14
Apr
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Yedda is another site that lets users ask questions about any topic they like. Other users of the site then answer the question and the best answer is voted on by the community.
With a little planning, you can get automated emails for when a question is asked that relates to your keywords, and then you can answer the question and build links from it.
For example, I subscribed to the keyword ‘online dating’, and received an email with someone asking “how do I get a girlfriend,” through which I answered, “try joining a free online dating service” and linked that to Datepad.com. (Source)
This is a very simple, very effective, nearly automated way of building related links to your site. The best part is, you might even get some decent traffic from it as well. Since there are so many possibilities and different variables with this technique, I will just leave the URL and my example, and you can figure out how to optimize it for your own sites.
This is part 28 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate untapped link building resource on the web.
2
Mar
The weekly winner contest is an ongoing contest that I run here on my blog. Every week, I give away $25 as well as free donated prizes to a different person inside the blog raffle. If you would like to enter for a chance to win $25 as well as a variety of free donated prizes every week, please read the official contest post about the weekly winner contest. The earlier you enter the raffle, the better your chances are at winning your free $25!
It is Sunday again, which means that the next prize winner is chosen! The sixth weekly winner is Collin De Ruyck who blogs over at Your World Gallery. You can read his entry post here. Congratulations on winning your free $25 as well as all the great bonus prizes.
Bonus Prizes
A free license to FruitfulTime task list software ($29.99 on sale value)
FruitfulTime has generously offered you a free license to the FruitfulTime software. FruitfulTime is a complex time-management software that aims to remind you for when you have tasks to be completed. For example, I gave myself a task titled “don’t forget to write your weekly winner post this Sunday!” so that I would remember to write this post on time! If you are interested in testing out the software, a 10 day free trial is available. If you would like more information I recommend you read the page on the to do list software as well as the one that has a general overview on the task list software.
1 Year Subscription to Create the Dream Magazine ($24 value)
Traci, the kind vice president/publisher of Create The Dream, has sponsored a free yearly subscription to their magazine. Create the Dream publishes 6 issues per year, which costs $24. Anyone can download the January issue for free, so you can see the quality they put into their work. You can read more about Create the Dream on their website, or my previous blog post called Create the Dream magazine.
One free hour of time from Vicky
Vicky is sponsoring an entire hour of time for her to do your work, much like a secretary. If I had a free hour, I would have her do link building, but you may get a little bit more creative. Here is what she told me, “I want to donate 1 Hour of my time. I run a virtual office business and I’m sure everyone could use a secretary to help with their office projects.”
*Update: I wrote this post very late Saturday night to be posted on Sunday, and I made the sleep-deprived mistake of having a few “he” instead of “she” typos. They have been corrected now. In my appology, here are a few free links so that you can read Vicky’s two latest blog posts here and here.
One free review on BlogBadly.com
BlogBadly.com is a humorous blog that parodies “blog-about-blogging” blogs and satirizes topics like blog marketing, SEO, making money online, and all that good stuff. A free review will surely help you gain some additional free promotion and help you increase your traffic.
Previous Weekly Winners
Weekly Winner Number 1
Weekly Winner Number 2
Weekly Winner Number 3
Weekly Winner Number 4
Weekly Winner Number 5
If you would like to donate a prize for an upcoming weekly winner, feel free to contact me. You will get a completely free plug in return for your generosity.
6
Feb
In my previous post where I introduced Adtoll and showed you how you could use it to make money blogging, I had only just touched the tip of the iceberg. Today’s post is dedicated to showing you many tips that I found out while monetizing my blog with Adtoll.
Set your prices LOW
If you believe you should set your weekly advertising price at $20 (Example number), then you will have very little luck getting direct advertisers. The best way to get direct advertisers through Adtoll is to set a ridiculously low price that will negate any risk the buyer thinks he/she may run into. Instead of setting your price at $20, change it to $3-4 and have 4-5 rotating advertisement slots. The reason that selling many cheap slots is better is because your blog will show up highly in the Adtoll directory because the price is so low. This will increase your rating which means you rank higher in the directory. The more people that see your blog the more money you are eligible to earn.
