Balloons vs. Popups

A balloon is a little window which opens to give brief information or a helpful suggestion about something a computer user has questioned. We’ve all seen them. Even our computer’s operating system uses them to tell us little things.

There are several differences between an info balloon and a full-blown popup window. A popup window doesn’t briefly explain or provide instant help that is needed. A popup window is intrusive. A popop window tries to manipulate you and take over your life for a moment. In short, a popup window is like a car salesman.

Most of us appreciate getting a little extra discreet information when we need it. Balloons are a non-intrusive way of getting this done. We are used to balloons and mouseovers and “hovers” in the computer world. But we have never quite gotten used to popups. Perhaps you feel they are rude and intrusive. You would be right.

I hope you will make your website as clear and helpful as you can. I hope you will find polite ways to give your customers the information they need without acting like a car salesman. I hope you will never consider treating your customers like car salesmen treat their customers. In short, I hope you will never even consider making a big blinking popup window appear in front of your customers’ faces univited.

Please?

Newsletters build loyalty

As you continue to broaden the circle of your internet friends, don’t forget the importance of offering a newsletter. Keep your newsletter interesting and entertaining, and be sure to talk about things that were not discussed on the regular blog. Use a newsletter to make friends and to build a solid base of regular visitors to your website.

Don’t send out your newsletter so often that you irritate people and defeat your purpose. They should look forward to receiving it because of its interesting content. For the same reason, don’t put too much advertising in your newsletter.

Make sure your newsletter is sent out regularly. Keep in touch, so that your blog readers are reminded of you. A newsletter is also a good place to run unique coupons and other special incentives that are not available to the general web population.

Along the same lines as a newsletter is the offering of an RSS feed. This also will help keep your regular readers in the loop and help keep them in your big happy blog family.

Links

Another really important thing that will increase traffic to your website is when other sites begin to link to you. As usual, there are several ways to get people to do this, but the most important way is the same: content. That is, make your content interesting enough and entertaining enough and useful enough so that people will WANT to link to your information and articles.

When you have been producing quality content for a while, you can begin mentioning it when you are out reading the blogs of other people and when you are making comments on those blogs. Also email the owners of popular blogs about your subject, and briefly tell them you have written an article they may be interested in reading, and give them the link to the article. Don’t do this very often, until you build up a circle of friends by making the rounds like this.

That’s really what the Web is all about--reading each other’s material, inviting them to read yours, interacting. If you continue to be a frequent commentor on other blogs, you will begin to get noticed. People will begin to visit your own blog as well, and many will begin to link to it.

The simple act of commenting on several blogs on a daily basis will in itself bring you some additional traffic, even if the visitor doesn’t actually put up a link to you on his site. You can’t be a wallflower in the blogging world. Most people are friendly. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Otherwise nobody knows you are lurking silently out there. Silent lurkers don’t make any money.

Work to become known, without being intrusive. Work to build up a circle of internet friends. And--always--return the favor by linking back to these people.

Advertise

As with any business, you must advertise. They say word of mouth is the best advertising. This may be true, but it is only useful if you have the patience to wait a hundred years or so for it to pay off. In the meantime, you’ll need another job. These are tongue-in-cheek statements, of course, but the intention is to remind you again that no matter how pretty your site is, no matter how scientifically it is monetized, it takes too long to make any money if you just sit back and wait for people to notice you and tell their friends about you.

Advertise. Be very proactive in this regard. Many things you do to get traffic to your site technically fall under the umbrella of advertising. When you strive to get people to link to you, is that not advertising? But what this post is about is direct advertising that you pay for. Generally this is in the category of pay-per-click advertising.

Whether you choose the most obvious, Google’s Adsense, or whether you choose another of the several very good other sources that have been springing up around the internet, you just need to do it. This generally involves setting up an advertising budget you can live with and bidding on keywords--words that describe the subject of your business. Then the advertising company can run your ad where it will be most effective.

How many other ways can you think of that come under the heading of advertising?

