Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Well, the time has come. I am officially starting my first MonkeyBlogger Challenge! What is this crazy MonkeyBlogger Challenge I speak of?

Well, basically, in each Challenge, we will set a main goal, something to achieve. Then we we take all the neccesary steps and mini goals to reach that destination. Think “Make $500 a Month” but for real. But in this particular Challenge, it will be related to blogging. I will give you three options, and you all must vote. Whichever has the most votes in 7 days from the point I make this point, will win. Than we will try and achieve that goal together. Now, this is not just a case study. I will need your input every step along the way, and we will get this done! When the goal is achieved, all my readers will get a nice surprize. Here are the options.

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Once it has been chosen, every other day, I will write about the progress in much detail, and you will all learn how this is done. Now remember, I am not an expert, and I will make mistakes, and I will need your help, but together, we can all learn together and put our minds together and learn.

Well, how do you all feel about this? As another note, If I can see 15 comments on this post, (Very possible, we have more readers than that. :-P), than every reader will get yet another prize!

Now, I know I didn’t post yesterday, my apologies, but you know, with my therapy, shoulder, and other things, it’s tough! But rest assured, I’m here. Also, I think for the time being, while my shoulder finishes healing, I’ll be posting every other day, just until I’m back up to 100%. So bear with me.

Now, onto our topic for today.

Should I bribe my readers?

When I say this I mean, do you need to give incentives for every little thing just to get some action on your blog? Do you need to offer a prize to the comment king every month? Do you need to run a contest 6 times a year?

Now, don’t get me wrong, contests and prizes are great, and they do increase activity on blogs, which is always a good thing. But what I’m driving at is this: If you stop bribing your readers, will you have any readers?

A lot of blogs are big and popular only because the people who run them are rich and invest 1000’s a month just promoting it and giving out prizes. This is false readership, in my opinion. Why? Because try and see how many readers stay for the content, which is supposed to be the most important thing. If you run contests constantly, and award readers for everything, chances are things are going to fall apart without those “bribes”, if you will.

So that’s my challenge to you. Yes, I’m talking to all you contest crazy bloggers. Try and take one, maybe two months, and focus on producing the best contests and incentives you can. Then let three months go by with non of that, and see what happens. Then, take one month and produce the best possible content that you could write, or that money can buy, and then take three months normal with non of the fluff or contest, and see how your readership benefits much much more from  the content, than the prizes.

Now, do not take this the wrong way, I love contests, and will run one here soon. But just don’t make it a habit that the only thing you do to keep readers is run contests.

Hey all, this is not Mark, but this is Nathaniel from green-flamingo.com. I am filling in for Mark, for as you should know he was injured. I said I would write a guest post about a week ago, but I forgot what I was going to talk about. Now I will tell you how to blog like a monkey and stand out.

Collect bananas - Well, monkeys are associated with bananas right? You have to collect them and then you can eat them. To collect bananas you must stay focused and on the job. Maybe you could have a few of your fellow banana collectors help you out, or you can join programs to help you monkeys get bananas.

In a way you can understand - Making money online is associated with blogging right? You have to make the money and then you can spend it. You have to stay focused, seeing ahead and making sure you are doing things right. You may consider visiting some of these friends which will help you to make the best of your blogging. You might have a few fellow bloggers help you out, and that would help. You can also join affiliate programs to increase and most likely start (unless you have a product or services to sell) you making money online. Some good affiliate programs:

-Google Adsense-

Google Adsense is well known by most, and well recommended. If you want to get the most out of adsense, visit robinhaney.com, maximizing your adsense earnings part one, part two, and recently part three.

-PepperJam-

I myself to not know much about pepperjam, but I hear it is good, and according to the site, they have been ranked one of the top 10 SEO firms in the United States. They are also honored to be recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held business in the US.

-OIO Publisher-

Here you find the tree with millions of bananas, too bad it is not free. You can get discounts though, which is good. OIO publisher is regarded very highly and it would be a good program to join, but make sure you want it before you buy it. What it really does is automate your monetization so you can do what really needs to be done: writing content!

Those are only a very few of some worthwhile affiliate programs, just browse around those trees and you will find many more.

Sell your banana collectors - Now it is time to promote and sell your products. Market well, but don’t be too spammy otherwise people won’t go for it. Carl Ocab can sometimes be a spam seller and spam promoter, which is really annoying. So find the right way to promote and sell your product and done!

Write like a monkey - Stand out, be creative, swing from vines, and from that writing get some bananas. Go ahead and be your fuzzy or fat self. Just be you in your blogging. Write not just in an ordinary way, but write with character and use of the force you must.

