Many people are very scared of raising their prices. In fact, so scared that they try everything they can do to save their declining business and doing every possible kind of promotion and modification to their sales and business procedures, closing in the end without even trying to raise their prices even a little bit.

Raising your prices can be the most efficient way to increase your total earnings in a matter of seconds and you can even split-test it! You can show some of your visitors a page with your normal price and some others your increased price, looking to find how the new increase will affect your conversions. Take a brief look at the following picture.

Let’s say you have an email list of 5,000 people. What you can do is the following: when you are sending a broadcast message with Aweber, you can send one version of your message to half your list and then another version to the rest. This way you will be able to send them to a different page for them to order, and you will be able to measure the results effortlessly.

What you need to do to increase your product’s price

1. Find what you will give to the increased price buyers in order to justify the price.

You can offer them one-on-one consulting, a report, a mini-course, anything that can justify the increase of the price.

2. Create two different packages in your billing system in order for your visitors to be able to pay.

3. Create one more (almost) identical landing page with the same information as the original, but explaining the value added bonuses of the offer.

4. Create two broadcasting messages for your list and send one to the first half and the next to the second.

5. Measure responses and conversions and see if the increase in price will help your business.

Note: When measuring the overall success of your price increase, take into consideration what increased expenses you will have by providing your members with the increased valued package. For example, if you have added one-on-one consulting, you should take that into account to be able to figure out if you’re profitable. As the image we’ve used before explains, examine the difference in sales and see how much more money the additional benefits to your “advanced” members will cost to you. If the additional sales money is more than your expenses, you SHOULD raise your prices immediately.

How to Increase your Sales Revenue by Raising your Product’s Price is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

So you’ve created your channel, you’ve created lots of videos and still you don’t have any traffic at all. Sure you’ve told everyone you know (even that girl you had a crush on in high school) but still you’re just working more on promotion and bringing in one visitor at a time, rather than spending your time creating your next video.

Why am I not getting any views on YouTube?

Let’s analyze all the ways you can go wrong and what you can do about it. Being involved with video is not an easy task. Many people are even afraid to show themselves on a video. Let’s see what might have gone wrong with yours and let’s try to fix it!

1. Going off topic

This is my number one reason why I don’t subscribe to a channel on YouTube. When I like a lot a videos on YouTube, I always search what other videos this person has posted. If I find that most of their videos are relevant, I always subscribe so I can watch more.

The problem arises when someone’s channel is not focused. I might love your videos on keyword research and find them very helpful for me but at the same time I really don’t want to see your other videos of you racing your street bike (actually, I’d love to see those too)! If your channel loses focus, it’s not a channel anymore; it’s a personal video diary and most probably I wouldn’t subscribe to it.

Solution: Take for example what iJustine has done with her YouTube Channels. She has a main channel (the one with the link), one for Vlogging (video blogging), one for gaming, one that contains her iPhone videos (shot only with her iPhone), and one with gadget reviews. This is the best example I can find of diversification. You might have many interests but don’t put all your eggs in one basket: create a separate channel for your other interests!

You might say: But on my main channel, I am a YouTube partner and already making quite a lot of money.

If you are a YouTube partner, making your second channel a YouTube partner channel is a much, much easier process than your first one. Do create a new one now because the longer you wait the harder it will be for you to do so.

2. Your Videos Suck!

There, I said it! Happy now?! Let’s see why.

i. When we create videos we most of the time get so overwhelmed by the whole process that we cannot easily put our thoughts together (especially in the beginning) and we can’t pass the information we need to our audience in the best possible way. The best solution for that is to have a script. I am not saying that you should write down every word that you will say in the video but even having some bullets will help you tremendously!

ii. Trying to be funny too much. You can’t be all about business especially at YouTube. You have to be even a bit funny to be able to engage your viewers in the best possible way. The best example of the finest mixture of being funny and at the same time teaching people new things is Frank Kern (and if you’re not subscribed to his newsletter, do so, amazing content there), where he’s funny but at the same time teaches you amazing internet marketing stuff.

Warning: Don’t try to be TOO funny because it’s much worse than being all serious. People might think you’re a joke and not take you seriously.

iii. You’re Afraid! Well, we all are, get over it! Especially in the beginning we’re afraid that everything will go wrong, that we will look ugly, that we won’t be able to speak naturally and everything will look bad. It’s natural to feel that way because with text you’re safe. No matter what you do, no-one will think bad about your bunny pajamas, or that you have been awake for the last 36 hours and look terrible.

Solution: If you don’t have enough time during the week to get a good rest and be the best you can be, just use those days to plan and organize your upcoming videos as well as promoting your previous ones. On Saturday or Sunday shoot all the next week’s materials and you’ll be much more confident.

iv. You think you look ugly on camera.

We all do, don’t worry. If you keep cultivating that thought you will eventually look bad on camera no matter what. Try to get over it, read something motivational, have a good sleep, shoot an episode with a friend.

And if you still can’t shoot a video: Many, many people do screencasting, if you’re not confident about your looks or just don’t want to “expose” yourself on camera, do create screencasts!

With screencasts you will be able to show your viewers your screen (very important for instructional videos) and create a presentation in order for you to teach them something. It’s a very good way to eliminate your fear of video and at the same time it looks really professional.

I have tried quite many screen capturing video programs but have finally concluded that for Mac the best one by far is ScreenFlow, and for Windows Camtasia.

Camtasia is a bit expensive but it’s really worth it. As for ScreenFlow, it’s the best software purchase you will ever make.

Last but not least, if you still think you look “funny” or strange on video, ask your very close friends for their honest opinion, they’ll know what’s best for you.

3. You haven’t done your research

Your ultimate goal is to help as many people as possible and with video you can do that 24/7! The only problem is that in order to do that, people have to be able to find you. Before creating a video you should do some research to see how you will name your video in order to be able to rank easier in the search engines (both Google and YouTube).

And I’m saying before, because even what you say on your video is important on what keywords you will rank for. But we’ll see about this in a bit.