Blog purpose

Although you must pay attention to how your website is perceived and classified by search engines, as we have just been talking about, it is important to pause and remind ourselves that there is something more important than search engines we should never forget. That point is that we are first and foremost writing for the readers of our blog. In other words, you are writing because you have something to say.

Sometimes we can get so caught up in our search engine placement that we end up basically writing for Google and Yahoo and not our readers. There is a delicate balance to be kept here. I don’t think I was wrong in my last post to say that you should always be mindful of how search engines work when you write. But never go so far as to write FOR search engines instead of your audience.

If it comes down to a choice between writing naturally and writing in a stilted manner to please the search engines by conciously including certain words, I say always go with the natural flow of your writing--don’t pay THAT much attention to what the search engines might want to see!

There is no reason, however, that you can’t still pay attention to the titles of your posts, and make sure they are to the point and descriptive. Something as seemingly small as that is helpful to the search engines and also helps define your subject for your readers.

Titles of blog posts

One big way people find you is by typing in search terms in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, so it is important that you set up your site in such a manner as to facilitate the search engines not only finding you, but in accurately defining your site’s subject matter.

People used to get very inventive in this regard, to the point of being deceptive. Running a blog, on the other hand, helps take care of this important function almost automatically. Over time, the many, many words you write in your blog help the search engine robots understand what you are all about more and more accurately. This is because key words and key phrases are repeated naturally in the flow of writing, without you having to contrive awkward sentences that contain keywords.

But you can still refine this. One way is to pay attention to the titles of your posts. Make them short and pithy and descriptive of what your post is about. I have a tendency to get cute, as if I were writing chapter titles in a book. When you are dealing with a robot, don’t get cute. Be simple and straightforward.

There are whole industries which have sprung up on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM.) That’s how important it is. If you are in business on the internet, keep the search engine robots always in your mind as you work on your site. Make working with search engines second nature.

Making money with your blog

By now you have discovered that building traffic to your blog is the main thing you need to concentrate on. Odds are, if you are successful in your efforts to drive traffic to your website, you will make money. You can have the most beatiful website in the world, and you can have it perfectly monetized and strategically set up, but no merchandise will move out the door if you don’t have customers. Fact of life.

We have had several posts about how to bring traffic to your internet store, and of course there are more things you can do that we haven’t talked about yet. But let’s go back for a moment and summarize some of the main points you need to be taking action on in order to build your traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO.)
Advertising on pay per click services.
Getting important successful sites to link to you.
Using other blogs and forums to get your site exposure.
Working to build repeat business.

Let’s briefly go over each of these points, so you are clear about what each step means.

Site setup and monetization

1. Choose the type of internet business you want to set up.

Do you want to sell physical things and then ship that merchandise to your customers?

Or do you want to sell other people’s products for a commission, while also selling advertising space on your website?

2. Set up your “store”--your website. Choose a webhost who is reliable and who offers everything you will need, at a reasonable price. How you answered number one, above, will determine how your website will look.

If you are selling actual physical merchandise from your website, then your website will look like a mail order catalog, and it will have a way for customers to pay.

If, instead, you want to be a commissioned salesperson for other businesses, then your website will consist of product reviews and a method to direct the partially sold customer to the real merchant’s website. You will also most likely display at least a few pay-per-click advertisements on your website.

3. Putting things on your website that people can read, look at, click on, and so forth, is called monetizing your website. When visitors to your website can read about things, look at things, click on things, and take other actions which will bring you an income, then your site is monetized.

All of these things take effort, research, and merchandising skills on your part, but these things are the easy part. The hard part comes next: getting potential customers to look at your stuff.

Take action

The best-written self-help book in the world won’t help you get rich unless you put the information into action instead of just putting it back on the bookshelf. Similarly, you can read 50 blogs a day that explain how people are making money on the internet, but just reading them will not put a single dollar in your pocket.

Many people seem addicted to learning how to do things. They have inquisitive minds. They are good thinkers. They know how to analyze. But they don’t seem to make any money. Don’t let yourself fall into that trap. It is so important that you DO something, however small, to get the ball rolling. Knowledge is just potential until you put it into action.

