Lose Money Today

If you are in to losing money online, then let me tell you a little secret (there is no Santa). For the rest of you… yes there is a Santa. And he presents himself as affiliate offers during the Christmas holiday season.

People (aka your potential users) like to spend money during Christmas. And if you are just figuring this out today (December 11th), you have pretty much missed the holiday season. Yes, you can jump in now and monetize your traffic for the next couple weeks. But you missed the chance to hook people in early and often. How about this for a great list of Christmas affiliate (and a CPC) programs:

1. Amazon

Why list Amazon first? For beginners, it takes virtually no time to set up their affiliate codes. I mean, you can use some simple Javascript that they provide to set up basic Amazon affiliate links (a must if your topics cover… ohh… just about anything). If you have specific product tie ins that you can make, then their individual product links are just as simple to put in. Remember though, they only keep their affiliate cookie around for 1 day. Get your user to a product that they will buy!

2. CJ

I am not a CJ fan. However, you can find an affiliate link for just about any product on CJ it seems. So no matter what your subject matter, I’d bet you can find a product to direct link to using a CJ affiliate merchant. At a minimum, with no technical skils, you can drop in a product link. Repeating my earlier comment — people spend money during Christmas. If you can put a product link in for a product that someone would want for Christmas, you can generate a commission.

3. Shareasale

While not a fan of CJ, I am a big supporter of Shareasale. They do affiliate networking right! No, they do not have as wide a selection of product links as CJ (I’m not sure anyone does). You can count on their integrity in dealing with both merchants and publishers, which is what you really want. As with CJ though, you will want to find product links that you can integrate with your content that will send a user straight to a product. Ideally a product someone will want for Christmas.

4. Adsense

You know, it is probably not the most lucrative revenue model at Christmas when you could pick up percentages of product purchases, it is like a more stable revenue source. If your content is such that it can be related to Christmas, be especially sure to use product keyword rich content so that you can increase your chance at higher paying CPC. I’d guess you are already running Adsense. All I am saying here is that if you can include this type of content while staying on topic and message, do. As a last thought on Adsense, do remember that they have affiliate offers as well. I had very little success with them, but that does not mean you won’t. Test.

There are other affiliate networks out there to choose from. I mentioned CJ and Shareasale for the reasons indicated. Don’t use this post alone though as a reason to skip other networks.

Good Luck, and don’t forget that Santa does exist. If you do, you will Lose Money Today!

Today’s post on how to lose money deals with getting your website in front of users (aka advertising). Taking the old “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” riddle and applying it to your website or blog, you get “if you make a post to your blog and no one knows your blog exists, does your post generate buzz?”.

Users have to know that your blog exists to get traffic. Otherwise, you got it, you lose money today! Even if you are naturally an introvert, there are ways to publicize, advertise, or otherwise tell people about your blog that won’t stress you too much. I’m going to cover 5 Ways to publicize your blog without raising the introvert alert.

1. Ping! Ping! Ping!

If we are talking about a blog, then you surely know about pinging the ping services. Heck, the default install of WordPress auto pings pingomatic on new posts. I’ve seen rumblings that pingomatic pings were sometimes dog slow in the past, so you may want to add additional ping servers to your blog. Others I’d recommend include (but are surely not limited to):

1. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
2. http://ping.feedburner.com/
3. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
4. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
5. http://www.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

You can add as many as you want, but these in addition to pingomatic will likely boost your traffic significantly if you are putting out quality content. Beware – the more ping services you ping, the slower your posts will be processed when you create them. It is a trade-off, and each person decides for themselves what this is worth.

2. It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s Social (networking)

If you are reading this, and you do not know about Digg, Delicious, or Stumbleupon, then you likely need to spend about an hour searching and reading about them. These services (among the tons of social networks that you discover with a little searching) have the potential to drive huge traffic to your sites (again the quality content caveat applies).

Specific ways to drive traffic to your site is to include their little widget buttons so that users can vote for your articles. In it’s most innocent form, you would create great content, have users come to your site, and have them provide the first vote for your content. This really is not the greatest solution (not even a decent solution). Why? Users submitting your content to a social network will create their idea of what the title and description should be — quite possibly not a very optimized combination (for either traffic or buzz generation). If your content is great, do the submission yourself. Make it buzzy, keep it non-spammy. It will pay off in the long run.

There are lots of schemes out there to boost the performance from social networks. All I’ll say here is, read up before you buy in to any scheme. And the ultimate caveat — if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is too good to be true.

3. What Do You Think (commenting on similar blogs)?

I’d be willing to bet that you are not blogging on a completely unique topic. More likely, you are blogging on a topic that is covered by many other bloggers. I’ll even go so far as to guess that you visit some of these other blogs regularly. Have you ever thought about actually participating in these blogs by commenting? If not, you are missing out on a great way to start getting your blog’s name in front of potential users. Potential users who probably have the same interests that you are using on your blog.

Comment, regardless of whether they have no follows in place. Yes, you always want links to your site (in particular followable links). But in this case, you can use well thought out, non-spammy, comments to create a buzz for your site. Search engines give you rankings, but users who actually come to your site can be more beneficial for actually generating links. Give users every reasonable chance to come to your site.

4. Directories

There are as many diverse opinions about the value of pursuing directory links as there are people spouting opinions. (Yes I know that mine is just adding to the disarray). So my position is simple. The big guys (BOTW, Yahoo) are likely worth getting a listing it. Yahoo is a recurring cost, BOTW has a one time option or a recurring option. For the remaining directories I have a general rule that I use — if a directory is highly ranked for a search phrase like “KEYWORD directory” (where you obviously replace KEYWORD with the keywords most related to your site), then it is likely worth a few minutes effort to submit to if the cost is marginal. “Highly rated” is subjective, but my own preference is top 10.

5. You Got To Have Friends

Ok, so even the most introverted person I know has friends. Tell them about your site. If they are familiar with the topic at all, tell them to stop by your site to give you some feedback if nothing else. If your site has the magic content, they will likely subscribe to your RSS feed. Users who read your RSS feed are likely to come back in the future as a topic of interest comes across their reader. Traffic = potential money. No Traffic = no money.

If you are the type who just prefers to work on your merry way, not really talking about your blog with friends, how about this simple solution. Include your blog URL in your email signature (also your forum signatures if allowed). No, this is not going to cause a sudden rush of traffic to your site. It will actually surprise you though how the clicks from these links will be consistent if not spectacular.

Tiny Traffic = Big Traffic?

I’m not saying all of these suggestions are going to send you so much traffic that your server crashes. I am saying that if you are reading this post, looking for tips, you likely have very little traffic. When you have very little traffic, every little bump up is a step. My general believe on blog traffic is that it takes small bumps until it reaches some critical mass. At that point you are going to start experiencing something closer to exponential traffic growth than linear traffic growth.

Don’t leave money on the table. Get the traffic, and monetize it!