Archive for June, 2006
My mother started her career at our local newspaper as a reporter, then eventually became a successful news editor for ten years. During that time, she’s written countless stories and edited many books. Needless to say, she knows how to write.
In the past little while, I’ve been trying to convince her to write for the internet and start her own blog. She started off with a long article which I thought was really good and would interest a lot of people, but I found I had to show her a few tips to get more people to read the whole thing.
First of all, readers on the internet are completely different than traditional readers. When you pick up a book, you read every word. When you read an article in a magazine, you usually read the whole thing.
Internet readers are actually more like ’scanners’. They scan headlines and skim paragraphs for phrases, but generally don’t read every word on the screen. In many cases, they don’t scroll down to read a full article.
To keep your readers (or scanners) on your website or blog, you need to make sure your content is internet friendly. To do this there are a some things to keep in mind:
- Use bulleted lists with short and descriptive sentences (like this).
- Use sub-headlines to break up long content.
- Use bold, underline and italics when appropriate.
- Keep paragraphs short, about 4-5 lines.
- Pay attention to your headlines - make them enticing for the reader.
- Add photos or graphics to spice up articles.
- Get to your main point right away before the reader loses interest.
- Connect with your readers using words like ‘we’ and ‘you’, instead of ‘they’.
- Keep sentences short and easy to understand.
- Don’t let your lines go for more than about 65-70 characters.
- Don’t ‘pretty’ up your site with distracting backgrounds.
- You don’t need to sound like a rocket scientist. When you write, imagine you’re writing for someone in grade 6-8.
- Don’t be afraid of being casual and friendly in your articles.
- Use fonts like Arial or Verdana for your text. It’s easier to read.
- Always, always, always proofread for spelling and grammar mistakes. The occasional slip-up is usually forgivable, but too many gives the impression that you don’t care.
I come across so many sites and blogs with really long articles and bland looking content. It’s almost painstaking to read every word, but headlines and bullets would have made it more interesting and easier to follow.
From now on, make sure your own content is internet-friendly and if you already have articles published, go back and edit them. If you have sales copy for your own product or an affiliate product, now would be a great time to tweak it and raise your conversion rates.
You don’t have to be a best-selling author to be a successful internet writer. However, it’s important to be able to see your content through your reader’s eyes. Always proofread your copy, then ask yourself if you would find it interesting and informative if you had read it for the first time.
June 6th, 2006
Every day, more and more moms are discovering blogging. Some moms are using blogs as an online journal to write down their thoughts about pregnancy, the trials of motherhood, and other things that happen in their daily lives.
Other moms are using blogs as an addition to their existing online business. This is a great way to keep in touch with your readers and customers, and it’s also a way for you to promote your products.
Some moms are using blogs specifically for income generators. Even though he’s not a mom, Darren Rowse at Problogger is a perfect example of someone who blogs for money. If you have a minute, I encourage you to read his blog. He’s got loads of valuable information for anyone thinking about blogging, or who already has blogs and wants to improve them.
So, you know some of the reasons why moms blog, but do you know what advantages blogs have over traditional websites? The things I’ve discovered about blogging are:
- Search engines love them. Blogs are already very search engine friendly, and with Wordpress, there are various plugins that enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- They are extremely easy to maintain. Unless you design your own templates, you can pick out a free template or pay someone else to design one for you. There are plenty to choose from to suit your needs. Once you’ve decided on a theme, you can change your settings and options, then start posting. It’s basically as easy as that.
- Pinging. Most blog platforms like Wordpress, Blogger and MovableType have an automatic pinging function that notifies blog tracking services that you’ve added new content.
- It’s easy for readers to interact. With comments at the end of each post, it makes connecting with your customers and visitors that much easier.
- They introduce you to a whole new community. Bloggers almost seem like their own little (or big) community. Once I started blogging, I started seeing the internet in a whole new light. I discovered blogs that I never would have otherwise and they’ve been extremely helpful to me along my blogging journey.
- It’s free. While it’s advised for serious bloggers to purchase a domain name and host their blog on their own server, you can blog for free with services like Blogger. They provide you with a name and host it on their servers so it doesn’t have to cost you a penny.
Of course, these are only some of the advantages of blogging. It’s up to you as an author to mold your blog according to your needs and tastes. You can use it as an online journal, you can reach your customers with it, you can even make money blogging.
If you haven’t already started blogging, you can check out Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and create one for free.
June 3rd, 2006
I see people asking all the time in different forums how to make more with Google Adsense. Other than a few tips and tricks to increase your clickthrough rate (CTR), the answer is get more traffic. That’s it.
You’re going to see tons of ebooks and videos for sale telling you how to make more, but what these people already have with their websites is a lot of traffic. That’s why they make a lot of money with Adsense.
Say you have one website or blog. You average about 100 unique visitors a day. Out of those hundred visitors, 20 actually click on an ad. This is a pretty good percentage in my opinion. There are many people with only a 1% CTR and think that’s good. I personally have a much higher CTR, sometimes more than 100% - but that’s beside the point. (Actually, that point there is always strive to increase your CTR).
Anyway, if you have 20 of your visitors clicking on ads each day, you can average anywhere from $0.20 to $20.00 or more depending on the value of your keywords. Some keywords get only one cent per click, others can get more than $1.00. That’s why you’ll see people searching for ‘high paying keyword lists’.
It really doesn’t matter how much you’re getting per click, you’re not going to get rich with only 100 visitors a day. You need to constantly drive more traffic to your site. This could be free traffic from article submissions, link exchanges, newsletters, or search engines - or it could be paid traffic from advertisements, paid link placements, or programs like Google Adwords.
The bottom line is, with more traffic, you’ll get more clicks and ultimately earn more with Adsense. There’s the big ’secret’ right there.
Of course you can do things like adding images beside adsense units to increase CTR (UPDATE: This is now against the Google Adsense TOS - if you’re doing it, stop now or you could jeapardize your account), or include ads ‘above the fold’, or even experiment with different colored ads. You can also keep track of your Adsense stats to see which ads are working and which need improvement. But you can only get so many clicks with the minimal traffic you’re receiving.
Keep working on a variety of things to keep your site fresh and gaining more traffic. Update and add content regularly. Market your site with articles, forums and joint ventures. Keep tracking your traffic stats to learn where your traffic is coming from and how to cash in on that. Keep researching more keywords to add to your site which will increase your search engine traffic. Keep optimizing your site for search engines to get better pagerank and search engine rankings. Keep collecting email addresses and sending out newsletters to your subscribers.
It’s a lot of work, but if you stick to it and don’t do anything that will get you banned from Adsense or the search engines, then you will succeed. You will see an increase in your Adsense earnings.
June 1st, 2006
