I think one of the hardest tasks for a blogger is to continuously come up with topics to write about. I used to spent quite a bit of time researching keywords and topic ideas for my blog, however over the last year I have started using Market Samurai. Market Samurai is a great keyword research tool that gives you a lot more than just search volume. I have been using it for the past year and the results have been great, I’ve cut down my research time by half and have been able to target better keywords. The video blow is a short review of Market Samurai, I will try to post more tutorial videos at another time. Although

I am not a big fan of spending a lot of money on unnecessary tools and services, I believe some tools are worth the cost. Market Samurai is NOT a free tool, it costs $149. However, I’ll outline a way you can get Market Samurai at a SIGNIFICANT discount.

1. Make Sure your cookies are cleared, I can only offer a rebate if I get the credit for the sale.
2. Go to Market Samurai and download the FREE trial version (please make sure you are using an email address you haven’t used previously). When you sign up for the free trial you will immediately receive an email to purchase it for $97. This will save you $52!
3. Once you have completed the sale through my affiliate link email me your paypal receipt and I will refund you $35 that’s a total savings of $87!! 

IMPORTANT: As I mentioned previously I can only offer the rebate if you purchase it through my link and I get credit for the sale.

The post Market Samurai Review And Discount! appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

This is a guest post by Robb Engen from Boomer & Echo.

One thing I’ve learned in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been blogging is the importance of diversifying your income streams.

Relying on a sole income for your blog can be risky. I’ve heard stories about blogs who relied solely on Adsense, only to find themselves banned from the program with no explanation.  A stellar affiliate can also quickly dry up if there’s a change to the program or if the product becomes less attractive to customers.

Relying on Google for all of your traffic and income can put you in a tough situation.  Panda and Penguin updates have hammered legitimate sites by dropping them in the search engine rankings.

A drastic loss in search traffic will lead to less Adsense and CPM revenue, less affiliate conversions and fewer subscribers to your newsletter. [Yet another reason why you should start an email list early.]

This is exactly why I’ve focused on building diversified blog income streams to help me steer through the ever-changing online world.

I started my main blog, Boomer & Echo, back in August, 2010.  It quickly became one of the most popular personal finance blogs in the country, winning a Plutus Award for best personal finance blog in Canada last year.

Some of the most popular articles on Boomer & Echo were about loyalty programs and rewards credit cards.

So, in 2011, I started a couple of niche sites called Rewards Cards Canada and Rewards Cards USA to explore those topics in-depth.

I did a lot of guest posting that year, and was a bi-weekly contributor on Canadian Finance Blog.  That’s where I was noticed by the editor of a new personal finance site called Moneyville, which was powered by the Toronto Star.

I began writing twice a week for Moneyville and I had the freedom to link back to my blogs.  This not only improved traffic but helped strengthen my link profile with a high authority site pointing back to my sites.  Did I mention I was getting paid to write?  Win-win!

As traffic grew, so did many other opportunities to earn extra revenue.

I joined a CPM network with a number of other personal finance blogs in Canada.  Big brands started contacting me with legitimate sponsored post – or advertorial – opportunities.

Then, once I was getting enough traffic to generate a few conversions, I was able to join the best affiliate programs and increase my pay outs.

I looked for affiliate programs with products that offered the best value for my readers – like an exclusive deal or a sign-up bonus. Then I added links to high traffic, relevant pages, or I wrote new content to highlight the product.

But the most important thing I did to help diversify my blog income was to start a newsletter.  As they say in online marketing, it’s all in the list.

I started collecting emails through a plug-in called OptinPop, which was set to pop-up after 20 seconds of a first-time visitor landing on my site.  The plugin was so effective that I was getting 10 to 12 email sign-ups a day.

It didn’t take long to build a list of more than 3,000 email subscribers.

I’ve created an auto-responder series of exclusive content that I send to this list twice a month.  When a special offer or a great deal comes along, I’ll send out an email blast to promote the product.

This drives people back to my sites and helps increase affiliate conversions.

So what’s the point of building all of these different traffic streams and income sources?

Well, despite my overall traffic levels plateauing since April 2012 and my search traffic decreasing by 30% over that time, I’ve been able to steadily increase my online income.

Last year I brought in more than $65,000 from 11 income sources.

Search traffic continues to be unstable at best, but in just a short time I’ve been able to minimize my reliance on Google by creating diverse traffic and income streams.

This approach has paid off so far and should help me to make money online for years to come.

The post How I Diversified My Blog Income appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

A lot of new bloggers often underestimate the value of an email list, however it is the most powerful marketing and revenue generating tool at your disposal.

The primary concern for new bloggers often is to drive traffic and that is where they focus all their energy, but what happens when you get the traffic? If you are unable to capture the reader in an email list you have wasted your efforts. Depending on constant new traffic to generate an income from your blog is a flawed strategy. If your goal is to established a successful online venture, an email list is a must.

