RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

2010: Year in Review

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Overall, my goals / resolutions for this year were simple and minimal:

  1. Travel more
  2. Take more time off
  3. Maintain or increase my income
  4. Lose 10 pounds.

Well, three out of 4 ain't bad. (I gained seven pounds – but had a great time doing it! 🙂 )

As for traveling more… I did that in spades with trips to:

As for time off… in reality, I worked only 2 months this year.

[Read more…]

My BIG Facebook Faux Pas

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I messed up my Facebook strategy right from the outset.

I created a profile and let everyone and his brother become my “friend”.

That was all well and good until I had nearly 5,000 friends and realized that was going to be all that Facebook allowed.

Limiting friends?

I have 100's of thousands of subscribers on my email lists and only a certain percentage buy. I want to GROW my lists, NOT limit their numbers.

Egads.

[Read more…]

How NOT to Do Blog Commenting

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Gee, those who do blog commenting these days have some really strange names.

Who would think to name their kid “seo strategies“, “plumbing fixtures” or “cheap ladies shoes“?

Seriously, you gotta wonder what some folks are thinking when they post comments like this to a business opportunities / Internet marketing blog like this one…

First of all, this blog is about Internet and affiliate marketing, so WHY would a knowledgeable blog commenter use a name like “weddings” or “buy LCD TV” to try and attract traffic to their site?

Uh, they wouldn't.

It's unlikely that “cheap shoes” will get their comment approved on professional blogs.

Business bloggers immediately see that “cheap shoes” is probably a spammer or a complete newbie who has wasted money on a bad blog commenting for traffic training course. And it makes me feel sad when “cheap shoes” actually does leave a good comment, but they've contravened my blog commenting policy so I can't approve their comment.

The policy specifically states that “‘nice post, thanks’ type comments from “Buy LCD TV” posters will be marked as spam, so it is in your best interest to contribute to the conversation as a real person, if you are looking for some link love.”

I have no desire to reward cheap traffic seekers who contribute nothing of value.

Even if the comment does get approved, it's too much of a crap shoot to hope that people who are interested in doing business online might also be planning a wedding or in the market for a new TV.

So, if you want traffic to a site about weddings, go post a comment on a site where the topic is about weddings.

Having said all that, a real affiliate marketer can drive traffic to their wedding site from a blog about affiliate marketing, but they have to be smart about it.

“Smart” means:

  • Building credibility by contributing value to the conversation. If your site is about weddings and the post is about traffic strategies, share an experience related to the topic and invite folks to look at a relevant page on your blog.
  • Using your real name or a pen name. Not just a first name either. You gain additional credibility for your blog comment by including your real FULL name. Even something like Super Affiliate Wendy W. is more likely to encourage visits than “cheap shoes”.
  • Having a Gravatar. Want even more credibility? Get a gravatar to show alongside your thoughful comment.

All that said, remember that you want traffic that stays on your site.

The fellow who pops by “acia berry wonders” from a business opportunities blog won't help your bounce rate if he only sticks around for a half a second.

So take the time to post real comments using your real name and point to content on your site of real value to your visitors.

Did you find this post informative and useful? If so, please share it with others! If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,
sig-ros

YouTube Video Earns Family 150K

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Maybe you've seen the video below?

But did you know that the 2 minute video had made the DeVore family 150 grand – $100,000 from YouTube – in 18 short months?

Within 4 days of posting “David after Dentist” on YouTube, the video had received over 3 million views. As of mid-2010, more than 64 million people have seen it and 94 thousand people have left comments.

With traffic like that comes money — money that can change everything.

Posting this crazy little video on YouTube has changed their lives completely. David's dad quit his real estate job to market t-shirts and stickers featuring their son's now famous post-dental surgery lines, “Is this real life?” and “Is this going to be forever?“.

What I love about their online store is a comment near the bottom of the page…

When the video went viral we quickly learned a new word, MONITIZATION. Its the cool, new hip word for making money off the Internet. Profiting has become such a dirty word.

Granted, they spelled monetization incorrectly, but what the heck… they sure picked up and ran with the concept!!

So, got any ideas for a cool YouTube videos? It could make you rich! 🙂

6 Ways to Lower Your Bounce Rate

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Google Analytics SummaryHow many visitors come to your homepage only to leave just a few seconds later?

Five, fifty percent… ninety percent?

The percentage of visitors who leave your site from any given page is known as the bounce rate. Keeping track of bounce rate for your homepage is particularly important, especially if most people visit your site for the first time through that page.

You want those visitors to arrive at your homepage and find information that interests them on pages linked from the homepage. Ideally, they'll stay on your site until they've signed up for your newsletter and then leave the site purchase one of the products that you've recommended.

