Many of us are victims of stress. Stress is common among all working class people, regardless of age or sex. This is one reason why stress is prevalent everywhere in the world.

Medically speaking stress is bad for your health, i.e it can give severe damage to your brain or nervous system, no i am not a doctor but i can safely say stress is bad for health. And if that wasn’t enough stressing out in our day to day life is extremely easy! Yes you can get free stress and it is so contagious that any fool or stupidity of others can be the reason for your stress.

But leave all that aside and lets come to the point i want to share with you all, “blogging while stressed“.

99% of people fail at making money online

The reason?

99% of them are desperate, but what that has to do with stress? Quite simple, countless number of people are trying to make some extra cash online, while some dream of becoming over night millionaires. When we are desperate, we do whatever we can in order to try and get what we want. But hitting your heads on the wall or your legs on the floor won’t get you nowhere. Which is what 99% of us are doing.

Where is the creativity? The originality? Where is the passion? All i see is people trying to rip each other off. One person trying to copy the success of another or just simply doing what others ask you to. But even still you fail at making money online!

The more you fail, the more you are stressed

It comes to a point that you keep failing one trick after another, one method after another. All this leads to stress, or to be more specific ‘Information overload!’. What can you do after that? 99% of us will most likely quit. The left 1% will keep trying.

And when everything else fails, there is one last resort. That is blogging. Its not hidden the fact that there are millions of new blogs born everyday on the Internet. But most of these bloggers are ‘stressed out’ desperate money makers that are now trying their luck at blogging. But this simply won’t work!

Why? Because stress is bad for blogging. If you blog just to make money, 99% of the time you won’t make enough to pay off your hosting. Because blogging is not about just ‘making money online’, its about sharing your views, your opinions and thoughts to the world. But right now, all i see is a net filled with bogus people that ‘use’ blogging platforms to try build money making sites. [i don't call them blogs, because they are simply NOT!]

‘But i am a hardworking, Dedicated and Passionate Blogger’

Are you? We all say we are, but if you seek money from a blog which is not even a few days old and got around 2-3 posts, then that is not dedication or hard work.

If you blog about anything and everything and concentrate only on blogging about affiliate products or schemes that will earn you money, then you are not passionate.

What i will say is you are stressed, most stressed bloggers don’t even know what they are doing, they just want to ‘try’ everything. Without any research or knowledge regarding the niche they blog about. That is the difference between top bloggers such as problogger, jhon chow, etc and the rest of the bloggers. They have a passion about their niche and they are defiantly not stressed.

How to kill stress?

Stress is bad for blogging, simply because when you are stressed you are not creative. No matter how hard you try you cannot get par to the level you want to achieve. Not only will stress kill you, but it will kill your blog as well. If your blog posts are filled with stressful remarks or poor attempts to convince your reader into doing/buying/trying something then you are more likely to loose the few leftover visitors you have.

But there is always a cure. Even if you are not stressed in the real life at that particular moment, a portion of your brain keeps worrying or thinking about ‘how to make money online’ or anything that you do online. If you are a full time blogger, then your worry is definitely about ‘what to blog about next?’ How to get traffic? How to find new advertisers? Where to look for reliable affiliate programs? There are so many questions and tonnes of problems which we are likely to face before we could earn our first few $ online. But it’s not impossible, in fact all it requires is a calm and fresh mind.

Specially in the case of blogging, having a relaxed mind is very important. Because when you blog with a relaxed mind, the words flow out on there own. Its hard enough to maintain a blog, managing your plugins, keeping it updated, not messing up the database, keeping it organized, constantly trying to improve the looks, keep a track of your traffic and stats, keeping off spammers and finding new readers.

After reading all those tasks i am sure, most people would not want to get into blogging, but its not as hard, only the set up is. Thanks to wordpress it’s quite easy, but making money is NOT!

Now comes the hard part, how do you keep relaxed? How can you stay active and not get stressed every time something dint work?

The answer is : take a break. Clear your mind of all the things you heard and tried. Once your fresh and ready to give it another shot, come back and start working. We all know how important relaxation is to remove stress. So go on a vacation, watch a few movies or just hang out friends for a few weeks.

My Message : Stress is bad for blogging, and blogging is bad for making quick buck. Don’t blog if you want to make money as soon as you start and definitely don’t blog when you are desperate for it and have absolutely no knowledge in the field your blogging about. If you are blogging and have quit blogging because you don’t see much results, then its likely because of the stress you get when you try to make money online. Don’t give up, keep trying. But at the same time make sure you are not getting bored or stressed. Enjoy what you are doing, be passionate.

Don’t forget that giving free knowledge or sharing your opinion [it doesn't matter if others agree with you or not, you will most likely end up as a good or bad blogger] without hesitation is what makes up the concept of ‘blogging’. And when you do that, you will definitely build up a loyal base of readers. Don’t ask others to do something which you won’t do yourself. Simple as that.

Remember stressful and desperate posts will kill your blog!

*****

I guess i am making it too long, so take care. Give it a tweet if you appreciate my advice and find me on facebook. Until next time, good day,

SJ

We all know that every company, person and brand seeks reputation. Reputation, respect, popularity, domination all go hand in hand. Without reputation no company can get good clients or sell any of there products.

But in the online scenario this might be different a bit. No questioning the fact that online giants such as Google, Microsoft, yahoo,etc are all about reputation. Google won’t stand and watch if someone tries to hurt their reputation, they got a reputed search engine. And there competitors such as yahoo and bing wants to get a share of that online reputation. That is the reason why the have signed contract with each other, to bring down the giant. Its all about reputation in the industry!