Network Ads Suck
Unlike Adtoll’s competitor Google Adsense, their default ads (network ads) are not targeted and they are sold in bulk. You only earn around 3-8 cents per click when Google Adsense will pay you 3-30. If you want to truly optimize for Adtoll, you will need to directly sell your ads by yourself of through the use of the Adtoll directory. The high paying network advertisers are mostly gaming companies which get a very low amount of clicks (since this blog is about making money blogging) and are not worth a lot. This combination results in a lower income than you have the potential for.
Enable Discounts
By enabling discounts (it should be enabled by default), you have the potential to dramatically increase your earnings. Adtoll discounts allow you to save a lot of money for buying long term advertisements. If an advertisements price is $1, you will save 20% by ordering 3 months of advertising. In an advertisers mind, that is a great deal. This will also keep your advertisements all directly sold meaning it mutually benefits both parties.
Bargain Discounts on Mixed Market Arts
It would be stupid for me to not take my own advice, so I have decided to lower my prices even more! When I first started monetizing my blog, I charged $200 per month for the top banner at the top. When I recently switched to
Adtoll, I lowered that price to only $80. Now I swear I am going crazy because I have just cut that price yet again.To celebrate my monetization experiment with
Adtoll, you may now advertise in the premium spot at the top of the blog for only
$4 per week. I have even enabled coupons on that already low price, meaning if you order a month at that super low price, you will save an extra dollar on top of that.
BEST OFFER: You may secure the premium spot at the top of the month for THREE MONTHS for only $41, which is less than $0.50 per day! If you act fast, you may now advertise on this blog for three months and only pay half of the standard cost for a single month!
If you are interested in the other advertising locations on this blog at a discounted price, please visit the advertise page at the top.
3
Feb
In the expanding journey to make money blogging, I have decided I would experiment around a bit on my blog to see the different ways on how I can diversify my earnings and maximize my income. The make money blogging topic does not have a lot of high paying keywords like a lawyer, debt, or bankruptcy blog would. This means that clicks on my Google Adsense would earn me less money than if it were a debt blog and the click was to a “get out of debt” ad. meaning it is a lot harder for this blog to make money with Google Adsense than it would be for different blogs. To counter this problem, I am now experimenting with a new advertising agency called Adtoll.
Adtoll is a relatively new advertising network that started in June of last year. Adtoll has a very large hill to climb to compete with the big names in the industry that can afford to pay high rates. Adtoll is unique in a sense because by being a relatively small company they can make large business decisions in a fraction of the time. This allows them to stay unique and to develop creative monetization techniques for bloggers like myself.
Adtoll allows publishers to make money by selling ad spaces in many different formats. They provide the standard formats, video advertisements, and are even developing “peel away” advertising. Adtoll provides publishers the ability to choose exactly what kind of advertisements they want displayed on their blogs. They allow you to choose age restrictions, topic restrictions, and even allow you to set your own pricing.
Adtoll offers a 75% payout rate which is extremely high for a new advertising agency. Google Adsense is said to only give out 40-60% of their share, meaning you may have a 15 to 35% increase in the amount of money your blog makes every month.
Adtoll gives every publisher a rate cardlet. A rate cardlet is basically your sales page. It displays all of your stats that advertisers want to see. This includes your Alexa rank, weekly clicks, average pricing, etc. You can see my rate cardlet here: Mixed Market Art’s Rate Cardlet.
The best feature that I want to emphasize is that Adtoll is not a contextual ad network, which means you are allowed to use it in combination with your Google ads if you would like. The only requirement is that your Adtoll ads cannot look like your Google ads, which should not be a problem.
I will be running Adtoll now on my blog, and to celebrate this I am offering huge specials on my advertising deals. I have cut prices to advertise on my blog by nearly 80%. You can now get the full banner at the top of this blog for only $20 per week. To see the other advertising specials, please visit my Advertiser page.
What do all of you think about Adtoll?