Actually, money gives everything a new meaning. Especially when you’re the one on the receiving end. Now when it comes to blogging, money can flow in fairly easily, and just like for everything else, there is a right and wrong way to monetize your website or blog and this week you’ll learn the Do’s and Don’t’s of monetization.

Instant* Ads

These are ads placed on your site that will pay you a flat monthly fee for simply placing their ads regardless of how much traffic your blog receives.

Freebies4Webmasters - Sign up, make ~$10 per month for displaying three banners and an additional ~$18 bonus for signing up and implementing ads. This may not be much, but it should cover your monthly hosting bill before your other ads start bringing in serious revenue.

Contextual Ads

This is probably the number one way you’ll be making money whether it is through contextual ad programs, link sales or whatever, ads are the way to go for beginners. Here are some programs to sign up for to start making money from day one:

Google Adsense -You’ve probably heard about Adsense already so it’s pointless for me to brag on how well it pays. Adsense is a must have, but it should not be the only

network you should rely on. We’ll get into more details on Adsense in the next couple of posts.

Chitika eMiniMalls - This program might not be one you’re ready to sign up with, but definitely works great in the latter stages of your site’s life.

WidgetBucks - Widgetbucks pays well, but it’s not much of a ‘contextual’ ad server but rather a program that shows product deals. If your blog is up for this, it is a great earner.

Link Sales

Link sales means selling links on your site. This is relatively straight forward and is all based on how much effort you put into your blogging extravaganza.

Text-Link-Ads: Simply sign up, add a widget, and get money. I mentioned some time ago when I launched this blog that it is a bonus to have a domain that has some Pagerank because Text-Link-Ads loves pagerank. I enjoyed PR5 for a while, and now although it dropped to a 2, I still get sign ups through this program. Don’t let their 50% commission fool you though. It’s better than nothing.

Referrals

Referrals also payout fairly well in blogging areas as opposed to some sites particularly due to that personal touch a blog offers. The only referral ad I’ve implemented here was the OIO Publisher which is a $37 plugin that allows you to have your own link sales manager giving you the opportunity of keeping 100% of the revenue. I didn’t expect much from it, but I was very amazed at the results it gave.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are very similar to to referrals as you are getting paid for referring visitors to whatever you’re showing them. These are not, however, recommended until you have some sort of established traffic otherwise you’re simply plaguing your visitors with unneeded ads that don’t bring in serious revenue. Some great programs include:

Clickbank - The leading digital product sales site. The bigger the sale, the bigger your commission.

CommissionJunction - Another very big advertising corporation and pays well.

Paid Reviews

Paid reviews are great as well, but for this you will need to become an expert in your niche. With us being this far in our blogging course, you should already have a clear idea of what you’re blogging about and add a paid review option to your advertising page and in due time, you will see results.

Donations

Donations are a handy thing as well, but be careful where and when you use it. I would suggest putting it on pages other than you’re front page because a person will only donate if they are very happy and satisfied with what you’ve offered them and this will only happen if they liked your post, they’ve browsed through your blog, and they’ve been on your about page. Then only on one of these pages (about or contact page) should you add a donation button.

All being said, stay tuned for more detailed methods of successfully and strategically monetising your blog.

(As usual) either work or procrastination gets the best of us, but nonetheless there are some that strive to combine these two things and still make a living (that would be me). So here we are with our week’s top five designs that made it to our extreme designs of the week list:

In no particular order:

By R.A. Evaristo,

By Ryan Stubby,

By Amir Khan,

By Sam Moening,

By Ronald Dowdy,

Want to have your design featured here? Apply Here

Want to See more designs? Subscribe Here

All designs are displayed with permission from the respective owners.

Link baiting is a recent term used by SEO geeks and professionals which basically means that you create something such as a resource, product, video, press release, or anything else that will create “buzz” about you and get people to talk about you.

This is a relatively straightforward concept, but is a tricky one nonetheless because you need some outside-the-box thinking to create something unique and attractive. As a result of your creation you will get lots of natural and organic traffic which will boost the credibility, readibility, and popularity of your blog.

