Work At Home Based Business Blog

Don’t look now, but Christmas is only a few weeks away once again. It’s a time for families to get together, kids to open their presents, office workers to do lots of embarassing things at the office party…

Ok, we all know Christmas is a time of festivities and fun!

But for those of us trying to make a buck (or several) online, what does it mean for your home business? Well, it’s a pretty good time to roll out the seasonal affiliate sites, dust them off and put them to work for you. Don’t have anything suitable? Well, believe it or not there is still time to make new ones if you’re quick. But you have to act fast.

First of all you have to be able to put up a half decent site quickly, get enough original content on there with a liberal sprinkling of your keyword to satisfy the search engines that its legit, then be able to link to it fast and furiously. Then rinse and repeat with more sites.

Why more than one site?

You need to build in some redundancy as well as create an interlinking system. By building in redundancy, I mean you’ll need a few sites that all target exactly the same keyword because you’re probably going to have a fight on your hands with a certain search engine that is currently indexing and de-indexing new sites seemingly at random. Some will feature in the SERPs and some won’t. And you need search engine traffic for this to work.

Here’s how.

Say you want to target a fairly competitive seasonal keyword, such as Christmas tree decorations, Christmas gifts, artificial Christmas trees or something similar. You’ll need three or four blogs with that exact keyword in the url, the site title and the page headers as far as on-site SEO goes. Don’t waste time looking for domains, you probably won’t find any .com’s suitable. Use some of the many free blogging hosts available, but just make sure they allow you to put up affiliate ads before you start building.

Build your blogs with a simple template and write an intro post, then social bookmark them to as many places as you can. Meanwhile, find a good affiliate company that has Christmas tree decorations (or whatever your keywords are) vendors that you can sign up with. ShareASale is one pretty good one, but there are others too like CJ etc and don’t forget eBay. There is a killing to be made so spread your net as wide as possible.

Now you’ll also need some supporting sites that you control that cover topics broadly similar to your keywords, such as special occasions, gifts, or anything similar.

What, you don’t have any?

Sheesh! You want an online business but haven’t been building backup sites? What about Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blinkweb, Blogger, Wordpress… the list is long and available so there is no excuse for not having the resources. They are there in abundance and if you’re not using them then don’t quit your day job just yet!

Ok, for those of you with plenty of sites, edit them all and add a link to each of your main Christmas keyword targeting sites with the keywords in your anchor text. I take it you know how to do that…

These links may or may not get counted in time, but do it anyway. The theory here is that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. Write some articles (also with your keyword anchored link) and submit them to a few top ezines (ezine articles etc). Get into some of the forums you are a member of and put a link in your sig to your sites and post something worthwhile. You are a member of some forums, aren’t you? Good!

The whole idea is to get your sites indexed fast and into the SERPs in the short term.

The next phase is to start writing as fast as you can. You want to hammer as many articles into your main blogs as you can. Don’t worry about them being perfect, just readable (the writer in me hates to say that, but needs must). Post as often as you can (daily or even twice a day) because the more you do it, the more often the Google bot will come visit your sites and give them the short term authority in the index that you need. Also, link the blogs to each other from within those posts. Normally this is not a good idea, but in this case in the short term you only care about creating authority fast.

In the meantime, you should have been accepted into some of the affiliate programs, so start creating pages in your blogs and fill them up with the products you want to sell.

Keep going like a mad person and some of the mud will stick. One or more of your blogs will appear in the SERPs for long enough to attract sufficient traffic to make some sales over the next few weeks. After that, Google will most likely sandbox your sites anyway, but who cares? You will have wrung out of them as much as you could while the going was good, which is all you wanted to do!

Of course, the sites will emerge from the sandbox in 6 months or so ready for an assault on next year’s festive season with the added bonus that they will have acquired more authority and will therefore do better next year!

That’s one way to make use of Christmas with your home business!

Terry Didcott
Internet Marketer, Writer and promulgator of how to make money online

There’s more than enough free information on the internet that you can use to learn all you need to know about how to make money online. You don’t have to buy every new product that comes out promising to give you the unknown secrets to making money. You can find all the money making information you need for free in blogs and forums.

The fact is that most of the blogs out there that are supposed to teach you how to make money online really don’t teach you anything. However, there are quite a few blogs that do. You won’t find much useful information on the so-called A-list blogs like JohnChow.com or Entrepreneurs-Journey.com or many of the other “top blogs” in the MMO blogosphere. Most of those blogs are full of a bunch of useless crap that doesn’t really help you learn how to make money online.

Right now I want to show you some blogs that are actually worth taking the time to read and will help you learn how to make money online. They also give you all the MMO information you need for free! These are not in any particular order because they all should be on your must read list.

1) Free Make Money Online Tips - This is one of my blogs. A little bit of self-promotion here but there is good reason for it, I have been running this blog for many years and it has hundreds of posts. They aren’t all great but there are a lot of very useful posts to help you make money online.

