Running a successful Internet business is more than just learning how to start an online business and making your website. One of the secrets to really successful internet businesses is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing works on the concept of revenue sharing between associated or affiliated businesses. It works like this: you agree to promote the products or services of an affiliated business, and anytime you generate a sale, lead, or click for that affiliate’s product or service, you get paid. It’s that simple theoretically.

If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you will need to follow the same basic guidelines as you would follow for any online business. You need to have a good website with good content that generates visitors. Your choice of keywords will greatly affect the level of traffic that you generate for your affiliates. To find out which of your keywords are generating the best rate of return, use your internet marketing tools. If you really want to be on the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, then you should monitor these keywords daily until you are certain that they are working for you. This is called keyword monetization.

Now you have to use those keywords to create effective ad copy for your affiliates. With affiliate marketing, you are likely to get copy from your affiliates. Perhaps you can generate some income using this, but remember, other people are using this same copy. The key is learning how to generate original copy that will make your website stand out against those others who are promoting the same affiliate. You can start by checking out your competitors and noting your similarities. Brainstorm any ideas you have about how you can stand out. Are their less competitive keywords you can use?

It is also important that you choose the right affiliates. You can’t just promote anyone and everyone on your site promote those reliable affiliates whose products and services closely match yours. People who visit your site are more likely to click through to those affiliates whose products and services match their interests.

There are many ways to promote your affiliates, but one of the most effective is to take advantage of blogs and social networking sites, as sites such as these help you establish a more prominent web presence. Social networking sites are quickly becoming the most utilized form of interaction especially for groups of people who are organized around similar interests. Social sites make it very easy for members of communities or fans to share information about their purchases.

A blog is another way that you can stand out as an affiliate. On your blog, you can establish yourself as an authority on the products or services that you promote. You can write reviews or how-to articles. If you can write in such a way that encourages commentary then that is even better. Search engines like sites that have a lot of comments. To even further establish yourself as an authority and outstanding affiliate, you can make YouTube Videos. If you do them properly, videos are a great way to shine your authentic personality!

Most people these days use their mobile phones for surfing the internet and browsing the web. Considering the high usage of mobile devices for browsing web, web developers now focus on designing the website for mobile standards. To make a website mobile friendly and user friendly, here are three awesome web apps that will make the process of designing mobile friendly websites very easy and will simplify the work of a mobile web developer to a greater extent.

InterSquash: Do More Code Less

InterSquash is a web app that utilizes your website’s or blog’s web feed to create an instant iPhone friendly website. While you cannot do anything much in the free version but the premium version of the service does provide you with loads of designing options to give a complete makeover to your website that will be even more attractive on a mobile device. In short, this is really a great app for those who don’t have time to go with coding etc. and those who do not have any knowledge of HTML 5.

Link – www.intersquash.com

MobiOne Studio: Complete Mobile Web Designing App

MobiOne Studio provides a WYSIWYG interface for mobile web development. This superb web development layout lets a web developer to accomplish the task of creating a mobile friendly version of the website easily and efficiently. The app is actually dedicated to web development for iPhone. It comes packed with a designing app and an iPhone emulator for viewing your website in iPhone environment so as to ensure that the website has been designed according to your standards. The application comes with 60+ iPhone app icons. The output code is generated in HTML 5 which is Apple compatible. In short, the app is a “definite try” for those who have no or little technical knowledge and no knowhow of coding.

Link – www.genuitec.com/mobile

Detect Mobile Browser

Detect Mobile Browser is an open-source project that help you know about the mobile audience of your website. It detects the mobile browser of those visitors who land on your website using a mobile device. This data can help you know what mobile browser is most used for visiting your website and design your mobile website to suite the majority of your audience.

Link – www.detectmobilebrowser.com

The following is a guest post by Edwin. See the author box below the post for more details on the Author.

Social media has actually took the web by storm. There are more and more people registering and using Twitter, Facebook even Youtube now a days then there was a few years back.

The power of the internet has really exploded in size. People would much rather connect online then face to face. No wonder America gets fatter and fatter every day. Face it were F.A.T or in lighter terms Fat American Taxpayers. Take advantage of this opportunity.

