In this post, Melvin discusses the importance of good marketing and properly targeting your audience and readers (editable).

It has been a huge misconception that a good number of traffic (pageviews and uniques) is the result of good blog marketing. I, as a blogger, have seen a lot of bloggers attributing increased number of traffic as a success for the promotions that they do. Although we can say that it is somehow a factor, we cannot just completely base it there. Here in my short post, I would explain why good marketing IS NOT just about getting good amount of traffic.

Most new and intermediate bloggers make the mistake of doing what I call as “hard promotion” (kinda similar to hard selling). Aggressive promotion is when a blogger considers quantity more than quality. If you’re into the blogging for fame or money, you probably have heard of the cliche statement “Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight”.

The problem with the statement is that many people, including myself, think it’s already obsolete! Tell me, are you going to wait for some period of time to implement new methods when you can do them now? The same applies to bloggers on getting traffic. They see other bloggers get ahead of them, they become impatient and they do things “aggressively”.

Why it’s harmful to your blog?

Just like the saying “Slowly but surely”, it goes completely the same the other way as well. I’ve spoken with some of my blogger friends and they describe the aggressive marketing as “annoying”. The harm here is that if your target audience gets annoyed, they would more likely tune you and your blog out. This is bad especially if you’re trying to establish a brand for your blog. You may not want to be known in the blogosphere for all the bad and wrong reasons, do you?

Good Amount of Traffic/Pageviews/Hits Doesn’t Mean Good Promotion and Marketing

Sure we can get a thousand unique hits to my blog in a day, but is the quality of traffic we are sending to my blog a good one? Or are we targeting the proper audience? During some point last year I know I made this mistake and the problem you would normally get is inconsistency in traffic and a very high bounce rate. These factors are crucial, especially if you’re working out on a certain goal to make your blog well-known.

Talking about increasing traffic and all the stuffs about it has become really mainstream. We, oftentimes read ways on how to get a thousand hits doing this and doing that but the real thing here is conversion. Are we converting on the traffic that our blog gets? Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.

What about you and your blog? Yea, you’re getting more traffic than I do and that’s given. But are you converting enough and reaping the benefits of having a well-trafficked blog? Do you have a lively interaction on it? If not, maybe its time to re-evaluate. Maybe time to list the marketing strategies you did and evaluate whether it’s proper or not. After all we (bloggers) live altogether with one goal in mind, which is to benefit from something that we’ve done.

Melvin is a young entrepreneur and student who has been doing internet marketing related stuffs for more than 2 years now. He shares his experience and ramblings in his blog located @ MelvinBlog.com in w/c you can subscribe to. He also uses Twitter and hopes to get followed by more people.

You guys are probably wondering where I have been lately. I received many emails with concerns from readers whether I was ok or not. I am perfectly fine. I was just launching another site successfully. The results I see after two months are great therefore I would like to share my first hand experience with you. In here I will reveal some of the simple steps that you can take when you are launching a new site or blog.

If you did not know which site I was working on it is called WPBeginner – Beginner’s Guide for WordPress. It was launched on July 4th, 2009, Yes the Independence day of USA. Since then the site has collectively received:

175,533 Visitors
490,644 Pageviews
7.18 Million Hits

Current Alexa Stats Rank at: 35,847

Technorati Rank: 18,583

These stats above are decent for a site that is just two months old. In this article, I will share some of the steps that I took in order to achieve this. One thing I will tell you is that the monetary investment on this project was $0 in terms of advertising. The cost of running this site is our normal hosting bills, the domain cost and such. This is probably the most affordable way to launch and promote a blog.

Read the full post….

If you want to make money online (by blogging), it is good if you have a niche blog. It is good because you would be recognized by people as an expert on that niche. When people recognize you as an expert, they would be visiting you site and that will help you to be an authority in Google eyes (You can read more about how to get authority status on Google). You don’t necessary have to choose a niche you know about. You can choose a niche that interests you and you want to learn more about it.

The main reason why you need a niche site is because it is easier to SEO i.e. to get backlinks to the site. If you want to get backlinks to your site, you need to do dofollow commenting, article marketing, directory submission and other ways. With all these methods, you would find out that what they all have in common is your anchor text. You would need to use your anchor text when doing this. so that you can improve your SERPs.

SEOing A Niche Site

When you are SEOing your niche site, basically you are mostly SEOing your home page. When you are doing this, you would have to use your anchor text or the keyword you would like to rank high on search engines. This means that all traffic that comes to your blog would be landing on your home page. This is great because when they go to your home page, the readers would see other articles you have written about the niche. Seoing a niche site is also easy to do directory submission. As you probably know, if you are doing directory submission, you have to submit your home page to the directory. Only few directories allow inner pages or deep submission. The top names directories such as DMOZ and yahoo directory requires you to submit your blog’s URL only. Most of the few directories that allow deep submission usually charge a fee for you to be able to do that.

SEOing A Nicheless Site

But if you have a nicheless blog, you cannot only optimize your home page. You have to optimize other pages for those pages to have good SERPs for their keywords. Optimizing other pages would need more work. And when the traffic (from search engine) comes to your site, they would not land on your home page, they would land on that article page they saw on thr search engine that they used. This means that they would not see other articles on your blog. The only readers that would see other articles are the curious ones that wants to know more about your site. You can argue that your readers would see other posts with the help of any related post plugin. But the plugin shows posts that are related either based on categories, keywords, anchor text or tags. For instance, if you wrote an article about caring for dogs and you also wrote another article about how to sleep; there is no way your readers would see the other article if they are reading one of the articles. They would only see it if they decide to explore your site.