However small companies and websites can’t be bothered much about reputation. Every company has some sort of reputation. Even hackers and scammers have a reputation to maintain, ironically they love the popularity and reputation they get. One such example is the a group of people who call themselves ‘RELOADED’, they got a reputation for hacking games and providing free versions and patches via torrents. No one is afraid since in the online world, you can hide your real identities quite easy.

I want money, one way or the other.

That is the mentality of most people in the ‘make money online’ niche. Actually not just this niche, but the entire www. Why do you think people and companies invest so much in online development and products? Because the web is easy to access and explore. And there are huge advantages to those who want to make money. In the online world, you can sit at home and be newton.

There are lots of people who wants to make money online. Some of them get lucky and earn a ton. Some fail miserably and quit. While some keep trying and become desperate! Most of the time they don’t make a single buck online, even after years of trying.

This creates a tendency among desperate people seeking income solutions. 60% of these are involved in the GPT [get paid to] industry. The rest run sites and sell duplicate, warez, stolen content to make money. There are many rings of sites and people that are involved in scamming. They don’t care for reputation, Only money. And they get them one way or the other.

Reputation does matter!

The path you chose decides the future. If you chose the path of making money the wrong way, then you will definitely get caught one day or the another. The risks are always high. Digital retailers and payment gateways are getting very serious regarding this. There are stiff rules and if you got bad reputation, then those companies will just kick you off. And yes i am talking about companies like clickbank, amazon,adsense, paypal,etc. Without those making money online is very hard and nearly impossible.

Yet there are some people who want to scam others, there reputation gets worse and worse. And what is worse about them is that they don’t regret what they do, take a look at the screen shot below. I receive such phishing mails from paypal[not really paypal] everyday and they ask me to register in those sites. If you are not cautious then you might get scammed! But thanks to the scam watching services who keep us up-to-date with the reputed scammers.

Here is the link to the phishing paypal site : http://mkbae.com/stageon/paypal.com/ [DON'T ENTER YOUR ACCOUNT DETAILS!] but if you got free time, give them some trouble by spamming the heck out of them!

Bloggers on the other hand can’t survive without reputation. And you earn reputation by your blog posts and reaction to your readers. Making money with blogging is impossible  unless you got good reputation. Because everyday there are thousands of blogs born, but still there are only a handful of them that make more then $1000 per month. These includes people such as jhon chow, carl ocab,etc. So if you are looking to make money by blogging then you need to build reputation.

How to build good reputation?

There are many ways you can build reputation.

• Interact with your readers, visitors and customers.
• Build a network of loyal visitors, build forums to interact further.
• Reply to readers comments and encourage discussions.
• Giveaway freebies, everyone loves freebies.
• Don’t spam them, this includes spamming there emails, co-blogger,etc.
• Act as a authority of your niche, not just ‘act’ but ‘be’ the authority of your niche.
• Don’t talk about, promote or teach anything that you yourself don’t know much.
• Do not spam your blog with lots of advertising, pop ups, pop under, etc
• Write valid, up-to-date, interesting, thought provoking, controversial and informative posts.
• Warn readers of other scammers, illegal stuff, harmful affects of certain ‘illegal’ or ‘immorale’ subjects in your niche.
• Don’t start selling as soon as you see your first few positive visitors. You will make them run away too.
• Be patient, don’t push yourself. When the time comes you will see good results.
• Join other webmaster,make money online and blogging forums, or any forums related to your niche.
• Interact with other bloggers, comment on there blogs, follow them on twitter, etc.
• Advertise your blog and get traffic, try to convert each of those visitors into RSS subscribers.
• find out your own ways to earn better reputation among your niche. The possibilities to gain respect are endless but hard. Don’t quit trying.

It takes years to build reputation, but a mistake to kill it!

Yes it’s true. It takes years to build good reputation and a single mistake could kill everything!  So if you are building a good reputation i would advice you to stay clear of anything that is wrong.

This includes staying away from ‘bad sources’ and people affiliated with it. One small mistake and there goes the rep. Since things in the Internet spread like wildfire you won’t even know how far and quick rumours can travel!

That is why companies like horizon sue there own customers for tweeting things. But i doubt you will have the money to sue all badmouthers. So buckle up and stay focused on your goals.

Reputation = money

That is the secret of most brands. No matter how close the competitors are. Or how better there products and pricing are, if a brand has reputation. Then they can merely sell anything they want. There are lots of real life examples of this. And the same applies on Internet Marketing as well.

Which brings  us to our lesson. Reputation is money. Without reputation you can’t make money, well not legally at least. So before you start building money, build relationships and reputation. Get respect and become the athuroty in your niche. Before you know it, money will start coming your way.

Hope you understand the value of reputation and how it can change your buisness. Consider this scenario as a Game and reputation takes you a level higher. And bad reputation will drop your level. It’s up to you now, how you play the game and write your own story.

good day and happy rep building,

SJ

That is the first most question i will ask before you go further. Blogging as you know is very popular and almost every day there are around 50,000 new blogs born. This makes blogging a very popular activity among people. However most people blog only for a purpose. Mostly for personal reasons.

While on the other hand some blog for earning a income. There are also blogs from corporate companies that blog about their products and services. There is a recent trend among blogs and there usage. Many people are now using blogging platforms for various purposes and blogs are no longer used as blogs. You can use a blog to start a arcade site, a article directory, a wiki, a link directory, the list is long. But blogging is still the king of online discussion.

Advantages of blogging – why i blog!

