Over the weeks since, I have seen no change in the amount of offers I was being given and with the advent of the Cost Per Click (CPC) model that Sponsored Tweets released not too long ago and the service is going stronger than ever. There was still the looming cloud of the loss of API access, but Twitter clarified it’s stance recently that gave support to programs like Sponsored Tweets and so it seems that they will be allowed to continue operating as normal, which is fantastic news.

Sponsored Tweets is a really easy and lucrative way to make money online and leverage your Twitter followers into some extra cash. It’s great to see that the owners of Twitter see the value in Sponsored Tweets and are going to continue to allow it to use the API and let us make money taking advantage of it. If you aren’t signed up for Sponsored Tweets yet, now is the time to get into the game and join myself, Luke and the thousands of others cashing in.

It’s no secret that I think developing a blog, building a brand and a community around it is a great long-term, more stable and more enjoyable method to making money online. I enjoy writing and sharing tips more than I do researching tons of keywords and constantly changing ad copy and all the other things that go into PPC/PPV campaigns and such.

With that mindset then, it’s easy to see why I think making yourself accountable to your blog, and each post on it, is a great way to build the base of your online community. If you are taking it seriously, putting effort into each post and checking it over that will show to your readers. They’ll no doubt be appreciative that you took the extra time to check your spelling & grammar, include relevant links and spice it up with a photo or a screen shot.

There are plenty of great tips on that list, and several I hadn’t even thought of. For those of you looking for just the list, here it is, although Daniel gives an nice write up on each one on his blog and a .pdf file you can print out and affix over your computer as a good reminder.

I think it’s a pretty solid checklist before publishing a post. Is there anything that you would add to the list, dear readers?

Recently, in a continuing string of mildly irritating changes Facebook has altered the way the information you put on Facebook is displayed. Anything you put in the Music, Books, Interests etc. fields now needs to be linked to a corresponding Facebook page. For example, anyone who likes Harry Potter books is linked to the Harry Potter community page. While I find this change annoying and self-serving on a personal level, from an advertising perspective it can be very helpful.

These community pages are a hub of information on a particular subject that lots of people will be viewing and connected to, depending on the popularity of the subject. The page allows you to sign up and contribute to the content, as well as displaying recent posts on the subject from friends and globally. There are a bunch of opportunities to profit from this new arrangement, and I am sure many people are hard at work generating traffic, links and money from this. Here are a couple quick ways I’ve thought of.

If you like Harry Potter (millions of fans), for instance, you can post a status update containing an amazon affiliate link to a box set of all the books and it can get picked up and displayed as a global link on the community page that tons of people will see.

Continuing the above example, you can sign up to add content to the Harry Potter page and work in links to a fan site of yours on the subject, driving lots of traffic, or reviews of the books or movies you’ve authored.

Also, since the main content on a lot of these pages comes from Wikipedia, you can add relevant content to the Wikipedia article that will get displayed again on the Facebook community page and put in front of that many more eyes. Additionally, while some risk is involved here, you can get great Page Rank 4 -6 backlinks from Wikipedia by adding your website or blog to the “External Links” section of Wiki articles. Make sure to read the full post from Garry Conn on how to best implement this practice.

As you can see, these are just 3 quick ways to utilize the new features of Facebook to your advantage. Taking advantage of these things early is often the best way to get in the door and get established before everyone tries to do it so get cracking on converting all these newly linked to Community Pages.

That leads us to the question at hand, is buying Twitter followers worth it? What’s that you say, I can BUY followers on twitter? You sure can and there are a number of services ready and willing to give you followers in exchange for your money. You can do a simple Internet search for “buy twitter followers” and get a bunch of results. You’ll see places like:  BuyTwitterFriends.com, PurchaseTwitterFollowers.com, TweetSourcer.com and UnlimitedTwitterFollowers.com among others. Each has a different price per 1000 followers that you buy, and generally speaking, the more you buy the bigger the discount you get.

Depending on what you use your Twitter account for, buying followers could be very worthwhile for you. If you have a twitter feed dedicated to promoting your blog/brand and selling products and Sponsored Tweets then buying followers may be a good investment. You’ll get more eyes on your tweets and be able to charge more for sponsored ones, and you won’t have any issues with your tweet stream being flooded and unmanageable since you aren’t interacting all that much to begin with.