Here are some ways to linkbait (taken from Jim Westergren’s blog):

• Make a valuable resource (lists, special reports, history of, how to, etc.)
• Interview (e-mail/phone) prominent people and publish it.
• Build a useful tool
• Write an interesting article
• Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest
• Test something new that has not been done before
• Be the first in doing something on the internet
• Write something controversial
• Be the first to write the latest news in your niche
• Be the first to expose a scammer
• Disagree with an authority
• Write some funny humor
• Make an interesting picture
• Be the first to research and document something
• Make a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Make a tool that others can put on their sites but that links to you
• Make a joke about a known person
• Make a resource that is just in time for a major event
• Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logics
• Write useful comments on something that is happening
• Give something valuable for free
• Coin a new acronym in your niche and get people to talk about it

A couple of my own additions:

• Write an ebook about your niche or something related. An ebook will boost your credibility quite a bit and will increase your knowledge in your own niche - guaranteed. If your blog (or yourself) are not known well then offer the ebook for free on forums and various sites. People looove freebies.
• [I was going to add something here but I didn't write it down after the thought came - arrgh]
  

Whatever you choose, think through it, make it look professional and be sure that it will attract visitors. Here are three aspects you should focus on to make your link bait successful: curiousity (urgent, limited, huge discovery), money, and free. With these three things get started by hooking your visitors all too well: hook, line, and sinker.

When we refer to the term architect, many get the impression of designing and planning and this is exactly what architects do. Right now though, you will become your own blog seo architect and learn about desigining the layout of your blog in order to have a smart and search engine efficient blog.

It may not seem much as you might realize blogs have nothing more than a front page, several other pages, and posts, but what you may not realize is not linking to these effectively will drastically reduce your blog’s search engine rankings.

To architect your blog, you need good internal linking. Internal linking is links on your blog that link to other parts of your blog or site. Good internal linking structures allow search engines to create a good “visual” of your website which will then allow them to provide better service for users and you. Here are some ways to get this done:

Sitemaps: Sitemaps essentially layout what your site looks like and does not force search engines to guess where or what content you have. For Wordpress purposes, install the Google XML Sitemap plugin that I talked about in this post. That will help you set up and configure how often your posts, pages, categories and other links are crawled by search engines.

Sitemaps make it easier for bots to crawl your site and you will see your optimization results in a matter of days instead of months. While external links play an important role on link popularity, so does your sitemap. Your internal links point to your content and help it rise in ranks whether it be in pagerank or link popularity.

For those who wish to make manual sitemaps, be sure to submit them into major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc. Telling where your sitemap is works much better than forcing search engine bots to guess.

Cross-Linking Navigation Structure - This is the small navigation bar you see on top of sites that looks something like this:

Home >> Your Category >> Your Post Title

This is really useful to do in your blog as well, and there is a plugin for that as I mentioned in my earlier post that does this.

TIP: Structure your breadcrumb bar opposite of my example so that it will be something like this;

Your Post Title >> Your Category >> Home

Setting your post title first will tell search engines that it has more importance than the text after it which in our case is a good thing.

URL Structure - Url structure is as equally (if not more) important as the above factors to developing a good website structure, and as I covered briefly in my beginning posts, it is important to have URLs that are “search engine friendly”.

What do I mean by that?

Search engine friendly urls are those that contain specific keywords, no query characters and are easy to type in. In order for this to happen, I suggested go into the Admin Panel –>Settings–>Permalinks and choose ‘Custom Structure’ and enter /%postname%/

That should set your post and page urls to their titles. Some people choose to add a category name before the post name, but I find that frustrating because if you change your category name, you will a)have a lot of 404 pages (page not found errors), b) you’ll need a really good plugin to redirect to the new pages, and c) your search engine rankings will drop.

How do you get people to buy your product if you don’t tell them about it? How do you get a search engine to rank your site if other sites don’t link it? This is exactly the reason why backlinking is important. Backlinks are a way to tell search engines that a) your site is worthy of visiting, and b) other sites care enough about your site that they even link to you. The methods to backlinking are relatively straight forward, so here they are:

• Directory Submissions - Submitting to directories is a great way to build up backlinks as well as PageRank. Look for directories that have pagerank and preferably get visited often. It is doubtful you’ll receive much traffic from these, but search engines will love you for submitting. Also, be sure to submit to dmoz.org as this directory is human edited and works with many popular search engines as I described in this post.