As you already know blogging is becoming quite easy. The best part about it is that anyone can get a free blog on blogger, wordpress or any other service they want to use. So starting a blog is very easy and cost free. There are many advantages of blogging . These are the advantages of blogging in my own theory. In other words i love blogging because of these advantages.

1. Blogging means ‘web log’. In other words you are your own boss. You don’t need to listen to others or follow instructions. Blogging lets you to express yourself. Which is why you can blog about anything you want. On the other hand writing requires you to follow specific guidelines.
2. Blogging for passion. In other words blogging without the intention to make money. Blogging gives you the platform to talk freely and you don’t have to scatter around the Internet to express yourself.
3. You have full control of your time and your blog. There are no time limits and you can post whenever you want and whenever you want.
4. When you blog – you talk. Everyone is free to read your blog posts and your thoughts, articles and work is open to the world. You get all the credit.
5. Blogging helps you build a brand and gains loyalty among your readers
6. Your blog can be customized and optimized to be presented in any way you like, giving you the advantage of how you want your blog to look.
7. Blogs are search engine friendly, no matter what your article is about – Google will surely pay you a visit.
8. Blogs are easy to create and maintain. Some blogs have drag and drop features and you can get pretty much anything you want from your blog.
9. Blogging is irrespective of time and place for both the readers and the authors.
10. Blogging allows you to participate and socialize with your visitors and readers.
11. Blogging helps you to further develop your writing skills. The feedback you get on your blog posts can help you gain more knowledge and shape your skills and talents.
12. While blogging you discover amazing ideas and innovative solutions to problems and issues. You share your knowledge with the world at the same time others share theirs with you.
13. Blogging involves social media and encourages discussion. Blog posts spread like fire on the Internet.
14. If your blog is regular and informative, then the power of ‘word of mouth’ is at your disposal
15. you can create polls and surveys among your visitors. You can do lots of research without actually annoying your visitors
16. Blogs have plugins and widgets that makes blogging very competitive among all other methods of website development and discussions on the Internet.
17. Blogging gives you the advantage of ‘earn while you learn’ and ‘learn while you earn’. The potential is endless.
18. Blogging saves time – you create, edit and publish posts direct from your blogs. You don’t have to go through 10 different sources in order to publish your work.
19. Blogging saves you money – some features of blogging and its compatibility gives you the ability to have any functionality on a blog. Thus saving you money from buying other resources such scripts,etc
20. Your blog lets you experiment different possibilities.
21. Blogging gives you self satisfaction. The biggest reason why many bloggers blog is for self-satisfaction. When you feel happy and when your hard work starts paying , no matter what purpose it is. The feeling is great!
22. Blogging gives you the opportunity to make money and educate your readers.
23. Blogging keeps you busy, if you are bored or don’t have anything better to do you can always blog!
24. Blogging makes you self discipline. You learn lots of things such as time management, proper way of communications and sometimes even anger management when you get spammed continuously!
25. Blogging gives you the power of online and offline networking. Not just that it also lets you fight a system and ask for changes. Blogging is ultimate tool for freedom.

Tell me why you blog?I hope these advantages encourages you to start blogging if you don’t do that already!

Take care and keep in touch, till then have a good day,

SJ

well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

Its almost the same thing as a artist without imagination, a road without cars or a job without payment. Many blog owners who are successful knows the power of these small little files known as plugins and usually those who fail at blogging are the ones that never experimented with plugins.

Which is why you must know about your possibilities and expansion into the blogging world. WordPress is a excellent open source platform and the best fact about it that their are endless possibilities for creating your ‘dream blog’ with wordpress and getting almost any feature you want working in a wordpress blog and all this is possible because of plugins and widgets.

So i prepared this list of 10 most useful and must have plugins for any wordpress blogger. Also i have included 5 bonus plugins which are not a ‘must’ but helps in enhancing your blogs!

[Please note that the list is arranged alphabetically and all plugins are equally important]

1 . Akismet

Akismet is from the creators of wordpress itself and it is already available to you by default, i can’t imagine surviving without akismet. Akismet blocks and stops Spam in your blog which is a necessity for any active blog!

Akismet is free to use and it requires a API key for it to work, you need to register at wordpress.com and get a account, this account also grants you a AIP key to use with akismet anywhere on a wordpress blog.

2. Add to Any : Share/Bookmark/Email Button

This is one of my favorite plugin, this plugin is has been powering my blog and spreading it viraly since the start. The best part about is that its not ‘visibly abusing’ to your visitors and just a small button on the end of each post which has resulted in so many sharing and caring for my posts. I recommend this plugin to any blogger because it is a viral one!

3. All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is the backbone of my blog, its the life of my works because this is the plugin that has been generating endless amount of organic Google friendly traffic for me every month.

AIOS pack enables you to easily add keywords, title, description and meta tags to your post making it very search engine friendly, this plugin is a MUST if you want to generate organic Search engine traffic.

Using this plugin i am ranking in top 10 on Google for many keywords and my search engine traffic is never less then 300 unique every month from Google for those keywords, which is a very big thing for me considering that this blog is only 2 months old.

4. Comment Luv

Spread the luv!

Comment luv is a plugin that enables you to give back to your readers, using this plugin the people who comment on your post has the ability to use a snippet of their own blogs feed, which means that they would love to comment on your blog! This plugin helps you get social – in few short words it will increase your comments count because their are people who loves comment luv blogs.

You need to register on the comment luv website to get it, but its free so welcome to the community!

