Make Money Online

Your Blog Wants a Favicon!

admin1 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:36:30 +0000

As part of the PeiProfit redesign I just created a favicon for our blog. It was so quick and easy, I was wondering why every website doesn’t have one.

In case you’re not sure, a favicon is that little square icon that appears in the corner of the tabs in your browser and also next to the URL in the browser’s address box. I wouldn’t say that a favicon is essential, but they certainly add a nice touch, especially since many people keep multiple tabs open in their browser. A favicon makes you website’s tab distinctive (just like in the above pic).

At favicon.cc, you can create your own favicon from an existing image or from scratch using their color picker. It only takes 2-3 mins and it’s 100% free to use.

So if you don’t have one already, pay a quick visit to favicon.cc. You’ll get to see our favicon when the redesign goes live in about a week.

Make Your First Web Video Today!

Naomi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:45:43 +0000

Web video marketing is pretty hot right now and it’s something that we plan to talk about on this blog a bit in the coming weeks. I don’t claim to be the world’s biggest web video guru, but I’ve created quite a few over the past year. It’s a fantastic marketing and SEO tool.

Personally I am not a big fan of the amateur “Talking Heads” web videos that seem to dominate YouTube. Have you ever tried looking some of those Internet Marketing promo people in the eyes? Is it the poor lighting or are they scary in real life too?

I happen to think that unless you are standing in a studio fresh from an appointment with a professional stylist, do the world a favor and keep your bad-hair-day to yourself! Still, plenty of people do the camcorder thing, so it must work… right? Personally I favor the screencasting types of videos, i.e. capturing the action on your screen or a PowerPoint-type presentation. These are really fun to do and the average web user likes watching them.

More importantly, it is a thousand times cheaper and easier to make them look professional than if you film a real live person. If I am doing a really sleek promo, I also avoid adding a DIY voice-over and instead use background music and the written word and images to convey my message.

This video shows you what I think is the easiest, fastest way to make a web video for free.

After watching, follow through and make a web video right away (whether it’s your first or your 100th). Upload it to your blog today.

How to Upgrade WordPress… If You Dare

Naomi — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:40:38 +0000

Blogicide!

Yay! We finally finished the WordPress upgrade and all is well. For a few hours there I thought I’d killed Pei Profit… and we all know what a terrible loss to humanity that would have been .

The problem was that we were still using WP version 2.6, which is just one step up from your mother’s old typewriter. Unlike the newer versions of WP, which can upgrade with a click, this upgrade required much more complicated backupping, downloading and FTPing.

After my brush with blogicide, I decided I needed the hired help of a WP expert, but had to I speak to 4 of them before I found one that wanted to get involved. Thankfully, I found Sharon (@shari) who took this dangerous mission in her stride.

I asked her for some tips to help other bloggers when upgrading WordPress and here is what she said:

Always stay up-to-date with the latest version of WP. But before upgrading, its always a good idea to do a backup, just in case…
One easy way to take care of the backup issue is to install the WordPress Database Backup plugin and have your data emailed to you periodically – you can set up an email account just for this purpose
If you are using WordPress 2.7 or older, it is safer to upgrade incrementally – e.g. we went from version 2.6 to 2.7 to 2.8 to 2.9.2 (the current version)
Make sure that your theme is not called “default” – that is apparently what led to the spooky disappearance of the old Pei Profit theme, R.I.P.

That’s what Sharon had to say. I want to add that if you have to upgrade from version 2.6, ask for help from a WP guru before you do the upgrade yourself. You don’t want a blogicide on your conscience…

Anyway, I’m back to work on the Pei Profit redesign…

Apologies

admin1 — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:16:11 +0000

Due to a technical glitch during the upgrade of Pei Profit, the blog disappeared temporarily yesterday. Now we’re back with temporarily different theme. We thank you for your patience as construction work continues…

Change is on the Way!

admin1 — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:19:34 +0000

OK, I hope you thought that we were joking about the last post…

“Clean layout”, “clearly defined goals”, “interlinking between content”… C’mon, who are we kidding? Pei Profit readers are very loyal and supportive (luv u guys!), but a few of the commenters couldn’t help but notice that we don’t practice what we preach.

Tell me the honest truth guys. Is this blog ugly? Is it hard to find what you’re looking for? Do the posts jump around and lack a clear direction? Is the color scheme tacky? Are the ads annoying?

I’m kinda scared to hear the answers (for good reason), but I’m also genuinely interested. To let you in on a little secret, me and Michael are planning some huge new developments for Pei Profit in the next few weeks, including a brand new design and a new direction clearly focused our goal: To help our readers to build their blogs into profitable businesses – and to have fun doing it.

In case you’re wondering who I am – I’m Naomi and I’m Michael’s biz partner. You’ll hear more about me soon.

So stay tuned for some exciting developments and take this opportunity to have your say about the future of Pei Profit.

