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Are you struggling to find ways to capture your reader’s attention with your articles or blog posts ? Here is a really easy and quick method to educate yourself on great copy writing and attention grabbing headlines.

This is going to be a really quick post because it is an idea I have been playing with and wanted to let you in on.

First, the golden rule:

Include your keywords in your title of your article and post. This is a “given” for many internet marketers not so much for usability sake but for search engine sake. Search engines put a lot of weight on the title of the page.

The Method:

That being said, here’s the method to try out. You may sometimes need to put the golden rule aside. And that is this: learn by example.

Sure you already knew that

Web Design 101: Learning By Example Is One Of The Fastest Ways To Educate Yourself

How do you do it? Check out eBay auctions. Because eBay is so competitive with so many auctions that people are just dying to get your attention.

And the auction titles are limited in character length.

So read through a list of auction titles, figure out which ones catch your eye and why and then apply that to your Article Headline.

Combine that with searching article directories (like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com) and search for your keyword and see what articles come up. Go through the same exercise: why are some article titles popping out to your more than others?

Learn by example.

And in no time at all you will have great article titles and blog posts for when you build your own website.

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Creating your web site can be a tricky process. It is getting easier and easier today with more software available to you.  However, for many people they would rather do what they do best whether it’s being a dentist, a photographer, or a businessman.

My Tips For Getting Your website online quickly

For that reason it seem to still be cost effective for these folks to choose a web design company.  Unless you run a web-based business, you probably do not have web design experience within your company. Building your web site will take time and a little homework!

To create a web site for your business, follow these steps:

1. Establish your goals
2. Determine your budget
3. Pick a web design company (and usually with this a web hosting company)

Establish Your Goals

Before you begin looking for company to help you design and build your web site, take the time to understand the goals of your web site. This will be extremely important to help set expectations with the web design company you choose.  Web user psychology is very important when taking into account what you want your site to do.  Is the goal for users to buy?  To subscribe?  Or …?

In order to set your web site goals, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want a web site?
• What do you want your users to do when they get to your website?
• Who is your target demographic?
• What is your industry?
• Who are your competitors?
• Do they already have web sites? If so, what do they look like?
• How soon do you want your web site?
• What happens if you never create a web site for your business?

For many businesses, the online web site presence is the last piece of the puzzle to success.

Take the time to answer each of the above questions and if you have time, write the answers down on a sheet of paper. These are the same questions most web design companies will ask you before they begin to create your site. If you have these questions answered up front, you will have some criteria for choosing the right web design company.

Determine Your Budget

How much do you want to spend on your web site. web sites can cost you anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending upon what you want it to do. Know your spending constraints before you begin negotiating with design companies.

Check Out web design Companies:  Review their Portfolios

A well established web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site the design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do the sites have a style that appeals to you? In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. And remember, what you see and personally like MAY NOT be what is right for users coming to your site.  This has to be figured out in the section above as far as what you plan to do with the website.

Comparison Shop

Pricing for creating a web site can vary. Typically, web design companies will charge one of three ways:

• Time and materials: price is variable based on the actual number of hours spent working on your site.
• Fixed Price: some design companies will charge you a fixed fee based on a fixed set of requirements.
• A La Cart Pricing: some design companies will charge “by the page” or “by function”.  This can allow you as the web master to have some flexibility within your budget.

Lastly, get everything in writing.

And do not finalize the deal until you understand all of the costs up front. Also make sure that you understand what “done” means.

As an incentive for both parties, and to split the risk amongst both the designer and yourself, structure partial payments at certain milestones.

There are thousands of web designers across the country and they should all fight feverously for your business! If a web design company dismisses any of your questions regarding their design process, pricing, or client references, take your business elsewhere!  Good luck with designing your own website and building your website for online!

One of the appeals of making money online is that it does not take a lot of money upfront.  It still takes a lot of time, but money wise even if you pay for services and help, it is still much cheaper than running your traditional storefront busienss.  However, you can actually do fairly well with little to no money spent using Google Adsense and various free blog sites.

The first thing to do is get approved by Google Adsense.  This involves submitting your website for approval and most of the time you cannot use a free blog for this.  You will need a nicely constructed self-hosted website to get approval.

One exception:

Blogger.com Blogs

Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners.

The big bonus of this is not only is it free, and not only do Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, but Google is fine with approving Blogger.com blogs for Adsense!

So if you’re looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works.  This is important for setting up your free blog.