• Blog Commenting - Comment on the blogs you visit and read and include a backlink url in your comment. High pagerank blogs may also be good to post comments on, but don’t just visit random blogs and post comments just for the sake of it. Also include thoughtful comments because other readers will see your comments and if they’re good, they’ll want to know more about you.
• Social Networking - Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, Odnoklassniki, etc. Add your link to your (or your blog’s) profile page and connect with others. Sure, it might not be very full, but SEO doesn’t happen overnight. This is a long and grueling process that you must make the best of.
• Forums - Forums are also a great way to add some variation to your backlinks. They may not be very “SEO-savvy” but they’ll help you nonetheless whether they’ll bring in traffic or plain backlinks. What’s even better if your link is found on forum pages that are related to your topic.
• Link exchanges - Link exchanges are great too as long as you trade with sites that display your real URL instead of http://domain.com/out.php?id=2345. Always be sure you watch out for that otherwise your link exchanges are pointless for SEO.
• Paid/Unpaid Reviews - By now we’re out of freebie ways of backlinking, so if you’re willing to forge out a couple bucks to pay someone to review your blog, do that. Not only will you get more traffic, but your reviewer will boost your rankings heavily with the keywords you want them to include. Unpaid reviews work if you have a buddy and wish to trade reviews or something along those lines.
• Advertising - Plain ol’ advertising works as well to have your link placed on various sites. When it comes to money though, be sure to choose sites that will guarantee good backlinks because when it comes to money, everyone has a shortage of it.

Wherever you research anything about Search Engine Optimization, you will always run across something that has to do with keywords. Keywords are essentially the groundwork of optimizing your blog which also, you may not know, sets some of the goals in your blogging experience.

How does it do that?

Let’s go back a few posts, to where I define SEO terms. As I mentioned in that post (indirectly), keywords are specific and significant words that represent your blog. These are the words/phrases that “represent” your blog in search engines. For example, if your blog is about making money online, your keywords would be the “key” “words” that represent your blog, in this case “making money online”. If you Google “making money online“, there will be around 48,100,000 results and your goal would be to optimize your blog to a point where it is one of the top of these listing pages. Of course, this is somewhat nearly impossible considering there is so much competition, but what if we found words that had less competition?

This basically means, find some primary keywords you wish to target them and work with these keywords.

I Found My Primary Keywords, What Now?

The goal here is to choose keywords similar to your primary keywords that you will use to boost your rankings that don’t have much competition, and also those that people actually search for. You may think you know what people search for in order to find you, but in reality many people are far off in this. So, in order to be correct in our keywords, we have some handy tools that we may use:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool - Great tool which gives you keyword ideas based on either the keywords you enter or based off of a URL you enter (your site URL).
• Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool - Another keyword suggestion tool that gives suggestions revolving the keywords you wish to target.
• Thesaurus.com - This one is my personal favorite. The above tools will generate lists of keywords that users search for, and Thesaurus.com will help you fill up your list even more with synonyms that more often than not, are not showing up in those tools, but are still searched widely.

After researching the keywords you’re trying to rank on top in, you should have a compiled list of many different variations, synonyms, and related words that will still point to the primary keywords you’re trying to rank in. Now, keep this list close to you and use these keywords when blogging.

Tips on Using your Keywords

1. Use your keywords in post titles - Using your keywords will give those keywords more importance making those posts rank higher.
2. Use Keywords in Anchor Links - When you advertise your site or blog, the “anchor words” are those words that are in the title of your link. So if you’re blogging about making money online, your anchor words would be “Making Money Online” and not “mycooldomainname.com”. When search engines find the links to your site, they’ll see those keywords in your links titles and will already direct themselves to associating your site with those words.
3. Use your Primary Keywords in Your Domain Name/Site Name - This generally gives a great boost to your rankings if your keyword is included in your domain name. You can see my domain name has nothing to do with my keywords or “designers” and “web development”, which is why those keywords are on the very top of my blog. Include your main keywords in your blog title, and meta tags to tell search engines that this is what you’re ultimately targeting.
4. Use Keywords in your Post - Tip #1 was about post titles, this one is about post content. Use your keywords from your keyword list in your post content because, although your post content may not be relevant enough that it gets many searches, but when it does, users are much more guaranteed to click on your link because your post content is usually much more relevant than general keywords.
   

   IMPORTANT! Do not overuse the same keywords in your posts. Keep a keyword ratio of 4-5 (4-5 keywords per 100 words) otherwise Google and other search engines may throw you out for keyword spamming.

5. Use Keywords in Image Alt Tags - This may not apply to those who blog about things that do not relate much to visuals, but if you’re blogging about clothes, toys, photography, etc put in keywords in your image alt tags. You just can’t imagine the effect these may have.

That’s it for keywords and should basically set up the foundation of your blog key SEO elements. If you need to make some changes to your blog in order to match up with what I’m suggesting, DO IT NOW! Otherwise, all of your SEO efforts will result in lost time and worthless rankings.