First of all, you really want to use an actionable keyword as your title and by that I mean search queries that people type when they mostly want to view a tutorial video on a subject. Most actionable keywords have videos in the top of Google because how-to’s are amazing using videos. Do a search for the term that you want to use in Google and see if there are already some videos on that keyword. Unless you want to create a new market, this will increase your video ranking chances tremendously. After all, if that query doesn’t show any video results, you can’t rank!

The second step is to do some keyword research and see if that keyword is hard to rank for and most importantly if that keyword will bring any traffic if you rank well.

Doing some keyword research is essential for you to understand your market and at the same time not doing it is like shooting a weapon in the dark! There are two ways to see your keyword competition. The best free way is to go to the Google Keyword Tool, type your keywords and see what Google suggests and what has the most benefit for you, with the least competition.

The Keyword tool is an amazing tool but the second I bought Market Samurai I saw a huge increase in the visitors I’m getting for my blog posts and videos I do for clients. This happens because Market Samurai digs deep into your selected keywords and suggests exactly those that are fit for you. In a keyword phrase, even changing a single word can have a huge difference.

Top Tip: Check out Market Samurai’s Video Tutorials on how to use their application, it’s so essential I can’t stress it enough! Even if you don’t buy their tool, go ahead and watch their videos, they will provide you with amazing knowledge no matter if you’re a beginner or a pro.

To sum it up: First find if there’s a video market for your keyword and last but not least, analyze the keywords you have selected to see if it easy for you to rank on them with your video.

4. Your videos are not optimized

Next on our guide comes video optimization. Even though it’s the most important aspect for video promotion, most people just ignore it! Let’s change that once and for all, shall we?

The following are the things you should focus on when it comes to video optimization.

i. Video Title. As we discussed in the previous point, the title is the most important aspect of your video page. It will help you rank on search engines and at the same time, you can create your title so that when someone looks at it, they will want to click on it even out of curiosity. Remember, it’s not only about where you rank, it’s also about how many of those that will see your listing will click on it.

ii. Video Description. The second most important element on your video page! This is where you will write what your visitor will learn after viewing this video and also include links to your business blog and/or where this video is posted on your blog. You want to add links there because if you don’t you won’t be able to tell your viewers what you want them to do next. You should also include your main keyword in your description as it will help a lot with your ranking efforts.

iii. Video Tags. You should use tags, it’s one of the best ways to categorize your video and one of the few ways for YouTube to understand what your video is about. Tags play a very important role when it comes to related videos (videos that are suggested from YouTube on the right side of the page or after a video ends) so use them but don’t abuse them.

You should add all the relevant keywords that your video is about and if you are out of ideas, do see what others with almost the same title and content have used.

The more impressions you get, the more YouTube will suggest relevant keywords for you to use on each one of your videos.

That takes us to the next point that could easily be included here but it’s so important that should be a whole category by it self.

iv. Video filename. I haven’t split-tested this personally but there are so many people stating that your video filename should be optimized that I have to include it here also. What they mean by that is that when you upload a video to YouTube, you should rename it before in order to use your main keywords. For example you shouldn’t upload a video named sally004.mp4 but rename it into something like sally-cooks-ravioli.mp4 so that even from the filename, YouTube understands what it’s about.

I would perform a split test to see if that theory actually works, but to tell you the truth, it’s an action step that requires so little time that I always do it no matter what.

5. Video Transcription

When you upload a video to YouTube, it automatically tries to understand what you are talking about inside your video. As you can imagine, this doesn’t work that well for the moment, and it gives back strange sentences.

This text is used by YouTube in order to rank your video for the content of the actual video and it’s a really powerful strategy for YouTube to show it’s visitors much more relevant results. So you can utilize something that 99% of the other YouTubers don’t do. Upload a transcription of your own. It will be without mistakes and most importantly, YouTube will rank you for what you’re actually talking about, not just what it thinks you’re saying.

I can’t stress enough how powerful this method is especially for business or instructional videos. If you haven’t done that before, just give it a try! And if you don’t have enough time to do it yourself, you can easily and cheaply outsource it to oDesk in order to gain all the benefits that transcription offers. Navigate to virtual assistants and find someone that can do what you want at a reasonable fee.

Tip: You don’t have to upload your text with the actual content of your video at the same time you upload the video. You can do it anytime you want and you can also use that tip to update your old videos with the actual content in text form. All you have to do is to go to your Video manager, click the More tag of a video and select Captions and Subtitles. Then select Upload and upload your text. And you’re ahead of the 99% of your competition!

6. Engagement. Use it!

Most of us are forgetting about this very important part. Don’t just finish your video with a thank you, use the most valuable time of your video in order to tell your viewers what you would love them to do!

The end of a video is the most powerful part of the video, because the viewer has already enjoyed all of your video, might have learned something, had a laugh or whatever. Don’t just end your video, ask a question, ask them to like the video, subscribe to your channel and visit your site. If your video has helped them, they can’t resist doing so. Ray William Johnson and Philip DeFranco are masters at this. Look how they use engagement without being thought of as needy or anything else. If they can use this method to bring millions of views and subscribers to their channel, you should too!

7. Approve Video Responses

Many people (including me) have been quite grumpy when it comes to accepting video responses. In order for me to accept a video response in the past it would have to be exactly in the same subject as my video and a real response to it. Otherwise it would get a decline. Not anymore ;)

The thing is that when you have many video responses, YouTube acknowledges that many people not only took time to see your video, not only left a comment, but they created a video response for your video and that counts a lot in their positioning algorithm, giving you many “points” if your video has many video responses. What you should do is to accept (almost all) video responses. In order for the last 3 that are actually shown to be as relevant as possible, add a video response too, from one of your videos from your other channels. It’s a great way to “recycle” your viewers from one channel to another without spending any more time!

