How To Leave Comments

Comments are very popular today, and just about on every blog you can stop and leave a comment, or just read what others had to say. Leaving comments is a great way to get back links, and more free traffic coming to your website if you do it right.

Leaving the right kind of comments will help you to establish your online credibility, but when leaving the wrong kind of comments you could destroy yourself before you even had a chance to  establish yourself.

So how can you leave comments so that others will be drawn to your website? 

First and foremost, you should always stay on the topic of the post. Anything else may get your comment removed, or not even accepted at all. To help you to stay on topic, always read the content before leaving your comment. 

You should also strive to help others by adding new information, or clarify something where the author is not very clear. You can also share your own story or experience regarding the post. People love to hear personal stories and this is a great way to build your credibility online. Anything you write should always be something that others can benefit from in one way or another.

Leave links only if the readers will benefit from the link. These links can be to your website, or someone else's, as long as they are related. Leaving links that are unrelated to the topic will be considered as spam and will not be accepted or removed.

Always be courteous when leaving comments. This does not mean that you can never disagree with the author, but you must do so with respect. 

For the best results regarding traffic, try to be the first to comment on the blog posts. But this does not mean that you have to be the first one on every blog post; if you do, you will come across as a comment spammer.

Participate in the comment discussions whenever possible, but be careful so that you do not dominate the threads, as you again might come across as a spammer. 

Always keep your comments clear so that there is no misunderstanding. People online cannot see your expression behind the comment, so it is easy to be misunderstood if you are not clear. If you are misunderstood in your comments you might not be accepted, or it could cause others to become irate with you. 

The bottom line is, keep it simple and always think before you post.

What Are Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are programs which allow you to make money without having your own products to sell. All you have to do is promote other peoples' products and you then get paid a percentage or a flat fee for each sale. 

Affiliate programs have made it extremely easy for anyone to start making money with them. Once you sign up for the program they will give you a unique affiliate ID which will be in every link or banner which you put up on your website. This unique ID helps the merchants to track how many impressions, clicks, leads, and sales were generated through your affiliate link.

With most affiliate programs the ID is automatically inserted into your ad or link. But in order for this to happen you need to sign into your account before getting the link or banner code. Always check to make sure that it is there before placing it on your website.

There are different kinds of affiliate programs which you can join, some will pay for every click, others for every lead, and most only pay after a sale is made. These programs are called: Pay Per Click, Pay Per Lead, and Pay Per Sale.

Pay Per Click programs will pay you for every click on one of your ads or links.

Pay Per Lead programs will pay you for every form that is filled out at the merchants website. This is usually just entering an email address so the merchant can market to the individual.

Pay Per Sale programs will only pay you for every sale that is generated through your affiliate link. These are the highest in pay-out, and every effort put forth within these programs is well worth it. Some merchants will pay you a percentage of the final sale, while others will pay you a flat fee.

Before joining an affiliate program, always make sure to read all the terms and conditions before agreeing to them. Each program is different and it is important that you understand how each program works.

All you need in order to get started with affiliate marketing is a blog where you can put up ads, or your own website. If you want to get started with a blog, then I recommend blogger. It is a great blogging platform which makes it easy to integrate Adsense, as well as Amazon products. 

Then once it is set up, you need to drive lots of traffic to your website if you want to make some real money.

On-Page Optimization

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it basically helps the search engines to better find your website. There are two types of SEO; on page optimization, and off-page optimization. 

On-page optimization focuses on the content and structure of your website. It is important that you learn some of these strategies even before you build your website. Doing so will save you a lot of time and money in the end, because the search engines will send you free traffic, and so you won't have to spend as much time or money for marketing.

So what exactly is on-page optimization?

On-page optimization basically places relevant keywords on your webpages where the search engines will place the highest value on them. The search engines read your webpage from left to right, top to bottom. So the keywords which are placed at the top of your website are more valuable to them than the ones placed on the bottom.

As a matter of fact, after about 200 words into your content, the search engines will place little or no value on any keywords listed after. So you want to make sure that you get them in within the first 200 words.

The search engines also place a lot of emphasis on the title tag. This is actually the most important place to put your keywords. But, don't add too many to the title as the value decreases with each keyword in the title. So keep the title short, adding one or two keywords at the most for optimum results.