How to NOT chase potential visitors away

Michael — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:35:52 +0000

In the amount of time that I have been working in online marketing and SEO, I have seen many, many websites that are graphically rich, informationally poor, and quite frankly terrifying. (And yes, I know that “informationally” is not a real word. I just made it up.) Today I am going to discuss a key component of online marketing – site design.   Before I begin, I would like to thank my inspiration for today’s post, Vincent Flanders.
So site design. Why am I discussing site design on a blog that is about making money online, you may ask.   I’ll tell you why. Because once visitors land on your site, you want them to actually count as visitors and not instantly run screaming from nightmarish graphics and general overstimulation. That’s what is known as increasing the bounce rate of your site, and you don’t want to do that. Because you won’t make money that way. Traffic that bounces doesn’t qualify as traffic in your analytics, and traffic is the moneymaker..
Below are some tips to decrease your bounce rate from a site design perspective:
·    Clean layout
o    Your content should be the central part of your page. If you make it all about the advertisements, then it’s obvious to everyone that your site isn’t intrinsically valuable.
·    Top bar vs. side bar navigation (or link architecture)
o    This is clearly a matter of preference. I find sites with sitewide top-bar navigation to be a lot more friendly on the eyes and on usability. Either way, you want to establish a definitive link hierarchy so that your users know exactly where they are on your site and how they got there. I’ve seen sites with links just thrown up randomly without rhyme or reason. It doesn’t work.
·    Clearly defined goals
o    You want your site (especially your homepage) to have clear central goals. Having five different brightly colored links scattered around above the fold won’t give anyone incentive to click on a single one of them.   You will want to select one or two central goals maximum per page.
·    Decent interlinking
o    I would like to issue a warning here: If you have a blog on your services site, unless you make it blatantly clear that clicking on a link within your content will get you to the services side of your site, don’t do it. I don’t know about you, but I’m reading a blog either for the entertainment value or for the information.
o    That having been said, you should certainly have links within your content to other pages on your site – where applicable and within reason. I cannot stress that enough.
At the end of the day, having a site that will garner traffic is all about common sense. So use it!

Semantic Advertising

Michael — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:57:25 +0000

There’s a new wave in the online advertising community. It goes by several names – Web 3.0, semantic targeting, and semantic advertising being a couple of the more popular ones. The inspiration behind semantic targeting is pretty simple – it’s (yet another) Google AdSense, just one that happens to be better targeted than its predecessors. Semantic targeting is pretty self explanatory – ads are placed according to the meaning of an entire web page as opposed to being placed according to specific matching keywords. For example, an ad for footwear being placed on a news story about, say, some guy with broken or crushed feet would be slightly counterproductive. Also, with traditional advertising networks there are many phrases or keywords that are a bit ambiguous – like Amazon (as in the jungle versus the online retailer). Improving advertisement relevance is never a bad move. Improved accuracy ultimately means more clicks for those advertisers, and more visibility. So as far as general online advertising goes (and PPC advertising in particular), it’s a step in the right direction. And I’m seeing it mentioned more and more frequently, so it’s clearly becoming more standard than it was, say, five years ago.
To be honest, I’m not a huge advocate of PPC advertising. Yes, it is an easily tracked advertising methodology, and it may appear to give you tangible numbers to report back to the big guys upstairs. Having said that, those tangible numbers do not necessarily indicate tangible results. Traffic from PPC ads does not mean higher revenue from your website. Firstly, I know of very few internet users who actually click on PPC ads, and of those few, even fewer clicks ultimately lead to conversions.
To my mind, the issue at hand is the blatancy of PPC advertising. Subtlety is crucial; decent marketing can produce huge quantities of revenue, but people don’t like being advertised to. The key to successful internet marketing is subtlety, a characteristic which is getting more and more difficult to achieve every passing day. Firstly, internet users have much more savvy these days and are much quicker to pick up on marketing efforts, and secondly, the rules are getting steadily more stringent. For example, the FDA made it quite clear that any bloggers who are writing paid reviews without disclosing this fact to the public will be in BIG trouble. As will those who paid for the review.
So I guess my point is if you have to blatantly advertise your product or service instead of subtly marketing it, semantic targeting just may be the way to go, because accuracy and relevance may be all you have left.
Note: Search in general has been getting more semantic – Google’s starting to look at synonyms differently. More on that later.

Yahoo Search Marketing – Why and Why Not

Michael — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:26:42 +0000

Two posts ago we discussed the positive and negative aspects of Google AdWords (again, not to be confused with Google AdSense, noobs). In today’s post we will be discussing the pros and cons of Yahoo! Search Marketing (which may or may not be swallowed up and integrated by Bing, it remains to be seen). There are less of them than Google AdWords…I honestly have a lot less to say on the subject.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is Yahoo!’s PPC advertising network that was started after Yahoo! acquired Overture. (I’ll get into history stuff at another point in time. If I don’t focus I’ll never finish the post.) For the record, YSM came before Google AdWords, which was the subject of much litigation. It has, however, fallen behind Google’s market share in the world of online advertising. Which, interestingly, leads us straight into a strong pro of Yahoo! Search Marketing:

· Yahoo! may generate less monthly searches than Google, but Yahoo! still retains a decent, somewhat existent percentage of the market share. (This is shifting dramatically with the Bing-Yahoo! deal…more about that another time.) Such being the case, Cost Per Click (CPCs) are significantly lower than CPCs on Google AdWords. And you still get a lot of views.

· This particular viewpoint also has a huge con – and I mean colossal. Since Yahoo! and Bing made a deal, Yahoo! has been getting less and less of the search market share. The question is what is the value of advertising on a page that no one sees. It may go up again, but searches on Yahoo! are definitely in a downward trend right now.

My recommendation? Stay away from Yahoo! right now…No one seems to know quite what this Bing/Yahoo! deal means or what it will affect. You may want to wait to see when (and if) Yahoo!’s market share picks up again.