You Tube traffic

 You Tube Traffic
YouTube is one of the most popular sites and in addition to all the fun there, YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site. Similarly to Facebook and Twitter, in order to use YouTube successfully for promotion and getting traffic, you need to know the rules for this. Here are some tips how to promote yourself, your site, and your products and how to get free traffic from YouTube:

    1 Post viral videos
    There are millions of videos on YouTube. If you post a video nobody is interested in, this video will go unnoticed, as millions of other videos. The clue to getting traffic from YouTube is to post useful videos, or even better – viral videos. Viral videos are not only useful videos, but they also tend to appeal to large groups of people. If your video manages to get viral, people will promote it for you and the only thing left for you is to reap the benefits.

    2 Create an interesting profile
    Similarly to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, an interesting profile is a must. If people like your videos, they will check your profile to learn more about you. When they see that your profile is boring, they won't bother more with you. You can make your profile a bit informal but don't make it as if it were the profile of a crazy teenager – you are using YouTube for business, right?

    3 Include your logo and website in the video
    Your logo and your website URL are your major branding weapons. This is why you must include them in the video. You can include them in the beginning of the video or at the end. It is best to have your logo and URL throughout the whole video because this way you will be gaining lots of exposure but if you can't do it (for instance because of artistic considerations), the beginning and the end of the video will suffice.

    4 Post quality videos
    As already mentioned, there is no shortage of videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, this also means there is no shortage of videos with poor quality. These videos are not favored by viewers, so if you want viewers to watch your videos, make sure that your videos don't have crappy sound and/or blurred pictures. YouTube is not a board for professional videographers, so you can post amateur videos, but make sure their quality is decent.

    5 Promote your videos
    If your videos get viral, you are lucky but you can't count on this. In order to get YouTube traffic, your videos need viewers. You can't rely solely on the fact that viewers will find your videos – you need to promote them. Even viral videos will benefit from a promotion by you.

    6 Make your videos search-friendly
    One of the ways viewers find your videos is through search – both locally on YouTube and on search engines. This is why you need to make your videos search-friendly. To do this, include your major keywords in the title and in the descriptions. Also, pay special attention to the tags. List as many keywords as relevant in the tags, but beware that you don't get spammy.

    7 Post in series
    Standalone videos can become a hit but it is best if you create series of videos and post them once a day/week. This way viewers will know that there will be more and they will be coming to check. Even if you don't create series, at least try to post videos regularly – this builds audience loyalty.

    8 Post video responses
    Video responses are one of the unique things about YouTube and you should take full advantage of it. Search your niche, choose the most popular videos in your niche and post video responses to them. Just be careful that the response you post is related to the video you are responding to and don't make your video response a blatant self-promotion.

    9 Choose the right time to post your videos
    On YouTube, timing is very important because there are peaks in traffic and times when there are not so many viewers. Weekdays (especially Wednesdays and above all - Thursdays) morning or early afternoon US time is the best time to post a general interest video. In order to have your video uploaded in the prime time, you need to plan a bit. Have in mind that for large videos and/or slow Internet connections the upload could take you an hour, so start early.

    10 Keep your videos short
    YouTube doesn't impose limits on the length of videos it publishes but generally long videos are boring. 3 to 5 minutes is the best duration for a video but if required you could go from 1 to 6 minutes. When a video is longer than 6 or 7 minutes, this gets boring and not many people will watch it to the end (where your logo and URL are to be found). 3 to 5 minutes is enough to lay your idea, give some details AND tell viewers to visit your site for more.

    11 Comment on other people's videos and include a link to your site in your comment
    In addition to video responses, you can also use plain good comments. Again, search for popular videos in your niche and comment on them. If your comments are liked by viewers, they will check your profile and probably watch your videos.

    YouTube is a valuable resource to drive traffic to your site and to promote it. The competition there might be fierce, but there is always room for a couple of good videos. Fill this room before your competitors do!

