Sales and Marketing

Yeah more money!

September 28, 2007 by Tricia

The strangest thing just happened. I got a paypal payment that said “Mass Payout” and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what company it was from for at least 15 minutes.

It was for a decent amount of money too.

I finally managed to figure out who it was from and sighed with relief. If I hadn’t of figured it out I would have been going through all the various affiliate companies websites looking at my account on each of them to try to figure out who had just paid me.

I guess the lesson here is that if you send money to someone from Paypal make sure it’s clearly marked who it’s from or what it’s for so that the recipient can thank you!

Get in on the BlogRush

September 25, 2007 by Tricia

Well I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Blogrush. I believe BlogRush only opened it’s doors last week but already thousands upon thousands of bloggers have signed up for a free account.

So what is Blogrush anyway?

Well, simply put, it’s another way to promote your blog. You sign up, add your blogs feed to Blogrush and then put the widget on your site. The widget will show blogs that are in the same category as the one you listed your blog under. In this way, your blog will be promoted on sites similar to your own. If your visitors like your site they’ll probably be interested in visiting some of the blogs that show up in your widget so you’ll be helping out other bloggers too.

It’s a win win situation!

Here’s how Blogrush explains things:

What Is BlogRush And Why Should I Use It?

BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication Network.” It’s a network of blogs that run a small “widget” on their pages. Each time this widget is loaded it will contain 5 clickable headlines which are the blog post titles to other users’ posts. Clicking on any of these links will open a new browser window and load the blog and full post. Users earn “syndication credits” based on each time their blog loads the widget as well as each time any of their referrals (users that signup after clicking the “add your blog posts” link on the widget) loads the widget. They also earn additional credit based on all the activity through 10 generations of referrals. 1 Syndication Credit = having one of their recent blog post titles served inside the widget on another member’s blog.

How Do I Earn Syndication Credits?

Syndication credits are earned based on the following formula: You earn credits on your own traffic using a 1:1 ratio. (One credit for each time the widget is served.) You then earn credits based on your referrals traffic (and their referrals traffic) through 10 generations of referrals based on the following ratios: 1st and 2nd generation (i.e. your direct referrals and their direct referrals) 1:1, 3rd – 6th generation = 1:4 ratio, 7th – 10th generation = 1:8 ratio. After all the math is calculated, there is a surplus of 1 headline space (5 spaces in each widget load) for every 10 that are served. So 10% of all the headline space is reserved for BlogRush itself to sell or use.

So if those of you who haven’t signed up yet would sign up under me using my referral code I’d appreciate it as I need some referrals in order to have my blog posts show up in my widget. Once you sign up invite some friends and make a blog post to get others to sign up under you.

My widget is in the lower left sidebar, but I thought I’d also try putting it in this post so that you an clearly see what it looks like:

Get in on the BlogRush early! Sign up now!

Have a room to rent out or are you looking for a roommate?

September 23, 2007 by Tricia

The cost of renting an apartment or a house just seems to keep going up and up doesn’t it? Meanwhile our salaries don’t seem increase at anywhere the same rate. Sometimes the best way to get around the cost of renting is to share your space with a roommate. Whether that be renting out a room or moving in with someone else.

Many years ago when I was single and had my own apartment I decided to started my own business and those first few months were hard. I had to build my client list and start earning money. How was I to cover the rent of my apartment? I got a roommate.

Finding a roommate wasn’t easy. I took out ads in the local paper and interviewed prospective roommates. These days it’s so much easier to find a roommate with the services provided by companies such as roomster.net. I only wish that a website such as this was available all those years ago when I had roommates!

Roomster is an advanced housing rental site. The site provides those who want to rent out rooms, floors, houses, apartments or condos with the ability to list their rental spaces. Those are searching for a room or home to share with another can look through the listings and easily find a place that fits their budget.

How Does Roomster Work?

Well as you can see from this screen shot, there are listings for all of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Roomster has a large and active membership and there’s thousands of listings from which to find a new roommate.

By creating a simple profile on Roomster those looking to rent a room or to sublet an apartment can contact property owners directly through the Roomster service. Likewise, property owners can search for potential tenants and contact them directly.

Of course you can go to the site, select the city you live in or the one that you plan on moving to, and begin looking through the listings without creating a profile. However, you will not be able to see the full details of the listing. Without registering you can only see a short summary such as:

“Respectful Renter/Roommate Wanted!” – woman, 65, San Francisco, CA, $400.00

Once you sign up and create a simple profile you’ll be able to use the search functions to find a room or potential renter:

Of course there’s plenty of other ways to search too. You can search through all of the roommate listings, rooms to rent, by rooms that have photos included, search for woman or men that have rooms to rent or who are looking to rent, search by a persons age, by how many rooms are available in the rental and or by price and coolest of all, you can even search for a potential roommate by their zodiac sign.