8. Be everywhere!

When you have a YouTube channel, it’s like having an actual blog, you have to have niche authority. I’m sure that no matter in what niche you are, there are many YouTubers out there in the same niche as you. Reach out to them, connect with them, help them promote their videos and the most important of all, make videos with them! It will create authority for you and at the same time it will strengthen your relationship with your “competition”. And that’s the magic of the Internet… In the real world, a competitor is someone who is in the same market with you and always tries to gain your customers. Not on the Internet. When you cooperate with your competition you both gain value and at the same time create more views and sales for both of you! It’s a powerful thing to utilize and you should do it immediately.

9. Create links to your videos

For the last one I’ve left one of the most important aspects of your videos ranking on Google and YouTube: link gathering.

YouTube and Google both work in similar ways: you need links in order to rank for your article or video keywords. What you can easily do and and gain a lot of ranking power is to submit your videos to social bookmarking sites as well as share them to your social networks. This will not only give you immediate results (friends viewing your videos) but also will strengthen their power against competition. It’s what you always need to do no matter what.

The most important social networks you should pay attention to are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn (if your videos are business oriented), and Chime (a new player, competitor with twitter)

Social Bookmarking sites to pay attention to: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, BizSugar (again if your videos are business oriented), Delicious, BlogEngage, HackerNews (for technology, programming and business videos), PinBoard, and Technorati.

My intention was to keep this less than a thousand words but the thing is that video is becoming so important that having a strong presence is becoming essential for your marketing efforts.

What you should do before closing this page is to share it with a friend of yours that might have any of the above problems and help them overcome them or any of your friends that you think this would help them in their business. This will help us too because we’d love to see some traffic in a post that took us so many hours to write. ;)

What you should do after closing this page, is to make things happen!

Angel

Why you don’t get enough YouTube views on your videos and how to fix it is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

YouTube is a powerhouse when it comes to video. Everyone who’s spending more than five minutes per day surfing the internet, is going to visit YouTube. Why? It’s simple! Thousands of people upload videos to YouTube every day! And supply eventually creates demand.

Looking at the infographic below (found on Techcrunch) you will be amazed with the the 48 Hours of Video uploaded / Minute figure but what’s more important is that there are 3 Billion views per day!

If we assume that the average video is 4 minutes long, everyday there are One Million new videos on YouTube!

So why it is that YouTube is not used excessively by and for marketers?

People until now used to think that YouTube was just a playground for kids to play and a platform for musicians to distribute their music videos. And that’s why there wasn’t enough of a business audience on YouTube. Well, not anymore! People are beginning to understand that with such a huge audience, it’s not what brought them to YouTube in the first place that counts, but who will keep them engaged in the end. Meaning that, for sure someone wants to go and look at some RWJ videos (who wouldn’t???) but in the end they will soon stay to watch motivational videos, instructional how-to videos and anything that they really care about.

It’s like having a personalized television created just for you. No matter what your passions are and what you really love spending time doing, you will find someone uploading videos for exactly that.

And that’s what will revolutionize the way we interact with video in general. For so many years we were used to just tuning in to a Television channel and just let it broadcast its program to us. If we liked what we saw, we just stayed tuned in, passively enjoying what the television companies had to send our way. Well not anymore.

Now we are able to subscribe to a channel we like in YouTube and be able to enjoy new episodes whenever we feel like, wherever we feel like. Google is getting that and apart from its own efforts to create a Google TV, there are many others who have included YouTube video streaming on their device (aka. Apple TV). Most flat TV sets nowadays, come up with YouTube as an app pre-installed. In a few years that’s what will make news; YouTube and not any other colossal news corporation.

Google just changed the default channel profile view and made it much more social, so that when you subscribe to someone, you will also be able to see what person also likes watching on YouTube. Google now pays huge attention to people subscribing to a channel and gives a lot of rank value to channels with a lot of subscribers. It makes sense that what now is a simple channel, soon will become the evolution of a television channel. You will be able to see all your unwatched episodes and when you click resume, you will be able to see everything you haven’t up to now.

To make a long story short, now is the time for you to invest in YouTube, especially if you are a blogger, marketer or entrepreneur. You will be one of the first ones to make a huge impact and help YouTube shift and become a much much better marketing medium than it currently is.

Don’t wait for the right opportunity, a new camera, new lights. Just start shooting and help people understand better what you do and why you rock at it.

To your Success,

Angel

Why YouTube is changing and why you should care is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

In the previous post we saw how fast and easy we can create a free online survey with Google Docs for our market research purposes. However, there’s one thing I didn’t tell you. Even the paid ways to create surveys lack one big important thing: the ability to automatically register the people who finish the survey to a newsletter management service. Many support the manual import of email addresses, but I am not sure that the deliverability of those services is reliable; since if you can import emails manually, what’s stopping you from adding emails that you don’t have permission to send a mail to in the first place? So I’m sticking with Aweber for the third year now and I am very pleased with it.

Back to our subject:if I want some people to complete my survey and at the end be able to send them mails about the survey results, etc., I’m not able to. And that’s when an amazing plugin for WordPress comes in to save the day: Gravity Forms! With this plugin, not only you can create any possible kind of form you can imagine, but also build a complete survey and be able to export the emails and names to your Aweber account automatically.

So let’s see how we can do this.

What we’ll need:

• A WordPress blog…
• A Gravity Forms license. (You need to purchase the Business license and up in order to use the Aweber function. A once-off $99)

Creating a Survey with Gravity Forms

The plugin is easy to use and simply straightforward. When you install the plugin and create your first form, you will be presented with the first block that you will need to fill in order for some basic settings to take place.

On the first panel all we have to do is to set the form’s name and description. These can be shown when you embed the form in a page. (You have the ability to hide them and write your own.)

On the second panel you are able to set what type of button your form will have and to enable the button to appear only if certain conditions take place (conditional logic). We will cover it extensively very soon and explain how this amazing feature works.

You can also limit responses to a certain number, enable animation (suggested feature), or require a user to be logged in (if you want only your members to be able to fill it in).

On the last tab we can set up what will the participants see upon survey completion. It could be a text message or another page with a thank you message. Using the redirect is an awesome way to either use split-testing and see which form performs better or even set a goal in Google Analytics and be able to track how many “conversions” you’ve had and from what type of traffic!

