New Site Deserve More Attention From Webmasters

Directory submission and link exchange are still among the most effective promotion methods to drive link popularity. When choosing which directory to submit and which site to swap links, we webmasters always focus on those established site that already get a certain ranking position in Google. With regard to those new sites, no matter how large their potential is, we always neglect them completely.

For a long time, I'm following the rule mentioned above. Now, I'd like to give it a second thought. Here by "give it a second thought", I don't mean to discard the rule. On the contrary, I strongly suggest we continue to strive to get our sites accepted by those established sites, because if those established directories, such as the most famous one, dmoz.org, accepts your sites, or a high PR site which operates in the same market niche with you is willing to exchange links with you, the promotion return to you will be huge. The key point that I want to make here is, at the same time that you strive to get your sites accepted by established websites, you'd better try to take advantage of new directories or websites as well. The reasons are as follows:

• Every site has its early days. Dmoz.org can give you a ranking boost in Google once you get accepted by them. But such promotion benefit couldn't be possible without Dmoz.org's continuous development. The same is true for those small directories or individual websites. If you can identify those news directories which have huge potential to be a second dmoz.org or those new sites which have all the qualities to become a second digg, the long-term promotion benefit is quite promising if you spend appropriate promotion efforts to them.
• Submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites can secure you a better position in those new sites. I wonder if you have the following experience. Your site finally gets accepted by a famous directory after several month's waiting. However, when you try to locate your link in that directory, it's over 10 clicks away from the home page. Wouldn't you feel such experience frustrating? If you submit your site to new directory, it's highly possible that your site appear on the first page under a certain category. The same is true for link exchange with new site. Some new sites are even willing to exchange homepage links with you, rather than parking your links in so called "sponsored links" page.
• Submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites has a higher possibility to get accepted. I'm also a webmaster, so I can understand how happy webmasters are when their links get accepted and how frustrated when their links get rejected. Link building is such a long lasting project that many webmasters give up half way. We webmasters really need acceptance joyfulness secured by submission to new directories or link exchange with new sites to keep us upbeat all the way to the final success for our link building project.

In brief, I strongly believe those new sites, especially those with huge potential to get good search engine ranking position and administered by a responsible and diligent webmaster, are quite worthwhile for promotion. When we are focusing on those established sites, why not divert some energy to them as well? 

Site Review: 2SubmitArticle.com

2 Submit Article (http://www.2submitarticle.com/) is a free manual massive article submitter. It's there to significantly reduce the author's article submission and social bookmarking time.

In summary, 2 Submit Article has at least the following unique strengths:

• Save your article submission time greatly. 2 Submit Article tries to include as many famous article submission and social bookmarking websites as possible, so that you don't need to open each site one by one and thus can spend more time writing high quality article. Moreover, with the drap-and-drop feature, you need to input your article information only once.

• Make memorizing tons of URLs unnessary. 2 Submit Article has already included those famous article submission and social bookmarking websites in its database. The only thing you need to do is select those article submission or social bookmarking websites you'd like to submit or bookmark your article

• Easy navigation between different sites. Since 2 Submit Article is an integrated platform, you can easily navigate both forward and backward to check your article submission or bookmarking status, which is impossible if you open each site and submit or bookmark your article from scratch each time

• Free to use, no pop-up or pop-under ads. 2 Submit Article is free to use forever. That doesn't mean 2SubmitArticle team won't spend any efforts upgrading and maintaining 2SubmitArticle.com. On the contrary, the whole 2SubmitArticle team devote themselves in launching new features and making 2 Submit Article better and better. In addition, there won't be any pop-up or pop-under ads to disturb your submission. That means, on the one hand, 2SubmitArticle.com its own won't place any pop-up or pop-under ads. On the other hand, if they find any article submission or social bookmarking site contains pop-up or pop-down ads, they'll remove it from our database.

What's more, 2 Submit Article just set up a shortcut to submit or bookmark your article. Simply drag the button 2 Submit Article has placed at the front of their front page to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. After that, whenever you want to submit or bookmark an article on some webpage, select a block of text as article summary and then click that button. Your basic article information will be auto-filled in the article submission and social bookmarking form, which will save your article marketing effort even further.

With so many unique strengths elaborated above, 2 Submit Article is relatively simple to use. Basically, you need to take just a few steps as follows:

• Select between Article Submission or Social Bookmarking
• Select websites you'd like to submit or bookmark your article
• Fill in the blanks with related information of your article
• Click "Submit" button
• Submit or bookmark your article through drag-and-drop process

Arriving here, do you still think you need to spend all of your time going to article submission or social bookmarking sites to submit or bookmark your article? Probably not! 2 Submit Article could be the ideal solution you need. Why not start your article submission or social bookmarking now?