An RSS feed is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog.

People can use “RSS Aggregators” to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites can also syndicate your posts by checking your feed for new articles and then reposting on their blog.  This is one method of “auto-blogging” (blogging on auto pilot) to give blogs fresh content.  It is a win win situation since the publisher can get “fresh” content on auto pilot while you get your posts syndicated.  With Blogger blogs, RSS fees are built in so you do not need to do anything to get it to work.

First,  figure out what topic the blog will focus on.

You can blog about products, create product reviews, or just blog about your hobbies.  The main thing is to blog about something you enjoy and are passionate about because money won’t necessarily come rolling in right away. It is important to be consistent with your blogging.  If money is coming in, that is a great motivator to keep blogging.  If money is nto coming in, then it is your passion that will keep you with it until the money comes in.  Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It’s important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

Now you are ready to create your blog.

From the Blogger homepage click the “Create Your Blog Now” link and follow the step by step instructions.  This is very straightforward and you will have the framework of your blog up and running in no time.

When you choose your blog URL, you can come up with a clever name as your brand.  However, for marketing purposes, you can also choose “keywords” to be in yur URL.  For example, if you’re creating a blog about dog training tips, then you could check to see if  “dogtrainingtips.blogspot.com” is available, or some variant of it such as “myawesomedogtrainingtips.blogspot.com”.   Having your keywords in your blog title will give you a boost in search engines.

From here, you also want to choose a template which suits your blog theme.  Just think about readers that come to your blog and what they would be looking for and choose a theme that fits your blog, not one that distracts from it.  You can always pick a plain one also just to get your blog up and running and then change it later.  Changing your blog theme is as easy as clicking a few buttons.  Once the blog is created, then click on the “Templates” tab and select one.

To further setup your blog, there are some various settings you can now set.

On the “Basic” settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.  So an example blog title would be “My Awesome Dog Training Tips”.

You can also give your description here as well.  Include your keywords, but make it a “human friendly” blog description (this will also help you get your blog Adsense approved).  An example would be: “Welcome to my blog!  I am a dog lover and come from a family of dog lovers.  In this blog I will give you my awesome dog training tips I have accumulated over the years”.

Not only will this help your blog more readable, but the RSS feed will show this description and help people choose your blog to syndicate or add to their RSS readers.

One very important setting is to set “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes”.

This is in the Publishing tab.  You want to set the “Notify Weblogs” to “Yes” so that each time you create a new post, notifications are sent out to the Weblogs site (which in turn is crawled by many other spiders).  This is an easy and automated way to let the internet at large now you have updated your blog.

Another setting is to accurately set your archiving to reflect how often you post

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days.  And by the way, you should aim to post almost daily if you can.  The more content, the more often search engines come, the better for traffic and Adsense clicks and thus revenue.

Here is a very important tip about the site feed:  Use the short feed.

By using the short feed, only a summary or description is shown in your RSS feed.  If people want to read more, they need to come to your site.  If they come to your site, they may click on an Adsense ad.  For this reason you want to make your blog titles compelling and your post description compelling as well.   Also the first 50 words or so will be seen so these need to be your hooks to get readers to your blog.

And now: Google Adsense

After you have a few posts set up, you can click on the “AdSense” link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. YES!  This is very convenient!

From there it’s just a matter of pasting the Adsense code into your blog and Voila!  You now have a monetized Google Adsense blog on a free blog out there that can make you money!

In Making Money Blogging – Part 1, I discussed pay per click advertising companies (e.g. google adsense). In Making Money Blogging – Part 2, I discussed affiliate networks (e.g. commission junction).

In this blog, I will be explaining how you can get paid to write a blog for a specific company, or about a specific product (for example – you would be asked by a toothpaste company to write a blog about cool mint toothpaste). This is the primary way that most people will make money from their blogs – and it can be a fair bit of money as well (the top earners at blogitive & pay per post earn up to $US1000 per week – just form their blogs).

This sounds a difficult task to achieve (getting a company to ask you to write a blog about their products), and one would expect that you would need a very well know blog to achieve this – but in fact it is very easy, and you don’t need to have a “known blog” to be able to write for a specific company.

How do you go about this? Well – there are several blogging companies, that will accept an established blog* into their “network of bloggers”, and will send you different topics to blog about ,depending on the type of blog that you have (for example – you may have a shopping blog, and be asked to write about some new electronic equipment from Company Bravo).

