5 Affiliate Marketing And Webmaster Resolutions For 2010
As a Internet Marketer, Website Builder, Blogger whatever you want to call me I am always looking to Improve. Its very Important to get better at making money online. There are people doing the same thing we are but with bigger and better resources. Like money and people to produce content etc.
With 2010 here I was thinking about how to improve this year and every year for the decade. So I came up with a off the fly list. I’m sure it will change as time does, but the basic theme is always the same. To improve and make more cash!.
It being tax season lets get that out of the way. If you don’t pay attention to this you could be getting a letter from the tax man at some point.
Resolution #1. So my first resolution is to get some tax software. My bookkeepers over the last 25 years have all hated me. I’m one of those people who keep two boxes. One for money coming in and one for money going out. Not the way to do it.
I have had so many business’s I could go on forever about this but a few things to remember.
(1) You have to file taxes even if you can’t pay what you owe. Not filing is the biggest no no. You need to atleast send in the forms declaring your income.
(2) If you make over $599.99 in the USA you must declare it. That means if you have made over that amount as a affiliate then you are a business.
(3) Its never to late to start organizing your taxes and business. If you simply jumped into internet marketing and suddenly started making some cake start keeping better track for this year. Start today! I am.
Resolution #2 is to do bigger a better email marketing campaigns. I don’t really do any of that stuff and I am losing money. So what one plan is to join AWeber and start collecting and making very large lists. It shouldn’t be that hard using AWebber because they give you everything you need. I used this to join.
Helping over 65,000 businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber’s opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.
Resolution #3 is to make sure every website I have has a mobile version. This has become very apparent to me as I love smartphones and own all the great ones. Its my one indulgence.
Cell phones are becoming mini computers. Take the Droid that just came out. Its amazing what this thing does. The drawback for people search the web from a smartphone is webmasters not making there site phone friendly. It sucks so bad trying to navigate a website and constantly touching links. Your phone visitor will never come back. I won’t. WPTouch plugin is what many wordpress blogers use including us.
I know the whole mobile version lecture seems stupid since I don’t have it on this site yet. Its coming. I only work on this site when I’m bored. Its not a money maker and not ment to be. Its really a place to store ideas like resolutions.
Resolution #4. Build better websites. This is very important to me. I started from never even typing to making a good living and skiing 100 days a year from Internet Marketing. I know I need to be better though. Slapping up niche sites and making a income is one thing but being truly successful online is another. The landscape changes every day along with rules and trends.
I try to look at it like this. In the beginning you need to learn from others and use what others are using. This is typical for many reasons the first being lack of skills. Its hard to face but most people do not have the knowledge to build a great website from the ground up. Hence BANS, PHPBay and many more scripts.
You can’t build a successful business on top of someone else s stuff. Why? Because after you perfect it the site you built off of will simply do it themselves. This is happening everyday to people who even paid or built for something that works off a API like Twitter or Facebook. If you build a image tool 6 months or even 2 years from know they will build there own tool if it looks like it will make money.
So you may think I am wrong, but that’s my road for 2010. I plan on learning and building my own ideas as I do Internet Marketing of Niche Sites. I suggest everyone do the same. Its OK by me to use what you need from a content provider like Amazon or eBay but don’t depend on them to always be there for you. They won’t be!
Resolution #5. Humm, this was simple to think of after a email I received the other day. Someone told me I was unprofessional on one of my sites. They said I was doing a dis service to my advertisers and I should take down the site. I promptly replied that the site was a personal blog and it wasn’t any of his business how I ran it.
So number 5 is a dual resolution. To be more professional and not have thin skin. The person was kind of right, but I think he was competition. I have learned how to bump anyone out of number 1 on Google and pissed a few of them off doing it. The email hit a core though and it will remind me to use spell check more.
Being more authoritative and knowledgeable is very important these days. People will call you on anything. So I will do due diligence on these areas and more in the coming decade
Is Your Website Mobile Ready Or Losing Money
These days as webmasters we need to take advantage of every evolution taking place on the Internet. Probably the most important thing that we all need to remember is that more and more people are accessing the Internet over their mobile devices. Some reports suggest that 100 million Internet ready mobile devices could be online by 2013.
The so-called traditional way of using the Internet is at home for most, but more and more users are discovering that they can use the Internet over there cell phones and mobile devices with ease.
The fact that more and more people will be online using their mobile devices will increase the traffic on the Internet tremendously. One of the reasons this will happen is that mobile web apps and operating systems depend on the Internet to operate properly. Most of the newer devices and apps that operate the entire time that the phone is turned on. In fact some need a app to shut them down to save battery life. The increase of traffic on the Internet to mobile devices is evident by the fact that AT&T plans on charging for bandwidth usage over their mobile devices. Networks are becoming overwhelmed from users accessing the Internet everything from shopping to searching.
