Build Your Brand Online

When I first started with my very first website in 1999, I had no real clue as to what made them bring in visitors or how to publish a website. I had to learn this all from scratch. Buying books from various book stores and going home to study them. This was a daunting task, but one that needed to be done for my small trading post that I owned. We wanted to sell some of our hand made items on there and bring in extra business for us to be able to make a living. This applies to today’s small business owners, they want and need exposure and a well built website is the answer. Whether or not you have a brick and mortar offline business or just plan on doing all commerce online, a good website will bring people to your door and help you build your brand.

Choose A Good Website Platform

I had started out using hot dog pro, coffee cup and some other small programs that help with web publishing. It was all by hand and the sites looked fine, but it was a steep learning curve for those who were new at this type of thing, it took many weeks to get where we liked what we saw. These days I use wordpress and good premium templates. I would suggest to you that going the wordpress route may just help in the long run both in ease of publishing, and power of plugin sets that you can install and configure.

The old websites did pretty well on the search rankings, this was before Google existed really. They were just coming on the scene at the time and the top search provider was Yahoo! We worked to get our sites recognized with meta tags and other ways of optimization, and ended up being up top of the results in a short time. This developed our brand and gave us extra business.

We also were on eBay at the time and directing customers to our website. This also helped develop our brand and bring in visitors.

Write Engaging Unique Content, Even With Product Reviews

Publishing content that is written by your hand or hired from a professional seems to be the the only way to develop a sticky search result ranking. Even if you are an affiliate, you should consider trying to write your own take on a product review or at least rewrite the given text for a product from places like Amazon to give a better chance of higher indexing.

You also may use the quote method. If you find an article that relates directly to your site, you may quote the source and write your own take on the subject. As long as attribution is given, there should be no problem in gaining good ranking for the content even if a version of it has been published before.

Spinning content has worked well in the past. These days if it’s a poorly spun article, you can count on it failing to rank. This is what many affiliate marketers have been seeing since the Panda or farmer updates. There are plugins that help and other web services that help “unique” the content, but the search engines seem to be able to detect this to a certain degree and have built systems to identify and rank accordingly these sites who employ such methods.

How To Monetize Your Website To Make Money Online

Adsense has been underrated to a lot of folks minds. I use it and have done well, but it was not always this way. It took me several years to reach the payout and I understand why so many people just gave up and moved on to something different. If you sell your own products and want visitors to only engage in what you have to offer on your web page, then this may not be for you. You could look at it in this way though, if a person finds the products you offer not exactly what they need, then an ad may offer a path to what they want. If the person leaves your website via one of these ads, then you receive at least something for your efforts.

There are other ad networks out there. Many of them run contextual ad services and this means they are able to do ad serves to your site content. There are many ways to add these services to your site, in content, ad blocks via widget or plugin that will display ads based on what is on the page and also targeting the actual visitor themselves.

You also may apply for Amazon Associate program. These days you will have to determine which state can work with this program as the tax man thinks it’s funny to make people collect sales tax for online sales. My opinion is if these states had not run the states budget so poorly, they would not be clawing for pennies from web publishers who just try to make a living.

I have been an associate for years now, I chose to have my payments in the form of coupons and I get all my books or games for free that way by just cashing them in for products. Works fine for me.

Banner ads that flash seem to have  mixed review of how effective they are. I use small 250×250 ads on the sidebars to show related products to my website. CTR or click through ratios vary, you will have to use web stats to see what received the clicks to determine the best placement for your website theme.

Website Optimization

There are sure fire ways to make sure that your terms you want to rank for are up front and in several locations on your site. In the olden days, meta tags were king, but now there is much more to it than that. My methods have been to use my keywords in my title of the page, the post, the category in which it resides etc. This good structure will help you rank for your terms. I also will use what’s called a double tap, my keyword phrase twice, both in title and description.

This method may just gain you one or two spaces on the SERPS or search engine results pages. Having a good meta description and leaving an ellipse at the end will entice readers to click through and gain the extra traffic like this…

It makes the brain say,”Let’s go read the rest”, and there you have it, another visitor.

Traffic is money, there are no two ways about it. You either have it or you don’t. You want to use all that you have available to get the visitor to your website. Eyeballs on your page is what you make a living from and that is the base.

Promotional Methods For Traffic-Social Media

There are many types of social media out there that you can use to help assist in traffic generation and building your own personal brand. I use both Twitter and Facebook as you see on the sidebar widget area. It posts to my accounts on auto-pilot whenever I decide to write an update to my site. This helps in two ways or even more. It builds a backlink from a high pagerank website, and it brings in extra visitors to me. I can engage them with interesting content from a distance and if they like what they see in the short post on these sites, they come to read and check it out.

I use services like Links Alpha, they have a plugin that will post automatically for me to my accounts. I also see folks using Ping.fm. I have tried just about all of the popular services, I found Links Alpha worked for me.

There are other plugins that will syndicate your content to social media and bookmarking sites. This also builds links and gives you a rise in rankings for your chosen keywords. I have tried many but have stuck with just a couple that seem to work really well.  You can experiment with these and see which posts and sticks the best.

Comment Luv

This is one plugin that will help you along the way to building a following. They now have a premium version that just was released and you may either do a search for it or find it here at their website. This helps build backlinks to your website in a white hat way. People have reported great results using this comment platform.

Comment Luv Premium Not an affiliate link

Add Proper Pages For FTC And Google Double Dart Cookie Info

Disclosing the use of Google double dart cookies is required for TOS or terms of service for the Google adsense program. I will try and show you why and how you remain adsense compliant and not run afoul of any rules with them. In order for you to remain compliant with Google’s policy on the cookie explanation, you should have inside of your privacy page the text for disclosure of what the cookies are and how a person may opt out if they choose to do so.

I will include a website that will generate this page text for you so you will be in full compliance and it does not cost you a penny. I am sure they will like it just fine if I include a link to their page for this.

SerpRank Privacy Policy Page Generator

Here is another website compliant page you should have, an affiliate disclosure page that you can build for free from here.

Disclosure Policy

That should just about do it for now. You may always feel free to visit or post your questions and I will do my best to answer. Thanks for visiting me!

Jim