In my opinion, not only do you make money with a niche site, but it is easier to make money if you can make a blog on a long tail keyword. The long tail keyword blog would help you to start making money quickly because it is easier to dominate. When you see that you can dominate the long tail keyword, that would post your confidence, and motivated you to go for the main keyword.

About the Author

Dalirin is a blogger that likes blogging about how to make money online. You can read more about how to make money on the internet at his blog.

When I was just starting out in internet marketing I had big… HUGE plans for the future. I believed that in two month time I was going to be insanely rich and famous internet marketer.

Needless to say that two month passed by without me making a single sale. I had no idea what I got myself into. Just like the majority of internet marketers I was mostly shooting blind, creating MySpace profiles, surfing the Traffic Exchanges a lot and spending my time mostly on the low dollar activities.

Now, year and a half later, I realize how childish it was of me to believe that success would come instantly. Mark Twain said: “Success Comes Before Work Only in Dictionary.” And it is indeed so. However, it is not because God hates you and wants you to work hard, but because in order to experience success you need to be ready for it Mentally, Physically and Spiritually.

Great Success comes with Great Responsibility, which means that in order to experience success one must understand what it means to succeed, first.

Are You Doing It For The Money?

Every success story always starts with a dream. For the most part, success means money, but what the majority of internet marketers don’t realize is that if your sole motivation is money, then sooner or later you will face an obstacle which is bigger, harder and more terrifying then anything you’ve seen before, which will lead you to a realization:

1. Money Isn’t Worth The Hard Work
2. I’ll Find Another Way To Get Money

To me, success is more than money. To me, success is the ability to spend 5 hours a day on my business and utilize the rest of my spare time on Fun, Growth, Mind Expansion, Quality Time with my family and just about anything that makes me enjoy life even more than I do now.

To me, Success=Freedom. Freedom is a much stronger motivator then Money. I haven’t yet met a person (online and off) that can be motivated solely by money ALL THE TIME. Humans are deeply emotional beings. We crave satisfaction, understanding and fulfillment – money alone simply cannot provide that.

How Hard Are You Willing To Work For It?

Another common mistake I see Internet Marketers make is after spending two weeks trying to setup a website, autoresponder and a newsletter – the intrepreneurs seem to believe that they did everything in their power to make it work. They believe that they have done A LOT. The majority of online business owners tend to think that placing a Pay Per Click ad immediately makes them the next Frank Kern.

Sorry to disappoint, guys, but it doesn’t. Success stories, for the most part, are years in the making. Anik Singal, one of the world’s top affiliate marketers, had to spend a year in his parents’ basement, working on his affiliate business before he could claim the “Super Affiliate” status.

Until you’re ready – it won’t happen. How do you get ready for internet marketing success? By working harder than everyone else does. When it happens – you’ll know you’re ready.

How Much Are You Ready To Change?

It is often believed that Success changes people. But relying on my personal experience, I must say that the change occurs long before success does.

Success often demands a mindset shift. And the moment I shifted mine – my life shifted as well. I even lost most of my close friends.

Before I became an internet marketer, I was a student at Israeli Air Force Technological University where I spend most of my days from 8am-16pm. After I have decided to go against the stream of commonality by pursuing an internet marketing career – my “friends” turned their backs on me and have never spoken to me since.

At first it was painful, but later I realized that it was necessary. I needed to change, and in order for change to happen – I had to find new friends. I had to find successful friends, friends that could contribute to my life experience and make it better – something my classmates simply couldn’t do.

Are You Ready For Massive Failure?

“Failure Is A Stepping Stone On The Way To Success”

Are you ready to fail? Are you ready to fail hard? Are you ready to fail so miserably, it will be a heart breaking scene to watch? If not, get used to the thought that you are going to fail. The sooner you do, the sooner you fail and learn the most valuable success lesson of all.

In his book “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill says: “Every Failure Has An Equivalent Seed Of Success In It.” It is important to remember that failure is a lesson. Learn your lessons well. Better yet, try to learn someone else’s lessons first.

Failure is to success as thick lips are to Angelina Jolie – it’s an essential part of the whole thing. Failure is essential in preparation to success. Only the ones that never truly tried – have never failed.

Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb. When he was asked whether he wasn’t discouraged by failure, he said: “I didn’t fail 10,000 times – I found 10,000 ways how not to build a light bulb.”
I encourage you to find 10,000 ways how not to run a successful internet marketing business. Because as soon as you do, the one way that is correct will have no other choice but to present itself to you.

Author byline: Igor Kheifets is 21 year old Internet Marketing Expert and the author and creator of Mastermind Internet Marketing. Get More From Igor On Twitter.

Earth is a beautiful planet, and we often ignore that in our dreams of success. With so many issues going around related to Global-Warming and the environment, I have decided to create a list of website designs that reminds us of the beautiful nature. We have seen more and more corporates shifting toward having green aspects in their business, how about having a green aspect in the web design? Sit back and enjoy these refreshing green website designs.

1. Lipton

2. Outdoor Italia

3. Interag

4. Nutrifield

5. Mint

More in the full post.