After this small setting configuration, we’re ready to design our form.

The most important fields that you’re going to use are located in the standard fields and the Advanced ones. You’re going to use advanced only for the email preferences.

You can easily use:

• paragraph text to ask your visitors for their opinion on something
• drop-down menus or radio buttons for selecting a single option
• multi-select or checkboxes for multiple selections

The most amazing thing that Gravity Forms lets you do when designing forms and in our case a survey, is to use conditional logic. For example, you have added a question for the user to answer, something like: do you own a website? The following question can be: how many visits per month do you have on that site? That question can appear only when the user has selected yes as an option to the first question! You can view our own Internet Marketing product survey and play with the options to fully understand how conditional logic works. By the way, please do complete that survey while you’re at it. We’re in the process of creating our own product and would be so grateful if you could answer our questions!

Using Conditional Logic in your Survey is dead simple! You can add the question that is the master question and then when you add the dependent question, you can click on it, go to its advanced properties and select conditional logic. Then select to show this field only if the answer to the previous question is what you want it to be. That’s it! ;)

Capturing emails with Aweber in Gravity Forms

If you want to capture a visitor’s mail into your Aweber account, you will have to use the name and email from advanced fields and a single check-box for asking your users if they want to opt-in for updates.

The first thing you need to do is to register with Aweber and create your first list with the step by step guide that Aweber provides. Hint: You need to create a form too even though it might seem pointless since you’ll incorporate the form into the survey. Just create a form and don’t pay any attention to the graphics. ;)

When you finish the list creation, return to your WordPress panel and click on the forms panel, then select the Aweber sub-menu. If you can’t see it, you will have to install it from your Add-ons tab under forms. You will have to connect your Aweber account with the Gravity Forms plugin. After adding your API key, the plug-in will ask you what form it should save data to. Select the form in Aweber that you have just created and match the name, email and check box fields with your Aweber fields. After doing that, you’re done!

Save the form and create a new WordPress page embedding the form inside the page. There’s a button created in order for you to easily embed your form in the page, together with the styling buttons above your content. After publishing it you can start viewing it’s conversion rate and see what answers people gave to you.

So that’s it, there’s some work involved and some money to be spent but in the end it’s really worth it. You are now able to keep track of who has completed the form and the most important thing of all, be able to contact them with updates on your progress.

Hope that this post helped you,

Angel

Create your own online survey with WordPress and Gravity Forms is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

Sharing on social media is not a simple thing to do. First of all, you have to have something meaningful to share; something that your audience will love to check out and will benefit from it. Getting valuable content and pushing it to your social media account is not easy, at least if you want to do it consistently.

My own problem is that I can’t schedule my posts, because every morning I read my RSS feeds I can find more than 10 posts worth mentioning, but I can’t share them all at once, because everyone will hate me! At the same time, I can’t add them to a note and keep remembering every now and then to open it and share each link or story one by one. That’s too unproductive!

Here’s where Buffer App comes in, a Web Application to save the day! The guys that created the application had the exact same problem (that’s actually how the best applications are made, by solving a problem their owners had: necessity is indeed the mother of invention) and decided to do something about it.

After registering with the application, you can add your social media account (Facebook, Facebook Pages and Twitter for the moment) and edit the settings.

As you can see from the image above, you can set up almost everything you should need. The service supports bit.ly so you can keep track of the effectiveness of your sharing, and you can even schedule the time you want your status updates to be published. If you are a more advanced user of social media, you should change your update times into the best hours your audience is more responsive and more likely to check out your posts.

After doing that, you can easily go and install its Firefox or Chrome plugins and start using the service.

You will notice the application icon (top right for Chrome and bottom for Firefox). When you are on a page worth mentioning, click it and it will pop up the buffer dialog where you can modify your settings and send the buffer to the queue.

The idea is quite simple but it’s done right and it’s a service worth mentioning. Speaking with Leo Widrich, co-founder of the application, we got some more information that might be relevant to you.

The application got released in December of 2010 and already has 75,000 users and for the near future, they are planning to release support for Google+ and a new algorithm for better sharing. Especially Google+ support made me extremely happy. ;)

If you’re a site owner and you would like to add the buffer feature for your visitors, you can get the button here and if you’re already using the ShareBar social sharing plugin we mentioned before, you can add it using the following code:

<!-- code for Big Button: -->
<a href="http://bufferapp.com/add" data-text="[title]" data-url="[url]" data-via="[twitter]" data-count="vertical">Buffer</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js"></script>
<!-- code for Small Button: -->
<a href="http://bufferapp.com/add" data-text="[title]" data-url="[url]" data-via="[twitter]" data-count="horizontal">Buffer</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js"></script>

If after loving the application you decide to mail them about adding more services (like LinkedIn, Chime.in etc etc.) don’t bother, I will email them EVERY single month until they do so (I’m serious). :p

So what are you waiting for? Register NOW and finally fix your sharing schedule, once and for all!

Buffer: The Social Media Management Service to Rule Them All is a post from Moneytized Blog
Follow @Moneytized @ Twitter.

The short answer is yes!

The long one is – well, it’s long! You might have created a personal blog some time ago, have a lot of traffic but don’t know how to make money from it or you want to start something new and want to check if it’s possible making money off of it.

Generally speaking, you can make money on the Internet with any site. But that statement alone is very vague. It all comes down to:

Your Visitors, your Focus & your Niche

Any site on whatever subject can make money. But when it comes down to money earned per average visitors, it’s all about the niche. Sites that follow a specific niche tend to get much more money/visits than “general” sites. For example, news sites are based on the huge amount of traffic they get. That’s how they are able to make money. Otherwise, if the subject is general, there are less monetization opportunities. To understand if your traffic is considered “expensive”, you have to think like the average advertiser in your niche. If, for example, you have a website about server configuration and security, your ads will be about dedicated servers and security. Profit margins for that niche are great: the monthly payments a client has to make in order to have a dedicated server are big, and the competition in this niche, huge! Therefore, ads shown in your blog will be expensive for the advertisers.