You have probably heard of the saying “The money is in the list” I know bloggers who earn a lot more from their newsletter than they do from the ads on the blog.

When Should I Start My Newsletter?

Unfortunately most bloggers wait till their blog is “successful” before starting an email list, however by then you will have lost a few THOUSAND potential subscribers! Implementing an email list should be one of your top priority when starting a blog. One of my biggest mistakes was not starting an email list when I started blogging in 2009, don’t make the same mistake.

Why Start a Newsletter?

A newsletter is in addition to your regular blog posts, not a replacement. A newsletters gives you the opportunity to provide your subscribers with exclusive content, offers and products that is not available on your site. A newsletter is a more intimate way to build a relationship with your readers. I get almost 3 times as many emails from my newsletter subscribers than I do with from my readers and the emails are always longer and more in-depth. More engagement usually translates into more trust which in turn increases your chances of making sales (we all like sales!)

A newsletter is an excellent way to promote your own products or your affiliate products. Since the subscribers already have a “relationship” with you they are more likely to purchase something you recommend. About 60% of my affiliate sales come from my newsletters, but what’s more interesting is that the conversation rate of the newsletter is four times that of my site!

Although setting up a newsletter maybe a little time consuming the long term benefits far outweigh the investment and the earlier you start the better your ROI.

How Do I Start a Newsletter?

I’ll discuss this in more detail, but here are a few quick tips.

1. Make it easy. No point in going through all the trouble of setting up a newsletter when nobody can find it. Bring the readers attention to your newsletter and make sure it’s easy to sign up. For example on this site you see a box on the right sidebar as well as at the end of the article.

2. Entice them to register. It’s always a good idea to offer something in exchange for the reader signing up. This can be a simple ebook, a mini course in your niche, a discount on a product etc. You don’t need to go crazy with it, just something to encourage people.

3. Value. If your newsletter doesn’t provide any value, people will stop opening your email and eventually unsubscribe. Make sure you provide valuable content.

4. Don’t Spam. Don’t send an email everyday. I usually recommend 2-4 times a month,  depending on your niche.

Use a Reliable Software

There are many email list management softwares available, however make sure you use a reliable one. The two most common ones are Aweber and MailChimp, I used MailChimp for a short period and didn’t like it for several reasons. First of all, it had deliverability issues and people wouldn’t always get the emails and more importantly MailChimp does NOT allow affiliate marketing! Given that affiliate marketing is a big part of a newsletter it renders MailChimp useless. I switched to Aweber about a year ago and it has been great. I haven’t had any issues and it’s easy to use. You can test drive it for $1 for the first month and see how you like it.

If you signing for Aweber using the affiliate link, I’d be happy to help you set things up!

What Others Say About Aweber:

I use it as an added benefit to subscribers. they get exclusive content, deals and promotions Robb - Boomer & Echo

I switched to Aweber from Mailchimp because it offered much better email tracking features.  I also prefer the way Aweber handles autoresponder sequences because you know exactly who has received what email.   Most importantly, the delivery rate improved as well once I made the switch. – Steve - BumblebeeLinens.com

I’ve found Aweber to be a great service. First I moved all my email subscriptions from Feedburner over to Aweber. This allowed for much nicer looking emails, more options to monetize, and send out subscriber only emails as well. - Tom Drake - Online Money

Send Your First Email Newsletter Today – AWeber Communications

The post Set Up Your Email List & Newsletter Before It’s Too Late! appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently when I started blogging in 2009. One of them being the set up of my RSS Feed. When I started blogging I didn’t know what RSS really is or does, all I knew was that I need it and followed some instructions on setting it up. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I realized that I need to make a few changes.

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) delivers your content to those who want to stay informed. Instead of visiting each site individually readers can subscriber to each site’s feed and receive it in their news aggregators. There are many aggregators available such as Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo etc. It basically takes your new content and delivers to these feed readers so people can stay current. Don’t ask me about the technicalities of it because I’m as clueless as you are.

WordPress Feed

If you are running your blog on wordpress, which most of you probably do, it already has a built in feed (http://yourblog.com/feed) so you don’t need to do anything. However you may still want to use a RSS feed management service and tools such as free Feedburner or premium service such as Feedblitz. These help you track subscribers, provide you with valuable stats and other tools such as social media buttons and more.

Redirecting Your Feed

Often when bloggers set up their RSS feed, usually through feedburner, they start redirecting their feed to feedburner. So http://yourblog.com/feed points to http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog, usually a plugin (Feedburner Feedsmith) is used to accomplish this. The problem is that when readers decide to sign up for your feed it will NOT be on your domain, instead it’s on feedburner. This leaves you at the service providers mercy, if they decide to close down shop your readers will be lost or if you decide to change the service provider for some reason you may end up losing your readers. There is an easy solution for this.