How to Boost your SEO with Google Adwords

Many advertisers use Google AdWords as their major PPC network. However, in addition to using AdWords for getting paid traffic to your site, it can also be used for SEO. Here are some ideas how you can use AdWords for SEO.

1 For Keyword Research
The most valuable use of AdWords for SEO is to research keywords. Keywords are the basis of any SEO campaign and even if you are an expert in your niche, you should always research keywords simply because users frequently search for quite unexpected keywords and keyphrases you as an expert will never think of. Needless to say, what matters most for high rankings is which keywords your target audience is searching for, not which keywords you as an expert think are most popular in a particular niche.

In order to find what users are searching for, you need a keyword research tool. It is true that there are many special (free and paid) keyword research tools but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is light years ahead of them all.

It is simple to use AdWords to research keywords. You can either enter the URL of your site or put in some seed keywords, the tool will then automatically generate a whole bunch of suggested keywords. Look at the results and shortlist all the keywords that seem relevent and have a decent global search volume.

You may want to rank well for ALL the generated keywords, but its best to focus all your efforts on a selected few. The idea now is to find keywords that are relatively easy to optimize and yet have a decent search volume. These would be the keywords with the least compitetion in Google. Go to Google.com and enter each of your short listed keywords (one at a time). It is best if you search for the exact phrase, so surround your keyword with double quotes. Note how many web results there are for each of the phrases. Now that you have collected the 'Number of web results' for each keyword, calculate competition ratio by divding it's 'Global search volume' by the 'Number of web results'. The keywords with the higher ratios are the easier ones to optimize.

You can now start a SEO campaign for your keywords however you'll see next, it might be much wiser to start an AdWords campaign instead.

2 To Ensure that the Keywords You Have Picked Convert Well

After you have picked your keywords, you need to verify if these keywords really work for you – i.e. if they convert properly. No matter how precise you've been when picking your keywords, if you don't test them in practice, you can never know for sure if they work well or don't. You can pick lucrative keywords with high global search volume and low levels of competition and still end nowhere.

For instance, for this website - webconfs.com we could try optimizing for the keyword "Search Engine Optimization". It could take a year or so with a LOT of effort to reach the first page on Google for "Search Engine Optimization” and still one can never be sure this will happen.

However, let's pretend that this happens – We manage to top Google for "Search Engine Optimization” after a year of hard SEO work. To our greatest disappointment, even the first place for "Search Engine Optimization” on Google did'nt bring the expected results because the bounce rate for this particular keyword turned out to be very high. Since we do not provide SEO Services a lot of people reaching us via "Search Engine Optimization" may NOT be getting what they're looking for. Instead, lesser popular keywords, such as "SEO Tips” or "SEO Guide” might have lower bounce rates and may actually perform better than "Search Engine Optimization” did for us.

The result is not surprising but the price paid is. If we had launched an AdWords campaign, it would have saved a lot of trouble. We could have spent $20-50 on AdWords for "Search Engine Optimization” and it would have taken us a week or less to figure that the bounce rate for this keyword is very high and it makes no sense to do organic SEO for it. These $20-50 on AdWords would have spared a year of wasted SEO efforts.

3 For Getting a Better CTR with Your Existing Rankings


In addition to keyword research, AdWords is a valuable tool for getting a better CTR (Click Thru Rate) with your existing rankings. You might rank well for a given keyword, get a lot of traffic, and still be unable to monetize this traffic because your CTR is low. The reasons for this might be various but inadequate title and description could be a very possible reason.

AdWords can also help you get better CTR with your existing rankings. For instance, if you run ad AdWords campaign and you are satisfied with the conversion/performance, you might want to keep changing your ad title and description until you feel you have reached the maximum CTR for your keywords.

Sure, it might take you a couple of tries till you find the winning combination of a title and a description and you might even lower your CTR in the process but once you find this magical combination of a title and description, just copy them as the title and description for your page in order to maximize your organic search CTR as well.