With a niche site, you have targeted visitors who are interested in the exact same thing as you. Therefore, you can pitch and convert them into buyers much easier. More product owners will approach a niche site to advertise their product, because an advertisement on a targeted site will convert much, much better.

What are the ways to make money from a blog?

• Affiliate Sales: If you don’t have your own product, you can sell someone else’s product! By doing so, you get a percentage of the price paid for it. Affiliate marketing is very lucrative, and if used effectively, can become a great stream of revenue. With electronic products, the commission paid from the publishers reaches 75% because a sale costs nothing to the product creator: there are no inventory and creation costs. Affiliate sales on physical products will give you a smaller percentage because their profit margins are smaller. It still can be a lucrative option, because physical products are more expensive on average. The best Affiliate networks to join for online products are ClickBank, Share A Sale, e-junkie. If you want to promote physical products, you should join Amazon Affiliate Program and Commission Junction.

• Pay Per Click: There are many networks that can help you monetize your traffic by paying you for every click your visitors make on your site’s ads or pay a fixed fee for every impression your visitors make. The best networks that you should consider are: Google AdSense, AdEngage and adBrite. If you would prefer to receive a flat rate per impression you can check out Buy Sell Ads. Buy Sell Ads is one of the most well known marketplaces to buy and sell ad space: the best thing is that you can set your own advertisement price.

• Link Sales: You can sell links from your site to other sites, although I would strongly suggest not to. Reason? Google will eventually penalize your site for selling links. If you’re still interested on how this works, you can check out Text Link Ads and TNX. To sell links you don’t have to go to a service like the aforementioned but you can sell links directly. When contacted for a link exchange or even a link sale, name your price and see if that offer seems reasonable to them.

• Donations: If you’re not a fan of displaying ads on your website, you can ask your visitors to donate some money for the amazing content you create or to help you pay server costs, buy a coffee or a beer etc. by installing a WordPress plugin named WordPress Donations. This will display a widget on your blog, enticing your visitors to give you some money with PayPal. This can work amazingly well for hobby, craft and mommy-blogging sites but I am not a great fan of this option.

• Premium Content: If you write on your blog very frequently and always write helpful posts for others you might want to create a membership site in order to let your visitors that pay a fee per month receive your best content and have value-added features for them. For example, you can also offer online consultations for the members of the site. One of the best plugins that can help you make that a reality is WishList Member and I’d suggest that you take a very good look at it because just one look at its features gives you amazing ideas of what you can do with a Membership site.

• Offer Consulting: If your blog is a business blog and you write about things on your niche, then what would be more fit that offering the services you offer to your offline clients, online? Create a page inside your blog and advertise that you’re able to do such and such, for that fee. Promote that page on your posts’ footer or widget and see what happens ;)

• Sponsored Posts: If you have some traffic and link value on your site, you will be contacted by product owners asking you to write an article about their service and provide a link so someone interested can check them out. This is a common practice and a service connecting bloggers and advertisers has been created to help the two parties find each other. You can check it out at pay per post, but remember, endorsing a product and getting money for it, is a no-no for Google and might penalize you.

• Create a Product: It’s one of the most obvious but also less used ways to make money from a website. If you’re passionate about a niche and write about it all the time, why not create an e-book and sell it to your readers? If your blog posts are informative and people appreciate your work, they will buy it for sure! Adding this revenue stream is a must because even if you have a few visitors per day, you’re taking your blog to the next level and open the doors to many more opportunities. You never know who will buy your book.

This is not a complete guide; how could it be! Monetization of a blog is such a huge area that many posts for each one of the bullets will be needed in order to be able to explain the when and how to incorporate each one in your blog. We’ll get there, one post at a time!

P.S. I’ve intentionally left out the best way to make money from your blog’s visitors, simply because I think it deserves a post all by it self. Stay tuned because I’ll write it so well, you’ll just have to read it! (I’m not toying with you guys; I’d just hate to give you a great idea like that and let you wander around with it without the proper guidance!)

Can I make money off my blog? is a post from Moneytized Blog
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I just found out about Code Academy or Code Cademy as their domain states. It’s a site about learning how to program. At the moment, they have some classes on javascript. Apart from the fact that I was hooked from the first second I landed on their website, I really saw how many things they have implemented awesomely from the get-go. So what, you might say?

Numbers can speak for themselves: 200,000 Registered Users in just three days!

I’d love if you would try it, a very fun experience indeed! But what can CodeAcademy teach us about a Startup and how to launch a website in general?

Don’t ask for a visitor to become a user at the first second! Show them that you’re a great service to subscribe to, give them a sneak peek of what you have to offer and they’ll look for the register button themselves. Code Academy follows that rule by heart and while you do the first exercise, the system asks you to register in order not to lose your progress. Brilliant!

Have a beautifully designed website. Doesn’t have to be flawless; you just have to follow what the rest of the world is doing. A lot of white space makes it easy on the eye.

Solve a problem and, even better, do that while creating a fun and interactive experience. If you break the learning process into many small steps, each user is able to progress and feel that there’s an accomplishment for every little step they make. Hints are a great way to make it more interactive and asking you to type commands that you have learned a few lessons before (while sometimes can be a shameful experience) can be an amazing way to refresh what you’ve learned minutes ago and use the same material in a more advanced way.

Use Gamification techniques. Let’s face it, Gamification is one of the hottest trends if not the hottest right now. In a year’s time everyone will talk about it. Getting experience by doing exercises, showing percentages of completion status of your courses, and getting badges for your achievements is what a visitor really needs to get hooked on a platform.

Use Social Media in a smart way. For a user to submit something to social media, that something should be either mindblowing or funny or just a company like Code Academy can make their users want to submit the website. How? By letting them tweet and like an achievement, a course completion or something along those lines. The second someone is happy for an achievement or the end of a lesson, that second Code Academy pops up a message (non intrusively) and says something along those lines “hey, you just did that, want to tweet about it?”. How can they say no?