More and more are using websites and blogs to express themselves their true selves. We write about what were passionate about. Then when we it the big Publish button we would like the rest of the world to read what we created. Social media plays a big part in getting traffic and a viewership. Why not mix passion and social media to roll in the traffic. After a while of searching I made a list of social media websites to help you branch your blog to the world or the nearest street corner.

Blog Engage

• PR:5
• Alexa:12,035

BlogCatalog

• PR:7
• Alexa: 367

Mixx

• PR:8
• Alexa: 702

StumbleUpon

• PR:8
• Alexa:207

Digg

• PR:8
• Alexa:100

DesignFloat

• PR:5
• Alexa:7,561

Reddit

• PR:8
• Alexa:314

Twitter

• PR:9
• Alexa:12

Technorati

• PR:8
• Alexa:896

Diigo (formerly Furl)

• PR:7
• Alexa:1,870

Bebo

• PR:7
• Alexa:560

YouTube

• PR:9
• Alexa:3

FaceBook

• PR:9
• Alexa:2

After you’ve read this article go out and take walk, get some fresh air. Now that I mentioned that I need to get out more.

As a teenager, Harry Truman and his friend Charlie Ross vowed they would read every book in the Library in Independence, Missouri, including the encyclopedias. Although they claimed to have accomplished the task it is doubtful they read every book. Still, they read a lot of significant books. More important, they learned to love books and the lifetime education that comes from consistent reading.

Not long ago I wrote an article about the degradation of English by bloggers on the Internet. I stressed that perfect English is not the goal, but a general compliance with English rules is essential. Otherwise, the language will continue to degrade and communication will be even more difficult that it already is.

Reading and writing is a chicken and egg enigma. Does inferior writing lower reading skills, or is poor reading ability a corollary of bad writing? Theoretically, people skim web pages because of the enormous quantity of content. And there is some truth to that. I want to absorb as much as possible. Occasionally, I catch myself skimming a book, the same as if I were reading a web page for the key points. This is a habit I never want to become ingrained.

Those of us who read blogs know that there are too many interesting blogs, and we cannot read everything we come across. It is far too easy to subscribe to a blog, especially with RSS feeds, then find we have a massive backup, most of which we never even skim. Years ago I decided to only subscribe to 10 blogs, read them, and if something better came along exchange instead of add. I would never have more than 10 blogs, all of the highest quality I could find. Like a mouse after cheese in a trap, I failed miserably the first time.

I have decided to go back to this method. Like others who have reached a point of critical mass with gadgets (We don’t need no more stinkin’ gadgets) I will read no more than 10 blogs.

I have pared back on magazines, email and social networking to allow time for quality, and substance over form. Now, its time to cut and choose the number of blogs to the magic number of 10. Just as Harry and Charlie probably never read all the books in the library, I can’t read every blog that catches my eye. Neither can you.

How many blogs do you subscribe to and actually read? Or, do you subscribe and skim them? And most important, how much do you retain from your reading?

Before I start mentioning about those 10 Google apps which the title of the blog highlights, I would like to make you known of the  4 terms – simple, fun, better and profitable – that I used in the title of the post. These four terms simply refers to more organized, efficient, coordinated and possibly more lucrative blogging.

Google helps blogging at every stage. Right from setting up your free blog (at Blogger.com), promoting your blog on social networks (Google Orkut) and finally monetizing your blog (Google Adsense) – Google is always there extending their selfless (free) service for you. Lets see what tools does Google have in stores for bloggers.

10 Blogging Power Tools from Google

1. Google Blogger: Lets get started with Blogging

Blogger.com is the simplest and easiest blogging platform that can be easily used by any new player entering the blogging arena.  Though WordPress is the blogging platform of choice of the most of the professional bloggers, but wordpress themes are now being adapted for use on Blogger platform and  Blogger users can now enjoy some of the features of wordpress like static pages. Further, with an account on Blogger.com, you do not need to look for hosting providers and pay hosting charges.

You are also given an option to use your custom domain. I use Namecheap.com for buying domains. A .com domain with privacy protection costs me under $10 when purchased at Namecheap.com. The default Blogger templates are quite minimalistic and basic. I would suggest to visit www.btemplates.com and use an advanced blogger template.

