Kick Start Your Blog by Embracing the Nobodies

Posted on March 30, 2011 Written by

This is a guest post by Danny Iny, an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing.

Your blog has been up for about six months, and your traffic is hovering around ten unique visitors per day… on a good day. And you know that at least one of them is your mom.

Does this sound familiar?

In searching for an effective blog promotion strategy, you eventually realize that commenting on other blogs can be a good way of getting some attention.

So you make your list of the hottest blogs to be on, and subscribe to them all. You check in every day, read the posts diligently, and dutifully leave solid, interesting, and value-adding comments. But by the time you’ve done it, there are already fifty other comments on the post, and you get a click or two through to your blog, if you’re lucky.

Don’t despair – there’s a better way: embracing the nobodies!

 

7 Ways I Make Money Online

Posted on March 29, 2011 Written by

Making money online is a hot topic, and it is one I get asked about frequently in a variety of forms.

  • How do you make money online?
  • How can I make money through blogging?
  • How long does it take to become a professional blogger?

So today, I will answer the first question which should give you some ideas for the second. The answer to the third I will tell you when I actually become one. :)

7 Ways I Am Making Money Online

Without any further ado, here are some of my top earners since I started blogging in 2008 through today.

Adsense

Google Adsense is like the starter pack for anyone looking to make money online. I earn a steady flow of income from Adsense using a variety of other websites I own. My top earners include my Dofollow Blog Directory, a simple site about Malshis, and some various HubPages articles I have written over the past year.

Why don’t I use Adsense on Kikolani? I did, up until last year’s Blog World where Scott Stratten made a very valid point that if you are putting Adsense on your blog, you are essentially giving people a reason to leave for just a few cents per click. Considering I want people to stick around my site, I decided it was a good time to pull those ad blocks.

Has removing Adsense made a difference for Kikolani? I really couldn’t say. I took a quick peak in Analytics and noticed that the average time on site between January 1 – March 26, 2010 when I had Adsense was the same as January 1 – March 26, 2011, but the bounce rate is a good bit lower now than it was then.

Advertising

Advertising is another good source of on-site income. I do the standard 125×125 blocks in the sidebar, a larger banner ad underneath posts, and inclusion of a banner spot in my newsletter as detailed in my advertising page. Some of the real income comes from offering customized advertising options based on the requester’s needs and offering discounts for long term subscriptions.

 

Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Red Pandas

Posted on March 25, 2011 Written by

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the best posts of the week in blogging, making money online, SEO, and social media on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbled upon, retweeted on @kikolani, and read in RSS subscriptions this week.

Blogging / Writing

 

The WordPress Comment System, Plugins and Moderation

Posted on March 24, 2011 Written by

After clearing out around 2,500 pending comments and over 3,000 spam comments, I thought it was time to do a little update post on how I do comment moderation and otherwise determine what comments to approve or delete.

The Overall Commenting Picture

Let’s start with the overall picture of what your comment will look like on Kikolani, starting with the comment form.

WordPress Comment Plugins on the Comment Form

And when you’re comment goes live, the above will result in the following.

Dofollow Comment with KeywordLuv and CommentLuv

The above is a great comment, and easy to spot as one to approve (thanks Murray of Start an Online Business). Now, let’s take a look at the plugins and services that make it happen.

 

The #1 Secret to a High Converting Sales Page

Posted on March 23, 2011 Written by

This is a guest post by Alex Whalley, owner and founder of the Build | Rank | Profit eCourse.

Crash Test Dummy

Now before you jump on the assumption train, allow me to clarify what I mean by ‘sales page’ because I am not talking about your typical squeeze page or the ‘no option but to buy’ pages. You know, the ones that will more often than not automatically pop up 37 and a half more windows before they finally accept defeat.

I also want to step away from the make money online niche because the main focus here is on physical products – products that cover every niche possible. The same rules apply for anything you might promote through Clickbank, although again – these methods might not ring true for the MMO niche where OTO’s, Pop ups and massively overhyped sales copy is the norm. Worth testing though, who knows?

Normal Sales Pages

Today I wanted to talk about a normal sales page, a page that has no hype, no exaggerated claims (OK maybe a couple) and certainly no “one time offers” that vomit all over your browser when you leave, because these are the pages I make, and these are the pages that bring me a fulltime income online.

Now there are probably a hundred ‘secrets’ that may or may not help you increase conversions on your niche site or blog, but the no.1 secret of all of them is only a secret because most marketers have spent way too long in their own (Wordpress) backend.

Thinking like a Consumer and NOT a Marketer.

This is the secret to configuring a well converting site.

The problem I see all too often when researching my competitors is that the majority of the Amazon (physical product) niche sites in existence are terribly hard to navigate, not so easy on the eyes, and seem only to be focused on the keyphrases they are clearly trying to optimize for. This is a typical example of a site built purely on the teachings of a third party – and at no stage has the owner of the site ever considered that a real person might actually visit them one day.

So how do we fix this?

 

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