Have your feed on your own domain!

The best thing to do is to keep your feed on your own domain. So your feeds should be http://feeds.yourblog.com/yourblog or something like that and you do this by setting up a redirect through your host. Confused yet? Don’t worry I’ll give you step-by-step instructions to accomplish this.

How to have your feed on your own domain:

1.) You will need to go to your DNS setting and set up a CNAME. If you are with hostgator (recommended. Use code: howimakemoney for 25% discount) then login to your cpanel and scroll down to Simple DNS Zone Editor. If you are not with hostgator contact your host.

2.) If you are using Feedburner go to My Accounts then My Brands under services. It provides you instructions on how to set it up. Basically copy the Feeds CNAME and enter this in the CNAME section of your DNS Editor. Make sure you copy it EXACTLY as it is.

3.) In the name section enter Feeds. Then click on Add.

4.) Go back to feedburner and enter your feed address in step two. It probably will be feeds.yourblog.com.

5.) Scroll down and activate the service.

6.) If you are using feedsmith or other redirection plugins or methods you need to change it to point to your new feed address. In most cases it will be feeds.yourblog.com/yourfeedburnerfeedaddress (the section in the green in the below image). This will ensure that yourblog.com/feed points to your new feed address hosted on your own domain.

It will take some time for it to propagate through the internet so check in 24 hours to see if it works.

Now your feed is hosted on YOUR domain, this is good for your brand and SEO and it will also make things easier if you need to change anything in the future.

What will happen to current subscribers?

Existing subscribers won’t notice anything they will continue to get your feed delivered, unless you change something, however new readers will be subscribed to your new link on your own domain. If you decided to change your RSS Feed manager service down the line they will continue to get your feeds, however the subscribers to the older link may not if you deactivate your current service.

The post Have Your Feed On Your Own Domain! appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

Guest posting is an important part of blogging that most bloggers seem to neglect after they consider their blogs “established.” However, guest posting is something you should do on a regular basis regardless of how established your blog is (unless you are Mashable).

Why Guest Post?

Guest posting is not just for the immediate traffic you receive, it helps you reach a new audience, you gain valuble back links and expand your network. Often bloggers only value the traffic, while others only care about the page rank and the value of the backlink while forgetting all the other benefits of guest posting.

Guest posting is an excellent way of expanding your readership, but only if done correctly.

How To Ask To Guest Post?

Bloggers receive a dozen guest post requests a day and most just ignore them. I receive about 15-20 guest post requests a day and ignore almost everyone of them. So how can you make sure to at least get a reply?

There are a few things you can do to increase your chances of getting a response.

1. Do NOT use a standard email template! Trust me, bloggers can tell if it is just a generic email and often they ignore it.

2. Try to connect via social media. Try to connect via Facebook/Twitter/G+ etc. Socializing via these mediums will help you stand out.

3. Keep it short. Do not write a long story about your life or blog, just keep it short and to the point.

4. Mention your blog with a link. This way the recipient will know you are not some sort of marketing agency trying to promote their client.

5. Links to other guest posts. If you have successfully published guest posts on other blogs provide a few links (2-3 is enough).

6. Offer post exchange. Sometimes they might be more open to the idea of a post exchange.

7. Do NOT include a post with the initial email.

Following the above guidelines will increase your chances of getting a response, of course there is no guarantee. If you do not get a response, you can send a short follow up in about a week. Also, try to ask via a social media site if they have received your email, just make sure it’s private.

How Increase Your Chances of Getting Your Guest Post Published. 

So you were lucky enough to get a response and now it’s time to submit the guest post, remember not all guest posts get published. Here are a few things you can do to increase your chances.

1. Make sure it is unique and not a re-write, a spun article or a previously published article. Bloggers run almost all of their guest posts through CopyScape and will catch you.

2. Make sure it is relevant to their audience. If you are guest posting on a parenting blog, do not write about how to upgrade your kitchen.

3. Link within the blog. Try to place a few relevant internal links.

4. Do not place more than 2 links back to your own blog and never try to place your link before an internal link. Nobody wants the reader to click on a link and leave after the first sentence.

5. Do not target specific keywords that the host maybe competing for. They will just remove your link.

It is always a good idea to ask about their linking policy if they don’t have published guidelines.

Don’t look at these as rules but rather as “guest post etiquette.” If you have a well written post and follow these tips, there is a very high probability that your posts will get published.

After Your Guest Post Is Published.

So submitted your guest post and it is finally published, what should you do now? After the post is published you really don’t have to do anything if all you cared about is just getting the post live. However, if you want to expand your network and get the most out of your guest post, I suggest you do the following:

1. Email the host and thank them for publishing the post

2. Promote it through social media

3. Respond to comments and try to interact with the readers in a polite manner

4. Link back to the post from your blog

Feel free to add more tips in the comments section.