4 For Geographic Targeting
One more good use of AdWords for SEO is geotargeting. If you bid on traffic from many geographic locations, you can use Google Analytics to compare how different locations convert. It is quite natural to have significant discrepancies in the conversions for the same keyword among the countries.

When you go to Google Analytics and see which countries are converting best, you can invest more effort in them. For instance, you can create local pages for these countries or target the geo-specific keywords with exceptionally good conversion rates.

AdWords is a really valuable tool not only for advertisers. It started as a tool for advertisers but its use is not restricted to them alone. For many publishers and SEO experts AdWords is the most valuable tool because even a moderate AdWords campaign can give you valuable insights and save you a lot of time and money to optimize for words, which don't work for you.

How to Optimize your Website for Mobile Search

It is not only web designers and developers, who need to adapt to webcomake changes to their strategies and tactics, if they want to capture the lucrative mobile search market. Mobile search is a constantly growing segment of the market, which is good news. However, mobile search has its own rules and they are kind of different from the rules of traditional desktop search. This is why if you don't want to miss mobile searchers, you need to adapt to their requirements. Here are some very important rules to consider when optimizing for mobile search:
1 Mobile Searchers Use Shorter Keyphrases/Keywords

Mobile users search for shorter keyphrases, or even just for keywords. Even mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards are awkward for typing long texts and this is the reason why mobile searchers usually are very brief in their search queries. Very often the search query is limited to only 2 or even 1 words. As a result, if you don't rank well for shorter keyphrases (unfortunately, they are also more competitive), then you will be missing a lot of mobile traffic.

2 Mobile Search Is Mainly Local Search

Mobile users search mostly for local stuff. In addition to shorter search keyphrases, mobile searchers are also locally targeted. It is easy to understand - when a user is standing in the street and is looking for a place to dine, he or she is most likely looking for things in the neighborhood, not in another corner of the world. Searches like “pizza 5th Avenue” are quite popular, which makes local search results even more important to concentrate on.
3 Current Data Rules in Mobile Search

Sports results, news, weather, financial information are among the most popular mobile search categories. The main topics and niches mobile users prefer are kind of limited but again, they revolve around places to eat or shop in the area, sports results, news, weather conditions, market information, and other similar topics where timing and location are key. If your site is in one of these niches, then you really need to optimize it because if your site is not mobile-friendly chances are you are losing visitors. You could even consider having two separate versions of your site – one for desktop searchers and one for mobile searchers.
4 In Mobile Search, Top 10 Is Actually Top 3

Users hate to scroll down long search pages or hit Next, Next, Next. Desktop searchers aren't fond of scrolling endless pages either but in mobile search the limitations are even more severe. A page with 10 search results fits on the screen of a desktop but on a mobile device it might be split into 2 or more screens. Therefore, in mobile search, it is not Top 10, it is more Top 4, or even Top 3 because only the first 3 or 4 positions are on the first page and have a higher chance to attract the user's attention without having to go to the next page.
5 Promote Your Mobile-Friendly Site

Submit your site to major mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories. It is great if your visitors come from Google and the other major search engines but if you want to get even more traffic, mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories are even better. For now these mobile resources work great to bring mobile traffic, so don't neglect them. Very often a mobile user doesn't search with Google, but goes to a portal he or she knows. If your site is listed with this portal, the user will come directly to you from there, not from a search engine. The case with directories is similar – i.e. if you are optimizing the site of a pizza restaurant, then you should submit it to all directories where pizza restaurants and restaurants in general for your location are listed.

