ScreenRuler
When you’re designing websites and graphics, have you ever wanted to measure the size of something on your screen in pixels?
You can do it by grabbing the screen and loading it into an expensive program such as PaintShop Pro or Photoshop.
Or you could measure it using ScreenRuler.
ScreenRuler is a useful tool for measuring anything in pixels on your PC screen. You can set the transparency level of ScreenRuler so that you can see what you are measuring.
Coming soon to this site, at an incredibly low price.
Article Marketing to Promote Your Products
Whatever you’re selling, whether online or offline, you should choose a variety of different ways of promoting your business. That way, you can reach the largest number of people possible.
To the beginning marketer, knowing where to start, and how much to pay for marketing can be daunting. In fact, many beginning marketers don’t have much spare money to spend on marketing.
And therein lies the problem. You won’t sell anything if nobody knows about your product. Putting up a web site and hoping that people will find it in the search engines just doesn’t work. You need to actively promote your site to your target audience.
Article Marketing is an excellent way of getting started in marketing. In its most basic form, it cost nothing but your time, but can be everlasting.
So What is Article Marketing?
In a nutshell, it is the publication of articles about your subject of choice on popular article directory sites. These sites usually rank highly in the search engines, so anyone looking for information on that subject is quite likely to come across the article. An article usually consists of a Title, Summary, Body Text and a Resource box.
The submission of articles to article sites has several beneficial effects both for the author and the owner of the article site. The additional content on the article site increases its rank in the search engines. This helps to promote any article that you submit. At the same time, it increases exposure of the article site and the owner will receive more revenue from the advertising he places on his site.
By including hyperlinks in the Resource Box of the article (or in the article body text if it is permitted by the article site), the author gains a high-profile, one-way link back to his own site, which helps his own site to achieve a higher rank in the search engine results pages.
Writing an Article
The Title should be meaningful, but interesting so that it catches the attention of people looking through search engine results pages.
The Summary is an introductory paragraph that gives a general overview of what the article contains. Some article sites don’t require a summary.
The Body Text is the actual article. Each article site has specific rules about articles, including the minimum and maximum number of words, whether hyperlinks are allowed etc. Articles are typically between 500 and 1500 words in length – check the requirements of the site to which you’re submitting.
Many beginning article writers make the mistake of writing a sales page or press-release about their website. This is the wrong approach, and such articles will probably be rejected. An article should contain an informative text about your subject. For example, if you sell fishing lures, you might write an article about fly fishing, or the type of lure to use for a particular type of fish.
The Resource Box is the final part of the article and typically contains information about the author, and a hyperlink back to the author’s website. Continuing the example above, the resource box might say something like “George B Hackenbush has been a keen angler for over 20 years. He runs Hackenbush Angling where he sells top quality fishing lures.”
In this case, the name “Hackenbush Angling” would be a hyperlink to his website.
When submitting to an article site, always take care to read the submission rules, and stick to them. If you break the rules, your article will be rejected, or worse – your account may be deleted.
Multiple Articles
By submitting several articles to the article sites, you will gain more “backlinks” to your website, improving its exposure to your potential customers. Do, however, write about different aspects of your subject in different articles though. Repeating the same old stuff soon makes your articles boring and tiresome.
Advanced Article Marketing
There is a new wave of Article Marketing that takes all the benefits of Article Marketing and magnifies them to an unprecedented level. At the same time, it provides a further income stream.
At Article Content King, you can submit articles just like any other article site. But if you pay a small monthly fee, the power of your article marketing expands dramatically. Your article doesn’t just get posted on a site, but it is also automatically syndicated to an actively promoted network of blogs, each of which will provide you with a high-profile backlink. All of the blogs are on different servers with different IP addresses, so all of the links will be recognised as unique by the search engines.
In addition to getting your articles syndicated, you will also have control of the advertising space on your article pages. This means that you can supply your own advertisements, and prevent your competitors’ advertisements appearing alongside your articles. You can even sell this advertising space and make even more money. Whatever your approach to the ad space, you are more than likely to make more profit from it than the monthly fee that you pay for membership.
It’s definitely worth checking out Article Content King. It has already boosted the search page ranks of several of my web sites.