Once you have setup your blog with a custom or free domain and an advanced blogger template, you can start using the below mentioned Google tools to populate content, organize your blog life and make your blogging activity pretty profitable.

2. Google Alerts

Populate Content for your Blog

You can use Google Alerts for grabbing content for your blog. You can setup an alert using suitable keywords for your blog. Make sure that you select ‘blogs’ from type dropdown. You will then get a digest of all the important blog posts and happenings settled around your keyword daily. You can go through these blog posts,  get inspired and write a blog post for your own blog.

Building Links for your Blog

A few days back I wrote about Google Alerts and told you how you can use it for generating quick quality backlinks for your blog with minimum effort. You can read that post here – How to generate quick quality backlinks for your blog using Google Alert.

3. Google Adsense: Make Blogging lucrative

Once you have setup your blog on a custom or free domain with an advanced template and have started adding some pretty descent posts everyday,  you can start monetizing your blog. There are many ways to monetize a blog – in-text ads, affiliate marketing, merchandising, etc. However, the easiest way to monetize your blog is by using PPC (Pay Per Click) ad programs and Google Adsense stands out as the most profitable amongst all the ad networks available. Just click “Monetize” button on your Blogger layout. Choose where ads will appear by placing them in sidebar widget or in between the posts. Google will pay you a decent amount every time someone clicks on those ads.

4. Google  Analytics: Track your Blog’s Growth

Visit www.google.com/analytics and use your existing Google account (the one used for creating a Blogger account) to use this service. Using the service is easy. Just embed a code in your blog and you are all set to get started with tracking your blog’s performance. It helps you track page views, search queries, and more. Go through these statistics on a regular basis and plan your blogging strategies using these stats for better blog performance.

5. Google FeedBurner:Manage your blog subscription

FeedBurner is yet another power product from Google which can be used to manage subscription. You can access it from “My Accounts” page. Setup a feed to deliver regular blog updates to your blog subscribers. You can use Adsense to monetize these feeds as well.

6. iGoogle: Connect with other Blogs

Bloggers should follow others blog to get updated on industry news, to learn new skills and to network with other bloggers.  You can setup an iGoogle account using your Google account used for singing up at Blogger.com. Once you log into your Blogger account, you will automatically be logged into your iGoogle account. The feeds of all the blogs you follow will appear on your iGoogle page and you will be able to know what is going on  in your niche.

7. Google Docs: Document embedding for your blog

Google Docs is essentially MS Office on cloud. The only difference is that unlike MS Office which stores your files on your PC, Google Docs stores it on internet and you can access it from anywhere in the world.  Using Google Docs you can create accessible Spreadsheets, Presentations, and Text Documents and embed it your blog posts for added value to your blog readers.

8. Google Calendar: Stay Organized

Google Calendar is an awesome tool for bloggers who have more than one blog. Using Google Calendar, you can track how many posts you posted on each blog within a given time-frame. Calendars are color coded and you just need to throw a glance to see how many posts you have made on each blog in any given week, month, or year.

9. Google Picasa Web Albums: Organize blog pictures

Photos uploaded to your blogger account gets automatically uploaded to your Google Picasa Web Album. You can use this service for organizing and sharing your own photos or for searching pictures with creative common license for use with future posts.

10. Google Orkut: Find new readers for your blog

Orkut is a social media community you can join using your existing Google account(I am not on Orkut because I use Twitter.com for this purpose). You can  connect with existing readers and network with bloggers using messages, photos, and information sharing. Further, you can join communities related to your blog for gaining new readers.

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Google Alert is an awesome service. It sends you recent happenings from across the globe about the things of your interest. This utility offered by Google can be used to generate some quick quality baclinks for your blog. With 10 or 15 minutes of work, you will be able to add 10 to 15 high quality backlinks for your blog everyday. So without wasting any more of our time, lets get started.

To make this thing simple and easy to understand, I have decided to decompose this post into simpler and easier to understand steps.