6 Follow Mobile Standards

Mobile search standards are kind of different and if you want your site to be spiderable, you need to comply with them. Check the guidelines of W3C to see what mobile standards are. Even if your site doesn't comply with mobile standards, it will still be listed in search results but it will be transcoded by the search engine and the result could be pretty shocking to see. Transcoders convert sites to a mobile format but this is not done in a sophisticated manner and the output might be really unbelievable – and everything but mobile-friendly.
7 Don't Forget Meta.txt

Meta.txt is a special file, where you briefly describe the contents of your site and point the user agent to the most appropriate version for it. Search engine spiders directly index the meta.txt file (provided it is located in the root directory), so even if the rest of your site is not accessible, you will still be included in search results. Meta.txt is similar to robots.txt in desktop search but it also has some similarity with metatags because you can put content it it (as you do with the Description and Keywords metatags). The format of the meta.txt file is colon delimited (as is the format of robots.txt). Each field in the file has the following syntax form <fieldname>:<value>. One of the advantages of meta.txt is that it is easily parsed by humans and search engines.
8 No Long Pages for Mobile Searchers

Use shorter texts because mobile users don't have the time to read lengthy pages. We already mentioned that mobile searchers don't like lengthy keyphrases. Well, they like lengthy pages even less! This is why, if you can make a special, shorter mobile version of your site, this would be great. Short pages don't mean that you should skip your keywords, though. Keywords are really vital for mobile search, so don't exclude them but don't keyword stuff, either.
9 Predictive Search Is Popular With Mobile Searchers

Use phrases, which are common in predictive search. Predictive search is also popular with mobile searchers because it saves typing effort. This is why, if your keywords are among the common predictive search results, this seriously increases your chances to be found. It is true that predictive search keywords change from time to time and you can't always follow them but you should at least give it a try.
10 Preview Your Site on Mobile Devices

Always check how your site looks on a mobile device. With the plethora of devices and screen sizes it is not possible to check your site on absolutely every single device you can think of, but if you can check it at least on a couple of the most important ones, this is more than nothing. Even if you manage to get visitors from mobile search engines, if your site is shown distorted on a mobile screen, these visitors will run away. Transcoding is one reason why a site gets distorted, so it is really a good idea to make your site mobile-friendly instead of to rely on search engines to transcode it and make it a design nightmare in the process.

Mobile search is relatively new but it is a safe bet that it will get a huge boost in the near future. If you are uncertain whether your particular site deserves to be optimized for mobile devices or not, use AdWords Keyword Research Tool to track mobile volumes for your particular keywords. If the volumes are high, or if a particular keyword is doing remarkably well in the mobile search segment, invest more time and effort to optimize for it.

SEO Musts for Local Business

The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:
1 Use your location in your keywords.

The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.
2 Use your location in metatags

Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of your site. Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body text because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn't have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.
3 Use your location in your body text

Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't afford to skip them. If your web copy is optimized for “car insurance” only, this won't help you rank well with “car insurance London”, so make sure that your location is part of your keywords.
4 Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local

Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they will include you in their listings for a particular location.
5 Create backlinks with your location as anchor text

It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural – for instance, “car insurance London” isn't grammatically correct and you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will still get a backlink with anchor text that helps for SEO.
6 Get included in local search engine

Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely for your country. For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market.
7 Get listed in local directories

In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product.
8 Run locally-targeted ad campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds are the two options that work best – at least for most webmasters.
9 Do occasional checks of your keywords

Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a good idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical. Needless to say, if people don't search for “car insurance London” anymore because they have started using other search phrases and you continue to optimize for “car insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money. Also, keep an eye on the keywords your competitors use – this will give you clue which keywords work and which don't.
10 Use social media

Social media can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and for local search this is also true. Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites have a great sales potential because you can promote your business for free and reach exactly the people you need. Local groups on social sites are especially valuable because the participants there are mainly from the region you are interested in.
11 Ask for reviews and testimonials

Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and these are like letters of recommendation for your business. However, as far as SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review sites, where you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your clients to do it) and this will drive business to you. Some of these sites are Yelp and Merchant Circle but it is quite probable that there are regional or national review sites you can also post at.
12 Create separate pages for your different locations

When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit more difficult because you can't possibly optimize for all of them – you can't have a keyphrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris, New York”. In this case the solution is to create separate pages for your different locations. If your locations span the globe, you can also create different sites on different, country-specific domains (i.e. uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.) but this is only reasonable to do, if your business is truly multinational. Otherwise, just a separate page for each of your locations will do.

