February 15th, 2009
Everyone in the world doesn’t speak English. If you want to cater to other audiences you have to speak their language. There are three options. One is speaking the language and creating content for them, two is paying someone that speaks the language to create your content in the other language and third is using translation software to create content in other languages. Software is not perfect, but it’s a cheap and easy way of getting your product out to a new audience.
Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to do it:
Download
February 11th, 2009
You built a site and now you want to make money off of it. There are several ways to add multiple income streams to your site. You can mix and match these and make money from all angles.
1. Sell your product. You might have a product you’re interested in selling or the whole purpose of your site is to sell your product.
2. Use contextual advertising on your site. Services like Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network spider the content on your site and automatically create ads that match your content. Be careful here you might be advertising your biggest competitors if you don’t filter them out.
3. Become an affiliate. There are so many affiliate companies and products out there chances are you’ll be able to find something that will complement your business. Don’t look at everyone as a competitor. If you can find a few good products that complement what you’re doing you can make a lot more money from just about any product.
4. When all else fails. Put up zip and email submits. You only get a $1 or so for each one, but that’s $1 more than you were getting before. These dollars can add up if you have good traffic and you picked a decent offer/offers.
5. Sell banners and ads on your site. You can get premium pricing if you sell the ads on your site directly. Give it a shot.
There are even companies out there where you tell them about your site and they will sell the ad space for you.
You can get that site making money quickly, the only thing you need is traffic.
January 17th, 2009
Depends. For Adsense, YPN or similar ads (especially text ads) the best thing in all of my experiments is to blend it in with your content. I’ve had extremely high click through ratios for years doing this. There are some people that will disagree and say that making the ads completely different colors and sticking out will get you more clicks, but I don’t believe that and so far my experiments haven’t shown that.
Also when I say blend I mean exactly matching all colors, not make it look similar in colors. It has to look like part of your content or part of your sidebar links. It might sound hard to use the exact colors but it’s actually very simple.
Making Your Ads Blend How-To. The way I do it is I open up my website or template and use Visual Color Picker. It’s an awesome freeware program that will tell you exactly what colors are on your page. Of course you can use Photoshop or a similar program but Photoshop doesn’t let you find your colors from websites that are already online. Anyway I open up my website and use the program, find the colors I need to blend, then make notes of each color (colors are in the #000000 format). Then I go to my ad company let’s say Adsense for example and input the colors. Ta…da…it’s that simple. In under 5 minutes I have all the colors I need for my ads.
For banner ads or ads that are images I don’t worry about blending in the colors, I just make sure the ads are relevant to my site.
If you design websites, manipulate images, or anything like that Visual Color Picker is a great tool for your arsenal. I find myself using it almost every day for different jobs. Of course you can’t beat the price (FREE!!!).