Add your site to Blog/Web catalogues

After “Add your site to Search Engines” I’ll show you how to get some additional traffic. Adding your website to a Blog catalogue or Top List can get you some additional traffic.

But don’t expect to much from it, especially Top Lists tend to have a quite low traffic effect (it depends on situation, in some situations it can give a good amount of traffic but is quite rarely the case).

Blog catalogues

Adding your Blog to Blog catalogues has several other advantages, besides traffic only. Blog catalogues are updated quite often and this means, Googlebot is crawling Blog catalogues more often and this way will also add your blog faster to the index than it would otherwise. This is especially important if you just started blogging or having creating a website and have a low page rank/update frequency.

Another advantage is that blog catalogues have a high number of blogs in their database and usually also have a search function, so chances are higher that people will find your blog there and visit it (if your content is good enough).

Blog catalogues are especially useful for new websites or blogs as there is usually rarely a requirement to be added to the catalogue (other than that you shouldn’t have content which violates against the blog catalogues term of service)

Top Lists

Top Lists on other side, are usually only for certain categories. For example if your blog or website is about a certain type of game (i.e. online games) then top lists can be quite a good idea, while having a business blog usually won’t profit much from it.

Other than blog catalogues, Top Lists are more for websites which already have a certain amount of traffic (let’s say at least 400-1000 unique visitors daily). Reason for this is, that the top lists either use clicks or page views to determinate your ranking within the top list. If you just don’t have any traffic on your website or blog, then your blog won’t be visible in the first pages of the top list.

Visitor vs. Click/Vote Top Lists

• Visitors: Counts unique visitors per day/week/certain period of time
• Click/Vote: Requires your visitors to click on a small banner and press vote on the Top Lists website

In my opinion the Visitor counting Top Lists are better, because they tell more about the success of a website than clicks, because it doesn’t require any interaction from your visitors. And most visitors won’t even bother to vote for your site.

Sadly, most of the Top Lists still use the Click/Vote variant. Depending on the topic of your blog or website, you need to look for Top Lists which fit for your category.

So if it’s possible try to avoid Click/Vote Top Lists unless you’re sure to have good potion of loyal users who’d really clicking on the vote buttons and vote for you.

Not all top lists/blog catalogues will be beneficial!

But be careful! Don’t just sign up for every Blog Catalogue/Top List you found! Some of the Top Lists and Blog Catalogues abuse some flaws in the Google Search Engine which allows them to highjack your content/page ranking which in long terms hurts your search engine placement/rank. This method is called “url-hijacking” by redirecting the users via 302 redirection code (temporary moved) instead of 301 (permanently moved).

The url-hijacking topic is a big one and would exceed this post, so I will only give a short explanation. Many of such malicious Top Lists and Blog Catalogues will redirect the visitors by using redirection instead of directly linking. It could look similar to “http://www.blogrankings.com/out.php?url=http://www.yourdomain.com”

This is one indicator if the page is trying to hijack your website or not. In this case it’s better not to use this service. In worst case, they could replace the links to your website with theirs. So instead links in Google search engine to show “www.yourdomain.com” will show “http://www.blogrankings.com/out.php?url=http://www.exoticobsession.com". This way they could steal all your visitors who come via search engine to your page.

One such “bad” blog catalogue is http://www.blogrankings.com. We suggest not to register there, if you don’t want to risk your content to be url-hijacked!

Important note: When entering your website to different web catalogues, directories or top lists, make sure to use different site description on every one of them. Google may penalize you if there are same descriptions on different sites. 

List of Blog Catalogues/Top Lists

Catalogues/Directories (Good)

• BF Directory
• Bloge Catalogue

Catalogues/Directories (Bad)

• Blogrankings

Top Lists (Good)

• Toplists.de (for German blogs, sorry ^^)

Top Lists (Bad)

• No available yet

If you’re unsure if a top list/catalogue is trying to use hijacking techniques, check out About-Hijacking and check it. Simply copy an URL of one of the blogs or websites there into the text box and click “check link”. That’s all.

Adding your website to Search Engines

This one is probably most obvious steps you'd want to do, when you're about to publish your website/blog to receive some traffic. There are several ways to do this. As the Crawlers are automatically searching the web for new content/websites, the chances are good the search machine already indexed your website, if your website was linked from somewhere.

How to check if your website is index by a search engine?

It depends a little bit from search engine to search engine.

• Google.com: 
  Simply open Google Webpage and enter
  site:monetize-website.blogspot.com
  in the search field (of course replace monetize-website.blogspot.com with your websites root)
  
  If you want to see which pages are linking to your website, enter site:monetize-website.blogspot.com instead.
  
• Yahoo.com:
  To check your website in Yahoo, go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and enter your URL at top of the page and hit Explore URL.
  If you click on the "Inlinks" button, you can also see which pages link to your site
• Live.com (MSN): It was a hell to find out it (it’s located in the Advanced search options), but it seems it similar to Google’s syntax, just enter
  site:monetize-website.blogspot.com
  in the searchfield.
  