These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a must, if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some of them and you know what works for you and what doesn't. Anyway, if you haven't tried them all, try them now and see if this will have a positive impact on your rankings (and your business) or not.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

It is always a good idea to be updated on the factors that search engines use to determine search results and rank websites. SEOMoz released a very detailed document titled “Search Engine Ranking Factors V2”, which outlines the views of 34 SEO experts regarding how Google’s algorithm works. Below you will find the Top 5 positive and negative factors on the study:

Top 5 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site

Top 5 Negative Factors

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content on the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Page

Email Marketing BasicsAll You Need To Get Started

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels on the Internet. You can use it to promote your websites, to interact with your customers, to make money with affiliate offers and so on. Yet, the vast majority of bloggers and website owners still neglect email marketing.

That is why I decided to write a quick guide with all you need to know to get started on email marketing. Enjoy.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as its communication channel. Direct marketing is an umbrella term used to describe all marketing forms that go straight to the end user, thus not passing through the traditional advertising channels, which include television, print and radio.

Companies using email marketing basically collect the email addresses of prospects and clients, and then send email messages to those subscribers, containing information about the products, special offers and so on. The company must explicitly ask permission to collect the email address and send future messages, and this is usually done with a double opt-in process (where the subscribe must fill a form with his name and email address, and then click on a confirmation link sent via email).

Why You Should Use Email Marketing

Over the last years email marketing started being used by a wide range of individuals, including bloggers, website owners, affiliate marketers and small business owners. This happened because email marketing proved to be one of the most effective marketing channels online.

Email messages get delivered straight to the subscriber (as opposed to blog posts, banner ads or online articles, which require the person to visit your website). Secondly, if you craft the content of your email newsletter carefully, you’ll be able to build a solid relationship with your subscribers, which will yield really high conversion rates (i.e., your subscribers will pay attention to what you recommend to them, and will actually take action based on it).

Finally, email marketing is very flexible, and it can be used for a wide range of purposes. You could use it to drive more traffic to your website, to promote affiliate offers, to build a relationship with your existing customers, to launch new projects and so on.

Email Marketing is NOT Spam

Many people are reluctant to start using email marketing because they associate it with spam. In other words, they believe that email marketing is the art of spamming other people and trying to make money while doing it.

This is obviously a confusion between the tool and how you use the tool. Email marketing is just a marketing tool. How you use it is a completely different story. Sure, some people use email marketing to spam, but you’ll find that most use it legitimately and ethically.

In fact if you subscribe to the email newsletter of any reputable company, blogger or online marketer I am sure you’ll be surprised by the quality of the content you’ll get from it.

It is perfectly possible, therefore, to use email marketing without annoying your users. You just need to make sure the content of your email newsletter will be top notch and relevant to your subscribers. If you do that they will actually thank you for your newsletter, and that is what modern marketing is all about.

The Effectiveness of Email Marketing In Numbers

Let’s use an example to illustrate why email marketing is such an effective marketing channel.

Suppose there are two bloggers, Mark and John. Mark focuses exclusively on growing his traffic and RSS readership, while John focuses on growing his traffic and his email list. After six months or so Mark is receiving 1,000 unique visitors per day, and has 3,000 RSS subscribers. John, on the other hand, also is receiving 1,000 unique visitors, but he has 3,000 email subscribers instead.

Now suppose both bloggers launch a paid eBook. The content and price of the ebooks is very similar. Mark promotes the launch of his eBook by writing a post on his blog about it. John, on the other hand, writes a post about the eBook but also sends an email to his list, encouraging the subscribers to purchase the eBook.

