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What is Your SEO Rating?
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I have listed my sites for quite a while on online marketplace, and eventually concluded that listing mine can increase traffic and business of your websites!
How so?
Consider this – you list your sites for, say, $20 to Sitepoint.com Marketplace for a 30-day listing. Your site, of course, will attract attention, that will usually be followed with bid placement.
If the price is right, your sites are successfully flipped to the new owners. However, what many site owners are afraid of is that their listed websites fail to sell well.
Some lose heart, some re-list theirs.
But do you know that, even if your listings are ended without any suitable bids, your sites will end up getting more attention by webmasters and advertisers?
By the numbers, my listed websites are always getting more visitors during the listing period.
I have been contacted by webmasters asking whether the websites in my non-successful listings are still on sale… 2 months after the listing has ended!
What’s better, some advertisers have contacted me for an advertising opportunity simply by having my websites listed.
One of my sites is even earning commission selling affiliate products, which traffic is originated from Sitepoint.com Marketplace.
So business-wise, $20 for hundreds of visitors + affiliate sales + adsense earning + advertising opportunity. Priceless.
Image by CarbonNYC.
Your website link popularity determine your placement in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The premise is, the more sites or pages linking to your website (a.k.a. backlinks), the higher your link popularity, and the more exposure you will receive.
Now, link building involves many methods – directory submission, article submission, RSS submission, link exchange, getting reviewed, etc. But doing those methods take a lot of time – something that can’t be measured by money.
Outsourcing those link building activities is an option, but too often, the cost is blinding.
One, effective, method that people often overlook in link building is Wordpress theme sponsorship.
Wordpress theme sponsorship is basically sponsoring a Wordpress theme, that is usually will be distributed as a free Wordpress theme. In exchange for the sponsorship money, sponsors will receive a link on the footer of the Wordpress theme, linking to the sponsor’s site.
The ‘norm’ – the link must be ‘dofollow’ (allowing the search engine to ‘count’ the link as one backlink), and permanently placed, as long as the theme is available to download.
Your link is usually encrypted, so that if someone download the theme for free and he/she tried to delete your link in the footer, he/she will end up with non-functioning theme.
Usually, sponsor a Wordpress theme will cost you $25 to $70, depending on the theme owner and the method of acquiring sponsorship – fix prices or float prices through auction.
The number of links available is also varies – usually, a good theme always have three to four links available to be sponsored, which one of them is usually a designer link (includes the ‘designed by…’ – increasing your link exposure even more). However, a designer link always cost you more than the other link types.
Viral link building. Period.
You only need to sponsor one time, and your link will be permanently embedded to the theme, and will follow wherever the theme go.
Of course, the key is on how to choose the right Wordpress theme that people will want to download and use it as their blog’s theme – the more people use the theme, the more your link exposed.
Let’s do some math – Think about it:
Suppose you sponsor a link in a good Wordpress theme. In the first week the theme launched, there are 100 bloggers download and use the theme on their blogs.
This means, you are getting 100 backlinks minimum. And this is just the beginning.
Suppose the 100 bloggers using your sponsored Wordpress theme has 20 blog posts and growing, you will end up with 100 x 20 = 2000 backlinks. And bloggers will always write blog posts somehow.
Suppose the bloggers using your sponsored Wordpress theme are writing exceptional blog posts – they will get a lot of attention and eventually getting people link to them – this will eventually increase the Pagerank and link popularity of the blog posts.
What this means to you? What if those blog posts are getting indexed high and having good PageRank? You will end up with thousands of quality backlinks that will increase your link popularity.
Interesting isn’t it?
But take heed – all the benefits is gone if the bloggers decided to change their theme to another Wordpress theme – there goes the benefit.
Nevertheless, as long as you choose quality Wordpress theme design, the overall result has always been outstanding – I know this is true, because I use this strategy to some of my web properties 
First of all, you can look sponsorship opportunities in many marketplaces, but I always look for them in Sitepoint.com Marketplace and Digitalpoint.com Forums.
Here’s some tips on how to choose a good theme to sponsor:
Doing this, just like in any other link building strategy, will have some caveats.
One biggest caveat is: you can’t control who is using the theme you sponsor.
What if the blogger used the Wordpress theme you sponsor for gambling or adult sites? Your link will receive backlinks from ‘bad neighbourhood’ – this will somewhat affects your site backlink quality, or even will cause Google to penalised your site’s PageRank.
But as in everything in life, there are certain negativity in every positive thing you do – so, I’ll say, go for it.
Image by aromano.
Paid reviews are one of the most common make money online methods that bloggers can do.
Paid review is basically a website reviewed by a blogger in exchange for cash – in other words, you are paid to review someone else’s websites.
Many people avoid doing paid review for one reason – Google don’t like any form of payments involved in every website – either it’s for a review, purchasing link in exchange for PageRank ‘juice’ transfer, etc.
Experts said, and they are not bluffing at all, that if Google catches you doing so, your website will be penalised – reducing your PageRank, or even some reported that their blogs are delisted from Google after they trying to make money through link sales or paid reviews.