My personal feeling is that I am using Twitter to connect with people, have conversations, find interesting content to read and promote blog posts that drive some traffic. I love the list feature since it allows me to better manage my followers and engage more effectively in communicating with people. Having a bunch of untargeted followers I bought from a service doesn’t seem to further my goals. Additionally, I don’t like the idea of “paying for friends” essentially and would prefer to have people following me that are interested in what I have to say and not there because I paid them to be. I also feel like buying a ton of followers can create a false influence effect, whereas people become perceived as an authority due to a large following, even though they could have bought most of those followers.

In a nutshell, if you are looking for a fast way to build a big following and make some more money in the short term than purchasing twitter followers may be a good option for you. Otherwise, you may want to take a longer term approach and build your twitter following organically and have invested people following you.

So what benefit did taking a break have? For one, I was able to relax a little bit and not get caught up worrying about the day to day affairs of having an online business. Secondly, I was able to take a step back and this gave me some excellent perspective on the things I had been working on. Things that I wasn’t able to see because I was so engrossed in all the things that I was doing.

It’s this gaining of perspective that I want to talk about for a second, because I think it’s an overlooked aspect of being a successful person. Lots of people think that working as hard as they possibly can all the time is going to unlock the keys to success, fame and fortune for them. While I am a huge proponent of hard work and dedication, I think the ability to work hard most of the time comes from the ability to occasionally take a step back, relax, and reflect on the process you’ve taken to get where you are.

Using a weekend, or mini-vacation, to take an overview of your work or get away for awhile can let you see your projects in a whole new light and could take you past a stumbling block. Spending an afternoon with family and enjoying the weather allowed me to realize a silly mistake I was making with a Facebook campaign. I shifted some variables around and made a new ad today that combined the picture from one with most of the text from another. I should have put them together in the first place but for whatever reason I didn’t originally. After looking at it with fresh eyes, it just clicked for me.

So next time you find yourself frustrated with a campaign, or affiliate marketing in general (we’ve all been there) maybe think about taking a brief break and seeing if you can get some fresh perspective when you leave it all behind for a bit. Who knows, it could open up your next big break!

The thing is, I bet all of you are wasting a bunch of time doing things you think are “important” and “necessary” but actually, once you step away from them leave you with A LOT more time to get other stuff done. This could be working on writing more blog posts, doing more SEO work, tweaking a Facebook campaign or AdWords campaign or any numbers of things business related. It could also be a bunch of other really great stuff that you wanted to make time for, but didn’t know how – spending time with family, exercising, taking a course, or in my case, reading.

Here’s my routine that I’ve been in for awhile now when I sit down at the computer, and I’ll highlight the areas where I feel I am wasting a lot of time.

Check Email (5-15 minutes)

Google Buzz (2-3 minutes)

Check Google Reader (10-40 minutes)

Use Twitter (15-20 minutes, usually 2-3 times a day)

Read FanGraphs (10 minutes)

Check Fantasy Sports Teams (15 minutes)

Various other web browsing (5-30 minutes)

That adds up to anywhere from one hour to as much as two+ hours a day of obligations, before I even start getting stuff done online. I could be so much more efficient and get so much more accomplished if I had known how much time I was wasting on these things.

Take a look at the list – you are probably doing some of the same stuff I am am may not realize how quickly an easily you could recapture a good chunk of your day. I am going to cut down my number of RSS feed subscriptions, streamline my twitter use and spend a lot less time randomly browsing the web. That should save me about an hour or more a day in which I plan to do more reading (of, you know, actual books) and potentially get in a little more exercise/outside time as the weather gets nicer.

What more could you be doing with your day and how easily could you make it happen?

Step One: Know Your Niche

The first thing to remember is that different niches are going to carry different costs to get the ad placements you are looking for. For example, if you wanted to run a dating campaign on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more per click for popular keywords than if you were to run an IQ test on Google. Knowing how competitive, and thus, how expensive a given niche is is critical for both effectively pricing your ads and maximizing your budget. Researching a niche, and the associated cost to advertise in it BEFORE you start a campaign is a great plan and is a very common mistake made.

