Monetizing 104 - Paid Text Link Ads aka The Big Flop

You may have heard of sites like TLA (http://www.text-link-ads.com/) that pay you for link ads within your text or other places on your website.  They claim (or at least TLA does) that buying these links for a flat rate will push your site higher on the search engine page rankings.  Sounds like a great deal for you... buying your way to the top.  But in all reality it's a bad deal for the buyer, and for anyone who puts these types of ads on their website.

Pinoymoneytalk.com has done their research and has examples of how Google has fought these text link ads tooth and nail, and has in some cases actually penalized sites for buying these ads, or selling them on their site.  Check out their article HERE for more information.

The bottom line about text link ads of any sort: Avoid them at all costs.  Yes, they can make you money, but at what cost?  Your page ranking could drop, and that equals less traffic for you, and less clicks on any of the ads on your site.

If you have already been penalized for having these ads on your site, and have since removed them, supposedly you can contact Google and get some of your page ranking back.

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Getting Traffic 104 - Stumble Upon

Like using the Ping-O-Matic, adding your site to Stumble Upon is one of the easiest ways to start getting traffic, and should be one of the first things you do after setting up your blog.

What is Stumble Upon?  It's a website that allows users to install a toolbar into their browser with a 'Stumble' button.  Users make an account with Stumble Upon and then choose their interests.  After that, whenever they click the 'Stumble' button, their web browser jumps to a new page matching one of their interests!  It's a fun thing to do when you have some time to kill, and it has helped thousands of people discover new favorite sites.

How does this help you?  Simple:

1) Go to Stumble Upon and sign up for an account (free).

2) Install the Stumble button into your web browser (you can uninstall it easily as soon as you're done with this tutorial).

3) Go to your website.  Once you're at the homepage of your blog or website, use the stumble tool bar to add your site to the stumble search engine.  Be sure to set it to the appropriate category, and put an interesting and accurate description into the description box.  Add it to the Stumble site, and you're done!

4) At this point you can uninstall the stumble toolbar from your web browser if you want to.

Congratulations, now people from all over the world will be 'stumbling' onto your website.  The whole process takes just a few minutes.

Keep in mind that some of these 'stumblers' you get may not stick around on your site, and may keep on stumbling along, which is really useless traffic to you as guestblogging.com points out.  I still maintain however that some of my favorite sites have been found by using stumble, and there is the possibility that you may get some loyal traffic from it, but perhaps not as much as you would hope for.  It is worth a try anyway.

To discover more great tutorials and articles about building or monetizing your blog, click on the category tabs at the top of the page!

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Getting Traffic 105 - Forums And Backlinks

As you've seen, you can get traffic to your blog in a number of different ways: Search engines like Google, ping-o-matic, stumble upon, social networks, word of mouth in the form of other sites sending traffic your way via backlinks...  Today we're going to talk about you doing some footwork (or typing work as the case may be) by using forums to send traffic to your site.

We know that the more backlinks you have out there to your site, the higher up your site goes in the search engine rankings.  Forums can help you push your site up in the rankings as well as send you some direct traffic, and here's how:

1) Find a forum that matches whatever topic you blog about.  For example, let's say you blog about cats.  Go out into the internet world and find a lively forum about cats.

2) Sign up on the forum, and customize your profile.  Many forums allow you to have a link and maybe even a banner or a few words in your forum 'signature'.  The signature shows up below every single post or reply you make in a forum.  Let's imagine the potential of this here for just a moment:

You sign up on the cat forum, and in your signature put:  
Visit my cat health site at www.cathealth.blogger.com.  (Yes, you want it in bold, and in a different color than black if you can.  Sometimes you can even make the signature a larger size).

Now you go onto that cat forum once a day and make one valuable, insightful post or reply to someone else's forum post, every day for a year.  (Don't reply with, 'wow that's cool...' or something else meaningless.  Try to be an active part of their forum community).

After a year you have made 365 posts on this cat forum, and below each post is the link to your site.  Odds are you're going to get at least a little direct traffic from people clicking on your link in your signature.  But even better than that is that the Google bots are out there crawling the web, and finding all of those backlinks you've made in your forum signature.  You slowly climb the search engine page ranks.

Let's imagine now that you've actually signed up to two different cat forums, and you make one post in each, every day for a year.  That's 730 of your links out there on the web
after only a year.

This is the first way you should use forums to get traffic to your site.

The second way you have to be careful with, as you don't want to be considered a 'spammer'.

1) Sign up for a few forums in your niche (topic), again we'll say they're cat forums because you're writing the best cat blog around.

2) Post insightful, meaningful content on the forums in posts and replies to other people's posts.

3) Every once in a while you'll get the opportunity to post a link to one of your posts in a reply.  Let's say you've written a post about what to do when your cat is sick, and you've just come across a person on the forum asking about what to do when your cat gets sick.  Simple, you give a little information and then give a link to your post and say, "I've already written a great post about this on my blog if you want to check it out!"  And there you have it, yet another link to your site on the web, and more chances for people to click on the link and give you some traffic from the forums.

I say to be careful because if you do this too often, they will call you a spammer and you might get removed from the forums.  But if you're giving them a link with valid information to a specific problem every once in a while, odds are they'll appreciate the help.

If you're using the forums in this way, then you should really be signed up to three or more forums in your niche area so that you get more chances to do this.  You can also do this with Yahoo Answers, where they love for you to give links to valuable information that relates to the question.

Check out our other great tutorials and articles by clicking on the category tabs at the top of the page!

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