours I spent on your sites, I saw less than a handful of good headlines.

9. Writing Audience-Focused Content

People expect blogs to be flooded with useful information that benefits the audience more than it documents the blogger’s life.

If you want to build an audience, focus on the audience.

10. Finding Motivation to Write Consistently

When you put a lot of work into something and don’t experience results right away, it’s demoralizing. You question why you’re doing all of this if no one is paying attention.

Two things. One, you’re definitely doing something wrong and you just need to figure out how to fix it. Two, this is the internet’s way of filtering the good from the bad. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

The people who find success online, without exception, dedicate years to figuring out the internet before they finally crack the formula.

11. Writing with a Busy Schedule

I’ll admit I haven’t found a good solution for this either. The posts I write here take 6-8 hours. If you have a full-time job, an attention-hungry kid, and a literally hungry family, I know it’s hard to find the time to write even once a week.

You have three options. One, write higher quality, less often. Two, find (probably hire) someone to create content for you. Three, find a way to accept and filter user-generated content.

12. User-Generated Content

If you can figure out how to accept user-generated content and maintain a high-level of quality, you’re golden.

Again, two things. One, tell your users exactly what you want them to submit. Two, make the submission process as smooth as possible.

If you use a good contact form plugin, you can create a form that saves their submission as a draft in your “Posts” section of WordPress.

Getting Traffic

Getting traffic was the most common struggle online. Over half of you mentioned that you wanted more traffic.

13. Ranking for the Right Keywords

If you want your site to rank for the right keywords, you need to create exceptional content for that keyword. Either that, or you’re going to be paying for traffic.

14. Building Backlinks

I’ve been running blogs since 2008 and I’ve never implemented a formal link-building campaign. Yet, between my two largest sites, I get 18,500 search visits per month which accounts for 56% of my traffic.

Backlinks are important, but not as important as creating exceptional content. Links come naturally.

I think the larger problem is that people would rather focus on building backlinks than creating exceptional content.

15. Optimizing Blog Posts

None of you mentioned that you struggle with optimizing blog posts, but I saw that this was an underlying problem to why you’re not getting traffic.

To help you with that, here are 10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget and 10 Blog Post Marketing Steps to Take Immediately After You Publish.

16. Encouraging People to Share Your Content

If you’re not creating content worth sharing, people aren’t going to share it.

Again, it all comes back to creating exceptional content. If you’re doing that, they’ll find a way to share it.

17. Boosting Page Views by Keeping People on Your Site

To boost engagement, get people to consume as much of your content as possible. If I read seven blog posts on any one site, then I’ll probably become a regular reader.

To increase the likelihood of somebody staying on your site, add a Related Posts area to your blog post footer. For this, I use the Similar Posts plugin.

Converting Traffic

Once you get people to your site, focus on encouraging them to do something. It could be to subscribe, to buy, or even just to comment.

18. Creating an Opt-In Bonus

To create your opt-in bonus, the first step is figuring out what readers want. If they have a specific set of problems that you can help them with, write an ebook, create a video series, or set up an auto-responder.

The software-as-a-service equivalent is a free trial. Very few sites find success without first giving something away for free.

19. Getting More Email Subscribers

The first step in getting more email subscribers is to give them a great reason to subscribe, oftentimes with an opt-in bonus.

Once you have a compelling reason for getting someone to subscribe, then it’s as simple as constantly reminding them to do so in a way that communicates the benefit of subscribing.

20. Positioning Your Opt-Ins

The most popular places to put opt-ins are in the header, at the top of the sidebar, at the bottom of the post, and in the footer. Of course, Popup Domination works so well because it makes the opt-in front-and-center.

One location that IncomeDiary.com used to utilize and is beginning to pick up steam on other sites is above the content and sidebars on the homepage.

21. Designing Your Opt-Ins

Using the Aweber/MailChimp-generated opt-in templates is a good start, but they don’t fit in with the rest of your design. It looks sloppy and makes people think that your bonus/newsletter is subpar.

If you know HTML and CSS, you can strip out the auto-generated styling and style them however you want. Explaining this in more detail is outside the scope of this article, but if you need help, drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

22. Building a Community

Building a community is a process that starts with earning one reader at a time. Get someone to read one post. Then another, and another, and another. They’ll subscribe, open your emails, leave comments, and share your stuff.

Then someone else will come along and the two of them will start recognizing each other in the comments. Then another will come, and another, and another.

But it starts with one reader reading one post and thinking, “That was worth my time. What else is here?”

Making Money

If you’re doing everything right up to this point, it’s time to cash in, but in a way that doesn’t detract from the work you’ve already done.