Launch fast and see where it will take you. If you pay attention to the lessons in Code Academy you’ll find out that it can start teaching you only JavaScript and while at it, not thoroughly, just the basics. Why? The creators wanted to make their idea a reality, see how the world will respond and then decide how to move on. The results are amazing, people ask for more lessons and  languages and now are waiting for anything new to come out. If you’re building something for more than a year and it’s not live yet, no matter what’s your excuse, you’re beating a dead horse. Start simple no matter what and see where it will take you.

Have good investors. Code Academy started with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Social+Capital Partnership, Thrive Capital, CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Joshua Schacter, Vivi Nevo, Naval Ravikant, and several others. I’m not telling this to find one excuse for not doing all the above, remember the guys had so little time to prepare the service. I’m just saying that it’s one more benefit that you will get if you have all of the above, many and huge investors.

If you’re like me, I’m sure you’re waiting for the next lessons, and most of all waiting to see what will be the next business steps and monetization plans of Code Academy. From all of us at Moneytized, Kudos to you guys and off to a great start!

What Codecademy Can Teach you About Startups is a post from Moneytized Blog
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Don’t you just hate it every time you are set to write an article and you end up spending 5 hours just looking at an empty screen without any outcome? Guess what! It happens to all of us! I can’t tell you how many hours I have wasted on just thinking about what to come up with next. It’s called writer’s block, and it happens to everybody.

Apart from the 1,000 different ways to deal with it, like running, cooking, sleeping, taking a shower, reading a book etc., I’ve found a simple and surefire way to help you not only come up with new article ideas instantly, but also help you at least double your site’s traffic.

Beat writer’s block by looking at your site’s stats!

You might think, “Won’t that make me procrastinate even more?” That’s why I tried to make you stop looking at your site’s stats in one of my previous posts; but if you’re in real procrastination trouble, traffic statistics can become an invaluable tool for you to get things done.

I’ll assume you already have Google Analytics or any other traffic reporting script that helps you understand where your visitors come from. If you don’t, sign up for it; it’s an essential tool.

Getting over writer’s block Step-by-Step guide:

Log in to your Google Analytics account, go to the search engine traffic, and select to see all the different keyword results. Then select to see the top 250 rows. Copy those to a spreadsheet or a text editor.

Now you can easily see what keywords bring you the most traffic. If your blog or website is still small, fear not! Even having keywords at your top 250 that are searched only once, that’s more than enough! (If you don’t have 250 keyword variations that people searched for and came to your site with, and at the same time, you have posted more than 3o posts, contact me! You may be doing something wrong and I most probably will be able to help you.)

Now start crossing out the keywords that have no meaning at all. To further explain, when I do this for this site, I will remove vague keywords like “image”, “projects”, references to my name, etc. I will also remove expressions that have no interest for my blog like “you shouldn’t leave”, “the things that people shouldn’t do” etc. Most probably by now, I’m left with 150 keywords.

Now comes the grouping. I will try to eliminate search queries that are very close to each other. For example the keywords “pagerank back to zero”, “pagerank go to 0″ and “pagerank went to zero” will become one.

Try not to group keywords too much. For example, it’s one thing to have a keyword like “pagerank went back to zero” and another query “how to raise my pagerank”. The one is about a penalty that a site got, and the other one is for link building.

You should now have about 30 to 40 keywords. Next step is query rank on Google. For a keyword to bring you visits you should rank somewhere at least at the top 100. Log out from your Google account (being logged in affects the ranks you see for your site) and start searching the position for each one of your keywords. A much faster and better way to do that is to use Seo Book’s Rank Checker plugin for Firefox (it’s free) and do this automatically. It will save you a lot of time!

After doing that, you will have a small table like the one below.

From the image above we can see all the top keyword groups, ranking in Google and if this keyword ranks because of an article I wrote in the past or just because Google thought that my page was relevant to that keyword.

This analysis will take you one hour at most, but will give you the following amazing benefits:

1) Help you discover keyword phrases for articles you’ve written that you had no idea you should add. The best example I can think of is the Evernote article I wrote a few months ago. While this article ranks highly for its main keywords, many visitors came with the search term “how to make folders evernote”. Looking at my article again, I found out that even if the word “folder” is mentioned just once, the keyword was ranking at position 19 and receiving quite good traffic. Why? Search a bit more; I’ve found out that for the iOS devices, making a folder in Evernote is not quite straightforward and that’s why people were searching for it. Therefore, with just one paragraph and screenshot on how to do it, I will be able to receive many more visits for an article I’ve written in the past. Increasing traffic from old posts by spending almost no time at all? Check!

2) This analysis will pinpoint which of your older articles already rank at Google and bring you traffic, but with a little bit of promotion could perform 10 times better. For example, the keyword how often should I post on my blog, ranks at position 15 and brings me quite a good amount of visits. Imagine how many times more visitors I would be able to get if I was ranked in page one! Therefore, one or two more links will help it rank to the first page and by spending only 5 minutes. I will be able to bring many more visitors to my site. Multiply traffic by helping your keywords rank? Check!

3) This is the most important one of all and while the above points will help you find some small tasks to do when you have some time available, this one will find amazing article ideas for your site. Writing if an idea is for an already existing article or a completely new idea for one, will help you find at least 20 titles for articles in just 5 minutes. For example, the keyword “dropped domains with traffic” can become an amazing article on where and how to find expired domains that still receive traffic; the keyword “successful people blogs” will become a great mashup post of the blogs that successful business people have. The last keyword ranked because I have a post on the 7 Traits of successful people, this new idea for a mashup post will help me write something new and at the same time focus on the new-found keyword and be able to rank much better because the new post is exactly what users searched for.

After doing it you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of new ideas for articles you’ve just found and at the same time your writer’s block will be a thing of the past! I found 14 new posts I can write, 23 posts I can bring some more links to make the keywords rank better and 12 posts that will get a very good increase in ranking by just adding a paragraph.