5. Comment Relish

Ever wondered how to get loyal visitors? or increase the amount of your RSS subscribers? or better yet thank your visitors for participating on your site?

Well Comment Relish does just that! It will send a automated personalized message, just like a auto-responder from aweber or getresponse, the best thing about it is that it won’t spam your commentators, it only sends the message once per email. So that means you can thank them for commenting on your blog when they do it for the first time only!

I use comment relish to remind those readers of subscribing to my RSS feeds and to follow me on twitter, this is working like a charm and is really helping in the growth of my blog at the same time not spamming the commentators to death.This plugin is also free.

6. Contact Form 7

This is a must have plugin for every blog, specially for every new blog!

Contact form solves a very big issue among wordpress bloggers which is having a ‘contact form’ using which your visitors could contact you, it builds your own branded contact form which does the job very well, you can add and include custom fields and can have a form about anything you want, be it feedback forms, contact us form or selling advertising on your site. Plus its really easy to use and insert on your pages.

7. Google Analytic Plugin

If you don’t have this plugin in your blog then you rather stop blogging right now!

Google analytic plugin easily connects your Google analytic account and wordpress blog, this plugin is important because you want to know each and everything that is happening with your blog and the outside world. Tracking your visitors and then optimizing yourself to perform better is what every successful blogger does and this is the sole reason why you need to use Google analytic.

8. Google XML site maps

Since Search Engine traffic what matters most for any blogger, you need to provide the search engines with a ‘passage’ to each and every corner of your blog!

This is where this plugin comes into play, smartly designed this plugin creates XML site maps which tells the google bot of the whereabouts of your pages, posts and every single corner of your site, the more the bot crawls the more higher are your chances of SE traffic and higher rankings!

9. TweetMeMe Button

Twitter is perhaps the most viral social media till now and its really easy to take advantage of this!

Tweetmeme button makes it easy for your visitors to tweet/retweet your blog posts and spread the word, the one thing i noticed is that tweetmeme button gets more attention then any other share/save buttons which makes it viral and infectious! This is also used by industry giants such as mashable and tech crunch and it usually creates a twitter trend for them, so why not take advantage of this?

10. Digg this Button

Digg is very well known to everyone, which is why you need a ‘digg this’ button to get your articles and blog posts on the top!

The best use of digg this button is getting your posts indexed fast, believe it or not but search engines loves ‘social buzz’ and digg has helped me to get some of my posts indexed in less then 12 hours which is very good and welcoming news for us bloggers!

Bonus Plugins

These plugins are not a ‘must have’ but their use are really fantastic which is why they are making to this list!

1. DoFollow plugin

This plugin removes the evil ‘nofollow’ tags from your blog and thus increasing the amount of attention and comments you get on your blog, but be warned you need to use ‘akismet’ if you want to use this one because it will double the amount of spam comments you receive!

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feeds are the heart of any blog and having subscribers to your feeds is important! This plugin detects all possible ways to access your feeds and redirects them to feed burner making it easy for you to track your subscribers.

3. Subscribe to Comments

This plugin gives the option to your visitors to subscribe to other comments on a blog, thus increasing the amount of comments and social interaction among your readers.

4. Top Commentators widget

More like a widget then a plugin but you need the plugin installed and activated in order for the widget to work, it enables you to show your top 5,10 or any number of commentators on your blog, this creates a competitive spirit among your readers and increases the amount of social interaction and comments on your blog. The widget can be displayed easily on your sidebar, footer or any widgetized space using the widget tools from your blog dashboard.

5. WP-Cumulus

Evey wordpress blog uses tags, but displaying those tags in your sidebars looks very ugly.This plugin makes your tags look more organized and cool, by displaying them in a flash embedded 3-d space.

That’s all for the top plugins but remember you need to add them to your plugin directory and adjust the settings of each individually, and respect the copyrights of the plugins.

Also many plugins might not go with your current themes so you will have to test them before that, and some themes requires certain plugins to be functional such as limit post plugins or page navigation plugins, these plugins are common which is why they are not included in the list, these plugins are supplied by the theme owner or designer.

P.S i don’t like spam and i don’t recommend you to abuse any of these plugins and spam!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Its not even 2 months since the launch of my blog, and recently Google made me very happy!

My blog is now PR 2, which is a very welcome news for me and am working on it to take it to even more higher my goal is PR5 or higher so the journey is going in the right direction so far.

In case you don’t know what PR[page rank] is, it is a way Google uses to show the popularity of a web page, my domain i.e sameerjoad.com is currently PR2. I will write soon about how you can increase your PR and gain good back links to rocket your popularity.

I am not yet sure if i should start selling advertising on the blog but time will tell.

Also as a surprise to all of you guys, the blog is now a ‘DoFollow’ which means that when you comment on the post and submit links, then those links are worth to the search engines,which will increase your page rank so participate as much as you can. In case you don’t know links you submit via comments on blogs have a ‘noFollow’ attribute assigned to them, which tells the search engines that these links are not valuable, you can remove this ‘nofollow’ attribute by using this plugin and making your blog a ‘DoFollow’ which means that your readers all benefit when they participate in the discussion, a win-win situation for all so why not?

To check weather a blog is ‘Dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’ right click the comment authors name[the authors name is where the link submitted by him is located], and click properties, you will see something called ‘link relation’ if it says ‘external’ then the blog is a ‘Dofollow’ and those links are worth it, and if its a ‘nofollow’ or ‘external nofollow’ then commenting on those blogs won’t benefit your search engine rankings in any way! To come to think of it, many people comment on top blogs including john chow etc to gain link backs, but no one knows that most of those blogs are ‘nofollow’ so their is no point in comment just for link backs!