Income Streams for Bloggers
Make Money From Your Blog
There are many different opportunities for bloggers to make money from blogging. This article presents those opportunities and explains how you might take advantage of them.
One thing for sure about most of the techniques for revenue generation with a blog is that they won’t make you rich quick, unless you are very lucky and hit on something very special.
However, as money-making opportunities go, if you can write reasonably well, and you have something interesting to say, it’s one of the easiest income streams you can create. What’s more, it’s one of the cheapest – you can set up a blog for free.
Advertising Programs
Probably the most obvious way of monetizing your blog. Anyone who has ever viewed more than one or two pages in a browser will have come across “Ads by Google”. It costs nothing to get a Google AdSense account, and once you have it, all you need to do is add the code that they give you to your website or blog and the adverts will be displayed automatically.
But Google is not the only advertisement provider. Every day, new providers seem to appear on the scene, because advertising is worth big money. Google’s AdSense payout doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be, so it is well worth considering other providers. But that doesn’t mean you should exclude AdSense.
Check out these alternatives to AdSense: Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick, Value Click, and BlogAds.
RSS Advertising
RSS is a way of syndicating articles from one website to another. RSS Advertising syndicates advertisements. It’s as simple as that.
The providers create an RSS feed containing advertisements, which you syndicate on to your own site. This technique is in its infancy, so may not be as effective as others.
Sponsorship
Sell your advertising space directly. Instead of displaying dynamic ads provided by organisations such as Google, the advertiser pays you to appear on your site. An example of this would be if you ran a popular blog on motoring, then a manufacturer such as Volkswagen might like to advertise on it.
If large corporations get involved, then you could be talking serious money.
Affiliate Programs
There are thousands of products being sold via affiliate or associate programs. You can promote those items directly from your blog (eg via a ClickBank link), or use one of the larger companies such as Amazon, who will insert context-based adverts in your pages. This works in a similar way to AdSense, but the products being presented are all being sold by Amazon.
Digital Assets
If you create your own ebooks, reports, courses, software, videos, or audio, your blog is the ideal place to sell those products. They all have one thing in common and that is that they are digital and therefore downloadable. The advantage of that is that you do not have to be involved in the delivery of your product. The system is totally automated – the purchaser pays for the product and in return they receive a download link. The purchaser can be anywhere in the world, in any time-zone, and they will receive their purchase almost instantly. The first thing you will know about it is an email saying that you have received some money.
Physical Products
Your products might not be digital. No problem. Take orders from your blog and deliver them the conventional way. Be even more cunning and promote products provided by a Drop-shipping company and you don’t even have to handle the stock or fulfil the orders.
Professional Blogging
You may have come across blogs belonging to famous people and celebrities. Do you think they write them themselves? In most cases, it’s unlikely. Professional bloggers, working for the celebrity’s agent write them.
It’s probably not easy to swing a deal writing a pop star’s blog, but there are a number of companies and organisations who run blogs but don’t have time to keep them updated. Find those, contact the company and strike a deal.
Donations
Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years. If you write useful, informative posts, provide an important information service, or give away useful items, some people will donate money to you.
There have been reports of bloggers being able to quit their jobs to become full-time bloggers by virtue of the donations they have received.
Blog Flipping
Create a blog, build it up, and make it popular.
Once you’ve made that blog “the place to go”, you can sell it.
Go for it! Make that blog! Make money!
Link Cloaking
What is Link Cloaking, why should you do it, and how do you do it?
Link cloaking is a means of using a URL or web address to go hide another web address. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this, which are explained below.
Cloaking Affiliate Links
The main reason why most people want to cloak their links is to hide the fact that it is an affiliate link. Again, there are a few reasons why you might want to do that;
The first is to prevent other people from removing your affiliate ID from the link, thus denying you the commission that you would usually earn from the sale of a product. In some cases, especially with ClickBank, affiliates have been known to replace your affiliate ID with their own so that they themselves earn the commission. All your promotional efforts and costs are in vain when this happens.
In reality, though, it probably doesn’t happen as often as some people would lead you to believe. Only a ClickBank Affiliate would recognise the link, and only a small number of them would replace your ID with their own. Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with protecting your efforts by cloaking your links.