After you have those bananas, keep going for more until you have dominated the monkey world. Just to blog like a monkey, work hard, stay focused, be creative and be yourself.

This post was guest blogged by Shannon Lilly of Infected by Bugs, a blog that teaches you how to make money online. If you would like to guest blog for MonkeyBlogger, I am still looking for more and you can email your posts to mark[at]monkeyblogger[dot]com. Thanks!

I often wonder why more people don’t take advantage of adding a blog to their websites. I know a blog can be tough to upkeep but it really only take 1-2 posts per week to do that. Only a few of us phycos make posts every day (me of course).

However I believe if business owners as well as personal site owners understood the importance of a blog they would get one up post haste. I am guilty of not putting

blogs on several of my sites or I have put a blog up but never update it. This is what you call (over worked and under paid blogging) but its really no excuse at all!

Today I want to talk a little bit about how to add some pizazz to your blog and get people interested in reading it, subscribing to it and even buying ads from you!

- Get Them To Actually Read Your Posts: Sometimes its difficult to determine why visitors don’t actually read your blog, however there are some things we can do to intrigue visitors to read more. You can place images, video and other forms of media further down in your posts to excite your readers and hopefully they will stick around to read the whole post if not then just the highlighted areas where video and images are appearing.

So far I haven’t had much trouble or complaints about my posts being boring or anything of that nature and I get lots of page views which tells me people are reading. That brings me to another tip we can do to each post to get readers more involved. Basically whenever you can without it looking spammy link to other posts from your new posts, this allows the search engines to find older posts easier and I guarantee your page views per month will jump if not double just by doing this.

- Get Them To Subscribe Already: When you think about subscribing to a blog multiple thoughts may come to mind, however one important factor is (why would they need to sign up?). What are you offering your visitors who actually subscribe, anything at all?

If you look at some of the bigger bloggers in the MMO niche you will see nearly all of them offer a free ebook of some kind from the blog owner on how to make money online, improve seo or other related topics. These ebooks are highly wanted because you are after all reading a ebook written by the pro blogger himself.

My suggestion is that you go ahead and offer a similar ebook or free product to everyone who signs up to your rss feed. Don’t be afraid to put a nice image and small text description about the ebook in your subscribe section on the front page of your blog (I hope you have it their). I can pretty much guarantee people will sign up and possibly tell their friends about you and your blog / ebook if its of good quality and worth reading.

- Start With The End In Mind: Well there you have it, a couple tips to wet your soda appetite. Each of these techniques have worked for me and I am confident they will work for you to. Be sure and share your experiences / opinions with us by commenting below!

This post was written by Paul Piotrowski over at InspiredMoneyMaker.com which is a Blog that focuses on teaching people how to make money doing what they love. I really want to thank him for the support, guest posting for me. If you are interested in guest posting on MonkeyBlogger, email it to mark[at]monkeyblogger[dot]com

As Mark has written about on a few occasions, the Blogging community is full of “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” Bloggers. New Blogs pop up every day, only to disappear into witness protection tomorrow.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons for that is that Blogging by nature is a medium of expression based on giving, not getting. A successful Blogger is a Blogger who gives first and gives often, without really expecting anything in return. Bloggers who have followed that formula have grown rather quickly as their readers have felt that energy from the first time they stumbled across their Blogs.

The rest of the herd who read an income report by a professional Blogger and begin drooling over the idea of “getting paid for nothing”, run out and start a Blog with the misconception that there’s a big prize waiting for them once they sign up for a free Wordpress account and they publish a couple of senseless articles. Professional Blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. If that’s what you’re seeking, you might want to look elsewhere.

For the rest of us who genuinely want to help people in our specific area of expertise there is a lot of potential in Blogging, but we must embrace the concept of Giving to accelerate our results.

Take this article, for example. When I heard Mark broke his clavicle, I jumped at the opportunity to help the guy out even though I don’t really know him. I stopped by his Blog one day and I liked his Mascot design and I found it quite impressive for him to be getting into this line of business at such a young age so I subscribed to his RSS feed.

If you really study Professional Bloggers, and meet some of them, you will very quickly learn that the REAL reason that they are so successful in what they do is because they are some of the most giving people you have ever met. People think that when Professional Bloggers run contests, it’s all just about drawing attention and publicity to our Blogs. It does have that effect, but in reality it’s not about that. It’s because we really do enjoy giving stuff away to people!

You want to be a successful Blogger? Try thinking from the point of view of “How can I give the most amount of value to my readers?” every day for 90 days and you’ll see how different the world looks like for you after that.

That, and also don’t forget to have fun in the process.