The description of your webpage is the little snippet which the search engines display when your website shows up in the search results. So when writing this, write it in such a way that will entice people to visit your website when it shows up for relevant keywords. Again keep it short; 30 words or less is all that is needed for this area.

The meta keyword tags are not that important as they used to be, simply because webmasters were abusing these. Never list any keywords here that are not in your content, and never repeat one keyword more than three times for one page. You can use single keywords, or keyword phrases.

The URL is another great place to stick your keywords into. And again, you want to keep it focused on one or two keywords at most.

Using these strategies together can help you to improve your rankings within the search engines, and increase your traffic.

Social Media

Social Media is a great way to get free traffic coming to your website. Not only do you get free traffic from the social media sites, but the free traffic coming from the search engines will also increase. This is because a lot of these social media links will count as quality back links. The more back links you have pointing to your website the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Think of Social Media as an actual social event, where you can go and hang out with other people. The more you hang out with them, the popular you will become.

Visit other people's profiles and then subscribe, or request to be friends. People who aren't interested will simply ignore you, and those who are interested will accept your invitation and come and visit your site. The more friends or subscribers you have, the greater the opportunity to make money.

The key here is to let people know about your site, or product without spamming them. Once they feel that you are spamming them, they will simply ignore you.

No one is obligated to respond to you, or even take a look at what you have to offer, so make your profile page interesting for them, or even give away free stuff to draw people to you. Write good content for your site, and update it regularly. This is a great way to show that you are an expert, to gain people's trust, and to make new friends.

You can also leave comments on other people's profiles to increase your followers, or your list of friends.

It may seem like a waste of time especially at the beginning, but then after a while once you start seeing some results, it all of a sudden becomes worth it. Over time your list of friends or subscribers will grow and more and more people will begin to take you up on your offers, click on your affiliate links, or whatever it is that you want them to do.

Most sites basically function the same way, but each site has its own rules, so make sure that you read their terms of services before reading to ensure you won't get suspended from that site.

Some of the main sites that you can join are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, RedGage, and Squidoo. Join up with one, get a readership going and then move on to the next one, or you can join them all at once if you like.

How To Re-Write Your Web Content Into Articles

Every time you create a new webpage you should build some back links to it. A great way to do this is to re-write your content into several smaller articles, which you can then submit to article directories.

Depending on how long your webpage is, you can get several good articles from the content on each page. Depending on the topic I can write about 3-5 articles from a thousand word article which I used on my webpage without repeating any information.

What I do is I break the 1,000 word article into smaller portions, or subheadings. Then I simply re-write. It's that simple.

When I write the content for my webpage, I usually make an outline first. I then use this outline, or the subheadings in my main article for my smaller articles which I submit to article directories.

You can also use these articles for your blog posts.

Now there is no limit as to how many times you can rewrite the same information. Thus the number of back links which you can build is limitless.

How To Improve Your Writing Skills

You can read all the books on writing, but unless you put into practice what you learned, you will not improve your writing skills. As a matter of fact the only way you will improve your writing is if you write every day, or at least on a regular basis.

When you write, don't worry about what your writing sounds like, just write. This is the most important part, that you just write. You can always go back and edit later. Many new writers tend to get stuck on a paragraph, or sentence, and because of this they don't make it very far into the article. Don't let this happen to you.

The best thing to do is gather your information, and put it in front of you in point form. Get a mental picture in your head as to what your finished article, or manuscript will look like.

Then begin your writing session. If you have a timer set it for about 10 minutes, and then use those 10 minutes just to write. Don't go back and edit during this time, but focus your attention on getting the words out. If you don't have a timer, you can use a clock.

When the 10 minutes are up, go back and edit what you just wrote. Then simply repeat the process until your article is completed. If you need to walk away at any point, do so. Everyone at one time or another will experience blank moments where there seems to be nothing to write about. Don't try and force it; believe me, it comes out in your writing and your readers will know it. So the best thing to do is just walk away.

At this time you can do two things; one is to meditate on what you want to write about, and the other is to read. Both are effective in helping you get back on track to finishing your article.

If you want to be a successful writer, then reading is an absolute must! This is where you will draw a lot of your inspiration from. This does not mean that you will be copying other writers; it just means that by reading other people's writing you will be inspired to write your own. Plus, there is a lot you can learn about writing, just by reading the work of other writers.

