When a major competitor leaves, you’re bound to get more of the marketshare. Or all of it. Google’s chief rival in China, Baidu, saw yesterday its shares hit $600 for the first tine, in the wake of Google leaving the country.

That puts Baidu’s market cap at $22 billion — the same as Yahoo’s (Google’s market cap is well over $100 billion).

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This is perhaps the stage that a lot of blogs stall at, How Do I Make Money? Firstly, let me recognize that not all bloggers are in it to make money, some just want to share their thoughts, ideas or interests with others. When I am talking about bloggers here, I am talking about those people who are trying to generate some income from their blog.

The first thing that most bloggers will try when they consider making money is Google Adsense or one of the other ad servers. This is primarily because it’s quick, easy and doesn’t appear to take a lot of maintenance. Of course as with so many things in life, you get out what you put in. Making a serious amount of income from the ads served on one blog takes time and a lot of traffic.

That’s not to say it can’t be done, but it isn’t quite the route to fortunes that some people seem to think it is. There are several other options, these are not exclusive and I would recommend that you implement as many of them as you can to increase your chances of actually generating revenue.  Some of the best include:

• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsors
• Blog Networks
• Product Sales

Later in the series we’ll take a look at each of these and how they differ and what you can expect from them.

Next: Promoting Your Blog.

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Have you noticed that your regular readers are not the people who click on the ads that you run via Adsense. For the most part they know where your ads are and they just ignore them. So what’s the point of having ads if that is the typical behavior of your regular readers.

The truth is displaying those, fairly untargetted ads to your regular readers won’t earn you much money. However, displaying them to people who haven’t seen your site will. This is because in all likelihood they found your blog via a search engine, so they were looking for something specific. Having them find your page and then see an ad increases the chances that they will click it.

Here is how to achieve this for WordPress blogs:

Firstly, as always with these tips, back up the files we are going to work with, in this case - functions.php.

The first piece of code are going to add is this:

function visitors_fromasearchengine(){

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; $SE = array(‘/search?’, ‘images.google.’, ‘web.info.com’, ’search.’, ‘del.icio.us/search’, ’soso.com’, ‘/search/’, ‘.yahoo.’);

foreach ($SE as $source) {
if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
}
return false;
}

What this section does is establish the array containing the various search engines, if you want to add others simply add them as variables to the array.

Now we need to tell your theme to use this function. We do this by placing the following code wherever it is you want your adsense ads to appear.

if (function_exists(‘visitors_fromasearchengine’)) {
if (visitors_fromasearchengine()) {
INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
}
}

Now your adsense ads will only appear for those coming from a search engine.

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Do you ever use the search box on an ecommerce site, maybe Amazon or some other site for which you are looking for a product. Were you aware that for most sites, the management of the results you see is a very big part of their marketing program.

Being aware of what people are searching for on your site and making sure that they get the right results is a great way to add real value to the relationship you have with your readers.

The WordPress plugin Search Meter will help you achieve that. Search Meter show’s you what topics people are searching for on your blog and most importantly whether they found them or not. If readers are coming to your blog and performing searches that lead them to no where then they will go to another blog. By using this tool you can ensure that the most popular terms are linking to the correct posts or even create new posts based on the topics you see people search for.

Do you manage your internal search, and if you do how do you do it?

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As an internet marketer who does a lot of work with websites and marketing, I know how much work I need to put in to SEO if I want to constantly get search traffic. SEO is a big part of managing a website because everyone knows the power of search engines. If you never ever promoted your site or bought ads on other sites, you can at least get traffic from search engines right?

With all the SEO blogs out there, it’s just hard to keep up. But fortunately for me, James Harrison from JameSEO asked me to review his blog. It was then that I discovered another undiscovered blog that has a lot of hidden treasures.

Who Is James?

My name is James Harrison. I’m an internet marketer working full-time for MEA Digital in downtown San Diego. I work as an Online Media Specialist in the Pay Per Click department and love every minute of it.

I truly enjoy working on the internet, especially in the field of search engine marketing.

During the day, I manage pay-per-click campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Business.com and other 2nd-tier PPC interfaces.

But, during the night I’m a SEO working on personal websites and studying new search engine optimization strategies. 

As you can see, James is the real deal. He works for an interactive agency as web SEO. This guy knows his stuff.

According to James about page, his blog has two simple purposes: 1) it’s the place where he records all his SEO marketing notes, and 2) he wants to rank #1 for the search term “James Harrison” (his name). The first purpose is understandable, but the second? JameSEO.com as #1 for the term “James Harrison”? Last time I checked, he’s only 7 spots behind from news stories of the NFL player James Harrison! With over 1,000,000 search results and claiming the #7 spot, he truly is doing something right.

The Design

So now let’s talk about the blog and its design.

To be honest with you, I don’t really like the design. I think that it’s one of the things that would repel readers away, or keep them from coming back. My simple advice to James is this: try out different themes and see how they go. You might have picked this one because of its simplicity, but there are other good ones out there that are really nice looking. Just get rid of this one.

The sidebar, meanwhile, has too much stuff going on especially the section with all the little buttons. I’m sure that you might need them because they’re required to be put on the blog somewhere, but try to keep the only ones that are necessary. The SiteMeter button, for example, can be placed in the footer while the Yahoo “Links to This Site” can be completely removed. There’s too much stuff going on and you need to fix them.

