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This guest post was submitted by Matt Smith who blogs about The Art of eMarketing. You can check out his RSS feed here.

If you are in the affiliate marketing or Google Adwords business, then you should know that having a lot of clickthroughs is not the only thing important if you do want to make money out of the PPC (pay-per-click) industry. Having an effective landing page (the page where you send your visitors to) is equally important and would actually make or break on the result of either having a potential customer sign up or purchase your product or service. Without a good landing page, then your business is useless. Below are a few tips on how you could create an effective landing page:

*Do not take your potential customers directly to your homepage if they would not be able to find what they’re looking for there. Make sure that you take them to a page or a site that would have the correct and complete information on the products/services that they saw in your ads. Never ever let your potential customers search for the information, instead bring them directly to it!

*Avoid Redundancy. Make sure that your landing page does not contain the exact same information that people find in your e-mails or ads. Do not give everything away in your e-mails to potential clients; just give an overview so that when they reach your landing page, they would not read the same words they have read in the e-mails you sent.

*Be Consistent. It’s as easy as posting an image within your e-mail that is the same as the image seen on your landing page. This would help in making your ad look more professional and would also help your visitors know that they are indeed in the right page. Consistency also ensures that there would be no disconnect with your potential customers.

*Be Direct. It is best for you not to beat around the bush especially when it comes to the information in your landing page. True, your customers or visitors may want complete information but then again they would not want to spend too long a time in reading information that are not straightforward. Not being straightforward when it comes to giving out information may even confuse people and in the end, they would opt not to sign up or buy the products or services you are offering even if they are interested.

In other words, get rid of those words that would only distract or prove to be useless to your landing page’s visitors. Make sure that all the information you post to your landing page would be needed by your customers.

Remember, following all these tips on how to create an effective landing page would not give you the results you want immediately. The saying: “Practice makes perfect” does apply to this process and so make an effort and test your work first. If something is not working, change it and see whether plan B works. Do not despair. Keep on trying new things and you’ll see that you are just a step away from coming up with an excellent landing page.

This is a guest post by Prem Shashi, who is running a contest with over $1000 in prizes. You can subscribe to Prem’s RSS feed here. If you would like to submit a guest post to be featured on my blog while I am in Nebraska, please visit the contact page.

Are you one of the many bloggers who want to stamp your name in the blogosphere some day? Do you feel like you have too much work to do everyday and you don’t find or have time to do some of the basic things in life because of your blogging career?

I wouldn’t call myself a professional blogger, but would rather introduce myself as an Aspiring Blogger. Now, one of the main aspects of being a professional blogger is being able to find the time to do everything you want to get done in a single workday. So how do these bloggers manage to do everything they want to get done? The answer is very simple. They have good time management skills. It’s not something which they possessed when they started blogging but it’s something they have brought into their work system and molded themselves to do tasks slowly or quickly based on the amount of time they had. It’s very important for any blogger who wants to succeed in the near future to be able to manage their time efficiently.

There’s no better time to start managing your time than the early stages of your blogging career as it might seem impossible to change your work ethics later on.

How to manage your time effectively?

Different bloggers do different things for their blogs on a daily basis, and it’s those little things like advertising, marketing and link building that add up to a huge chunk of your time. I have just listed few tips below which might save you some time somewhere.

Organize yourself – Your blog reflects the person inside you and what you stand for. If you’re not an organized individual it can be seen clearly from your blog and that will be a black mark for you. Organizing yourself and the rest is taken care of.

Time allotment – You know what you do daily for your blogs, so note it down and set certain times to do the tasks according to how busy your day is. Try to do this daily, so eventually you will know exactly how much time to spend on each task.

Avoid Pressure – Most bloggers assume they can do lots of tasks in a day and succumb to the pressure of completing the tasks that they not only leave everything incomplete but also unknowingly end up spending a lot of time. Blogging is supposed to be something which you should do naturally. Stressing yourself out will only make matters worse.

Know your limitations – Every human being has his own limitations. Know your weaknesses and work on it, but don’t waste too much time on it and lose focus of your actual task.

Breaking Point – When you reach your limitation, you might end up being very tired mentally, so always remember to take breaks between tasks. A small drink, snack or even listening to your favorite tunes can inspire you and get you some momentum for the rest of the day thus enabling you to finish your tasks faster.