2) How to Make Money Online - This blog gives more real and useable make money online information than any other blog I have ever seen. He doesn’t post often but he writes long and very informative posts when he does.

3) Make Money Blogging - He likes to use foul language and doesn’t hold anything back but you will definitely learn how to make money online from his posts. Most of them nowadays are videos and he doesn’t update very much, but if you check the archives you will find a lot of very useful posts.

4) Internet Marketing School - One of the top internet marketing blogs and has a ton of great information. You will learn a lot about internet marketing and making money online from this blog.

5) Make Big Money Online - This blog has been around a long time and has many great posts that will teach you how to make money online.

There are a few more blogs that I recommend but I will leave it at that for now. I don’t want to overload you with a bunch of new blogs to read and keep you from getting any real work done.

You should also remember that blogs are not the only places to learn about making money online. Forums have been around a lot longer than blogs and they are still very good resources for finding free make money online information. Sometimes they are even better because you can get your questions answered by many different people instead of just taking one bloggers word for it.

Here are some of my favorite forums that are on topics related to making money online:

* Internet Marketing Forums

* Work at Home Forum

* Webmaster Forums

* Work at Home Discussion

Once again, there are a bunch more great forums out there with a lot of knowledgeable members who are willing to help you make money online. The four listed above are just the ones I visit most often.

So, the next time you are about to pull out your credit card and purchase the newest product promising to teach you how to make money online, ask yourself if you really need it. Why buy another information product when you can get all the information you need from blogs and forums for free?

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Owner of the work at home blog and teaching you how to make money online with your own home business since 2003.

One of the best ways to make money online is by selling advertising on your website or blog. If you have built up a popular site then it’s pretty easy to find people who will pay you to advertise on it. I’ve made thousands of dollars from people buying advertising on my websites.

Part of the allure of selling advertising is that the income is residual. You pretty much know how much you are going to make each month and you don’t always have to be hoping for affiliate sales, Adsense clicks or other ways you make money from your website via your visitors performing an action. Sure you will probably have some advertisers cancel each month and have to find new ones to replace them but for the most part income from selling advertising is consistent.

There are services out there that will help find advertisers for you but they will take a percentage of the earnings. One popular service that does this is Text-Link-Ads.com usually referred to as TLA. These services can be good because they make it a lot easier to find advertisers. However, I don’t use them because I like to get all the money from advertisers on my sites and I want to be in control of who is advertising on my sites. Plus, Google doesn’t like these services so they might take away your PR and drop your rankings if they find you are using them.

Personally, I like to find the advertisers myself so I don’t have to worry about losing any of the revenue or having the possibility of links being placed on my site to websites that I don’t want on there. This is more work because once you find them you have to take the payments, put up their ads and keep track of them. But it’s not very hard if you get a good system in place.

Here are some things I have learned about how to make money online selling advertising since I started doing it about three years ago:

* Be specific on what your advertising options and prices are. A confused advertiser will either not pay you to advertise on your site or they will complain later because they didn’t get what they thought they were paying for. If you look at one of my advertising pages - work at home advertising - you will see that I laid out exactly what they get and how much it will cost.

* Offer a lot of options. Again if you look at one of my home business advertising pages you will see that I offer 11 advertising options. Having more options increases the chances that you have an option that will fit the needs of most potential advertisers. You can’t make money selling advertising if you don’t have options that people want.

* Set the right price. It’s difficult to know exactly how much you should be charging but you want to get it close because if you overcharge you will lose advertisers and if you undercharge you won’t be maximizing your earnings. Take a look at what other sites in your niche with similar traffic as yours are charging and go from there.

* Only accept certain ads. You don’t want to have ads and links on your site to other sites that aren’t even remotely related to yours. You also don’t want bad neighborhood or banned sites linked from yours. Be sure to state on your advertising page what sites you will and won’t accept. And check each new advertiser’s site before accepting the ad. Deny them and refund their money if you need to.

* Don’t be sneaky. You must give your advertisers what they pay for. Don’t cut their ad time short, or hide it, or do anything else sneaky and unethical. You will lose advertisers very quickly if you do this. You can’t make money if your advertisers are mad.

* Keep track of the ads. You don’t want to accidentally remove an ad that shouldn’t be deleted or keep an ad up long after they have cancelled. Make sure you know which ads are supposed to be up and which need to be taken down.

* Put the ads up quickly. When an advertisers pays for a spot on your site you should get the ad up very quickly. They have already paid for the spot for a specified amount of time and you are wasting their money if you don’t put it up right away.

* Promote your advertising. You can’t make money selling advertising if nobody knows they can buy ads on your site. You should actively promote that you allow advertising on your site/blog. Get keyword anchored inbound links to your advertising page so you can rank higher in search engines, tell other site owners in your niche, put links to it in forum signatures and blog posts, etc… Any way you can to get the word out.

That’s basically all there is to it. Now you know how to make money online selling advertising. It’s one of the best ways to make money from your website or blog and I highly recommend it as an additional source of income.

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg
Work at Home Blog