Then once you have written and edited your article, you have to put it out so others can read it. After all, this is the whole point of writing.

EzineArticles Just Got Better!

The staff at EzineArticles has been working hard to make EzineArticles a better online article directory. It used to take up to 48 to have your articles approved, but now they have set the limit to 24 business hours. But they are much quicker than that; I had an article approved the other in a few hours...I think about 3-4 hours after I submitted the article it was approved. That is absolutely fantastic!

They also made another change which I really like. In the past, if we wanted to edit an article it would not be live until it was approved again. But now, the old article remains live until the new changes are approved and then the old article is replaced with the new. Another major improvement!

Last but not least, for those who are participating in the HAHD challenge, they can now see their progress along the left side of the account. This takes the guessing out as to how many articles are written, and one can see at a glance how much further we got to go.

EzineArticles was already my favorite article directory, but now it just got better!

Writing Your First Blog Post

Many people fret over writing their first blog post. They worry about what they will write about, and whether their content will be good enough for others to want to read more. 

But writing the first blog post does not have to be a scary thing at all. The internet has a large audience making room for everyone's opinion, and everyone's voice. So really there are no right or wrongs; just be yourself.

However, in your first blog post you should take the time to tell the world a little about yourself. Tell your readers a bit about your past, what got you to start a blog, and what your plans are for the future, either for yourself or for the blog. This will help you to connect on a personal level, and this is what blogging is all about.

Let your readers know what is in store for them, and how reading your blog will help them to grow or how it will change their lives for the better.

If you are planning on giving away free prizes by holding regular contests, then now is the time to let them know about it as well. To sum it up, you want to basically give your readers an overview of what to expect from future blog posts.

You should also make your blog post interesting for your readers. This will be the key factor as to whether or not they will keep coming back for more. A few things that you can do, is engage your readers by asking them a question like: "Has this ever happened to you?" or "What do you do when you find yourself in this situation?"

You can also add humor in the form of clean jokes, quotes, silly facts, or statistics. Of course all of these should be related to the content in your niche.

As you are writing your first blog post, you want to keep SEO in mind and scatter your keywords throughout the article without sounding spammy or unnatural. Doing a keyword research will help you to determine what the best keywords are to use. Keywords will also help you to get more targeted traffic coming to your blog.

Once you are done writing your first blog post, make sure to proofread it several times before posting it to your blog. If your content is not written well, your readers might not be coming back, because it tells them that your heart is not in it.

How To Increase Your Online Sales

Sales are essential to every business; the more sales you make, the more money you will make. But it is not always easy to generate the amount of sales hoped for, or needed to sustain a successful business.

There are many strategies that one can use to increase the amount of sales, but the most important strategy is to attract new customers. If you fail in this area, your business will never grow. The more customers you have, the more sales you will make, and thus, your business will soar to new heights.

There are many ways to attract new customers; you can give out free samples of your products, offer free shipping for first time customers, and have sales on a regular basis.

The next important thing is to keep your current customers returning on a regular basis. You can do this by offering them certain products, or a product of their choice at a discount not open to the public. Another thing you can do is offer a rewards program where they can collect points every time they shop with you. 

Provide good products at reasonable prices; these have to be products that you believe in, and your customers will love. By selling only good quality products you will increase the word or mouth advertising, resulting in more sales for you.

Offering a 100% money back guarantee will help to build trust and also increase your sales.

Offer free shipping on orders above a certain amount.

If you have a significant amount of products to sell, then you can sign up with an affiliate network like Commission Junction, or Share-A-Sale; this way others can do the marketing for you, and you simply share some of the revenue from each sale.

Build a list using Aweber or Constant Contact so that you can keep your customers informed of upcoming events, sales, and new products.

Give away a free e-book, or newsletter which describes your services or products. This will help your customers to trust you, and they will also be able to buy with confidence.

Have a back-end product; when a sale is made, offer a similar or another product which will go hand in hand with the first product which they just bought.

Keep your website clean and neat looking, and with an easy navigation. Also provide a way for your customers to get in touch with you without any hassle should they have a question, or any concerns regarding your products.

By implementing the above strategies your sales will increase almost immediately.

How To Make Money Online

There are many ways to make money online; but no matter which route you choose, you will have to be willing to work extra hard and be patient. Time is your friend and if you stick with it, you will succeed.