Anyways keep reading and thanks a lot for all the comments and feedback, if you guys have anything to say contact me on sj@sameerjoad.com or use the contact form [don't spam]

EDIT : The recent PR update of October 2009, did not affect the PR of my blog,
it is still PR2 so i guess i should start more link building now:P

Update June 2011: I have removed ‘Dofollow’ links due to too many spam comments that i get, i guess its not worth it since people just want a free back-link and don’t genuinely read the blog or the post. Regarding the PR, it has dropped to PR 1. But i guess it should be PR 2+ in the next update if it ever comes. Google removed PR from its webmaster tools and asked webmasters to concentrate on other things then the PR, so i guess PR isn’t of any importance anymore.

I will add more features soon so stay tuned.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

I am sure you must have heard pretty much from every single guru, affiliate and successful online entrepreneur that the money is in the list, but what exactly is a list? How can you build one too? How can you convert huge traffic into your opt in subscribers and then later convert those subscribers into your paying customers?

These are the things to remember when building a list, but more importantly building a profitable list so you can really supercharge your ‘make money online‘ dreams:

What you will need in order to start building a list:

1. An Auto Responder: Building a list requires a few tools in order to get started. The first and the most important one is an auto responder. Auto responders are were you will store your list, build campaigns & send messages to your list. Auto responders are the backbone of your list building efforts & it’s important to get a auto responder that has good delivery rates, lots of features, good support and of course is within your budget. The industry leaders currently are Aweber & GetResponse, which are the most preferred auto responders used by internet marketers. However Aweber & GetResponse can be costly if you are just starting out with an average of $200 for 500 subscribers annually. For starters i would recommend Mail Chimp, another good auto responder but most importantly a great tool for building a list without a budget. Mail Chimp has a free for life plan where you can store up to 2000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is good enough for now, so register at MailChimp if you are starting out or consider Aweber and GetResponse if you want more options.

2. A Landing Page or Blog: Now that you got a auto responder ready & fired up its time to start getting those subscribers. But of course where will you send your traffic? You will obviously need a site/blog or else a squeeze page (also known as landing page) to send your traffic to where your optin lead capture forms are (alongside your offers). If you don’t have one already then you will need a web host (i recommend Hostgator – use coupon code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ to get 25% off) along with a domain (get them at Goddady or Namecheap). Once you got everything set up, all you need to do is set up your squeeze pages & plugin your opt-in forms.

3. Traffic: Its all about traffic when it comes to building a list. Once everything is set up you will need to start driving quality & targeted traffic to it. Start getting the word out, promote your page via social media, bookmarking, etc. Once you start building traffic then read my post on how to retain traffic to your site.

List Building Ethics:

Now that everything is set up its time to convert the traffic to subscribers & then the subscribers to paying customers.

1. Know what a mailing list is: A list is basically the collection of all the people [their emails and other optional information] who have opted to receive messages from you, always remember that manually entering a huge list of emails into your auto responder is not actually a list and their is definitely no money in that too, because what you will be doing that way is spamming those emails which could be very bad later on. So never spam your list or create a list without the permission of those people who are added into your list, make sure your list is 100% opt-in. On a site note it will be hard to find a good auto responder that will just simply allow you to add a list and send them mails. Another thing to take care of is that importing a large list can cost you a lot & migrating from one auto responder to another can result in loss of your subscribers.

2. Bribe your visitors: When it comes to building a list, most successful internet marketers actually ‘bribe’ their traffic into submission, they do this by giving attractive free offers which results in the traffic and the people to sign up for the list, those offers must be highly niche related, free and very tempting. If you obey this single rule you will convert more then 90% of your traffic if its highly targeted, so obey this golden rule, bribe them.

3. Write a good landing page copy: The landing page is the most important aspect of a list, its the page where the traffic comes to, this page should be able to convert that traffic into opt-in subscribers. So making your landing page as informative, short, tempting and attractive , the more will be the conversions. Read my post on how to make good landing pages for more help.

4. Don’t be a dictator, Respect Freedom: Give your list members the ability to unsubscribe, make sure they are able to contact you, so maintain a separate email for that activity. Give them valuable information but not all at once, keep them waiting so that they don’t run away, spoon feed them step by step, don’t be Hasty and don’t talk always about a product, i.e don’t always do promotions with your list, send emails that are worth reading and related to your niche, involve them in your work. Don’t annoy them by sending messages every single hour or day for that matter, maintain a gap and monitor your lists.

5. Engage & build a community: Once you have a list which is growing continuously, there are a few things to remember, now that the traffic to your landing page are your subscribers, its time to treat them as ‘humans’ and not ‘bots’ anymore, this is the most important step where everyone else fails. If you read point no.2 i told you to bribe them, but its actually that they are forced to join and after they get what your giving free, they are more likely to unsubscribe to maintain low spam in their in-boxes. This step is very important because once someone joins your list, your ultimate goal is to NOT let them unsubscribe, once you follow this the money will flow automatically, because you must win the trust of your subscribers and not make them feel as yet another group of email list which you keep spamming and try selling your products too.

Bonus Tip for bloggers: If you find some of your list members being inactive then consider deleting them from the list to free up space for other subscribers, this can help you save a lot of money. If you are building a list via your blog or website rather then a squeeze page then consider getting pop up domination, it is a very powerful tool that can help you get up to 300% conversion rates.

