How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online

We’ve all seen them. Just about every blog out there has some pretty little buttons somewhere around the top or bottom of the article page.

What are these buttons? Usually they’re tiny logos representing a handful (or 20+) social media sharing sites.

But here’s the catch: for most people these social media buttons are confusing. At first glance the uninitiated (read: non-techie) reader has no darn idea what those buttons are. Once  you look closer you’ll see

Most people have just never heard of all those fancy social media sharing networks. But just about everybody and their dog has heard about Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

So should you really add these social media buttons to your site?

Absolutely! If you want people to bookmark your articles and share them with their friends, you have to give them a very easy way to do that.

But do it in a way that’s not confusing, focusing on just the top few sites that the readers of your site are likely to recognize.

Sadly we didn’t include these very visible buttons on our Ask Dan & Jennifer site or on our other sites… instead we opted for the “all social media buttons in one” Add-To-Any widget (more on this below). But ultimately it proved a little confusing and was too easy to ignore or just plain not notice.

So… we finally decided to add some social media buttons at the bottom of aritcles for our major sites: Ask Dan & Jennifer, Blog Success Journal, and our Personal Blog. Just to make it easy for people to share and bookmark stories they like on these sites.

What Social Media Buttons Should You Choose?

Ah, now to the rubber hitting the road… That’s a very fine line. Most people opt for showing every button available, to increase the odds that your visitor happens to have an account on one of those sites. In theory that’s a good startegy, but it can backfire.

Pretend you’re not a blogger, but a non-techie person who happened to stumble onto a great blog. Fact is, too many buttons can confuse non-techie readers. So you need to figure out what are your “big bang for the buck” sites… which sites best target your core readers base.

To find the rigth buttons for your site, Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a techie readership that prefers Digg or Reddit?
2. Do you have a more mainstream (non-techie) readership that prefers non-techie sites like StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz?
3. How about Facebook and Twitter… would your readers know what those are?
4. What’s  the primary language for your audience… are you perhaps popular in places that speak other languages? Think “Meneame” for example, the Spanish-language Digg-like site.
5. Out of the answers above, which sites are most likely to drive more traffic to your site if bookmarks are shared there?

For us, after significant deliberation (probably too much, LOL), we came up with our top list, in this order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Buzz, Del.ici.ous,  Meneame, and StumbleUpon.

What’s the best way to install these buttons on your blog?

Probably the easiest way is to find a social media button service (such as AddToAny) that will give you a simple piece of Javascript you can add to your site.

If you’re running Wordpress you can also choose from a myriad of plugins that will show these buttons. And there are LOTS of these types of plugins to choose from.

Which begs the question…

What are the best social media button plugins or services for your blog?

There are so many social media button options out there, it’s hard to even begin listing them. So we’re not going to. If you want to find all the options we didn’t choose after doing extensive research, you can search Google yourself for “social media button wordpress plugin” or something to that effect.

We’re just goint to tell you about the ones that we like enough to actually use ourselves.

AddToAny - A great one-size-fits-all social media button bar

AddToAny is a really cool, customizable, and easy to use widget that you can add to literally any blog. Oh, and it’s free too.

You just go to their site, customize how you want the button to look, etc. and they give you a piece of Javascript code to add to your site. It’s that simple.

Here’s what the AddToAny widget looks like:

And it works great, which is why we use it. We recommend AddToAny highly, you should definitely get it set up on your blog or website.

But here’s the question… is it enough? We used to think so, but no longer.

The problem with JUST having the AddToAny widget is that not everyone clicks on your pretty little “share or bookmark” button. Sure some will, but many won’t. They may not see it, or they may just not care.

SocioFluid - The first truly unique social bookmark button solution we’ve seen to date

So, we set out to find a good set of very pretty, polished, and unique social media buttons to add to the bottom of our posts… to make a facebook user say “hey, this was good, i’ll click on that facebook icon and share it with my friends”. Same for Twitter, etc.

When we started looking for the right social bookmark plugin / utility for our sites we were disappointed with all the blah, boring, all-the-same button options out there. And finally, finally we found one that is truly unique!

It’s called SocioFluid and it’s just plain and simply cool. It comes as a customizable Wordpress plugin… and more recently, it’s also available as a simple javascript widget that you can add to any blog, even if it’s not Wordpress (get that from SocioFluid.com).

Want to see this REALLY COOL tool in action? Just scroll down to the bottom of this article and hover over the nifty social bookmark icons… Facebook, Twitter!

OK, Now a question for you!

So what social bookmark / sharing plugins or widgets do you use for your blog? let us know in the comments below!

And be sure to Tweet this article or Share it on Facebook! Just click on one of the pretty sharing icons below!
Thanks! — Dan & Jennifer

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If you’re like us, you hear about the latest and greatest Social Media tools every day - only to be disappointed.