Basically what you need to do is do a keyword research and find out what is hot; but you do not want a market which is too hot with too much competition as you'll never be able to make it to the top. So you want to find a happy medium, you want a niche which gets a fair amount of searches, but has little competition. Google has a tool called the Keyword research tool which helps you to do your research.

Once you have determined what market or niche that you want to get into, you can set up your blog, or website and start building content. Ideally you should add new content on a daily basis, especially if you are just starting your blog or website. This will help you to rank faster and get noticed by Google and other search engines.

If you have your own products to sell you can begin to upload all the product information and sales pages. But if you don't have a product you can sign up with various different affiliate programs or products which you can promote. Once you have some content then you can sign up for Google Adsense, or other ad networks and make money when people click on the ads. 

Then once you have your blog or website up, you have to start driving traffic, and there are many different ways to go about doing this. You can use social networking sites like myspace, FaceBook and others, along with bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. Twitter is also a great tool to use.

Then there is article marketing which is also a great way to get more traffic, but it is more time consuming because you have to take the time to write each article. In exchange for each article you get several back links back to your blog or website.

You can also write for writing platforms such as Hubpages, Squidoo, RedGage, Scribd and InfoBarrel just to name a few.

Writing for these writing platforms will also help you to get noticed and help to build back links back to your main site. The more back links you have to your site, the more love it will receive from the search engines.

So basically once your content is up, you have to market, market, and market some more. The harder you work at marketing, the faster your website will soar to the top.

Market Research

If you are serious about making money online then it is essential that you do a thorough market or keyword research before venturing into your business. If you don't you could end up with a project which no one was interested in and you just wasted a lot of time. When it comes to online marketing you will soon find out that time is money, and that is the last thing you want to waste.

So by doing a keyword or market research you are basically searching for keywords which are highly sought after but with little competition. If the market is not hot enough then you won't make any money, even if there is no competition, and you want to steer away from these markets. If the market is hot, but the competition is too high, then you won't make any money either because you will just get drowned out by those already dominating these markets.

So you want to find something that is in between, something that will get you on Google's top list within a few days or months so that you can start earning money.

If the market that you want to get into is hot and has a lot of competition then you may need to focus on a niche or micro-niche within that market, and then eventually work your way up to the market level.

There are many tools which you can purchase to help you to do a market or keyword research, but Google has a tool which is free and does an absolutely fantastic job at filtering the results. It is called the "Google Keyword Research Tool." You can access it from the Google website.

The amazing thing about the Google keyword research tool is that not only can you use it for market research to help you determine which market will make you the most money, but you can also use it to find competitive keywords for your marketing ads such as Google Adwords.

Article Marketing Equals Free Traffic

Article marketing has many different benefits, but the main benefit is the amount of traffic and backlinks you can get from one or more articles. It takes a lot of hard work to pump these articles out, but the end result is well worth it. Writing just one article and submitting it to only one directory can create many backlinks, and traffic, but the more you write the better you will do.

The way it works is very simple. Every article you submit has a resource box where you can put information about yourself and a link back to your site. When people read your article, they may want more information about you and click through and visit your website.

But the beauty of article marketing is that when you submit an article, anyone is free to copy your article, with the resource box intact, and paste it to their blog or website. So you see how that can get you free traffic and backlinks very fast with article marketing. It is probably the quickest way to get quality backlinks without you having to link back to the sites linking to you.

There are hundreds of article directories where you can submit your work to, and you can submit to as many as you like, the more you submit to, the more backlinks you will create. On the other hand you might do just as well if you only submit high quality articles to a few of the top article marketing directories. Look for article directories with a high page rank within Google, as these backlinks will be worth more than from other low ranking sites.

Another thing you want to do is to develop a readership within these article marketing directories. When you submit quality articles on a regular basis, webmasters and bloggers will subscribe to you so they can be notified every time you write a new article so they can be the first to copy your new article.

You can submit each article to as many directories as you like, but take caution that you don't get penalized for duplicate content. I would recommend submitting the same article to no more than 5 directories at once to avoid this. If you want to submit to all directories, simply take your article and rewrite it; give it a different title, and rearrange your sentences and paragraphs to make it look like a new article to the search engines.

Rewriting your content might even get the same webmasters to subscribe to you on different directories, as they may have more than one blog or website which they need content for.