This should be enough for now for list building basics. Keep building that list, next time i would get more deep into the topic. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Traffic is the most precious asset of any website, blog or online business, and almost all new start ups fail in protecting traffic loss, which results in their business being paralyzed before they could even start to the fullest potential.

But the most important thing is, that those who fail in this are mostly the ones that do not realize the difference between ‘real people’ and the term ‘traffic’, but i can’t blame them, because the so called gurus teach them about traffic as if it is some bots which will pump us money like a ATM, but on the other hand those who learn about the value of traffic and understands the needs and requirements of those people who visit their sites and then use the learned information to optimize their service are the ones that will really make money online.

So keeping that in mind, i did my research and found lots of interesting things and facts that will make traffic coming to your site vanish. So this is how you can ‘not’ lose traffic from your sites, do and don’t of blogging. Remember making money blogging isn’t rocket science, all you need to do is learn by trial & errors.

1. Less advertising: Don’t Offer any advertising on your website or blog if its less then 30 days old.

2. Stick with your niche: Make sure your website carters to the needs of the subject on which its built upon, i.e stick with your niche don’t wander off.

3. Don’t fake comments: Do not do fake comments on your posts or add fake subscribers to your feed burner.

4. Engage: Participate actively in communication by replying to comments on your posts.

5. Be Original: Make sure your content is original, fake content of any sort, even PLR and MRR articles are useless and it could hurt your search engine rankings as well.

6. Don’t annoy: Never Do pop-up or pop-under advertisements, its a very well known fact that visitors hate the pop ups and are tend to run away from a site that spams the visitor with tonnes of pop ups.

7. Respect the Big G: Obey the rules of service providers, advertisers and other programs that you are affiliated with, for example AdSense, do not offer them or ask your users to click those ads or use words such as ‘pick a link’ etc, such terms can get you banned not just from the program but from the search engines as well. Use words such as ‘sponsor ads’ instead. Getting banned form search engines means NO traffic.

8. Build links & community: Make sure you submit your site to all top search engines, directories, etc. Write ezine articles for article directories and get back-links to your site, maintain a must follow blogs list and use them to build more back-links. Check out making money by writing to find more useful article sites that you can also use to build a community & make money at the same time.

9. Don’t spam or scam: Do not spam on social media sites or any site for that matter, set your goal every month or week and do not deviate from those, never try to scam or make money illegally, such things might be bountiful for some time but in the long run your in loss. Read how to detect online scams to find out more about what you shouldn’t do in order to be scam & spam safe.

10. Get a new theme: Make sure your website design and layout is user friendly, do not use too many dark or eye irritating colors, get better themes. Attractive themes means more loyal visitors, take a look at these amazing themes.

11. Cloak your links: Cloak your links, do not start using affiliate banners in your advertising space. Get the pretty link wordpress plugin if you have a wordpress blog to automatically cloak all outbound links, just like i do on my blog.

12. Don’t do flash: Don’t use flash banners and too much flash work, search engines don’t detect flash as good as they do words, even if you get your flash content indexed in search engines you will have a hard time ranking them.

13. Build a List: Make sure you offer your visitors RSS feeds and subscriptions, its always advisable to start building a mailing list since the start, you can also create a custom landing page and use list building techniques to build a huge list of opt in subscribers. Offer Free reports, ebooks or products to attract more subscribers. Take a look at my article on how to build a list. Get a auto responder which are the most important list building tools, the top 2 in the industry are aweber & getresponse.

14. Don’t buy traffic: Do NOT waste real money doing blog promotions, blogs with content are not worth promoting with real money on services such as the ‘get paid to’ or ‘opt in lists’ or even the custom ‘traffic’ packages from sites, such traffic is pointless because for a blog the most important traffic is the readers and those who are interested in the niche you are working in, Google AdWords and other advertising networks should be used to promote affiliate products instead.

15. Keep your blog alive: Remove the first default post on the blog, the blog-roll and make sure you adjust your plugins and widgets, this is the step where most ‘new comers’ fail in blogging. Read my post on the must have plugins for wordpress bloggers.

16. Customize your site: Customize your Error pages to give it more professional look, add a custom favicon and custom blog logos to fit your overall blog design. If you don’t know how to add a favicon to your site then read about it on my post.

17. Let them search: Offer search in your site and make sure its visible by the visitor, this helps the reader find what he is looking for.

18. Be Social: Offering links to your other accounts including social networks and twitter is always advisable, this helps build a relation with the visitor and could actually gain you loyal readers.

19. Use a traffic retainer: When users exit from your site,its up to you, if you would like to include a ‘exit pop up’ that could ask your visitors to check out another offer, etc. But this is not advisable for normal content sites and blogs, as it would not work and is most effective on landing pages. Check out this amazing pop up plugin for wordpress blogs if you are interested.

20. Use google Analytic: always analyze your traffic on a daily bases, note down the visitor trends and the change, keep yourself updated to your traffic sources, top landing pages and use this information to optimize your service.

21. Write for people not for bots: Remember what i said about the term ‘traffic’ and the ‘actual traffic’ ? always keep in mind that people visiting your site are real and not bots, so give them real things and make your posts look real, as if your giving a speech or talking to someone on email, the more personal and targeted you get the more the reader will read further. Read how to seo for beginners to learn more about mixing SEO with real content.

22. Be simple: Don’t get too professional, their are many people on the Internet and depending on your niche, specially on a ‘make money online‘ niche, 80% of the visitors to your site might be new comers and they will have a hard time understand your hard use of terms and concepts, so break down your content and information to make sure everyone can understand

23. Give credits: Most traffic is attracted to ‘sources’, which means nothing else but a list of ‘top’ services or ‘top tools’ etc, such source posts are always indexed quickly on search engines and study shows that users spend more time on ‘source’ posts then on other average posts.