Step Two: Work Within Your Budget

Another critical step, especially for those of us working on a budget on part-time. You want to get the most out of your advertising dollars so make sure that you set a daily budget big enough to give you some valid testing results. If a click is costing you. 75 in the dating niche, a $10 a day budget won’t get you very good info as to how successful your campaign is going.

Step Three: Getting Valid Data

One of the biggest things we did at the start was abandon campaigns too quickly. If we hadn’t seen conversions in the first 100 or so clicks for the entire campaign (ones with LOTS of keywords, mind you) we would get discouraged and think that ad/offer/niche wasn’t working. I feel that you should try to get a solid bank of data per keyword before deciding if it is worthwhile or not – 50 or so clicks per keyword is usually a good sample. Other people like to spend 2 -3 times the offer payout before deciding if a keyword is worthwhile or not, it’s up to you.

Step Four: Making Adjustments

Once you’ve researched a niche, set a useful budget and gotten some test keyword data you can now go in a lot of different directions to make your campaign more profitable. You have data now, and this is the key to making smart, profitable decisions. If certain keywords aren’t converting well, replace them with some new ones. If you have keywords that are converting well, adjust the bid on them (either up or down) and see how that effects conversions through another 50-100 clicks. Since you you always be split testing your ads anyway, if one is performing a lot better than the other, replace the weak one with a new ad copy and see what happens. Data is your friend as it lets you know what keywords, what times of day, what people are converting well for your offer. If you track well, you will profit.

Step 5: Scale the Campaign and Repeat

After getting your test data and making adjustments, you’ll know if your campaign is paying off for you or not. If it is, increase your daily spend to get more exposure, maybe up some really hot keywords bid and always keep tweaking looking for improvements. Then, it’s back to step one with a new offer, maybe a new niche and seeking those profits again.

If you are looking for good tracking software, tracking202 is a great free resource for tracking your PPC campaigns if you aren’t already.

For a great refresher, or introduction to, what the simple math behind all of those terms above you should read Daniel Scocco of Daily Blogging Tips newest post – Basic Mathematics for Internet Advertising. It provides a detailed breakdown of CPM, CPC & Conversion Rate with some great examples. Puts all those potentially irksome numbers in perspective for sure.

The basic calculus that I like to employ when looking at the big picture of making money online is pretty simple:
Does Time Invested = Monetary Return + Enjoyment? When taking a look at the basics of working online, if the time I am putting in isn’t getting me a satisfactory amount of money and enjoyment, then I probably shouldn’t spend my precious time doing it.

Your values for those variables in my equation can be whatever works for your situation. Some people may be happy spending 10 hours to make $1,000 and hate every second of it ($100 for every miserable hour). Others would need to make more for that to be worth it, or would want to enjoy it more and perhaps make less for it to be worthwhile.

Take a second to think about what your Affiliate Marketing Calculus equation looks like and see if you need to make some adjustments.

After I laughed a little to myself I explained to him that it was a little more difficult than that to just make a ton of money from putting up a website. One of the biggest things you need as a a blogger looking to make income from a blog is readers. Your mom only visits your blog a few times a day, and probably won’t buy every product you promote on your blog (unless she is really nice) and so you are going to need to attract new readers. Here are some tips to building that new blog of yours into a really valuable piece of web real estate.

1. Be Consistent

This goes for both establishing a posting frequency and with regards to content. You don’t have to post every day, or multiple times per day, to build a successful blog. What you do need to do is be pretty consistent with how often you make updates so that readers know how much content to expect from you. I’ve been aiming  to get a couple posts up here every week, and since I have gotten more consistent, the number of visitors and subscribers has started to rise.

2. Stick to the Plan

As I mentioned above, sticking to the plan of what your blog is focused on will help readers know what to expect for content when they see and update from you. If you have a blog about beer, you should generally stick to talking about beer. This isn’t to say you can’t ever make an off-topic update, as readers also like to get a sense for who the author is as well. Generally, though, they just want the content.