How about you?

Need help overcoming Writer’s Block? Get amazing article writing ideas from your own site statistics is a post from Moneytized Blog
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AdWords is such a sophisticated platform, that in order to fully understand it and be able to use it effectively, you’ll not only have to read up about it, but also have a good hands-on experience. It’s that complicated because there are numerous targeting options and because they have many system rules for pricing and ranking the ads.

Google takes many factors into consideration and combines them into one score, the Quality Score: each keyword we target gets one. We eventually want most of our main keywords to reach a Quality Score of 10 in order for us to have great exposure. At the same time, we will be able to get more quality visitors on our website at the least possible expense.

There are many things we can do to decrease the cost per click, so let’s get started!

1) Increase the Click-through Rate of our Ads

Our CTR tells us how many people click our ads out of every 100 times our ad is displayed. When we create advertisement texts or images for our campaign, we’re trying to appeal to the visitors of Google and intrigue them enough in order to click the ad and see what we have to offer. Ad creation is a mixture of art and science because there are so many things that you can do to make your ad perform better or worse: one article alone is not enough for me to explain! We have to test different approaches on our ad’s copy, and see which one performs better. For example, having a college/university website to promote, we can focus on explaining to the viewer the advantages that they will gain from attending that particular college or get them nervous that there’s no time to lose – if they don’t make that decision, the competition will leave them behind. While this example is a bit extreme, you get my drift!

Having 2-3 ads for every AdGroup we create is a necessity. We’ll have to leave them running for a few thousand impressions in order to see which ad performs better, then keep that ad, and test again with a new ad.

What is a good “click through” rate for AdWords?

I can’t give you a precise number on what CTR you should aim for because every language and every niche has a more engaged audience or less. As a rule of thumb, my record CTR is 14% and I always try to optimize my campaigns until I reach at least 2-3%.

Why CTR Plays an important role on the price we’ll pay per click

Let’s take as an example two companies, company A and B.

Company A has a 2% CTR as an average and pays 25 Cents / Click.
Company B has a 9% CTR as an average and pays 10 Cents / Click.

At a first glance, someone would guess that Google would prefer company A because it pays 15 Cents per click more (more than double the price company B pays). But that’s where we would be wrong! Google has a “pool” of visitors searching on its search engine every single day. For these visitors Google wants to maximize its profits; therefore, it doesn’t just look at how much each company pays per click but pays much more attention to how much money it can make per 100 impressions (different pages seen). Therefore in the end…

Company A pays Google 50 Cents per 100 Impressions
Company B pays Google 90 Cents per 100 Impressions

Therefore Company B’s ads will be displayed first, and the quality score of company B’s keywords will increase. So if company B lowers the click price from 10 cents to 6 cents, it will still be shown first in the ads and profit more from people visiting their website. That’s why raising your ad’s CTR is THAT important if you want to lower your costs.

HUGE TIP: Apart from testing different kinds of ads, one great tip that works amazingly well for my campaigns is to pay more than needed in the beginning of each campaign. For example, if for an ad to be shown, 30 Cents per click are needed, I’d pay 50 or even a bit more on some days. This would make my ads appear first almost always, and therefore get a good CTR from the beginning. So spending some more money at the beginning, will save you a lot more in the long run! You’ve got to try it ;)

2) Keyword Relevancy and Landing Page Quality

Google cares a lot for its reputation and therefore, pays a lot of attention to the Keyword Relevancy. If for example your ad is about dog training and the landing page you take your visitors when they click the link talks about something else, even slightly close (e.g. dog food), Google gives a lower quality score to that keyword. The more the keyword is far from the subject of the landing page, the worse your Quality Score will be.

Case Study Result: I once tried to bring in people with the keyword “image hosting” to a games site. The cost per click was calculated to $5 per click. If my site was actually about Image Hosting, it would cost less than 10 Cents / click.

Solution: We should try to create a different AdGroup for every group of keywords that we have. For an interior design retail store we would create one AdGroup for Leather Couches (containing all the possible keywords around leather couches), one for interior lighting, and so on and so forth. That would make Google look good since the ad would be about leather couches and the landing page would be exactly that and not the main page. Doing that will help you increase your quality score a lot! It is given that if you make the AdGroup about leather couches you should also create a specific landing page that contains everything about leather couches so that the whole experience for the visitor would be very optimized. Google loves that.

HUGE TIP: Creating different AdGroups, landing pages and ads for each group of keywords, gives you another great advantage against your competition. It is very likely that when someone searches for a keyword containing “leather couch”, your ad title or text will contain those exact words since you have created an AdGroup about it, so this text will appear as bold text, increasing the likelihood of the visitor of Google to click your link dramatically, and not someone else’s that couldn’t be bothered to create many AdGroups and landing pages ;)

Landing Page Quality is the quality of the code of your landing page together with all the tags and images etc. The basics of On-Page SEO apply here. To understand the additional changes you should make to your landing pages, read more: what is search engine optimization, how to write for the search engines, Meta Elements and proper image tagging.
Also keep in mind that the less HTML and CSS errors your site has, the better.

3) Landing Page Load Time

The time it takes for a site to load has lately become very important for Google. And it’s makes sense: when someone clicks a link from Google to another domain, especially if it’s an ad, he/she doesn’t want to wait a lot for the page to load. Subconsciously the wait makes the user “unhappy” and that is transferred to Google’s image. If the page is loading fast, that will give a small boost to our Quality Score. The easiest and fastest things we can do is to choose a good host and cache your pages.

4) Targeted Countries

The countries we target play an important role on how much we’re going to pay per click. It’s logical that a visitor from US is going to cost a lot more to target than a visitor from Greece.

HUGE TIP: What I’m doing when I want to target many countries is to make a campaign targeting USA and Canada, then replicate the whole campaign with AdWords Editor (tutorial coming soon…) and change the countries targeted to make the second campaign target the good European countries. Last but not least the third one will target the rest of the world.

Doing the above, I am able to change my pricing according to the countries I target and therefore control every aspect of my campaign perfectly.