As webmasters we all need to take advantage of this new mobile revolution. We need to make sure our websites are compatible with cell phone operating systems. With so many people coming online through their cell phones around the world you would be at a clear disadvantage do not have a mobile version of your website. Having a mobile version of your website ensures that as many visitors as possible (know matter where they come from) can navigate around your site and find what they need.
Asked questions of yourself about your website.
Does it render on a mobile devices?
Can your visitors navigate without hitting links with there finger? This is by far the most annoying things for mobile web users. If your user keeps hitting links taking them off what they are reading they will most likely never come back.
Does your site have a mobile version as a add-on or subdomain with a mobile version?
If you run WordPress does your blog have a mobile device plug-in?
If the answer is no to any of these questions you really need to do some research immediately. If you run WordPress you can find a plug-in that will work with your website. WordPress has at least three good mobile website plug-ins that we have found by doing a simple search in the WordPress admin. Just look under add plug-ins in your WordPress administration.
If you opt to have a subdomain or add-on domain or even a folder or file on your site you also need to consider proper search engine optimizing.
We don’t need to worry about SEO as much for the WordPress plug-in’s as much as we do with a subdomain or folder. If it’s a subdomain or folder the search engine’s could see the content on your site twice and consider it duplicate content.
We all know that duplicate content is bad for our websites. So as a webmaster we must figure out a way to even stop the crawler from accessing your mobile version with robot text or a mod in your htaccess.txt file.
Fortunately Google has a mobile blog for mobile enterprise and also has published some videos of how to approach the Mobile Web in Webmaster Tools Video Channel.
There is no one way to make websites mobile friendly. Every website needs to be treated differently. If you have a lot of coding experience processes can be very easy but if you don’t you may need to hire someone to help you. If you jump right in and start adding folders to your website or sub-domains without making sure that your SEO is correct and that the site renders properly on most phones you could just be wasting your time and also breaking your site within the Google search. You should do your research but do your research get it done this is very important as you will be losing money for every visitor that appears to your site on a cell phone that can access the information you are providing.
As the mobile phone revolution gets into full swing webmasters need to stay informed and up to date on the latest mobile devices that users may use to access their websites.
Here are some links to relevant posts on Google.
Reunifying duplicate content on your website
Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication
Help Google index your mobile site
Write Your Own Ad Copy With Bedrock For Monetizing Websites
Over the last few week some crazy things have happened with affiliate marketing. Google started banning thousands of adwords accounts was the shock of the year for most.
The banning where very strange and happened to users including us with account that are rarely used. So when I heard about BedRock and started reading a smile came back to my face.
So the other day I heard a new name floating around the Internet that interested me so I investigated. BEDROCK
What is BedRock? Its a new way of monetizing your website. You write the ad copy and bid it out to advertisers. After all who knows your visitors better than you? This idea is pure genus and just in time for those having a hard time adapting to Internet marketing changes.
Webmasters need to have traffic to there site for this we assume. I say that because so many people think they can throw up a site, monetize it and make money. Those of us who have been around know that’s not true.
This is a start up company and is just getting off the ground. Here the press release.
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Bedrock, Next Generation Ad Network, Unveiled by GumGum
SANTA MONICA, CA – Dec 2, 2009: GumGum, an analytics and monetization platform for content online, announces the launch of a next-generation ad network. The ad network, called Bedrock, was borne out of GumGum’s own need to monetize non-standard ad- inventory.
Conventional wisdom today is that online advertising dollars cannot sustain the operations of publishers. Declining click-through-rates and mounting banner blindness suggest this. Bedrock believes that these problems are, in part, a failure of existing ad networks to tend to the rapidly evolving needs of advertisers and publishers. Bedrock turns the current system on its head in the following ways:
- Turning over the responsibility for ad creation to publishers. Unlike traditional ad networks, Bedrock does not provide creative to publishers. Rather, advertisers purchase visits on a cost-per-click basis and publishers build, host and distribute their own ad units. Bedrock believes that publishers have a unique understanding of their visitor demographics, site, and context and can build ad products that drive far higher click- through-rates than achievable with standard ad networks.
- Allowing advertisers to focus on ROI, not ad creation. Bedrock provides unparalleled, real-time transparency into visits while making available inventory not redistributed by any other ad networks accessible to advertisers.
- Enabling publishers to capitalize on “non-standard” inventory. Currently, online real estate such as Flash widgets, desktop clients and chat rooms are not capable of displaying standard network ads. Bedrock enables publishers to monetize newfound inventory.
“Bedrock has provided us with an opportunity to see beyond the typical IAB Banner Unit and the flexibility to better understand our users” says Thomas Dodson from OVGuide, an online video guide. Darian Shirazi, CEO & Founder of Fwix, a local news aggregator, comments “Bedrock has given us the flexibility to integrate advertisements into Fwix’s AdWire in a way that makes the most sense for our product and business.” ”
Check out BEDROCK