3. Focus on Keywords

While you don’t need to go overboard focusing on keywords, as you always want your blog posts and titles to seem natural, actively thinking about keywords you want to target when making posts is a great habit to get into. By improving you Search Enginge Optimization (SEO), you will help improve the rankings of your blog posts, and subsequently your blog, so that search engines will send relevant users to your site and give you great new readers. A couple easy ways to do this are to use a keyword in the title of the article, have the anchor text of your links be keywords, and use secondary keywords in the body of your blog post. Also, be sue to categorize your posts and tag your posts with keywords/main ideas.

4. Build Relationships and Links

As i spoke about earlier, building relationships is important to helping both to grow your blog and make it more fun. If you have blogger friends that you link to, and that link back to your great content you both win. Each of you gets the links and you have more fun blogging if you are connected to other people.

5. Once they Come, Make sure they Stay!

Last, but certainly not least, you want to always focus first and foremost on writing informative, interesting and useful content for your blog. Once you manage to start getting readers, either through word of mouth, organic search traffic, incoming links or subscribers, you want to make sure they keep coming back. Make sure to have something they’ll want to stick around and read and keep coming back for more.

These tips should help speed up the development of a readership, but the biggest key to remember is that it takes time and effort to build a blog readership, especially one you are looking to make money from. Trust is what is going to keep people coming back and get them to buy from you, so always remember to be honest and keep plugging away and eventually the readers will come. If you are looking for even more tips and activities to help you build your blog, I highly recommend the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook from ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse.

Share any other helpful tips for building a blog with us in the comments!

Everyone is looking for the newest technology or emerging traffic source and often times I feel that people will overlook simple, yet effective methods of getting cheap, targeted traffic. Enter EzineArticles.

I’ve been using this as a way to promote sites that I am working on and get traffic to them for free. It’s free to sign up for the service, and costs you nothing to post articles. Not only can you get traffic & conversions for nothing, the backlinks never hurt either. The best part is the traffic we’ve been seeing converts really well if you publish quality articles. For example, I wrote an article with tips and suggestions for people looking to buy a wireless router. Within 3 days time, I had 328 views and more importantly, 158 clicks over to our site’s URL – that’s a 48.2% conversion rate!

If you are employing any pre-pop tactics on that page you send them to, you are going to increase the conversions even more. It less than an hour I had signed up for EzineArticles, written and published an article and that resulted in almost a 50% conversion rate on the traffic – FOR FREE. Imagine if I had used social media to promote that article…

Now, you should be excited about this, but I imagine there are some skeptics out there so let me go over a few tips for creating a good EzineArticle submission.

1. Focused Articles lead to Paying Customers

The more focused your article is, the more relevant it will be to those who find it. Continuing the above example, I made my article about how to choose a wireless router and went over the 4 major components that people should be looking for when purchasing one. That’s it. I didn’t review a bunch of routers, or explain how to set up a wireless network or talk about the benefits or wireless computing. Just what to look for in a wireless router. All those other things are separate topics and could be articles of their own. With focused content, people find what they are looking for and what you want them to find (your site).

2. Tagging is critical

Tags are one of the main ways people will find your article, and so if you write a focused piece, the tags should be easy to come up with and similarly focused. Using huge tags like “Computer Technology” on that routers post wouldn’t get me the type of targeted traffic that converts as well. People looking for all different kinds of computer technology, not just routers, would find your page and that’s not what you or the user want.

3. Titles = Traffic

Having compelling titles in your articles (and blog posts etc.) make it easier for people to get an idea of what your content is about. It could be the best article ever written on the subject, but if the title is boring – think “Some random thoughts about reading good books” or something similarly uninteresting – no one will bother to read it. People are inherently lazy and that’s why everything you can do to catch their attention and do the work for them will only benefit you in traffic, conversions etc.

4. Follow the rules

The Terms of Service are pretty straightforward at EzineArticles, so make sure to follow them. Don’t put your links above the fold, don’t link to prohibited sites and the most important, don’t over-use a keyword. The last one is the hardest, as my first reaction was to use terms like “wireless router” as often as possible, but that is prohibited. Use the keywords you want to target often, but naturally; usually no more than one or so every 100 words. If you do that, your articles will be approved quickly with no editing required.

That’s exactly what I did to quickly drive some free and targeted traffic to one of our websites. Anyone can do it, so give it a shot and let us know how it went in the comments section. If you aren’t getting as much traffic or conversions as you want, let us help!