Who do you think will get better results? I am ready to bet that John would sell at least twice as many eBooks as Mark. Why is that? Because John has a much stronger relationship with his 3,000 email subscribers (provided he sent them quality content over time) when compared to the relationship Mark has with his 3,000 RSS subscribers. On top of that, once John send his email message he is sure most of his 3,000 email subscribers will read, while only a fraction of Mark’s 3,000 RSS subscribers will do the same.

Getting Started in 4 Steps

Are you convinced that email marketing rocks? Good. Below you’ll find four simple steps that you must follow to get started with it.

Step 1: Getting an Email Marketing Software

The first thing you need is an email marketing software. That is, a software that will let you collect email addresses, send a messages to them, create an auto-responder, get statistics and so on. There are basically two types of email marketing software: self-hosted and hosted.

Self-hosted means that you’ll need to install and host the software yourself, on your own server. This option is only recommended to people with technical skills and time available.

Hosted solutions are a better option for most users, as the company will host the software for you, and you’ll just need to login on their website to manage your email lists.

When choosing an email marketing company you need to pay attention to two factors: the deliverability rate, which is what percentage of the emails they send actually reach the end user, and the features available (e.g., pre-made web forms, auto-responder options, scheduling options and so on).

I use a company called Aweber.com, and I recommend them exactly because they are very good at both factors I mentioned above. Their deliverability rate is considered by many as the best in the industry, and their control panel has more features than you could ask for. The basic plan starts at $19.90 per month.

If you research around you’ll find that this is the standard price. It is not cheap if you are just getting started, but it should be worth it. Remember that apart from the deliverability rate factor, there is also the compliance with the anti-spam laws. By using a company like Aweber you are sure that your email lists and messages are compliant with everything.

Step 2: Getting Subscribers

Once your signed-up with an email marketing company you’ll just need to login into your account, create your first email list, and then create a web form that your visitors will use to subscribe. Most companies have very simple graphic interfaces to help your create your forms, and you’ll just need to drag and drop the fields around. Aweber also has a wide range of pre-made forms you can choose from. The result will be a piece of code (either a JavaScript or HTML) that you’ll need to paste on your website.

You should consider displaying your subscription form in two spots: on top of the sidebar and at the bottom of single posts. These two spots are very visible, and usually they have highest conversion rates. The spot below single posts performs particularly well, because people will look for something to do after they are done reading your content.

Aweber also offers a feature called “Light box,” which will display your subscription form like a pop-up. This feature is a bit intrusive, but usually it has a very high conversion rate, so it is worth a try. You can also specify how often visitors should see the light box, so you won’t need to annoy your visitors permanently.

There is one thing you can do that will drastically increase the number of subscribers you’ll get, regardless of where you’ll display your web forms: to offer a freebie as an incentive for people who join your list..

The most common freebie is an eBook or a report that you give away to people subscribing to your email list. But depending on your niche it could be something else, including a software, a collection of icons or images, audio or video files and so on. It just needs to be something valuable to your audience, as to encourage them to subscribe.

Once your freebie is ready you’ll just need to adapt your subscription forms accordingly. For example, you could include an image of the freebie (e.g., the eBook or software cover), and you could use the headline to call people to action (e.g., “Subscribe to my newsletter and get a free eBook!”).

Delivering the freebie is very easy. All you have to do is to upload it to a secret folder inside your website, and them to create an auto-responder sequence on your email software, where the first email is sent to new subscribers right way, containing the download link for the freebie. Note that on Aweber the auto-responder found under “Messages” and then “Follow-Up.”

Step 3: Building Relationships

The value of an email list is a consequence of two factors: the size of the list, and its responsiveness. In other words, focusing on growing the size of your list alone is not enough. You need to make sure that your have a good relationship with your subscribers as well, else they will just ignore your messages. How do you achieve this? By sending top quality content to your list.