*An established blog is based on a number of factors, which differ depending on the blogging network you choose. As an example – blogsvertise accept blogs that are 1 month old, blogitive accepts blogs that are 3 months old & have a certain amount of traffic – read more on the requirements below.

If you apply to a number of different blogging network companies, or have a number of different blogs – you can make a fair bit of money (for example – you may get 3 blogs at $5 each from blogitive, and another 5 blogs at $7 each from pay per post, and another blog from blogsvertise at $10) – so you have 9 blogs to write, and make $US 60 doing it).

The other good thing about applying to more than 1 network is that some of the networks require that you write 2 blogs in-between blogs for them. For example if you write one blogitive post, you need to write a further 2 non-blogitive posts before you can write another blogitive post. If you are also a member of pay per post, and blogsvertise, you could write one blogitive, one pay per post, one blogsvertise and then another blogitive post (which means all of your blogs for the day are paid). It takes a bit of juggling but can certainly be done.

The following companies offer paid blogging opportunities:

http://www.blogitive.com Blogitive have several opportunities for bloggers. You don’t need to say that the blog has been sponsored, and you don’t need to write nice things about the product (i.e. you can write that product x is awful and should never have been invented). You are generally paid $US5 per blog. Requirements are as follows: – Blog must be 3 months old – The Blog must receive (or can receive) some level of traffic – The blog must be indexed in the Google and Yahoo search engines. – The blogs must not contain violent, hate related content or be adult natured – The blogs must maintain a minimum of 3 posts per week – You must write 2 other blog posts in between paid blogitive blog posts – Blogs must be active for 1 year (but payments are made at the latest 1 week following the post) – The blogs must not be hosted on the following networks:- Writingup.com, Bloggerparty.com, Blogcharm.com, Clearblogs.com, Xeeks.com, Blogfeast.net, WordPress.com (blogs that use wordpress software but are hosted on individual url’s (e.g. http://www.shoppersclub.co.nz) are acceptable and Geocities.yahoo.com

http://www.payperpost.com Pay per post have probably the biggest range of opportunities on the market for bloggers today. You do need to notate that the blog has been sponsored, and you may be asked to write positively about a product. Payment is from $US4 to whatever the advertiser is willing to offer (e.g. $10, $15 etc..). The advertisers have more leeway at Pay per post, and can specify blogs to have a minimum page rank, traffic range etc (this is great for advertisers, but not so good for new blogs). Requirements are as follows: – You must be 18 or over to participate in Pay Per Post (and have a valid Tax ID if a resident of the United States) – Your blog must be at least 90 days old, verifiable by a third party index of the site – If over 90 days old, your blog must have at least 20 entries in the past 90 days. If just around 90 days old, your blog must have 20 pre-existing entries. – No blogs with gaps over 30 days (no entries posted for 30+ days) will be accepted. – Blogs must remain live for 30 days – you will be paid after 30 days. – You must write 2 other blogs in between a pay per post blog.

http://www.blogsvertise.com Due to being a newer blogging network, Blogsvertise currently have a limited number of opportunities for bloggers. However, they do tend to offer more money when they do offer blog posts (e.g. $US 7.50, $US 10.00). Requirements are as follows: – Blogs must be 30 days old – Blog entries must be permanent – You will be paid after 30 days (once the blogs have been verified). – Blogs must not be adult related – The blog posts are not required to be positive (i.e. you can negatively review a website or product) – You are not required to say that the blog has been sponsored

[http://www.creamaid.com] Creamaid is great in that there are NO requirements. Anyone & everyone can write a blog about any of the creamaid products. The advertiser (rather than the blogging network) will review your blog after your write and approve/disapprove it (I’ve never heard of one been disapproved yet – but I guess if you are writing very negatively about a product it may just be…).

As well as writing a full blog on a topic, you can also place text links on your blog (so you would place a text link at the bottom of your blog, or the sidebar of your blog, rather than writing an entire blog about the subject). The good thing about text links is that you set the price. If someone wants to advertise on your site, they will have to pay what you ask. If this suits your blog or yourself best, some networks to look at are: – http://www.text-link-ads.com – http://www.textlinkbrokers.com – http://www.linkadage.com

And… that my friends – are the most common paid blogging networks in the blogosphere today.

And… that is also the end to my Making Money Blogging Series – keep tuned for more money making opportunities.

Shirlene Moore

If Ya Want – Making Money Working from Home

Author: Shirlene Moore
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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