24. Check your work: Make sure your posts are spelling free, the font and color of your font are readable, divide your content in paragraphs and/or point-wise this would give a more organized look and feel, which will guarantee a longer stay.

25. Make a point: Highlight and bolder the area or words that are of importance, the semi title and the title, use more eye catching terms for your title of the post. Post title should ALWAYS be search engine keyword related, for example someone looking for ‘twitter tools’ are likely to search with keywords such as ‘twitter tools’ ‘top twitter tools’ etc, so make your posts with similar titles, don’t use titles that are very long, for more information check out my previous posts on how to write great articles and content and how to make money writing.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Google has always been a source of income both directly & indirectly for many internet marketers. Making money online with AdSense being at the top of that list. Google AdSense is the second hand of the Google advertising network and the twin of Google AdWords, which means AdSense and AdWords works hand in hand for Google.

When advertisers invest their money using AdWords, the publishers makes their money by displaying those AdWords ads using AdSense, so basically AdSense is huge and the possibly to earn money with AdSense is huge as well, but that also means that you are going to be competing with thousands of other publisher for the ad share.

In this post in my AdSense on-the-go-guide, am going to explain step by step process of starting your AdSense journey by registering a account that is guaranteed to be activated within 24 hrs. The post will basically show you how to get an Google AdSense account easily.

Step 1: Register for a blogger account

You must be wondering why am asking you to register for blogger instead of AdSense,well their is no catch its very simple trick and i will tell you why in a while.

But first go to blogger.com or blogspot.com (both are the same) and register for a free blog. This is done because blogger is a Google service and we are going to use this newly created blog of Google to get a fast AdSense account since Google is becoming very strict with admission to publishers in AdSense.

Don’t worry you don’t have to use blogger blog service its completely up to you on where you use your AdSense account, but Google will check your account details once you register and it will inspect your site which you register with, so if you use a blogger blog while registering it just makes it easy for Google to accept you faster then other sites since its their own blogging service, your account will not get rejected this way. You can also make money blogging on blogger if you cannot afford hosting.

Step 2: Register for a AdSense account

Here we go, before you can actually start earning money with AdSense you will need a AdSense account, AdSense is free for all as long as you accept the terms and conditions of Google and its advertising programs. To register for your AdSense account click here.

Now see the following screen shots on what to do once your there. Click image to Enlarge.

Adsense setup

Step 3: What information to fill

Remember to fill in all the details correctly because your dealing with Google here, don’t think you can fool them because your only fooling yourself. If your not 18 yet i recommend registering a account with someone else’s name, like your dad or mom or elder brother, but make sure you enter their details as required, because google don’t use paypal they send checks so the information should be very correct and make sure they have a bank account.

then see the second screen shot, Click image to enlarge.

Adsense setup

Read google policies and all the terms and conditions before signing up, don’t blame google later if you face issues.

NOTE: Never try to use multiple account with AdSense, if your already a AdWord advertiser or have a adsense account previously registered then you won’t need a new account you can use those settings for AdSense as well,  if google catches you with breaking rules or multi accounting then it may result in your accounts being suspended and all earnings whatever you have earned so far will be credited back to the advertisers or to Google. So if your registering with a account with your dads name, make sure he does not already have one, because not only you will get your account suspended you will do the same on his other account as well.

Once you are done with all of these steps, google will send a mail to your registered email id or google account id, if you registered as shown then your account should be activated within 24 hours.

That is all about getting started with adsense and registering a account without problems, in the next post i will show you how to manage and set up your ad units and more.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

The most important ingredients of sales letters are given below, i advice you that if you cannot do it yourself you can always find someone else to write it for you in freelancing sites, but its much more better if you actually did this yourself, as its going to help you understand your potentials and explore your talents

Every sales letter, review and article must follow these strategies.

Creating a killer title

The most important thing of any sales letter is the title or the header, this should be something very catchy, something that is relevant to the topic and something that is bound to make your visitors read further below and not just leave your website

If its a email that your sending to your list then you must remember that your main aim is to make sure the person you send it to actually opens it and don’t just mark it as spam or delete it, so your subject line must be very catchy and should create a tendency among the read to open it.

For example if your selling a weight loss product then subject line should be something like this,

“[name] i lost xx pounds in xx days, want to know my secret?”

or

“[person x] revels how she went from fat to slim in xx days”

it could be anything but it should be creative!

The body

After your title is created and you are sure that your visitors are bound to read further, make sure you use the following strategies in your body of the sales letter, review, article etc.

Create hope among the readers

Everyday many people search the Internet for something because they have ‘hope’, be it ‘hope’ to lose weight, ‘hope’ to make money online, ‘hope’ to discover a secret formula that could change their life, ‘hope’ to find free stuffs, yes everything has to do with hope, even tho 90% or more of them will never put the things they learn into action and start finding ‘hope’ again, its hard to admit but everyone on the net who seeks wealth or wants to fulfill their dreams are ‘lazy’, of course i am lazy too, but if people weren’t lazy they could be doing something in real life as well, but their are always the dreams of making quick cash, and yet another fact to consider is that on the Internet, there is no quick cash, yet their are people who will have the hopes that someone or something will show them how to make quick cash

And this my friend is the secret weapon which each and every online marketer needs to succeed, HOPE, give your prospects hope, that their is a way and tell them what they want to hear, even if your product requires lots of hard work creating hope gets you sales and that’s the important part to be successful and make a living on the web, you can create hope in many ways, mostly on informational product, you can show them how others who had used your product succeeded and how they can too, give them that hope which would make them buy your product instantly!