23. Ethics of Making Money Online

It’s not wrong to start forming a business around helping people with their problems. That’s what businesses do.

If you’re not making money nor independently wealthy, then the only way your blog can be sustainable is if you start selling things to your audience.

I understand the hesitancy to start making money online because it feels like you’re exploiting the very people that you’re trying to help. The best way to overcome this hesitancy is to only sell them things that they need.

The more niche your audience, the more easily you’ll be able to recommend products and show ads that’ll fit their needs.

24. Making Ads More Relevant

Click-through rates depend on the relevancy of the ads.

If you have a news-based or humor-based site that appeals to everyone, it’s going to be difficult to serve them relevant ads. If you focus on building an audience of a specific type of person, you won’t get as much traffic, but advertisers will pay more for that traffic because it’s targeted.

25. Positioning Ads to Increase Clicks

I’m not a fan of trying to trick people into clicking your ads. It’s a short-term game that’s not worth playing.

But if your ads are relevant enough to actually help people, then put them in the same places you would put your opt-ins (header, top sidebar, bottom post, footer).

26. Focusing on Affiliate Sales

Quick rule: Don’t recommend something that you haven’t used and benefited from using yourself.

Let’s say that you’re building an audience of people like you. If a product helps you, it’ll help them. If it has an affiliate program, sign up and recommend it. You can create full-scale reviews or simply drop it into your posts and emails when it’s relevant.

Recommend a mix of products with and without affiliate programs. That’ll show people that you’re there to help, not just to make a buck.

27. Coming up with Product Ideas

Ask your audience what they want.

Organize information into an ebook. Develop software that helps you and package it to help them. Launch a premium course to help them individually.

The neat thing about building an audience first is that they’ll tell you what they want and you have a platform to sell it.

28. Sales Page Strategy

The rules here are constantly being rewritten.

If you create something that people need and you effectively communicate the reasons why they need it, they will buy it. If they don’t buy it, you made a mistake on one of those first two things.

Foundations of Success Online

In terms of building a website, getting traffic, converting traffic, and making money, success is simply a matter of doing the right things in the right order. It’s easy once you know how to do it.

The more challenging part is getting the fundamentals right. If you don’t do these five things, you will struggle at every other level.

29. Help People Solve Problems

If your website doesn’t help specific people solve specific problems, it’s not going to get the attention that it deserves. And even if it does, it’s going to be difficult to sell things to those people.

30. Be Unique in a Crowded Internet

Most sites are average.

If you want to stick out, be different. If you want to be remarkable, be memorable. If you want to make waves, create something that you’re proud to show to your real-life friends.

Too many of us have template-y designs, generic logos, auto-generated opt-ins, and regurgitated content.

Be unique.

31. Get Past the Desire for Anonymity

I know that many of you choose to be anonymous because the internet makes that possible. Maybe it lets you be more honest with your advice. Or maybe you justify it with, “this site isn’t about me.”

But it’s like walking into a sales meeting with a mask on. Sure, it’ll be interesting for a few minutes, but if you never take the mask off, they’re going to walk out.

People buy from people they know, like, and trust.

32. Avoid Paralysis from the Pursuit for Perfection

One month on the design, two on the logo, a few months of market research, and many, many months crafting an amazing opt-in bonus. Now, just a few weeks to write the first five blog posts and bam! Site’s live.

Nobody comes.

I know, the gradient in the nav menu is all wrong. Just a few weeks to fix that. Might as well re-work the footer too. Another month goes by.

Nobody comes.

Maybe something’s wrong with my color scheme…

A year later. You cracked the 1,000 uniques mark in the 11^th month, but your site never picked up steam like you planned for it to.

Just get your site up, track data, and adjust your site based on feedback. Then, never stop improving.

33. Stick with One Project

Results are going to take longer than you expect, especially if you’re just getting started online.

If you move around from shiny object to shiny object every three months, none of your projects are going to get the attention that they need.

Like I said, if you have the fundamentals right, it’s only a matter of doing the other 28 things in this list. It’ll take time, more time than you want it to, but it will happen.

The Last Word

I learned a lot about you all last week. What you struggle with. What you’re doing well. What you can improve. And I hope this post shed some light on your common struggles.

For us to continue serving you, we need you to continue telling us how we can help.

I appreciate the, “Awesome post, Nick! Way to go. You’re so smart (and handsome)” comments. I really do.

But I’d like more of you to challenge my thoughts. Give me feedback that’s scary to give. Tell me, “Nick, this concept is good in theory, but I’m really struggling to implement it because…”

As always, I’m looking forward to your comment.

Photo by kirstinmckee

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