1. Go to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts)

2. Create an alert for keywords relating to your blog niche and select ‘Blogs’ from type drop-down menu. Select ‘once a day’ from how often drop-down menu (this doesn’t fill up your email inbox with countless emails) and select appropriate option from Email length drop-down menu.
An alert for TechRavings will be something like the one shown below:

3. Now just take out 15 minutes of your time to go through these blogs and post quick comments. It is suggested that you throw a look at the post content before posting a comment. Further, post a comment that is relevant to the article and enter your website link in the field specified for it and not in your comment. This way your comment won’t go into spam.

Now even if you do just 10 posts a day, you will be adding 300 quality baclinks to your blog every month.

Social bookmarking helps your blog in gaining exposure. The more is the number of social websites indexing your webpages, the greater is the exposure of your blog. My recent discovery is a tool that simplifies this work of social bookmarking of blog posts using a clean and minimalistic wizard. The web app I am talking about is called Social Marker and it is absolutely free to use. Let’s see what we have at hands.

Though it is every blogger’s desire to ping most people about their recent article, but the fact is that going manually through tons of hundreds of social bookmarking website and submitting to all is a great time-taking and almost impractical thing to achieve. A good option is to submit to only top social networks suiting to your blog post and use a simple wizard that can guide you through the process of submission to all the top social networks. Social Marker satisfies this need and does what is actually required.

To get started with Social Marker, there is nothing required on your part – no registration and no filling of lengthy forms. Just go to the website and enter the url of your blog post, the title of you blog post, a short summary and related tags. Next, select the websites where you would like to submit your content. Finally, click submit.

You will see that a web wizard comes up and takes you to each website where you wanted your entry to be posted. The wizard will ask you to enter your login credentials at every website. Just enter your login credentials (or select from your web browser’s saved logins) and you will see the submission taking place in real time. Since the submission takes place in real time in front of your eyes, you do not need to worry whether the entry was posted correctly or not.

Aditya’s piece of advice – I would advice to create an account for your blog’s related top 10 social networks. Store the login credentials in your web browser’s memory and use this Social Marker wizard every time you post on your blog. You will definitely see a great rise in your blog traffic.

Try Social Marker

I really like the FaceBook fan widget. It shows few profile pics from a FaceBook fan page and provides a button that anyone can click to join that fan club. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I am not on FaceBook. The reason why I am not on FaceBook can be read in my blog post titled – “Why I chose Twitter over FaceBook” (link). Anyway, that’s another story. In this post we will see how we can add a FaceBook-like Twitter Fan Widget in a WordPress blog sidebar.

Thanks to Sohail Abid who has created a WordPress plugin called “Twitter Fans”. This has made adding a Facebook-like Twitter Fan Widget to a WordPress blog immensely simple.

To activate this plugin and add Facebook-like Twitter Fan Widget to your WordPress sidebar, follow the following procedure:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.

2. Click “Add new” under “Plugins” from your dashboard sidebar.

3. Search for the plugin “Twitter fans”.

4. Click on “Install” link. The plugin will be installed.

5. Activate the plugin.

6. Go to “Widgets” under appearance.

7. Look for a new widget called “Twitter fans”.

8. Drag it to your sidebar.

9. Enter your Twitter username, no. of fans to show, border colour and other customizations.

10. Save the Twitter Fans’ setting by clicking the “Save” button.

You will now have a FaceBook style Twitter Fan widget on your WordPress sidebar.

Number of blogs is increasing at a daily rate. A large number of blogs start every day and a large portion of them fail to achieve the desired success. It is here that we should realise that the need for effective branding strategies is increasing and there is a strong relation between blogging and Social Media branding. Social Media branding not only brings in opportunities to stand out amongst other bloggers of your niche but also offers you the prospect of reaching out to a better-targeted audience. Further, Social Media branding also provides an opportunity to illustrate to your readers what you are about and why they need to pay attention to your blog. In short, Social Media branding stands out amongst others slew of techniques that bloggers employ for promoting their blog.

Social Media branding for blogs: An overview

The biggest advantage of Social Media branding is that it does not require a genuine call for financial investment. It is a fact that monetary reasons have always been an impending factor for starting a blog. And in such a situation, a free promotion strategy for the blog is the best deal that any such blogger can get. The Social Media marketing does not require financial concerns and investments. The only investment required is the investment of time and not the money.