Additional features of the site include the ability to look at an area where a rental is located by using google maps, as well as the ability to leave quick messages, quick links, IM, and view the profile of last member that logged in.

Roomster offers free and full memberships. Free basic memberships allow members to search, post and contact all registered members absolutely free.

The site seems very easy to use and there’s so many different ways to search for a potential roommate that I’m sure most people will feel quite comfortable on Roomster. I know that if I ever decide to rent out a room in our house I’ll be visiting Roomster.

Check it out for yourself if you are renting out a room or looking for a roommate.

Hiring a SEO company to market and promote your web site

September 8, 2007 by Tricia

As a former small business owner, and now a webmaster for more than 15 websites, I’ve learned quite a bit about marketing and promoting over the years.

Back when I had my jewelry trade business few companies had websites on the internet. Now, it’s almost unheard of to not have one.

The trouble is that not all business owners – big or small – are webmasters. Even if a business owner knows enough to create website for their company or hires a web designer to create their company page they must concentrate on the day to day aspects of their business, and as a result they don’t have time to learn all the ins and outs of promoting the online aspect of their company.

As I said, over the years I’ve learned quite a bit about promoting and marketing my websites online. I think I’m fairly good at it too, but now that I have so many sites to manage it’s getting harder and harder for me continue to promote my sites. Building the sites and creating content takes up the majority of my time.

I know several website owners, bloggers and even small business owners who are in the same position as I am. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do it all, and to do it well.

I’ve seriously considered hiring a SEO company to help market and promote my sites and get them the best rankings on the search engines for their keyword phrases. A company that knows how to set up a good promotional campaign can help an online business or website gain links, increase page rank and most importantly increase the amount of traffic to the site.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been looking at SEO companies services as I’ve tried to decide whether to hire a professional service to promote my sites or to continue to do this on my own.

One of the companies that I’ve been looking at recently is HTP Company. HTP is an Internet Advertising Company that specializes in web site marketing, internet advertising and marketing online.

I believe that HTP (High Technology Professionals) has been in business since 1996. They certainly offer quite a number of services and have some very informative articles on their website including a free Internet marketing, search engine optimization and Internet advertising tutorial for those that want to learn more about SEO.

Services offered by HTP include publishing, business consulting, search engine positioning, web development, web site design, marketing strategy, sales implementation and internet advertising. In other words they do it all.

One form of internet advertising that they specialize in is helping their clients buy text links, banner ads, text ads and in the creation of pay per click campaigns. All of which are of course aimed at increasing a websites SERP (search engine results page ranking), promoting the site or business and increasing traffic and sales. HTP Company can also place ads for your site on over 121,000 different websites.

As I look through their site I’ve become more and more impressed by the amount of services offered and the wealth of information on each and every page. Some SEO company websites just list their services and don’t really explain what each service really is or why these types of services or techniques are important to anyone who owns a website. You can actually learn quite a bit just by reading through the site if you are so inclined.

I’m also impressed by the partial client list on their About page. They have quite a few Fortune 500 corporations listed as clients. HTP Company has to be good at what they do to have secured such high profile companies as clients.

Can you see why I’ve been considering hiring HTP Company to help me promote my sites? Visit the HTP Company website yourself and see if they can help you promote your business or web site.

Before I stop gushing about this SEO company I should tell you that they also have a business directory where they list professional web sites and businesses. You can write to them to request that they view your site and add your link to their directory.

Update on my use of Kontera

September 7, 2007 by Tricia

Do you use Kontera to monetize your site? I’ve been using it since sometime in July on the majority of my sites and over all I’m quite happy with the results.

I have been in contact with my representative at Kontera though, because my impression stats (and resulting income) for all the blogs on my Feverishthoughts.com domain are a lot lower than I expected. I’m comparing my results to the amount of impressions I’m getting on my main website (not a blog) which probably has a few hundred less page views per day than all the sites on the feverishthoughts.com domain combined. You’d think that the Kontera link impression numbers would be about the same, but their not. I’m getting four to five times more impressions on my website than on my feverishthoughts blogs.

I’m using Lucias KonteraControl wordpress plugin to control when the Kontera links are allowed to appear on my blog posts. Naturally I don’t want them in the posts that I do for my advertisers – at least not for whatever amount of time is required by each companies TOS. I don’t think the plugin should be interfering in the amount of impressions that I get in the posts that I allow Kontera in, but something is causing there to be less impressions.

We’re trying to figure it out.

If you are using the KonteraControl plugin are you getting the amount of impressions that you think you should be? Say at least 3 to 5 links per post?

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Yeah more money!

Get in on the BlogRush

Have a room to rent out or are you looking for a roommate?

Hiring a SEO company to market and promote your web site

Update on my use of Kontera

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