When submitting your first article to a directory make sure to read their guidelines as each directory has its own set of rules and guidelines which you as an author must follow. For example some may require your article to be a certain length, or certain topics may not be allowed. Some allow you to put affiliate links within the body of your article, while others only allow it within the resource box.

Here are some of the top article marketing directories to get you started:

ezinearticles.com

goarticles.com

articlecity.com

expertarticles.com

ideamarketers.com

articlesbase.com

articlealley.com

searchwarp.com

If you want to submit to more directories simply do a Google search on article directories and you'll find many, many more. Start off by submitting regularly to the top directories first, and you will see an increase in good quality traffic.

Click here for more tips on internet marketing.

Making Money with eBay

 eBay is one of the largest online stores. It’s fun and exciting, yet it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to grow your online business. 

There are many options to choose from when selling on eBay. But basically there are two methods; you can list your items in the auction format, or you can open an eBay Store. Both are good, and both come with advantages and disadvantages, but when you use them together they can generate a lot of sales for you.

Some of the disadvantages of the auction format are that the listing only last for up to 3, 7 or 10 days and is more expensive to list. But the advantage is that you get a lot of traffic, because your items get listed in the main eBay directories and your items most likely will get sold.

The disadvantage of having a store is that you don’t get a lot of traffic to your store items; because your items do not get listed in the main eBay directories; leaving it up to you to generate traffic. But the good thing about the store is that you pay a monthly fee and after that it’s very cheap to list your items; making it perfect for when you have an inventory of a hundred items or so. Plus you can categorize your store making it easy for customers to find the items they are looking for.

If you are new to selling online, you should start with an item you have on hand and list it in the auction format. I don’t recommend opening an eBay Store until you have some positive feedback, repeat customers and an inventory to make it worthwhile.

After you open a store you should still continue to list in the auction format to help drive traffic to your store items. When listing in the auction format you simply remind your potential customers to check out your store for other items and offer them a discount on shipping when they buy more than one item.

Another thing to keep in mind is all the fees associated with eBay; first you pay a listing fee, then when your item sells you are charged a Final Value Fee. Pay Pal also charges you a small fee of 1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 for every transaction. I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with the fees, to help you decide what to price your items at, so you don’t end up losing money.

In order to sell on eBay you need to have Pay Pal account in good standing. It’s free and easy to sign up and you can connect it directly to your credit card or bank account, making it easy to transfer money.

There’s a lot to learn about eBay, but these are the basics you need to know in order to get started. Just remember to make this a fun experiment, if your first item doesn’t sell, simply try another, and if you don’t give up, you will succeed over time. 

Learning Basic HTML

There are many programs available today which will help webmasters to upload and create their webpages without having to know any HTML. Blogging platforms have a built in 'what you see is what you get' (wysiwyg) editor making it easy for anyone to create a professional looking blog.

But, even though these programs are excellent in what they do, it is still necessary for every webmaster or blogger to know at least the basics of HTML. The reason I say this is because by knowing the basics you will be able to better optimize your site for the search engines so they can send you more targeted traffic, plus it will make your whole online experience much easier, and much more enjoyable. You won't have to go running every time you see a little snippet of coding.

By learning the basics of HTML you will be able to create your own anchor text links, name your pictures within the codes, and just move stuff around to anywhere you want, just by using a simple code. 

Also if you are into affiliate marketing you definitely should learn the basics of HTML, because sometimes it is nice to be able to make minor changes to the affiliate code used to promote the product. Sometimes you may only want a text link, but when the company does not provide you with just a text link you need to know what part of the code you need.

Some of the things every webmaster or blogger should know about html is what the title tag is, how to make an anchor link, or a text link, basic formatting, and how to name the pictures within the code.

Learning the above is really not hard. The HTML coding or tags are very simple, logically used, and easy to understand. If you can learn how to use a webpage builder, then you can learn the basics of HTML; it really is that simple. All you basically need to know is what the code or tags are, how they are used, and then remember to close them at the end of the code.

There are many websites which teach HTML for free online; one of them is W3schools.com. They offer an excellent learning platform, where everything is in order. You are provided with a 'try it yourself' editor where you can put your own code in and watch what happens to it. This is how I learned and had a blast.

The best way to learn is trial and error, but practice makes perfect. Click here for some basic html tutorials.