Creating Urgency

The Internet is growing fast, everything changes within days, there was a time when Internet was not even known, and now half of the world is online, you can never expect anything to happen on the net with a prior notice,things come and go and it changes the entire web, just few years ago few not so net savvy people got creative and they invented something which sold for billions to google, this is the net and that’s what you must tell your prospects, create a sense of urgency.

I am sure you have seen sites that say “offer expires in xxx days” or ” xxx copies left before price is back to xxx$” etc, all these creates urgency among the buyers, and this is what you must do too, create urgency but always remember don’t fake!

Most people fake this, they put 10 copies left and that statement stays their for days, and people are not so dumb to not recognize that, it shows that either your product sucks and don’t sell or your just faking it to get sales, instead of doing that be fair and create a real deadline.

Be the authority

Yes that’s right, always be the expert, no matter what you sell make sure your an expert on the subject, because their is no point in saying someone to buy a weight loss product while you know nothing about weight loss yourself, this could get you in problems if the prospects feels uncomfortable with your explanation or reviews.

Always be the authority and don’t show signs of not knowing anything, do your research before you start your campaign.

Be unbiased

Being unbiased basically means you show the prospects that you have reviewed the products and you are helping them make informed decisions about it, never show that you have any affiliation with a product you promote be the ‘word of mouth’ not a pesky sales guy that wants to sell, but a customer who wants to help others make a decision.

This factor can help you gain the trust and hope of your prospects which in return creates you sales.

Cause Fear

Don’t forget that every business has competition, and this is how you kill competition, by fear – no not the “buy or die” type of fear. lol

The fear that if they buy something which you offer from other sites or people can be a big disadvantage to them as compared to your services, consider someone wanting to buy a weight loss product from your competitors, you can instill fear in your visitors that they lose a big deal if they buy anything else on the market, as your product has better satisfaction rate, better value for money, better results etc and you can always provide proofs to support it.

Be unusual

If your selling your own products then the fear and unbiased strategies might not work, but their is something new called the ‘unusual factor’, what this means is encourage your visitors and prospects ‘to NOT buy your products’.

I know you must be thinking wtf? but your wrong, saying something like “buy this[this being your product] and you will make xxx dollars tonight” will never sell that product, but instead saying “don’t buy this unless your sick of other products and scams”.

This factor shows that your not looking to make sales your showing them that they had tried everything on the net, and they should try everything on the net, but finally nothing would work and that’s why they should buy your product as you offer something different that is more promising.

But always remember don’t boast about your product, by convincing your visitors to buy and try other products on the net that you KNOW will fail them will create a sort of loyalty and that could be very useful for you.

Offer goodies

A standalone product never sells, that’s the fact and it can’t be changed, everyone knows that to make one thing work you need another, to earn money online you can’t do it with just a website,which in return requires domain, hosting, advertising, list building, ebook creation, many many things that all bundle up together to make the 1 product you sell ‘work’.

But instead you can always offer them everything, show them the resources, offer free informational products, PLR, MRR,etc this shows that you are not just providing your secrets etc but everything they could possibly need, but of course you don’t need worry about goodies if your promoting a product since the owner always bundle it up with something.

Protect your links

Maybe its not a big deal, but some people have a tendency to not to buy things which affiliates promote, they think its bad and think your only trying to make money by selling them some over hyped stuff, and how they find this out is usually with the link you provide them,always remember to cloak your links to avoid that issue.

And if your selling your own products then protecting your links is essential, specially if your not using any script to power your website, their are some smart ass people who try to find your ‘paypal after purchase redirection link’ which is of course the landing page after a customer buys or makes payment, if your using simple html, then your losing lots of money to links theft and your product is stolen.

Provide security and trust

Many a times, you lose your sales because someone thinks your site isn’t safe to enter their private information, this can be covered by offering SSL encryption pages [ask your hosting provider on how to get it] or by using a already established service like paypal etc.

But how does this step help you create killer sales letter?

Well often you have seen sites or basically sales letters that asks after some time to provide information to buy that product, but people always feel unsafe and that’s where the problem comes in for you as the seller, you can always include certificates like those of geo trust or validation/verified ones form other services, but make sure these are valid and not fake, because posting fake ones means your just losing everything.

Also another thing is to create trust, how you can do this is by showing your prospects testimonials of others who have used your services or products, or by asking other online marketers to review your products and provide your customers a valid link where they can check it, something like ‘read what person x thinks about my product etc this creates more sales for you and builds loyalty

Offering money back guarantees and other services gains trust as well.

Offer trials

If your site is about a service that offer subscription or a product that can be shown with a demo then do that, offer your customers trials which can give them the first hand experience of what they are likely to expect if they bought your service.

Give offers like ‘first month free’ or ’50% off the first year’ etc, this creates a sense of urgency as well.

The creative conclusion

The last few lines are always the important ones if someone has read your entire mail or sales letter, making sure you make it creative and once again reason why its important for them to buy your product could be a changing factor.

Writing post scripts, i.e PS at the bottom of the letter or page and giving 2-3 killer notices or facts could gain you extra sales as well,offering last moment bonus can be a advantage too.

Well that’s all their is to making the ‘almost’ perfect sales letter, email campaign or even articles & reviews, do your experiments and see what fits you better and gets you better results.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad. Wishing you good luck,

SJ