Here are some tips to help you lower the bounce rate on your homepage.

  1. Speed up your page load times. Slow loads are the main reason people don't stick around a site. If a homepage takes more than a few seconds to load completely, the site is losing potential revenue. Plugins are a common cause of slow page loads. Deactivate those plugins which aren't absolutely necessary. If it still loads slowly investigate ways to hardcode the plugin's functionality.
  2. Turn off related YouTube videos. After someone watches a YouTube video on your homepage, YouTube presents other relevant video options which all link off your site. Remember — keep links that don't generate revenue to an absolute minimum and NEVER place them on your homepage. If you want your visitors to see a video that you have posted on YouTube, uncheck the box that says “Include related videos”.
  3. Reduce the number of links on your homepage. Options are good. Too many options can be overwhelming. If you are using a blog theme like StudioPress that allows you to place recent posts under specific categories on your homepage, keep both the number of posts and categories to a minimum. Too, get rid of the ‘monthly archives' links in your sidebar as those lists of links get very long, very quickly.
  4. Get rid of the popups and page peels. When content on a site is compelling, a blogger doesn't need to annoy his or her visitors with endless in-your-face pop-ups to join their newsletter or ‘page peels' that display advertising in an irritating way.
  5. Limit or avoid advertising on your homepage. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, especially when you see all those popular blogs with 6 to 10 different banners in the header, sidebar and footers. The key phrase there is ‘popular'. A popular blog can afford a higher bounce rate through advertising. A new blog without much traffic needs to build rank and readership, and placing links out on the homepage is not the way to accomplish that goal. You want to warm your readers up to a product or service before sending them to the merchant's site.
  6. Place content strategically. Keep your most important content near the top of your homepage. For example, at the top-center of the homepage on my dating service review blog, I have a list of the Top 10 Things to Do on 101Date.com. Have such a list gives readers a quick scan of all the important areas of the site in a very small, obvious area. I found that adding that list lowered the homepage bounce rate on that site by about 20%.

Do you have any other ideas for lowering the bounce rate on your pages? Please share them with us by leaving a comment below.

Free Report: How to Write Content that Ranks Well

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Brian Clark of CopyBlogger has just released a completely free 29-page report called, “How to Create Compelling Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines“. Are you interested in ranking higher in the search engines for your content?

If so – you should download this completely free report (there’s no registration needed and no obligation to do anything to get it) from Scribe. It’s called How to Create Compelling Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines.

Topics include:

  • Why SEO Copywriting Still Matters
  • How Search Engines Work
  • Why You Have to Spoon Feed Search Engines
  • The 5 Essential Elements of Keyword Research
  • How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves
  • Five Link Building Strategies That Work
  • Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting
  • Why Writing for People Works for Search Engines
  • How to Make SEO Copywriting Simple

I'd highly recommend taking a hour or so to go through Brian's report to learn how to improve your SEO through better copywriting.

Or Words to that Effect…

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I get some of my biggest laughs while doing comment moderation on this blog.

Today for example, I found:

I have just visited and thoroughly reviewed all your site and resource area, and found that your site is a great resource for my site’s visitors (or words to that effect).

graphic design [linked]

“Or words to that effect”, indeed.

My guess is that the comment was posted by someone who just copied and pasted the suggested verbiage from a course in social media marketing and without actually reading it.

Duh.

The second comment of note was:

Rising Searches for “Twitter Affiliate Marketing” are at 450% and have been for over two weeks. I don’t know anybody who couldn’t benefit from throwing a nice “Twitter Tool” on their homepage.

That caught my attention for 2 reasons – “Rising Searches for Twitter Affiliate Marketing” seemed interesting and then “are at 450%” made no sense at all.

Clicking the commenter's link took me to a “how I make money blogging” page. Within the article on that page was the line:

I want to be a guy who researches what he says, what he does and sells, so that I can truly offer quality, coupled with genuine service, this is all that really matters.

Hmmm…

Then I did a Google search for “Rising Searches for “Twitter Affiliate Marketing” are at 450%” and came up with 76 results. Our little ‘genuine service' blog comment spammer has been busy!!

What really got me was how many so-called professional bloggers let this spam comment get posted to their blogs, either through failure to setup proper blog comment moderation OR failure to actually read the comment prior to approval.

Although I appreciate the laughs and resent the time these a-holes steal from me, I'd still rather do that than give them a link back to their site.

Thoughts? How tough are you on blog comment moderation? Get any funny spam comments lately? Please share — and remember, your comments will be moderated. 🙂

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