(Before I stop, I also want to mention their review feature just launched. You could post your insightful review to any of the article submission and social bookmarking site that you have expertise at. To show their deep appreciation, 2 Submit Article offer you a FREE One-Way text back link for every valuable review you share.You can't miss it!)

What Matters When Choosing Affiliate Programs?

Currently, there are numerous affiliate programs out there. Common types of them include CPC, CPM, CPS, CPA and other creative derivatives. On the one hand, such a massive existence of affiliate programs creates great convenience for webmasters to monetize their websites. On the other hand, it makes some webmasters quite confused in face of so many affiliate programs and other webmasters eagerly to choose those affiliate programs that they assume will bring a largest return within a shortest timeframe.

Then, how about the actual performance of those affiliate programs with a presumably largest return in a shortest timeframe? Not quite satisfactory I have to say. The majority of webmasters actually haven't received any payment from their chosen affiliate programs at all. In order for us to achieve a better performance in affiliate advertising, I think it's quite crucial we discuss what matters when we choose affiliate programs. In my opinion, there are at least the following critical factors that we have to keep in mind before we publish affiliate ads in our websites. Although some of them may sound quite basic to you, I insist to list them out since it's right the basics that many of us forget with regard to affiliate programs choosing.

1. The traffic of the affiliate program's official website. By "traffic", I mean not only the amount of traffic, but also the source of traffic and the quality of traffic. I believe you all know the importance of traffic amount quite well. But for the source of traffic and quality of traffic, we usually forget to commit our due diligence. If the majority traffic of the affiliate program comes from only one source, we may have enough reason to question the stability of its traffic. If most traffic of the affiliate program comes from traffic exchange programs, the traffic has barely any value and the affiliate program's reputation is in serious doubt.
2. The reputation of the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs have a relatively long history and accumulated a fairly large traffic base. However, a large part of their history is notorious. You may find my users complain about various issues, for example, payment delay, service unavailable, ads untargeted and so on. It this is the case, you'd better not participate in it at the very beginning, no matter how large the commission rate is.
3. Ad unit design of the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs have very poor design in their ads. Even a beginner in web design may not feel comfortable when trying to appreciate their ads layout. Remember, if we don't feel good for the ad unit, the visitors of our websites won't, either. Thus, poor ad unit design may severely impact the Click-Through-Rate (CTR). It's important that we don't comprise on this just because of their attractive commission rate or other strengths such as short payment schedule. 
4. The diversity of ad units is also very important. In this regard, Google Adsense is the most outstanding example. It has provided webmasters nearly all choices of ad units that one could think of, so that webmasters have a great flexibility to seamlessly incorporate Google Adsense into their websites. In fact, it's quite common that webmasters use Google Adsense to better their websites' outlook.
5. Anti-cheating technique of the affiliate program. If the anti-cheating is not done quite well for an affiliate program, some "intelligent" guys could take advantage of any possible backdoors the affiliate programs to generate fake ad clicks without being caught. So those cheaters will receive payment although they didn't generate any income for the affiliate company's clients - those advertisers who let the affiliate company publish their ads for them. In the affiliate marketing field, the interests of advertisers, affiliate programs, and individual website publishers are closely tied together. If the interest of the advertisers is damaged, all stakeholders in the value chain, including you, will suffer in the end.
6. Chemistry between the affiliate program and your website. By "chemistry", I mean whether the ads fit your overall content and style of your website. For example, if the website talks about article writing, you may not want to publish ads about commercial electronics. If your websites requires the user to fill in a long registration form, you certainly don't want to pop-up ads to disturb your users.
7. Commission rate of the affiliate program. Don't get me wrong when I mentioned "commission rate". Here I mean you should think twice before lured away by extremely high commission rate. Where does your affiliate income come from? Although it's the affiliate program that pays you, it's the advertisers that offer any amount of advertising budget, out of which the affiliate program distributes a share to you. You know, no rational advertiser is willing to pay one penny more than the advertising price determined by the market. If an affiliate program offers an extremely high commission rate, chances are, either it's another case of business fraudulence, or the affiliate program is giving away money like an angel.

Of course, there are many other important factors impacting your decision with regard to which affiliate program to choose that I fail to cover here. However, it's always more important to know how than to know what. As long as you know that you need to think more carefully than before when choosing a suitable affiliate program for your website, the probability of your success in affiliate marketing is much higher.

