Blogging

December Competition

Posted on December 4, 2007
Filed Under Monthly Competition | 3 Comments

Well, following November’s successful competition here at Blogging Web 2.0 it’s time to announce the competition for December!

As I won Monika’s competition at her Writer’s Manifesto Blog for last month, I decided to recycle the prize money and put it up here – in stages. I’m a great believer in giving back what I take out, so it seemed a really useful way of using the money rather than simply spending it on myself (ok, that’s also a nice thing to do with money…).

As the success of this blog is more important to me than a few case-loads of beers (aw, I like beer!) I talked it over with Monika and we decided that the best way to go would be to keep the competition the same for this month and keep attracting new guest bloggers to participate by posting as many (relevant and original) articles here as they can and the one who posts the most by midnight GMT 31st December 2007 will win the money. Simple!

How much money?

Well my first impulse was to put up the whole hundred, but then thought it would be better to split it over two months. That’s because Monika has put up the prize money for the first two months here and its well and truly my turn to do the same.

But…

This blog is still young and isn’t paying for itself yet. While it has done phenomenally well in it’s first two months of existence, it still needs more readers and contributors to push it along. It’s only by increasing our traffic stats sufficiently will we warrant touting for some advertising revenue to start making it pay. That will come soon enough as long as we keep working it as hard as we are and promoting it to the outside world as we’re doing.

So we decided it would be best to spin the money out over 3 months with December and January prizes at $30 and February at $40.

In three months we aim to be generating sufficient income from this blog so that further competitions will be sponsored from it’s own earning rather than from our own pockets – the way a business should be run!

So we ask all our current guest bloggers and friends to join in and post away as before and tell your blogging friend about us so more will join in the fun!

Remember, each post you publish here gets you a one-way back-link to your site. We’re already PR2 and the way we are going that will increase with the next round of Google page rank reshuffles so your existing as well as future links will grow in value as this site does. Plus as our traffic grows, more people will see your work and some to your blogs to see more, so everyone benefits from this.

So please get posting and anyone reading this who hasn’t already joined in, feel free to jump on board!

Monika and myself look forward to you joining us!

Terry Didcott
Blogging Web 2.o

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ClickBank

Posted on October 18, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money from blogging when it’s done properly.

One of the easiest ways of getting into affiliate marketing is by signing up with ClickBank and making use of their extensive database of digital products and services that can easily be downloaded by the customers that the affiliate marketer sends to the vendors’ sales pages. Of course, there are two sides to Clickbank - that of the vendor who has a digital product or products to sell and that of the affiliate marketer who will promote those products in order to earn commission from all sales that are generated from customers they introduced. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you’re going to be working as an affiliate in order to make money from those commissions.

Signing up with Clickbank is the easy part. It’s a straightforward form to fill in and you create your own user name and password. Then the fun begins…

To get the best from Clickbank, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing is to focus on niches that are nothing to do with Internet Marketing (IM). The niches you choose will depend entirely upon your own choices. These will be topics that you know enough about to be able to work with enthusiasm and drive in order to promote the products effectively. You will also need to have done your homework by researching keywords, consumer trends and other factors that will affect the potential of your chosen niche to make money for you.

You don’t actually need your own website to be an effective and highly profitable affiliate marketer. Many have done very well by using free hosted blogs and Squidoo lenses, so that choice is also yours.

One thing about having your own professionally hosted website is that you have total control on the content that will appear on your site, plus you will have the advantages of large storage and bandwidth as well as excellent guaranteed uptime that your host will provide.

Once you have decided on your medium, be it free hosted blogs or professionally hosted websites/blogs and you have found a potentially profitable niche, then you can start trawling through the vast database at Clickbank for products to promote.

There are some things you need to look out for when choosing which products to promote. Once you get the list of products displayed there is certain statistical information associated with each item that is of great value to you, if you know what each statistic means. Here is a summary of what you’ll see:

These figures should influence your choice of products to sell, as you might find it difficult to get many sales from those with heavy competition, so it might be wiser to stick to products that have lower gravity and % referred figures.

Once you choose your product to sell, there is a link to “create hoplink”, which is your unique affiliate code for that product. The resulting link you are given is what you should enter in your own promotional review of the product that you will write and publish on your blog or website. This is how Clickbank tracks which customers were referred to a product by which affiliate. A cookie with your hoplink is placed on a customer’s computer, so when they come to make the purchase, even if it is several days after being referred from your site, you are credited with the sale and will receive your commission.