Though there are always going to be people that can be employed to do the Social Media marketing stuff for you but that would only be worth considering if you have good amount of money for expenditure on such campaigns. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone (by spending some money); you’ll find that the Social Media influence on your blog will be worthwhile the expenditure of your money or time (as the case may be).

Another good thing about Social Media branding is that your potential will not be limited. Social Media offers unlimited potential and it is very evident from the fact that some of the most astounding blogs have been built upon the foundations of Social Media. But be forewarned that Social Media is not a platform that provides immediate success. It has to be used slowly and steadily but it does carry tremendous promises for those who seek to use it effectively and properly.

While the process of Social Media branding is quite gradual but it is seen that success through Social Media comes relatively quickly. Within just a few months, a blogger can achieve an appreciable Social Media branding and can bring forth the accomplishments that can’t be achieved by traditional marketing methods that very quickly.

10 Blogger Tips for Social Media branding

1. Social Media branding is a gradual process and it does take time for evolving a brand image. However, it is still very important to know how you would like to be perceived by folks on social communities. You must set clear goals for attaining Social Media branding of your blog or else the Social Media thingy will only get you a part of the success you desired.

2. Once you have decided your niche and are comfortable with a social networking community, you should begin writing materials that will strengthen your brand image. It is this time that you should take into consideration your Social Media audience and you should make it a point that you tailor your articles to the interest of the community.

3. Instead of wasting your time on large number of social networking sites, it is advised that you spend calculated amount of your time on selected social networking communities. It, however, does not mean that you spread yourself too thin. Spreading yourself too thin on social networking websites is a sure fire way to failure.

4. It is important that you remain active on social networking websites that you will use for marketing your blog. In this way, you will learn more about your target audience and their exclusive interests.

5. Try to make connections with people within your niche. It is a well-known fact that there is a tremendous possibility of gaining exposure from other popular blogs of your niche. By connecting with playmakers of your niche, you can gain much-needed attention to your own blog.

6. Do not risk your brand image for generating traffic. It is possible that you may strike an idea that would generate a lot of traffic for your blog but it does not fit into your Social Media image. So instead of choosing a short term benefit (of gaining traffic and generating revenue quickly), you should focus on your long-term goals.

7. Gaining inspiration and writing is not a crime. This, however, does not mean that you copy and paste from other blogs. Instead, get inspired on the subject that fits your Social Media image and then go deep into it to bring up a more valuable content for your readers.

8. Recommending other bloggers is a nice way to receive back the recommendations from them. It does not mean that you just give them a link. Recommendation here means that a fellow blogger recommends your writings to its readers. Getting recommended by many bloggers will surely bring in much-needed people’s attention to your blog.

9. Keep track of what people are talking about you. While it does make you feel good, but it also helps you in maintaining your brand image. Keep an eye on your social media reputation so as to be aware of any alarming things that may harm your Social Media image or blog.

10. Keep up with recent news in your niche. Have an eye on what people are talking about your industry on Twitter, FaceBook, Digg and other such social networking communities.

It is important to develop a strong connection with your readers. It is because blogging is a two-way process – one writes and others read and provide feedbacks. Creating a Social Media branding helps your readers to understand your goals and objectives that you would like to accomplish through your blog. This further helps you bring loyal readers for your blog and provides listeners to your blog posts. As long as you can get your voice heard by appreciable number of visitors and you are able to maintain your Social Media image, you are sure to get Social Media success as a blogger.

The statement – ‘pictures speak more than words’ is nowhere better suited than that on internet. If you are a blogger, you must understand the value of images in your blog posts. Images make your content more interesting and easier to understand. For WordPress bloggers, here is a nice plugin to find good and free images for use on your blog.

Freebie Images WordPress Plugin is a handy WordPress plugin that makes it easier for a WordPress blogger to insert free stock images into a blog post right from the post editor. The images are provided by Crestock Stock Photos.

Using this WordPress plugin is simple and pretty straightforward. Simply create a new post after installing the plugin and you will see an image search box. Search for an image using a keyword and you will be produced with a set of images. Simply drag and drop an image on your post body and the image source will be embedded in your post, thereby eliminating any sort of manual work.

Download Freebie Images WordPress Plugin