Is Link Exchange or Directory Submission Dead?

Nowadays, there are a lot of so called Social Network Service (SNS) providers out there. Among them the most famous ones are Facebook and Twitter and other social media websites. All of them are characterized by being highly interactive and user-friendly.

This is good news for webmasters who are eagerly to get unique visitors to their websites. Previously, besides on-page optimization, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they accomplish this goal mainly by traditional link building methods including search engine submission, link exchange and directory submission. Now they have realized the effectiveness of those SNS websites in getting their websites exposed to a large group of potential visitors within a relatively short timeframe. Therefore, a lot of their promotion efforts are diverted to those SNS websites.

I don't want to say they are wrong. On the contrary, I'm always so amazed by webmasters' rapid and correct adaptation to any emerging technique in the field of internet marketing. Take Facebook as an example. Facebook takes the 2nd position in Alexa's Top 500 sites list, immediately after Google but before Yahoo. Some analysts even predict that in 2011 the traffic of Facebook will surpass Google. I'll be the stupidest webmaster in the world if I don't follow the trend to target adequate promotion efforts to Facebook like SNS sites.

However, spending adequate promotion efforts to SNS sites does not necessarily follow that we webmasters should neglect entirely the importance and effectiveness of link exchange and directory submission.(Here I didn't mention search engine submission, because with tons of free submission tool available here and there, search engine submission work is just a matter of mouse click and thus webmasters are still willing to do so.)

Google is still the number one. Generally speaking, you can expect that the major traffic of your website still comes from Google. Therefore, link exchange and directory submission still contribute to your promotion targeted at Google buzz, such as Page Rank (PR). Some people claim that Google has updated its PR algorithm so that the back links got from link exchange or directory submission are given less votes to your PR than before. I don't see that. Even if what they said is true, it's most likely because that Google has taken more factors into consideration when calculating each website's PR, so that the average vote resulted from each factor, such as back link, turns out to be less. Anyway, based on the current mainstream search engine technique represented by Google, it's unlikely that they can achieve a relatively fair search engine ranking result without giving serious consideration to back links. This fact won't change until a truly intelligent next generation search engine comes out.

On the other hand, although without question those SNS websites represented by Facebook are more effective in promotion than traditional web links or directories, they still have a long way to dominate the whole internet. Don't be over-enthusiastic in front of those fancy things in the internet. Do you still remember how people's over-enthusiasm resulted in the internet crisis around the year 2000? Do you still remember how video sharing websites burned venture capitalists' money like paper in the past few years? Stay calm my friends! We need to figure out what actual benefits the SNS websites will bring to us and take advantage of them in a thoughtful way. Apart from that, we should continue to invest out energy into traditional promotion efforts like link exchange and directory submission without being misled by exaggerated SNS buzzes.

In addition, SNS websites usually need your extra efforts before you start your actual promotion work. Put it in other words, you need to build your social network. The problem is, it takes you a huge amount of efforts to build such kind of social network. Clearly, you can't import your email or other contacts in real life into your social network directly, either because you don't want your real life friends or colleagues to know what you do in the internet or because seldom there are some people in your close life that have the same interest with you. Hence, you have to build this social network from scratch. The time it takes is at least comparable to, if not more than, that it takes you to exchanges links with other webmasters or submit your links to directories.

Arriving here, you probably got my point.SNS-targeted promotion is indeed more effective if you can manage to do it. However, however effective is SNS-targeted promotion, you can't afford to overlook the importance of link exchange or directory submission in any regard, since Google is still the internet king and since SNS is still at its fledging stage.

When to Stop Giving Away Your article in BlogSpot

Blogspot, previously known as "Blogger", is so convenient to use that nearly every creature in the internet world has opened an account for it. This post is mainly related to those friends who use blogspot to publish ads alongside their posts in order to gain additional income.

From the day that bloggers publish their first post, they are thinking how to best monetize their blogs. Google Adsense is again the most popular advertising program being used. Recently, Amazon formed partnership with Google, so that bloggers could display Amazon affiliate ads alongside their posts as easy as they do with Google Adsense. As you know, you need tons of traffic to produce enough ad clicks and thus generate observable ad revenue. This is almost impossible without continuous content creation and promotion efforts that usually may last more than one year. However, if you really hope to make money from blogging, this is the necessary hard work and patience that you need to invest.