  However, i was unable to find a direct way to see incoming links, without having to sign up in the Webmaster Center. It seems to work similarly to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
  

You may notice some differences in the "inlinks" functions of the search engines, most of them may come from the facts that some engines handle links differently (i.e. following nofollow links or not).

How do I add my website to a search engine?

Your website is not in the index or not indexed fully? Time to change it. You can add your website to the search engines. Well “add” is the wrong term. You can “suggest” your webpage to a search engine, however there is no guarantee that the search engine will add your website to their index.

In order to add/suggest your website to a search engine, but before we do this, there is an important thing to know. There are two ways you can publish your website in the current search engines. The first is, to anonymously submit a website. For this version you don’t have to register with the search engine, the disadvantage is, you won’t have detailed statistics and options to check the state, stats, possible errors which influence your page rank etc. The second option is to register and claim the URLs you submit. For this you usually have to prove that you actually own this URLs and have to either upload a certain file to your webspace or and an meta-tag.

• Google.com:
  After you have signed up for Google.com, you can go to “My Account” and look for “Webmaster Tools”. If you can’t find it in My Products you probably haven’t signed in for the Webmaster Tools. So select it from “Try something new” section.
  
  Once there, you can add your website and verify it.
  
  To add a website to Google without creating an account and sign for Webmaster Tools, you can go to can Add your URL to Google and simply enter your URL there.
  
• Yahoo.com:
  Similar as with Google. Either Create your Account and add your website to “My Sites” in the Yahoo! Site Explorer and verify that you own the sites too.
  
  You can also submit your page without registering at “Submit Your Site”.
  
• Live.com:
  Microsoft also offers a Webmaster Center where you can register (or login if you already have an Live-ID).
  
  And the register-free submission of your site.

It’s worth to sign up for the Webmaster/Additional Services as they can offer you important information about how your site is performing (like search terms) or show you if something is wrong (404 errors, broken links etc) so you can fix it and improve your page ranking.

Advantages of signing up for advanced webmaster services

The main advantages are that you get

• Detailed statistics
• Detailed error reports
• Top search queries
• Inlinks statistics
• See Feed Subscriber statistics
• Show position of your page when user looks for certain keywords

They will be very helpful tool later when you’re about to start some optimizations. It’s also very important to submit a sitemap or Feed (Google accepts RSS/Atom Feeds as Sitemaps), they will make it easier for the search engine to index your website and will also be notified when you upload a new post or site.

How to get traffic to your website or blog?

In the last post Before you get started I told you what you need to do to have some quality-rich pages. Next, we need traffic. As mentioned in earlier posts, traffic is very important (although its not the most important) factor in become successful with your website or blog.

But getting reasonable amounts of traffic can take a long time. There are different ways to reach this target:

• Add your site to Search Engines
• Add your site to Blog/Web catalogues
• Add your site to your socialization page/bookmarks
• Do link trading with similar websites
• Be active in an community (i.e. Forums)

As this topic is so big, it will be split in many smaller parts, starting with “Adding your website to Search Engines”.

Before you get started with monetizing your website or blog

This post is mainly directed to newcomers, who haven't had a page before or who play with the thought on putting advertisement on their website. If you already have a page running Google AdSense, you maybe want to skip this post. However, reading this post you'll maybe find the one or another useful tip you wasn't aware before.

As mentioned in my Introduction post, before you even think about signing up or Google AdSense and start making money online, you should make a website or blog with some quality-rich content. It's not enough to make 2 "quality" posts and hope to get accepted by Google AdSense. In order to get accepted, you should also have a certain quantity of content. Having a good 10-15 sites of quality content (which doesn't violate Google AdSense Term of Service) is a good start.

For best results, you should focus on a certain area, like reviewing/posting about mobile phones, online games or digital cameras). This will give you the best results for a comparable low effort. Having a website which tries to cover many different topics, can be very time consuming to regularly fill it with new quality-rich content and may also result in a low Click-Through-Rate. If you already own a website which tries to focus on many areas, you may consider dropping some of them and only focus on few of them.

One important thing about writing quality-rich content, is to make sure the content has a certain amount of words in order for Google AdSense to work optimally. Your should aim for at least 200 words per post/article. Too short posts, won't offer enough keywords to make AdSense choose the best fitting advertisements for your website, resulting in many irrelevant advertisements which don't attract your readers to click on them.

You also may consider to make a good usage of keywords related to your post/articles topic. If you're making a review of a new digital camera, make sure to spread related keywords (like digital camera, photos, exact model of the camera and it's manufacturer) all over the post, but be warned: Don't over do it. To many keywords, will hurt you and your revenue!

If you haven't done yet, you should install a tracking script on your page, so you can see how many people are visiting your page, how they got to your page and what pages are the most popular. One very powerful tracking service is offered by Google themselves, called Google Analytics. Registering to Google Analytics is completely free and once registered all you need to do is to add a piece of JavaScript on bottom of your website and 24 later Google Analytics will start logging.