We’ll we’ve found a few that we feel are actually useful. We found these three tools on Rhea Drysdale’s Refresh Jacksonville Social Media Presentation. Rhea has a fairly new blog out of Jacksonville, FL, but we like what we see so far…

In her presentation, she listed several Social Media Tips and Tools.

Here are three tools that we really liked and have add to our list of useful Social Media tools.

Web2Subbmitter

This is the only tool in the list that isn’t completely free, but it’s still a must have tool for us.  The sales letter sucks in my opinion, but Brandon Hall has been awesome to work with. They handled the Netscape to Propeller change within a few days.

If you submit to more than one Social Media website, you need this tool.

This tool allows you to enter your URL, Title, Desription, and Tags one time and then submit to the major Social Media Sites with a few mouse clicks. Think about it, if you submit a story (we submit at least 10 per day) to  the top 5-7 Social Media Sites - how many times do you have to copy paste?

This tool saves us so much time every day!

Social Media For Firefox Extension

The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts. One of the secrets of top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators etc… is being the first to submit stories already becoming popular on other social news sites. For example you can browse Reddit to find good stories already submitted and be the first to submit them to Digg. You can browse Digg and be the first to Stumble pages that are becoming popular there. Most if not all articles on the front page of Digg are submitted to StumbleUpon and will get a lot of Thumbs up. If you were the first to Stumble that when the page reaches the Popular page for its tags and category on Stumble your account will be the one listed next to it, which will give you more friends and fans and so on.

This is a great tool! In additional to the above stuff, it also makes it easier to support your friends who may not have links or buttons on their blog posts. This tool will tell you if it’s been submitted on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious at a glance. It will also let you submit a link with the click of a button.

Digg Alerter

This is a great little tool that allows you to track the status of you recently submitted stories without having to log in to Digg. It show a list of your latest 1- 100 submissions with the number of votes and comments. The tools automatically updates the numbers for you at the interval you set. We have ours set to every 10 minutes. It even tells you when your story is made popular.

Digg Entourage

Ever wonder who’s got your back on Digg? The Digg Entourage tool checks the last 25 stories you submitted, figures out who dugg the most of them, and prints out your Digg Entourage along with tons of data on who your friends really are (or who should be)!

This is an interesting little tool that tells you who votes on your stories and how many times they’ve voted on your stories. The best thing about this little tool is that we found several people who support us that were not currently on our friend’s list. We never would have know about these people without this tool.

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Tags: Digg Alerter, Digg Entourage, Firefox extensions, Rhea Drysdale, Social Media For Firefox, Social Media Tools, Web2Submitter

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It’s seems that the Digg redesign has fubar’d everyone’s avatars. 

Here’s how we made ours look good - not fuzzy! 

The new size of your avatar should be 60 X 60 pixels. Most importantly, your image should be square.

Here’s a great, easy to use thumbnail tool. We use it to generate all of the images across our blogs. The stock photos that we use in our blog posts are around 200K downloaded. We run them through this tool and they are under 20K with no image degradation.

For example… check out the excellent (and really hot) image on this post. It’s only 11k - down from the 161k iStockPhoto original. Not bad, huh? 

The tool is called Extreme Thumbnail Generator and it rocks! (No this is not an affiliate link - just a great tool. :-))

It’s easy to use and just simply works. Whether you’re trying to create an avatar or upload pics to your website, we’ve found Extreme Thumbnail Generator to be a must have tool.

No, it’s not free but neither is beer. However, it comes with a free 19 day trial with no registration required, so get it and fix your Digg avatar!

I’m tired of looking at fuzzy pictures!

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Tags: avatar, create avatar, digg, images, resize images, shrink image, thumbnail, thumbnail generator

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ClickBank has been a source of endless frustration for so many of us who not only make money online, but actually make a living purely online!

On one hand the ClickBank network offers some of the best converting affiliate products anywhere. So, we all work with them. They also reliably make payouts every 2 weeks, yet another strong point in their favor.

But the major problem until just recently - they refused to show you how much traffic you’ve sent them, so you could never accurately figure out which affiliate products are converting better than others. AAAhhhhh!

So what’s the problem?

While this may not matter much to someone who’s happy to get a $50 ClickBank check every few months, for those of us who bring in several thousand dollars a month from affiliate revenue (from sales of many different affiliate products), optimizing your conversion funnel matters.  It matters A LOT.

Can’t you track affiliate conversions yourself?

In short, no. The best you could do was to use OpenAds to track your outgoing clicks for each affiliate product, and then compare that with the actual sales at the end of the month. But that’s error prone.

What you want is to see a per-product breakdown of how many clicks you’ve sent and how many sales you made. THEN you can see what’s actually making you money, so you know where to focus your energy the most. Read: do more of whatever works the best. 

So how can you see product conversion stats from ClickBank? 