Many blogger don't realize that. They believe the day they create unique content is the same day they ought to earn money. With this belief in mind, they soon think of a beautiful idea: Why should my article only reside in my blog? As long as it's my original work, I can park them in as many places as possible, either through article submission or through social bookmarking. If I do this, I'll receive at least two benefits:

• Free back links to my blog and individual post
• Some article directories offer ad revenue sharing program from which I can earn additional income from my articles.

Their basic idea is true. However, as I emphasized repeatedly in my previous posts, never go too far with regard to any of your ideas. Almost all originally correct things will turn wrong if one overdoes them. The same is true for your article marketing. My general points are as follows:

• Promotion effect follows the rule of diminishing return. You certainly can get free backlinks from article submission or social bookmarking. However, the more articles you submit or bookmark to the same website, the less marginal promotion effect the article will bring to you. At some point, it won't compensate your article marketing effort any more, and that's when you ought to stop giving away your article.
• Not all article submission or social bookmarking sites are worth your efforts. They are thousands of article directories and social bookmarking websites out there. We usually believe, the more the better. So we tend to submit or bookmark our articles to as many places as possible. An important fact we neglect is that most of those article directories and social bookmarking sites don't generate any traffic at all. The only result your article brings is free content to their website, with negligible benefit to you. Clearly, it's better that you stop giving away your content to those dummy websites and spend your saved efforts on producing more creative content and targeting your promotion efforts to those few best article directories and social bookmarking websites.
• Most ad revenue sharing programs do not sound as good as they claimed at all. You could refer to my detail analysis given in my last posts: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" and Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates. Same as above, you are merely contributing free content without any significant promotion effect, let alone additional income from shared ad revenue.

Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates

In my last post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing", we discussed how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs. The conclusion is only choose those few which have already got a large traffic base. The problem is how we can arrive at such an attractive list?

Of course, you can always try search on Google with keyword "Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites" and you'll get tons of relevant information. Then you can choose among them according to your own inspection and other people's experience. However, our time is usually limited. Thus, we can't afford to participate as many revenue sharing programs as we want. In my opinion, it's enough that we join in one or two best revenue sharing programs. The reasons are as follows:

• The purpose of joining revenue sharing programs is not to make a fortune. It's just to provide an additional income. If you do things right, the piece of income will be visible, but far from large. It's your own full-time work or entrepreneurship that you need to devote a major part of your energy to.
• We can't expect ourselves to be experts in every field. Those best revenue sharing sites operate in many different fields, including blogging, forums, reviews, article directories, social media and so on. It's highly impossible that you can maintain the quality and quantity of your content in more than two fields. For example, you may be good at writing high quality article, but may not be so good at producing videos. If that's the case, why not focus on the field you are best at.
• Copy right issue. If you participate in more revenue sharing programs than you can afford, a potential result is that you may start to copy others' content to maintain a regular upgrading frequency of your account page in each revenue sharing programs. In the short term you may increase your adsense income to some degree. In the long term you may end up with your account blocked. You're not safe even if you publish your own content in different revenue sharing programs, which is quite common in article marketing field, because some sites require exclusive ownership of your content.

Since we only need to select one or two best adsense revenue programs, the work turns out to be quite easy - We only need to select among those AUTHENTIC adsense revenue sharing programs instead of using some programming hacks to implement the revenue sharing function. By authentic, we mean those who have established formal official partnership with Google Adsense. Examples include Docstoc, Hubpages, Flixya, RateItAll, to name just a few. Even BlogSpot belongs to such an official partner of Google Adsense. It's just that Google is so generous that it distributes 100% of adsense revenues to its bloggers.

In the title of this post, we also mentioned one word "Pirate". Which revenue sharing programs belong to pirates? Generally, they possess the following features:

• Utilize self-developed code i.s.o Google Adsense API to implement adsense revenue sharing function. Need more information about Google Adsense API? click here
• Traffic is quite low compared to Google Adsense revenue sharing program's requirement: 100,000 daily page views.
• Link popularity is quite low
• Have a relatively short history
• In eager need of content
• Others...

Given the features mentioned above, you can imagine how much you can earn from their programs and how long it will take you before you reach Google Adsense's payment threshold. Then, you may wonder, how can I discriminate authentic adsense revenue sharing programs from pirates? Here I summarize several tips for your reference:

• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can be seen from your Google Adsense account center in the path My Account - Account Access
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs have 100,000 or more daily page views.
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs never require you to register Paypal or other credit accounts to receive your share of your adsense income
• Authentic adsense revenue sharing programs can usually act as your referrer to register a Google Adsense account if you haven't got one already
• Check with Google Adsense support.