SEO Tips and Tricks

Now let’s get to the treasures within the blog. What I like about the articles that James writes is that he actually walks you through each and every one of them. He also adds in images that complements what he talks about.

Anyway, below are 5 great articles from JameSEO that I’ve read. You NEED to read them because I promise you, almost all of them will be new to you.

• 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
• Keyword Placement: Thinking of Places to Place Your keywords
• A Few Backlink Factors I Tend to Think About
• Link Tunneling Explained - Link Building SEO
• Onpage SEO: Title Tags Change Search Engine Rankings

Other than the great articles that James writes, he also composed a lists of tools and resources for SEO, so make sure to check them out.

The Sly Guy Recommendation

James clearly is an expert on the topic of SEO. If you own a static website or a blog, then you must check out JameSEO and subscribe. As JameSEO grows, it will just keep on getting better with more and more SEO tips and tricks. James will eventually get a new and better design (preferably a premium theme) that will compliment with the great content that he writes. So go ahead, visit JameSEO!

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This guest post is from Salwa, a 22 year-old digital artist, designer and blogger from the U.K. If you enjoy this post, be sure to check her out at BlogRiffic.com and subscribe to her RSS Here.

Search engine optimization is a big part of managing a website, whether it’s a blog or not. It’s a surefire way of getting organic traffic through search engines like Google. Even without any type of promotion done by the webmaster, sites can always expect traffic coming from search engines.

There are several ways to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines. Here are five that should be at the top of everyone’s list.

1. The title of your post contains the most important words of your post. It is used to describe the topic of the post and helps readers to decide whether they want to read it. It should contain keywords that you think readers will type into their web browsers. Make sure the title is a live link. If Wordpress hasn’t already done this automatically, you should be able to conduct a search on the web for the necessary code to do this. You should also make sure the page title tag is optimized. This will allow you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page and will use the title of your post as your page title to make your keywords prevail.
2. Use link bait. This is the latest hot topic in SEO and is becoming the preferred way for natural link building. Link baiting is used to attract backlinks to your blog by getting people talking about it. This is the art of writing content that gets natural links. You should post your link bait on all of the major social network sites. Also, make sure you include a “link to me” textbox, which is a Wordpress plug-in that provides a coded box automatically. Link to and reference other bloggers with similar blogs to get attentions from them. If you have a good blog, they may link to it in return.
3. Always check your Wordpress blog on a mobile phone since so many users today are on the go and tend to check in periodically via mobile phone web when they have a quick opportunity. Don’t have a ton of ads on your blog. This isn’t the place to be selling shamelessly. Having a lot of ads and graphics will only slow your site down and irritate visitors.
4. Most of the link power will be coming straight to the home page of your blog and then goes out to the rest of the links. Make sure you have a good link structure. They should link to your most important articles and pages from the home page. Simply make a category with your best articles and then make a list of them on the index.php file. You can install a plug-in called “related posts” and have those articles link to other relevant articles.
5. Make sure you pay attention to your design. Keeping it simple is always best. Use larger text with large, clear headings. There should be nothing that takes your attention away from the text.  Make sure your content is the first thing your visitor sees, they should not have to scroll to find your content.  If you can make your blog look more like a website than a blog, the larger social networking sites will like it better.

The WordPress platform, along with much of the other blogging software available today, is search engine friendly right out of the box. It does a very good job of handling many of the technical areas of optimization for you so if you aren’t a technical genius you can still have a great blog. Simply provide informative, keyword-rich content that people will want to read and link to, and you are pretty much set to go. Blogging is not hard; it just takes some time and effort. Just take care not to get your blog up and running and then think that it will simply take care of itself. Take the time to optimize it as much as you can or your blog will eventually disappear in the search engines.

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Got a video on YouTube that needs views? It’s quite easy and if you’re a blogger who knows a lot about SEO, you should already know how it works. Just take a look at a couple of my videos (watch this and this). With over thousands of views and counting, I get a few visitors from YouTube everyday. There is a lot of potential traffic that you can get to your from popular social networks like YouTube.

Anyway, three quick tips on how to optimize your videos on YouTube to get on top of their search engine results.

• Have 2-3 keywords in the title. Even just the title of the video can increase the chances of your video being found. Titling a DisneyWorld video “My Visit To DisneyWorld” is better optimized than titling it “My Visit To a Theme Park”.
• Tag, Tag, TAG! If there’s one thing I need to emphasize, social networking sites like YouTube don’t have the tagging/keyword feature for no reason. Use as many tags as you can. Just pretend you’re the person searching for a video. What would you type in the search box?
• Write a keyword-rich description. When you search for a video, notice how keywords are bolded in the search results? They come from the description of the video. It’s like tagging but you’re doing it as you write what the video is about.

Your videos might not get thousands of views from being featured on the home page, but after you optimize them for searching you’ll feel good knowing that people are actually watching what you made.

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If you’re reading this, it’s most likely that you’re a blogger or webmaster trying to make money online. It’s also most likely that you have a blog… a make-money-online blog. But do you actually think that people make money online just from blogs or niche sites? Meet Digital Point.

Digital Point is the mother of all webmaster forums. If you don’t know what it is, you are missing out on a lot of things (and a lot of money). Bloggers like John Cow and Jason from TUK are already reputable members of the community. Let me tell you a little secret. Ready? I make hundreds of $$$ from DP almost every month. So along with this blog that I already make money from, Digital Point gives me another source of income.

Read the rest of this entry »

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