The post Guest Posting Etiquette appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

You spent hours on researching a keyword then another few hours on writing a great blog post and promoting it via social media sites, finally you work on getting  back links to it. You do all this just so you can make it to the first page of Google. After a few days your article starts to climb Google SERP and you finally make it into the top 3 and traffic starts to flow. You are ecstatic and very pleased with Google.

A few months later you wake up and traffic has dropped about 50%…WTF? You immediately start checking your analytics and SERP rankings and find out Google has decided that your content is no good and dropped you to the second or third page. WTF! Google is a f*(#*@!

Sounds familiar?

Almost every blogger can relate to this scenario, myself included. In April 2012 some of my pages dropped in ranking on Google and took traffic down by about 50%, late in September 2012 it happened again and traffic dropped about 50% again.

So, What Should You Do?

It is natural to have a little bit of a panic attack when you first realize what has happened, however you need to snap out of it and get back to work because nobody cares about your whining. Yea I know, it’s not fair that some crappy content is outranking you, but then again life is not fair.

So complaining and bitching about Google’s algorithm isn’t going to help you, but what will get you back up is continuing to publish great content, of course I am assuming your content is great which maybe an incorrect assumption.

The fact is that nobody outside of Google really knows much about the algorithm and updates. Although there are people who make educated guesses, they are guesses. Don’t waste time trying to outsmart Google, or figure out how they rank sites. Your time is way too valuable for that kind of crap, spend your time on what you do best, publish great content and connect with readers through social media.

Besides publishing posts on your blog I highly recommend you make it a regular habit to publish guest posts on other blogs. You will not only reach a new audience that may not be aware of your blog and some might even subscribe, but you can also get valuable back links from the blog. Maybe even make a new friend in the process.

Another thing you should do is go back to your old articles and update things a little. Sometimes bloggers tend to over optimize articles, Google has warned a few times about over optimization. Make sure you have a good meta description and title. Just don’t go back and stuff it with keywords and phrases.

Post it again on your Facebook page, Google+ page and tweet about it, maybe write a new article and link to it again.

You can also ask a few of your blogger friends if they can link to a certain article on your blog in an upcoming post, often people don’t have an issue with it.

Will this get back your old ranking? Maybe, maybe not. There is no way knowing for sure, but it sure beats being bitter and passive.

Remember search engine ranking is a zero-sum game, there were 10 links on the first page last month, there are 10 links today and there will be 10 links tomorrow. For every site that falls off the first page a new site comes in. There will always be as many happy people as there will be bitter people.

The post WTF!-Google Dropped My SERP Ranking appeared first on How I Make Money Online.

After announcing the new site I got about a dozen emails from readers asking how much they can expect to make online from a blog. Unfortunately the only answer I can give you is that “it depends”. Do you want to establish a small passive income stream or quit your day job and make a living online? The internet is a big place with a lot of opportunities. It depends on what you want to do and how much work you are willing to put into it. You can make high six figures, even seven figures, or a few hundred a year. I know people who have been able to make a name for themselves online within a short period of time and I know people who have been trying for a year and still don’t make enough to pay their internet bill. I will not sit here and tell you that you will be rich overnight and that you can make $20,000 a month, that’s all bull crap. Very rarely do people become that successful that fast, and if someone is promising you that you will make $20K a month after purchasing their product for the amazing price of $199…well just use some common sense. The barrier to entry is extremely low if it was that easy everyone would be doing it.

Although I can’t promise that you will become wealthy with a blog, I’ll give you a realistic picture. You may not like it but at least you won’t feel like a failure when you don’t make $20K a month.

If you start a blog, depending on your niche, realistically you can expect to make around $200-300/month after about a year if you put the minimum amount of work into it. Some will be more successfull and others not as much. That may not seem like a lot, but remember this is often a side income and for most people it can go a long way. If you take things a little more serious spend sometime and reinvest your income you can make +$2000/month after about a two years. Now things are starting to get more interesting. The formula is pretty simple: more dedication = more $$.

I bet you are wondering if that’s how much I was making after two years. Well, my main blog was making over $1500/month after the first year. Some may not consider that a lot, but I was thrilled as I never expected to make anything.

A few words of wisdom

• Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme, do not quit your job (yet!). It takes time and work.
• Your niche will be a big factor.
• Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see any profits in the first few month, think long term.
• Blogging can sometimes be a pain in the ass.
• Don’t expect to sell your blog for $20,000 after 6 months with $500/month in text link income, unless you can find an idiot.
• Don’t start 5 different blogs, just focus on one.

If you are serious and want to take a business approach to blogging, instead of using it as a personal diary, be ready to invest some time and money into it.

Remember the 3 P’s; patience, perseverance and persistence. 

The post How Much Can I Make With a Blog? appeared first on How I Make Money Online.