The second reason why you might want to cloak an affiliate link is to reduce the length and complexity of the link. For example, you might have an affiliate link that looks something like this:
http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/products/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829
This doesn’t look too good. If it’s printed somewhere, people aren’t going to want to type all that in, and there’s a danger of mis-typing if they did.
By cloaking the link, you could give them a simpler link such as:
http://www.yourdomain.com/gizmo
The third reason why you might want to cloak your affiliate link is that you can make the link look as if it is in your own domain instead of somebody else’s. That gives your customers more confidence because it looks as though it’s your product, even though it’s not.
Other Benefits
I only realised this one myself a few weeks ago. I had an affiliate link for a well-known software product, and I cloaked it as I do for all of my links.
The vendor of the product released a new version of the software and at the same time, changed the affiliate system they were using. This meant that all affiliates had to re-apply for affiliate status and obtain a new affiliate link.
I thought that I would then have to go through all my web pages and advertisements, changing the affiliate links. Then I realised that I had used my cloaked link in all my sales pages and ads. So all I had to do was update my cloak with the new link and all my pages worked just fine.
It also meant that any links in emails I sent out still worked, because they all point back to my cloak.
More importantly, links contained within ebooks that I have written will also still work – they will just go to the new location.
How many times have you opened an old ebook or email, only to find that the links no longer work? As long as the vendor continues to sell the product and I am an affiliate, my cloaked links will still work just fine.
How Do You Cloak a Link?
Cloaking a link can be done in several ways, but my favourite, and the easiest is a simple PHP redirection.
- First decide on the link that you want to use as a cloak. In this example, I’m going to promote a product called “gizmo” and use this link:
http://www.mydomain.com/products/gizmo
to promote an affiliate link
http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829 - Next I create a folder in my domain called products/gizmo.
- I create a file called index.php containing this code:
<?php header("Location: http://www.somevendorsdomain.com/gizmo.php?affid=230561&tracking=4829"); ?> - I then upload that file to the new folder that I created in step 1. And that’s it! All I have to do is promote my new link, http://www.mydomain.com/products/gizmo.
Why Start an Online Business?
A lot of people hear about how it is possible to make a good living online and decide that they want a piece of the action. If you’re one of those people, that’s ok – welcome to the club – but ask yourself this…
“Why do I want to start an online business?”
Your initial response to that question is probably along the lines of “Because I want to make more money”.
Well that’s the main motivating force behind most businesses, isn’t it, so I can’t criticise you for that.
But that is a very simplistic approach, isn’t it? Look deeper down to find your real reasons.
I used to work as a freelance computer programmer. The market tended to go up and down from one extreme to the other. I’d work solidly for a year or so, and then there would be a slump in the market and I’d be out of work for a few months at a time. Those lean times could be pretty stressful, especially as I had a young family to support.
Eventually, I gave up freelancing and got a job with a small company, so that I could have a guaranteed income. But it wasn’t really enough, so I decided to start an online business as a sideline, so that I could afford a few more luxuries, maybe buy a new car (and pay off some hefty debts that I had built up over the years).
So that was my motivation. I always keep that in the back of my mind so that it keeps me working at my business.
What is your motivation?
Some online marketers are housewives who want a part-time job they can do while juggling the household, looking after children etc.
Some people hate their job and want to replace it with something of their own.
Others simply don’t have a job because they are considered unskilled, or they have been made redundant, so decide to start up on their own.
Many, like me, simply want an extra source of income to improve their living standards. I’m not aiming to become a multi-millionaire (although if it happens, I shall not complain!). I just want a nice, steadily increasing income that will get my life back on track and set me up with a decent income when I retire.
Another common motivation is for a parent young children who spends so much time at work, and commuting to work that he only ever sees his family at weekends. By changing to a work-at-home job, they can spend more time with their family.
If you want to set up an online business because other people are doing it, or simply for something to do, you need to think again. Running an online business is just like running any other business – it requires effort and determination to make it successful.
So think about why you want to do this, and keep it in the back of your mind. It will help you focus on getting the business up and running.
You will come up against a lot of obstacles and frustrations, which you’ll need to tackle – although I hope to guide you past those with this website. Occasionally you’ll think that you just can’t do this. You can! Just think about why you really want to do this and you’ll get a renewed burst of enthusiasm.
Article Marketing
