7 Ways to Promote your Site with a Bit of Money

Some time ago I wrote an article titled “Are you marketing your blog?” where I argued that there is a myth around the Internet that bloggers and webmasters should not spend money on advertising. The myth comes in great extent from the success stories of people that managed to create popular websites without spending a dime on advertising or other paid promotion techniques.

The reality is that most of those successful websites were pioneers on their niche, hence why they became popular without spending money on advertising. Now a days the market is crowded and you have thousands of websites and blogs even for small segments. As a consequence paid promotional techniques are becoming an important factor of any successful marketing strategy.

Below you will find 7 ways to promote your website or blog with a bit of money. You can use them to generate raw traffic, improve your search engine rankings, gain visibility on your niche and so on. Despite the initial investment most of those techniques will pay off on the short to medium term. If you are expecting to make money with your website there is no reason to assume that you will not need to spend some as well, right?

1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).

2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.

3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.

4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point’s market place.

5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.

6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe or PayPerPost.com.

7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance.

(By: Dailyblogtips)

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Earn money with PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews

Many of you know how to earn money on the Web with Google Adsense, AdBrite, etc. I have become publisher of GA and AdBrite recently. Beside these programs, you can earn more money with some "pay-per-post" programs, that is, you can earn money by your post, your reviews, or any articles that you submitted. You can read here for more such programs.

In this post I show you about two of the programs in the above list: PayPerPost and Sponsored Reviews. Actually I have applied for PayPerPost, however they have refused me, since my Blog is so young to become their publisher. I wish some of you can earn money with these programs.
This post is a part of the article of David (Eblogtemplates). It is so old for many people, however it is new for me. So I hope that it can be useful for many Bloggers like me. Thanks David for sharing your useful post!

How does writing reviews make me money?

It’s actually easier than you think. The first step is to sign up with a blog review network and submit your blog. Some of these companies have rules in place like the age of your blog (at least 6 months old, etc), where it’s hosted (blogspot, wordpress, etc), and page rank. They try to weed out spam blog sites which are usually not very old or of good quality. Make sure you read the fine print before you spend your time applying only to find out you don’t qualify.

Assuming your blog is approved, you can now browse the review marketplace looking for reviews to write about or another option is to wait for someone to approach you. I recommend you be the aggressor and sift through the marketplace so you can start making money asap.

Once you find a review you’d like to write about and meet the criteria to qualify, just take it and begin. You’ll create your blog post and follow the requirements of the reviewer, then submit it for approval. After it’s approved, you get paid. Pretty easy huh?

What blog review networks do you recommend?

There are several companies out there who pay you to write reviews on your blog but only two of them are worth talking about in my opinion. They are Sponsored Reviews and Pay Per Post.

Sponsored Reviews is great because they allow you to search for advertisers directly and bid on jobs. Their bidding system allows you to negotiate rates with advertisers in order to maximize your earnings. They also provide the largest payout of all review networks by only taking a 35% commission for their services. That means you can earn anything from $10 to 500+ for each review. Their user interface is one of the better ones out there and the only drawback to their service is the lack of advertisers. I’m sure it will continue to grow it’s advertising base so they are at least worth a look.

One other perk is their affiliate program. Earn up to $175 per Advertiser and $90 Per Blogger referred. Payouts are based on money spent by the advertiser and money earned by the blogger. See the chart below for payouts. Their average advertiser spends several hundred dollars so most referrals will be worth at least $25 (according to their website).

You’ll then want to put one of their ads on your site or a text link to start taking advantage of their referral bonuses. Can’t hurt to get an ad on your blog right? Get started with Sponsored Reviews now.

Next up we have PayPerPost which is another great pay for review site. They offer the largest sponsored blogging network with the greatest amount of offers along with a forum where bloggers can post questions, etc. They also pay you a $20 bonus after you complete your first review post. The review post is easy…you just need to write about PayPerPost and they give you $20. Pretty quick way to make a quick $20.

One bad thing I noticed while browsing their marketplace is the restrictions on a few of the reviews. For example, you couldn’t write a review and post it on blogspot.com, wordpress.com, or myspace.com and you must be located in North America, Asia, or Europe only. That doesn’t mean if you have a blogger blog or wordpress blog using your own domain or hosted on your own site you can’t write a review. All I’m saying is make sure you read the review details carefully so you don’t waste your time writing a post only to discover you won’t get credit for it.

They also have a scoring system which might be a barrier to you on some post reviews. It’s usually the higher payouts that are looking for nice reviews from established high ranking sites. They utilize Google Page Rank and Amazon’s Alexa rankings to factor in what your site’s “score” will be.

PayPerPost also offers a referral affiliate program with some pretty nice payouts as well. You will get paid $15 for each referral once the referees first blog posting is reviewed, approved and then finally accepted 30 days later. This means they need to go all the way through the process in order for it to be a legit referral. Again, not a bad payout for just putting a banner or link on your blog. It’s cool because you can see which referrals you currently have signed up and the total amount you potentially could earn (assuming they convert all the way mentioned above).

Summary

If I were you, I’d sign up for both Sponsored Reviews and PayPerPost and see which one works best for you. There is no rule preventing you from having two accounts and writing reviews from both sites and you can promote whichever you choose. That’s what I did and it also gives you a bigger selection of available reviews to write. After you sign up, make sure you get some affiliate banners on your blog so you have another avenue to make money. Just imagine if you write a dozen or so reviews a month and get a couple referrals. You could easily earn a few hundred extra bucks a month for some pretty minimal work!

I wish these sort of sites were available when I was in college because I had tons of free time and needed to make money. I could have easily earned $500+ a month writing a couple reviews a day!

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