5) Competition

Competition is another HUGE factor on how much we’re going to pay for every click. It’s logical that when a keyword is targeted by many Advertisers, it will be more expensive than one that no one targets.
To check your competition, the easiest thing to do would be to go to Google and search for our main keyword. See if all spots are taken or if there are available ones. If not, the keyword is ours for the taking! (there’s a chance that a keyword that we enter with no advertisers won’t be available because it has low search volume).

Solution: If you’re on a competitive market we can easily outperform our competition (once again) by going for long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those keywords are keywords that are not searched that often but they get some searches per month. These add up to a good sum if you gather up many of them and one thing is for sure, people who search with long tail keywords are much more focused and ready to buy! Do read the article about long tail keywords, it will really help you understand how you can use them to your advantage!

Last but not least, what also affects the prices that you’re going to pay for your ads is your:

6) Current Account standing

Lately Google has incorporated another metric determining how much you will pay for your ads. Your account history. If your account is completely new it will take some time to get things started. The same happens if your old account had many experiments, many ads rejected, banned keywords and low CTR campaigns.

CASE STUDY: Having a very old AdWords account and learning by doing mistakes, when Google tweaked their algorithm to include this metric, I wanted to create a new campaign. As you can imagine it wasn’t performing great but since the new campaign was very targeted and generally a very good campaign, all it took was $400-500 in clicks to bring back my account to a normal status.

Doing all of the above will really help you understand how pricing works and how you can benefit from a good quality score. If it’s worth starting an AdWords campaign for your website, use the above advice and start outperforming your competition!

From your experience, have you got any more tips that helped you get a better quality score and lower prices? It would help a lot to contribute to this post!

How to lower your AdWords Campaign Keywords’ average Cost Per Click rate is a post from Moneytized Blog
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When you create your web site, you’re faced with the following task: Choosing what keywords best describe your website and picking the best title and keywords for the main page, category pages and content pages.

This might seem a mundane task but in the long run, it’s really worth it. Being able to tell the search engines what each page on your website is about will help you a lot in your rankings.

You’re not going to use keywords only when you are trying to build a better ranking for your website, but also when you drive traffic with AdWords, and any other PayPerClick services.

Keyword selection is and should be a big part of your Internet Marketing efforts.

If you’re in a competitive market you can easily outperform your competition by going for the long-tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those keywords that are not searched that often but get a few searches per month, most of the time being keywords of 3-4 words or more. These add up to a good sum if you gather up many of them and one thing is for sure, people who search with long tail keywords are much more focused and ready to buy!

Imagine the following example.

Let’s say we’ve created an online store, selling cameras. We would want to promote that store with Pay Per Click through AdSense. We can go for very broad terms like “Photography” or “best cameras” or even “Canon”. We’ll get many visits, but we won’t convert those visits to sales. Why not? Because these terms are too generic.

Let’s take the “Photography” keyword first. If a person searches on Google with the keyword photography, that person is most probably looking for general information about photography, or just to look at some photos or just see some cameras and how much they go for. Nothing specific. While this keyword has 83,100,000 searches per month, those searches are too generic and not focused at all.

Next stop, the “Best Cameras” keyword. This is a much better keyword because the Google visitor might not know a lot about cameras but wants to find more information, reviews etc.

Going deeper into keywords, we might add “Canon” as a keyword. This is a keyword that might have some focused people searching for it, but it might not be about cameras; plus, our visitor still has no idea which camera they want. While having 55,600,000 searches/month, this keyword would be too competitive and too expensive for the results that we’d want.

“Canon DLSR” on the other hand, is the first query that can bring a more targeted visitor to our site. That’s because someone who’s using that keyword already knows that they want to buy a Canon camera and at the same time, it should be a DSLR. We instantly know that they are more interested in buying in comparison to all the previous ones and they’re not looking for something very cheap. With 368,000 searches/month this is a very good keyword but still… We can do better!

“Canon EOS 600D” is a keyword that already has a specific product in it. This should be a keyword on the product page of our site or a keyword in AdWords whose Ad Text will take the visitor to that specific page. Using this keyword we will be able to limit the amount of clicks someone should make to find the product they want to zero! At the same time, this visitor knows exactly what they’re looking for and therefore, they are of high value to us. 110,000 searches/month is a great number for that keyword. Someone might think that we can’t go deeper into the long-tail keyword selection. That person surely hasn’t seen Inception!

“Canon EOS 600D Review” is the next keyword that we would want to add to our campaign because the person searching for it has a hint that this camera is exactly what they need and just wants to read what others think about it. That person is very close to buying one for themselves. 3,600 searches/month is not a big number but that visitor is so targeted that every cent you spend on ads or link building, makes you sure that the clicks will convert.

“Canon EOS 600D Buy” is a  720 searches per month keyword. It’s very low, but we would be crazy not to add it to our campaign because whoever searches for it, looks exactly for a place to buy that specific camera. It’s like having a customer ready to buy for only a few cents!

What you should remember from this post is that:

For SEO, we should use our main keyword on our main page, but use our main category keywords and go deep on landing/product pages. We will convert better and at the same time it will be easier for us to rank on a big keyword like “Canon EOS 600D Review” than the word “Canon”.

For PPC (PayPerClick), we should create AdGroups that contain all the general keywords that are still targeting conscious buyers, for example “Canon DSLR”. Plus, for our most popular cameras, we will have to create AdGroups where the ad will have the exact model stated on it, the link should take us to that exact product page and all the keywords should be model specific.

In most of the cases, using long tail keywords is much cheaper than using broad terms and at the same time the visits you will have will be better converting. As you can see, imagination is your only limit when it comes to keyword research and you should add as many keywords as you can since the visits will be more targeted and therefore, better conversions, sometimes with cheaper visits!

We’re going to talk about specific tools and methods to create keyword lists with as many keywords as possible in the posts to come. Stay tuned ;)

How to use Long Tail Keywords to your advantage is a post from Moneytized Blog
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