It would be a good idea to create an auto-responder sequence that all your new subscribers will go through. The first email on the sequence will be sent right away, and it is just an introductory message with the download link to your freebie.

The second email should be sent 2 or 3 days after the first one, containing something really useful to your audience. It could be a tip that will help them solve a problem, a tool that is available online and that they will find useful, and so on.

The third email should be sent 7 days after the second one, and it should contain another really useful piece of content. These first 3 or 4 emails are really important because they will set the tone of your newsletter, and build an initial trust with your audience. If you fail to deliver value right away, many of your subscribers will unsubscribe (after all they already got the freebie they were looking for).

Step 4: Promoting Your Stuff

After the third or fourth email you should have already have a good relationship with your subscribers, so you can start promoting your own stuff (e.g., your products, posts on your blog, affiliate offers and so on). Just make sure to make it with moderation, else people will unsubscribe.

For example, you could send one promotional message every two or three content messages (e.g., messages with valuable stuff). This way your subscribers will keep getting value from your email messages, and they will actually look forward to receive them every week.

As for the frequency of the messages, there is no right or wrong, but weekly tends to be the standard around the web.

That is it! If you have any questions or doubts let me know through a comment below and I’ll be glad to answer them.

7 Reasons Why Google AdSense Rocks

If you ask bloggers and webmasters what they think about Google AdSense, you’ll probably hear all sorts of answers. Some love it, some think it’s OK, and some hate it because they can’t seem to be able to make any money with it. I fall in the first group.

AdSense certainly is not suitable for all types of sites, and there are other monetization strategies that can be more profitable in some situations (e.g., selling your own products). That being said, and as far as monetizing your site with ads goes, I think AdSense is the best advertising network on the Internet. Here’s why:

1. It’s Easy to Setup and Get Started

Most ad networks require a minimum traffic level before you can join, and the application and setup process can be a pain.

AdSense, on the other hand, can be used even on small websites, and it has very few restrictions regarding where you can use it.

2. Huge Number of Advertisers

AdSense is by far the advertising network with the largest amount of advertisers. This means that you’ll get your units filled with ads pretty much every single time a visitor comes to your site.

On many other ad networks this is not true, and your earnings tend to get negatively affected.

3. Ads Are Really Targeted

Most advertising networks claim to only display ads that will match the content of your site, but few actually do it.

This is connected with the previous point. In order to be able to display targeted ads the network must have a huge collection of ads to choose from, and most networks don’t have it.

4. You Can Monetize Global Traffic

Another problem with most ad networks is that they tend to focus on US traffic. Some will pay pennies for impressions coming from outside the US, and others will not pay at all. If 50% or more of your traffic comes from other countries, you can guess that you’ll be losing money.

It’s true that on Google AdSense you also have some advertisers targeting US traffic exclusively, but there just as many targeting visitors from other countries and parts of the world.

5. The Earnings Are Pretty Good

I have seen ad networks that occasionally offered very high eCPMs (i.e., how much you actually earn for each page view on your site) but on average AdSense tends to beat most networks.

Another advatange is that AdSense earnings tend to be consistent all over the year (and over the years), while the rates you’ll get from CPM networks vary both with the season and with the overall economic climate.

6. The Ads Blend Well

Some people don’t like text links, but I think they are actually less intrusive than flashy banner ads, and it’s possible to integrate them with the design of your website without making it look ugly.

Some time ago AdSense started working with banner and video ads as well, but most of the ones you see around look very professional too.

7. Payments Are Always on Time

I had my share of problems trying to receive the money ad networks owed me. Sometimes they would pay 30 or 60 days late, other times they would pay only half of the money I was supposed to receive.

With Google AdSense I never had a problem in this regard. The payment is always sent directly to my bank account at the end of every month, and the amount is always accurate.

Over to the Readers

What is your relationship with Google AdSense? Do you love it? Hate it? Explain why with a comment below.