I’m not saying you should jump right in over your head without having a plan. Not at all. Just don’t wait until your plan is perfect. It never will be. The trouble with analyzers is that they are really planners at heart. They see their job as one of figuring things out and finding out how things work. I speak from personal knowledge and experience here. Many thinkers believe they are procrastinators, that putting things off is their problem in life. It isn’t. It’s just that once they have figured out how to do the thing, their job is finished. They then abandon the project and go on to the next problem or area of interest.

Be sure to include in your business plan a list of actual sequential steps you need to take in order to implement your system. Make sure the first step is something you can do right now, this very minute. Then put that system to work as an actual real-world monetization program.

If research scientists and inventors never shared their discoveries with others, what good would any of them be? Don't just think and plan. Do something.

Your blog's theme

After you decide upon a subject you are interested in, go ahead and start researching that subject on the Web and blogging about your findings. At the same time, begin working on your main website. This is the website whose domain name you own and is the place where you will be displaying your product reviews and product pictures.

Is it absolutely necessary to have two websites working in tandem like that?--both a blog and a “regular” website? Of course not. You can do it all with a blog alone if you are careful to keep it simple and straightforward. But if you choose to do it that way, please blog from your own website with your own domain name. You will be taken more seriously than if you “sub-blog” from a free blogging service, such as Google (blogspot) or the free version of Wordpress. Not that you can’t use Wordpress software and templates, for example, just do it from your own official website if you possibly can, instead of one of their free blogs.

Of course, even a free blog from Blogspot or Wordpress is better than doing nothing. Get up and get going! Get started today! But normally you will be using the free blogging services as “funnel sites” for your primary business sites. Nothing against Blogspot or Wordpress, obviously--I use them myself and they offer a great service. It’s just that you have more control over your destiny when you have your own “real” website.

Choosing affiliate partners

I would recommend that you first make a list of your personal interests. This is because you will tend to do a better job talking about products or subjects that you personally care about and find interesting.

This holds true not just with with the advertisors you affiliate yourself with, but also with the theme of your website itself and your blog for that website. To be successful, and to have fun doing it, please consider working with some subject you like. So start by making a short list of your personal interests. Golf? Antiques? Travel? Whatever.

Your blog should be about this subject. Share your thoughts and discoveries about that subject. Explore that subject and talk about it on your blog. Make the design theme of your main website along the same lines as that subject so that the interface between the blog and the store website is smooth and natural.

Finally, it will then be a natural step to choose advertisers to be affiliated with which offer products and services that have something to do with that main subject. You will be attracting visitors who are searching for information about that subject--that’s why I think it is a mistake to try and blog about more than one subject on one blog, or even to try and sell more than one major category of products on one website store.

Of course you have more than one interest. That’s because you are such an inquisitive and interesting person. Just make sure you have a separate blog (and website store) for each subject you want to talk about.

Choosing affiliate partners

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2007

Choosing affiliate partners
I would recommend that you first make a list of your personal interests. This is because you will tend to do a better job talking about products or subjects that you personally care about and find interesting.

This holds true not just with with the advertisors you affiliate yourself with, but also with the theme of your website itself and your blog for that website. To be successful, and to have fun doing it, please consider working with some subject you like. So start by making a short list of your personal interests. Golf? Antiques? Travel? Whatever.

Your blog should be about this subject. Share your thoughts and discoveries about that subject. Explore that subject and talk about it on your blog. Make the design theme of your main website along the same lines as that subject so that the interface between the blog and the store website is smooth and natural.

Finally, it will then be a natural step to choose advertisers to be affiliated with which offer products and services that have something to do with that main subject. You will be attracting visitors who are searching for information about that subject--that’s why I think it is a mistake to try and blog about more than one subject on one blog, or even to try and sell more than one major category of products on one website store.

Of course you have more than one interest. That’s because you are such an inquisitive and interesting person. Just make sure you have a separate blog (and website store) for each subject you want to talk about.