This has a downside in that many people now use anti-spyware software on their computers, some of which block cookies from being set, which effectively negates your sale. Many affiliate commissions have been lost because of this and at present, Clickbank have not come up with a solution to the problem.

Still, don’t be put off by this. There is still a lot of money to be made from affiliate marketing using the services of Clickbank and the beauty of it is that once you have your site up and running with your carefully reviewed affiliate products displayed, your energies can then be directed to promoting your own site in order to attract as many people as possible, any number of whom could be potential customers just waiting to buy one of the products that you are promoting.

Here’s to your success!

Terry Didcott
Author and creator of Blogging Web 2.0

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All in a Days Work!

Posted on October 2, 2007
Filed Under Traffic Generation | Leave a Comment

Monika’s last post says it all, really. We’ve barely launched and already the interest in this blog is quite amazing.

But of course it is!

We’ve both worked hard on putting this blog together and populating it with some very fine articles. We’ve divulged information that a lot of internet marketers would rather we kept to ourselves. But both of us are of a similar mind when it comes to keeping secrets when it comes to how to make money online and run a successful business.

We both believe in full disclosure because we’re both honest and are smart enough to realise that if you want to do some serious traffic generation attract people to come and read your blog, you’d better darn well give them a real good reason to come! On top of that, the promise of more valuable information will give those readers every good reason to want to come back again and often!

So here at Blogging Web 2.0, you can see we take this business seriously!

Not only are we writing like demons to bring you, the reader a diverse and interesting collection of great articles, but we’ve opened it up to anyone who wants to add to the richness of this blog by signing up for free and joining us with a post or two of your own. As you can see, we’re serious enough to be giving away a nice $30 prize to the person who posts the most right here!

Despite the relative infancy of this site, we’re promoting it very hard in order to gain a good search engine ranking as well as a high volume of readers so that your posts will be seen by lots of people, creating a good deal of very targeted traffic back to your own blog.  Plus you get a free one-way inbound link to your blog in the bargain, which will stay in place for the lifetime of this blog - which will grow in importance over time. Meaning your links that you place with us now will grow in importance as this site surely will - as surely as day follows night. You can bet on it!

So you see this is also a platform for you to embark on some traffic generation of your own, blogging your way to success as surely as we do.

And from the vibrancy of our first (partial) month’s stats show, we’re very much on our way!

Terry Didcott
Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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Monthly Overview of Blogging Web 2.0 September 2007

Posted on October 2, 2007
Filed Under Monthly Competition, Monthly Overview | 9 Comments

Blogging Web 2.0’s first month launched with a bang. We had over 79,000 hits in a few short weeks and this is awesome for a brand new blog. We had some really good traffic and both Terry and myself are very happy with the amount of exposure we have received so far. Below is an overview of the traffic stats so you can see for yourself that I’m not kidding. Also we have as of now 4 new registered authors and all though they haven’t bothered writing a post yet, they might be tempted by the next announcement!

Blogging Web 2.0 pays $US 30 for the month of October 2007 via Paypal to the Author who posts the most amount of new posts. This includes all new registrations and MUST include a minimum of 2 posts per person for the month. Also, this doesn’t include either Terry or me by the way. I have decided to invest around 10% of my income from the prior month for my blogs competitions and this is number 1. Click here for the full competition rules.

Just remember that we don’t accept spam posts and non related posts and they will be moderated before they go live. I encourage you to get writing and as soon as the posts are written either Terry or myself will approve them and posts them for you. Basically if you write about Internet marketing related stuff, spell check your entries and use good grammar, you will have no trouble being posted.

For those who would like to participate, simply fill out the registration information and get posting ASAP. If we have a tie between several people, then we will divide the amount between them. This should be an incentive to just keep writing and and secure the win to you!.

All the guest bloggers will be featured constantly on a separate page with a short Biography and one link back to their website/blog. This is your change to get noticed and build some relationship with other bloggers and also earn some money as the winner.

Summary by Month
Month Daily Avg Monthly Totals
Hits Files Pages Visits Sites KBytes Visits Pages Files Hits
Oct 2007 4729 4260 513 163 129 25272 163 513 4260 4729
Sep 2007 2742 2415 267 95 1525 454178 2771 7765 70041 79545
Totals 479449 2934 8278 74301 84274

We look forward to seeing a healthy competition going on and read all the great posts you guys have up your sleeves.

Here is to an awesome month

signature.jpgMonika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0

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