Believe in yourself – When I say that, I mean you should know what you’re doing is going to be useful in some way for your blog. I see lots of bloggers doing things like Link-Building etc for building PR when they have no clue why exactly they are doing it. In the time you waste doing that, you can spend it writing few posts for your own blog which is more productive.

Spend Time Wisely – In the End, it all comes down how well your blog is doing. If you seem to be spending too much time and not getting the desired results, you should be sensible enough to know that something what you’re doing is not right.

The whole ploy of managing your time is to spend less time and produce greater results. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight, but the ones who are more flexible with their time are the ones who can stand apart from the rest of the crowd.

So, how do you manage your time? Do you take breaks between tasks? Feel free to include additional points or experiences you have gained through blogging……

This guest blogging post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie.

Who doesn’t like to get something for nothing? If you own a blog or website, the idea of free traffic is tremendously appealing, and many of us are willing to do whatever it takes to get a few more visitors to our websites. If it’s as easy as putting a widget on your blog, so much the better. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and you stand to gain a lot in return, or do you? I’ve tried a few of these widgets - TheGoodBlogs, BlogRush, Entrecard and others, and I’m beginning to wonder if they are really worth it.

The Good Blogs - Not So Good

One of my first experiences with traffic widgets was TheGoodBlogs. Like most other sites, you sign up, add your blog, select some tags that fit it and put a widget on your blog. The idea is that the widget shows posts related to your content, and your content in turn is shown on other blogs. One of the things that troubled me about the widget was that much of the content actually shown didn’t seem that relevant to my readers, and my stats showed that very few visitors actually came to my blog from that site. After a while, I gave up on it and removed the widget from my blog.

Blogrush? No Rush!

I was a lot more optimistic about Blogrush when it first started. Ok, the widget was ugly, but at least it had possibilities. The ten tier referral system meant that the more people you signed up, the more your blog would be seen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The trouble is that it probably works best for those who don’t need the additional traffic. If you are an A-list blogger, you can sign up thousands of people, earning referral and traffic credits and getting your posts displayed in even more places. For the rest of us, the traffic you get is fleeting, if it comes at all. I got a trickle of traffic from Blogrush at a time when I published some of my best posts. It was time to move to the next big thing - Entrecard.

Entrecard

Entrecard held even more promise. When you sign up for Entrecard you get to customize a widget to put on your site. You earn credits for dropping your Entrecard (like an online business card) on other sites and when others drop their cards on you. You use these credits to buy 24 hours of advertising on the site of your choice. So how does it work? I have had a lot of traffic from Entrecard, but most of it is drop and run traffic, lasting 5 seconds or less. However, if I spend my ad credits wisely, and advertise on a related site, I get new visitors who stick around a while and may even subscribe to my feed.

The Verdict

So, what’s the verdict? These widgets don’t work well for me. My blog (piggybankpie.com) is in the freelance writing niche and it’s been around for a while. If you have a brand new blog, these widgets are a great way to start getting traffic. If you have blogs that cover blogging, technology, gadgets or any of the popular topics on Technorati, then you will probably get a lot from traffic widgets. They didn’t do much for me. I have removed all of those widgets from my blog and am concentrating on building a readership in other ways, through social media and networking sites. And even though I no longer have the widget, I am still spending my Entrecard credits to advertise on blogs in my niche. That’s the best way to use it, in my opinion.

Collin LaHay’s Verdict: I agree with Sharon, most of these traffic widgets are not sending me a whole lot of traffic, however I have so much extra room by having two sidebars instead of one that I am leaving them up until I find something useful to replace them with!  If you think they are there because they are bringing me tons and tons of visitors, you would be mistaken.  I will be getting rid of them in a few weeks.

Photo by Jurvetson

This guest post was submitted by Patrick from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services.

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimization hundreds of time. But bloggers these days are looking at more efficient ways to drive traffic instantly. The answer resides in Social Media Optimization.

There are numerous social media sites on the Internet. Some are specialized in news feeding, others in bookmarking, but the main point is, they are tools you can use to promote quality content published on your blog. Now, I cannot stress how important this last sentence is. Promoting every single post that comes out of your blog may put you in trouble. You will be seen as a spammer, and users will simply ignore you. But if used wisely, social media sites can really boost your traffic and give you high, very high visibility.

Let’s look how we can nitro boost your traffic using social media sites.

1. Install ShareThis

Let’s start with the basic. If you want to help your blog with social media sites, you need the provide a tool for readers to help them vote and promote your content. The best one I know is ShareThis. This plugin combines most of the social media submission links into one applet, and the installation is done in a snap.