Next post will be about getting traffic to your website.

Earn money with your website - The Introduction

I'm sure you've heard many people claiming they are making good money from their websites and blogs and even make so much, that they quit their regular jobs and became full-time website/blog publisher.

Is it possible to earn money with a website or a blog by using Google AdSense?

The answer is simple: Yes, it is. However, you have to be realistically: Not everyone will be able to become rich by blogging or running a simple Internet website. It's important to notice that most people won't make a living from the money they earn from their website.

How much money can I earn online with my blog/website?

This is the most asked question from people who want to make some money from their website/blog. It's also the hardest one to answer. There are many factors which decides this.

• Traffic: One of the most important factors is traffic. The more people visit your site, the more likely someone will click the advertise (Cost-Per-Click Systems, like AdSense) or the more advertisements will be displayed (if you're using a Pay-Per-Mille (per 1000 impressions system)
• Targeted Audience: The biggest traffic doesn't help you, if no one is interested in the content. The more specific your website is, the more specific will the ads be in Google AdSense. I.e. if you have a site about Mobile Phones, most of the ads will be about mobile phones too, as Google AdSense seeks special keywords on your website and display advertisements which are in context of your content and people who read a page about mobile phones more likely to be interested in other mobile phone related topics and hence click on your advertisements
• Niche market: Sometimes it can be more profitable for you to have a small, loyal base of readers if your Internet website is specialized into a specific niche topic (read: there aren't much pages with similar topics)
• Loyalty: Another factor to consider is to have loyal readers who regularly revisit your Internet website/blog. Loyal readers will bring you much more money then people who once visit your website and never come back again
• Placement: Also placement of the advertisements can decide your online earnings. Good placed advertisements will yield much higher Click-Through-Rate than bad placed ones.

Over the time I will teach you to get most of money from your website or blog. However, you should notice, that this is not an easy way to become rich and it may take some time until you will start to earn serious money.

You still haven't answered the last question: How much can earn with my website/blog?

Most authors of such "make money online/with your blog" sites, may promise you earning of ~1$ per click and telling you that if from 10.000 people only 1.000 click on your website, this would be 1000$/day.

The reality however looks more different. You can't predict the prices of a single banner click (Cost-Per-Click). It can be anything in between 0.01$ and 5.00$ or more per click. Realistically most clicks will earn you about 0.05$-0.50$. And the above's example is quite unrealistically too. 1.000 clicks out of 10.000 visits is an incredible high number and much more than most pages will ever get in their life. While it's against the Google AdSense ToS to call exact numbers on the Click-Through-Rate (CTR), realistically you should expect 0.50-2.5% CTR.

Let's assume, a Click-Through-Rate of 0.75% (which is a good value for the majority of online web sites). That's 75 clicks out of 10.000 visitors or impressions. Assuming a Cost-Per-Click range of 0.05$-0.50$ per click, this would result in 3.75$-37.50$. This is pretty inaccurate, but the only thing I can tell you. For some, it may even sound as much (taking the peak of 37.50$ out of this example), but getting 10.000 visitors your website sounds easier than it really is. Also consider, many people are using banner/popup blockers which won't yield you any money.

How do I know if Google AdSense (or any other Advertiser) is something for me?

• First of, you should make sure, to have a Internet website which contains some content which could be interesting to other people. A personal blog, where you write about your everyday's doing may not be the best platform to earn money online with Google AdSense. But if you test products in a special area (I.e. digital cameras, mobile phones etc), then this may be a much better choice
• Second, you need some traffic before you should even consider to put advertisements on your website or blog.
  
  Before you don't have at least a traffic of 300-500 visits/day, advertisement won't make you rich. Remember? At 1% CTR this would mean only 3-5 clicks at best (sometimes even as low as 0 clicks). It will take you months to reach the 100$ limit before Google will pay you off.
  
  Remember: Build up some traffic first
• Also make sure, you have some a certain quantity of content (additional to the quality mentioned above) in order to be accepted to the Google AdSense program
• Your content should be free of
  • Violent content, racial intolerance or advocacy against any individual, group or organization
  • Erotic, pornographic or adult/mature content
  • Drugs and drug paraphernalia
  • Excessive profanity
  • Gambling or and casino related stuff
  • Sales or promotion of weapons or ammunition
  • Sales or promotion of alcohol
  • Illegal content (I.e. illegal downloads, mp3 etc.)

There are dozens of eBooks in the Internet. What can you offer me, what the authors of these books can't?

Well most of this books are pretty useless and tell you stuff and tips which are already available online for free. It's just a way for them to exploit people's desire to make some quick money who hope to become rich by reading such a book. While there can have a good tip here and there, mostly of it's information can also be gathered online for free.

In order to get the money back for such a book, you'd need to have a few hundreds of clicks (approximately 400-800 clicks).

Instead here, you will get all the information for free.