Well, this is a new feature, and it’s buried down deep. But, if you look deep within their reporting tools, and select just the right combination of options (see the image), you’ll get… drumroll please… conversion stats broken down by product! Yeah!!!

Note that currently this is only available for the "by publishers" report, and only for the past 30 days.  

And this is what you’ll be seeing… Note how neatly the crucial numbers are computing for you. You see "clicks per order" and how much money you actually made per click. Looking at this graph, can YOU pick out the obvious winner? 

While we found it quite by accident while reviewing our top money makers for the past several months, we’re very happy and grateful to see this new feature.

Any great tips to optimize affiliate conversions?

Absolutely. More on this in a future article, but here are some big ones… 

• Use OpenAds to split-test ad headlines, and see which attract more clicks to each affiliate products. Every couple of weeks, choose a winner, and add a new contender to "beat the control".
• Use "goals" in Google Analytics to track how well your pre-sale review of the affiliate product is performing. You can see how many clicks to the product sales page you generate, and what your abandonment rate is. You DO pre-sell your affiliate products, don’t you? 

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Tags: affiliate marketing, analytics, ClickBank, clickbank stats, conversion stats, Google Analytics, Google Analytics goals, make money online

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The debate over providing a full RSS feed or just a partial (teaser) feed has been going on in the blogosphere for years. Some bloggers swear by full feeds, while others are hesitant to offer more than a few lines of teaser text for each post.

Wait a minute, what’s the difference here? 

Some people will only read blogs in RSS feed readers. They’ll visit some web sites directly, but every day they sit down and scan headlines from their favorite blogs in their feed reader.

When you set up and start your new blog, one of the most important configuration decisions you make is whether to give these readers full access to your text content directly in their feed readers, i.e. a full RSS feed.

Your other option is to show them only the headline and a teaser for each article, and to make them click through to your site to read the full article.

Why would you NOT offer a full RSS feed?

There are various reasons bloggers give for not offering a full feed…

Bloggers who focus on making money online usually prefer to have their readers come to the actual site, where they can click on ads, etc.

Readers who consume the content through RSS are not nearly as easy to monetize as are visitors who visit the website directly. Through an RSS feed, they can’t click on AdSense ads, etc.

There are definitely ways to monetize your RSS feed as well, but they’re not as elegant or as flexible as general website monetization options.

Providing a full feed makes it easy for scraper sites (a.k.a. AdSense scraper sites) to suck and republish their content.

The concern here is that if Google stumbled upon your hot new article on these sites FIRST (before finding it on your site), then this "SPAM" site would essentially trick Google into thinking they published it first. That would give them "first content rights", so that site would "rank" for your article content instead of you.

Theoretically, this could indeed be an issue for small blogs, since small blogs are not spidered by Google nearly as often as the most popular sites are. So, technically Google MAY discover that fresh content on another site that just sucked it down and republished it.

However, that’s only an issue for sites while they’re very small, and frankly it’s not really much of an issue at all.
The good people at Google are very good at sniffing out junk sites and sifting through all the crap to find the truly useful sites. If your site is actually good and useful, then people will be linking to you organically, and your blog value will rise. Not only will Google start indexing your content much faster, but they’ll immediately know that your site has much more value than some SPAM site that nobody has ever linked to without a reciprocal link.

The short version is: don’t worry about this! Stay the course and focus on making your blog the absolute best that it can be. There are also measures you can take to foil these scraper sites.

Deep linking - The secret to foiling AdSense scraper sites?

One simple solution to get around the issue of scraper sites republishing your content by RSS and taking credit for it is to place deep links to your own content within each post. Then when Google scans the articles on these sites, you’ll get free linkbacks from these very sites - very cool!

Note that deep linking is very valuable to begin with, whether you care about scraper sites or not. People naturally click on links, so if you link to your own articles from within articles you write every day, your readers will spend more time on your site and find articles they would not have found otherwise. Definitely a good thing. 

Also, Google will notice that you find your own content useful enough that you yourself link to it, so you’ll get SEO kudos for it as well. 

Are there any real advantages to offering a full RSS feed to your readers?

Absolutely! To us, it’s all about our readers and getting our content in front of as many readers as possible. Period!

Fact is, some people will only read blogs in feed readers. Not all, but some. That’s just a reality of the world we live in. Those people simply won’t come to your site, and won’t subscribe to your RSS feed unless it’s a full feed.

So we offer our content to our readers the way they want it, and this way we capture these people as readers.

Hogging the full RSS feed is essentially making decisions out of fear and a lack mentality. That’s a very bad place to be if you hope to grow and prosper. 

So set your full RSS feed free and watch your RSS readership surge!

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Tags: adsense sites, FeedBurner, full feed, partial feed, readers, RSS feed, scraper sites, spam sites, subscribers

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