2. Activate FeedBurner FeedFlare

Many of your readers will grab your posts right off your RSS feed. But when comes the time to get votes, these readers are away from your site, and therefore less likely to give their thumbs up… unless you activate FeedFlare. FeedFlare ads a footer at the bottom of each of your articles in your RSS feed. It displays the count of Stumbles, Diggs, comments, Del.icio.uses, etc. Not only subscribers get instant and dynamic information of how the post is doing on social media sites, but with a simple click they can cast their vote, helping you reach even more readers.

3. Get The Sphinn Button

If you wish to play the social media game, you need to play it right. Leaving aside the Sphinn community would be a mistake. More and more bloggers are using Sphinn to promote… what’s often buried in minutes on Digg: Internet Marketing and Blogging content. Sphinn is not BloggingZoom though, you should be careful not to submit only your own posts. Provide Sphinn fans their favorite tool and install the Sphinn submit button on your site.

4. Write a Diggbait

What is a Diggbait? It is a post especially written for Digg users. Writing a good Diggbait can bring so much traffic that very often, shared servers (cheap hosting deals) collide under the pressure of gigantic network load. But still, if you survive a Diggbait, you can easily add hundreds of new RSS subscribers to your blog. Your host here, Collin Lahay, previously wrote this Diggbait and received 70,979 visitors from Digg in 3 days! You can read the results of his experience in this post.

5. Help Your Blog To Survive DiggBaits

If you read digg on a regular basis, chances are you’ve been sent to a site that collapsed under pressure. If you decide to focus your energy on Digg, help yourself by installing WP-Cache or WP Super Cache. The concept of caching is very simple. Each time a visitor goes to your blog, a PHP request queries your WordPress database and retrieves the content that goes into your page (the text you wrote). This might sounds like an instant process, but thousands users reading the same page mostly at the time would badly impact your server’s performance. Instead of going through this database querying process, a caching plugin saves a copy of your pages including their content on the server’s hard disk, leaving slow database calls aside. Surviving mammoth traffic from social media sites will surely help your blog’s reputation, and Digg users will be confident they can safely submit content from your site.

6. Invest In StumbleUpon

A poll on ProBlogger asked readers what was their favorite social bookmarking site. 34% of voters said StumbleUpon. The closest followers were Del.icio.us and Digg with 21% and 18% respectively. When stumblers are going nuts for a post on your blog, you can easily expect hundreds of unique visitors in a day. Now the question is, can you stumble your own post? Yes you can, just don’t overdo it. By using SU on a daily basis, you will vote sites and participate in the community. Develop friendships and socialize with other users to build a strong profile.

7. Optimize Your Content For Social Media

It is well-known that users from social media sites have a very short attention span. What it means for you is that if you wish to promote content on these sites, you need to slightly adjust your writing. Never-ending posts where readers can get lost in paragraphs and paragraphs of text will not work. Keep in mind that not only you are writing for the web, but in this case you are writing for social media users. Let’s digg into the mind of a StumbleUpon user (that was a social media joke.) Ok, you click the Stumble! button and a site shows up. Your eyes are seeing what’s above the fold, which means, you’ll see a title and maybe the first paragraph. Now remember, the eyes are looking at the title, but the mouse pointer is still on top of the Stumble! button. Your mission, as a writer, is to provoke a mouse movement to push the pointer away from this location and prevent the user’s index finger from clicking the trigger. First thing you need is a killer title. Now if you pass this step, readers are heading for the first paragraph. Tell them what they can expect but don’t give too much information, you want them to reach the bottom of the page. Remember that social media users love bulleted and numbered lists. This makes your post easily scannable, and increases chances of being voted.

8. Play By The Rules, But…

To rap this up, I’ll conclude by sharing some explorations I’ve done recently. Blog Catalog has user groups where you can post vote requests for either Digg or StumbleUpon. When you feel like you have something valuable to share, like killer content, you may ask for social media love in order to get more visibility. Now, be VERY careful. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t join these groups, but you need to know that reciprocal stumbling can get your blog kicked out of SU. I’ve seen users posting vote requests for each and every articles they publish. And sometimes, stuff that would never get submitted otherwise. Concentrate on writing quality content, and votes will fall from the sky. Curious? Go to Blog Catalog and join the Stumble group.

Do you optimize your content for social media sites? Any tips you wish to share? Join the conversation over to comments.