From my own experience, I can tell you, if you make a right decision with regard to which authentic adsense sharing program to join and pay adequate efforts to operate your account subsequently, the return you'll secure will be quite satisfactory. I hope this post, together with my previous post: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" will help you make a better decision when you want to join some adsense revenue sharing programs to bring some additional income.

Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing"

Google Adsense revenue sharing is a rather trendy concept nowadays. Lots of websites majoring in different niches, including blogging, forums, social media, video sharing, article directory and so on, all claim that they provide a share of adsense revenue to their users who are contributing contents. Some of them even claim that they distribute 100% of their adsense revenue out, which is quite attractive at first glance.

However, as a content contributor, one might concern the following question most: how much in absolute dollar amount can I earn within a certain period of time, let's say, a month, which is the pay schedule of google adsense program. To answer this question properly, we should first understand what factors drive the absolute dollar income you'll earn from a certain adsense revenue sharing program.

For the sake of easy elaboration, I'll use the following formula to approximate the absolute income you'll earn from adsense revenue sharing program:

I = N * C * R * P, in which, I represents the absolute income you'll earn. N represents the number of visitors that view the content you contributed. C represents the Click-Through-Rate(CTR) of the ads placed by the websites for you. R represents the Pay-Per-Click(PPC) rate related to your article. P represents the percentage that the website is willing to distribute out to its content contributors.

Based on the aforementioned formula, you can easily see that your adsense revenue is determined by both yourself and the website. For example, you can improve the quality of your article, so that the number of viewers for your article will be higher. Or you can optimize your keyword selection and density, so that the PPC of the ads alongside your article will be higher. However, the major determinant of your adsense revenue still comes from the website, since the number of your content's impressions is by far more determined by the popularity and traffic of the website itself. The quality and optimization level of your content play a role to some extent, but far from critical. With regard to the adsense revenue sharing percentage, which a lot of websites manipulates to exaggerate their adsense revenue sharing programs' attractiveness,  its impact on how much one could earn is really minimal.

Arriving here, you probably know how to choose among numerous so called adense sharing programs - Only participate the few ones who already have a large traffic base. Otherwise, you are making contribution to others' wallet without gaining a reasonable return for your content. 

Therefore, the problem here is where you can find such a list of truly attractive adsense revenue sharing programs? I'll deal with this issue in my next post. Please stay tuned if you are interested.

How to Earn $100 per day?

This article is not meant for experienced website publishers or those start-up entrepreneurs who have received money from venture capital (VC). This article is meant for those who are new to the industry, working as part-time, but yet hope to earn a considerable income. A question that they often ask in webmaster forums or somewhere else is, how to earn $100 per day?

The reason that they ask the question demonstrates how difficult it is for one to earn that much through website building or blogging. Although it's true that it takes a long time before one could earn $100 per day steadily, I believe everyone could earn that much or even more if he/she has a correct thought and holds on to that thought until achieving the target.

First, you need to form a correct thought with regard to so called $100 per day. Does it mean that you have to earn $100 a day from just one website? Not really, and often it's almost impossible for an ordinary webmaster. However, it's quite possible that you earn $10 per day for each website or blog after a year or so's continuous optimization and promotion efforts. Then the answer is clear. Why not setup another website or blog after you have succeeded in earning $10 per day for your existing website or blog? Go on with this process and you'll find the goal $100 per day not far away.

Second, you need to hold on to the correct thought. Knowing what's correct thing to do is relatively easy. It's doing correctly for a long time that is difficult for most people. That's why most webmasters end up earning pennies, if not nothing at all. If you know beforehand that you can't afford the time to maintain 10 or more websites or blogs, either lower down your earning target or quit the online market completely, otherwise, it's highly possible that you spend a huge amount of efforts without any money return.

Sounds easy huh?  I want to tell you my friends, it's not easy at all. Otherwise, there shouldn't be so many webmasters still wondering how to earn money online. Only with a correct thought and strong perseverance could you have some chance to succeed.

Before you implement anything, I have another word of advice: never start your work in a haste. We always tend to start our work as soon as possible once we believe we've got the correct thing to do. What's more, setting up online business is quite easy nowadays, which is further facilitated by various CMS systems (i.e, Joomla) and the free service provided by many hosting providers (i.e,GoDaddy). Thus, we always feel it hard to resist the temptation to setup our websites one after another. Don't do so! I myself have learnt many lessons from doing like so. I can assure you that we could getting nothing from a hasty work, no matter how hard we work, despite a lot unnecessary layout of investment.