Nevertheless, nobody knows how Google ‘caughts’ violators – in effect, some people decided to play safe and rely on other methods of blogs and websites monetisation (advertisements, sponsorships, affiliate sales, etc.)
I, on the contrary, am with those that decided to play on the borderline – No matter what the expert said about paid reviews, I view that they are actually good for your blog.
My reasoning, Suppose Google penalises you by reducing your PageRank, or even delisting your blog from their database – so what?
Anything focusing on PageRank is a bad idea. Doing reviews or sell links are often not due to your site/blog’s PageRank – there are way, way much more things for a client to decide your site/blog is appealing to advertisers:
And those are just to name a few.
In fact, doing paid review is not only just okay – it is great for your blog, for 5 reasons:
Think about it – treat Google as your partner to grow your business, but never fear or even count on them! build your blog holistically – never build yours to cater Google audience only, but also other blogosphere audiences – social media, other blogs, etc. – so that if Google did penalise you, you have a safety net to fall on.
Image by pedrosimoes7.
I started to enter the make money online and web investing about 9 months ago.
I am an off line entrepreneur before, and I found out that the online marketplaces and the online businesses inside are lucrative. The barrier to entry, in my opinion, is your willingness to learn and resilience.
Sure, there are big guys on the Net that rake in millions of dollars a year from their online businesses, but there are (still) places for you and I to explore and make money from the Internet and blogosphere.
In term of blogging, this blog is a better blog today because of other bloggers, that happen to be the authoritative voices in the blogoshpere. The probloggers or A-list bloggers or any names that refer to the blogging authorities offer valuable tips – for free – on how to get to what they are right now.
I learn from them on how to create valuable contents that are useful for my blogs’ visitors. Why learn from them? Because each of them starts just like you and I starts blogging and/or make money online – know a little about blogging, but a HUGE desire to success.
I guess desire is what separate those A-listers to the rest of us.
I make quite a bit money online. Not considered a huge success, but my journey in web investing is off to a good start.
For sure, I has passed the $1000 mark – a milestone that according to Yaro Starak, one of the A-lister I follow, a difficult milestone to achieve, and things would be easier afterward – hopefully
All thanks to these 5 blogs that radically changes my mindset about online money making:
This is the blog that, in my case, starts it all – a down-to-earth guy, yaro Starak, the blog owner, offers tips that are legitimate and doable in make money online and web business in general. Yaro also run a blogging membership site, Blog Mastermind, and just launched a new one, Become a Blogger, a video coaching program.
The most inspiring blog post of his is How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit.
Darren Rowse, the owner and blogger, offer one of the best advice on the Net on blogging – how to increase traffic and convert those traffic into revenue. He started it all as a hobby. He is also the founder of an authoritative blogs network – b5media.
One of his blog post that kick my @ss to start learning to make money online is How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs.
Brian Clark’s CopyBlogger is a heaven for writers and bloggers. The tips on article writing and copy writing are helping me to be a better writer. It is named among the best blogs in the world, such as Technorati’s 50 most popular blog in the world.
One article that lights me up is 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers.
JohnCow.com (not John Chow) is one of the blog rockstar on blogosphere. Its posts are often controversial, but truthful.
One of the most interesting post is When To Outsource Your Blog Writing.
Last but not least, BloggingTips is one of the most easiest source of FREE information on blogging. Try the phrase “blogging tips” into Google search, and voila! You’ll get BloggingTips.com on #1. A multi-author blog, BloggingTips offer, well, blogging tips from different perspectives.
I actually don’t have a special post that change my view on blogging from this blog, but recently, one of my favourite posts I read from this blog is A Unique, Free Marketing Tool for Freelance Writers and Bloggers.
So, there’s there. Hopefully you learn as much as I did from those 5 blogs who set the trends of blogging and make money today.
Image by alwitt.
I closely monitor trends and what people do in online marketplaces, and I start seeing things
I mainly monitor Sitepoint.com Marketplace and Digitalpoint.com Sites Sales Forums to see which type of web business is hot, and which is not.
The demand of content-oriented sites, such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and article directories are increasing.
My pick for the strongest web business of the year candidate in 2009 is blogs. I’ve never seen so many blogs listed on the marketplaces – some are decent earners and very popular.
However, if you look closely, the trend is hot on start-up blogs with unique designs, start-up unique blog posts – the real turnkey.
But first, let’s start with established blogs.
Established blogs are typically packed with a lot of original content, a loyal followers, a strong readership. And of course, they have made the owner some money.
How to value an established blog’s price tag? That really depends on the blog flipper or web investor.
I agree to the mainstream view that a blog is valued 10 to 20 times its monthly revenue. However, the deviation is quite huge – for instance, a blog that make $20 a month but has a lot of potential could have bidders place their bid over $500.
Even, some established blogs I saw listed make little or no revenue, yet they have been won more than $1000!
The things to consider in acquiring an established blog is: the number of RSS and/or newsletter subscribers, the traffic, the income, the comment-to-post ratio, the ease of blog management, etc.
Start-up blogs I saw before are mainly abandoned blogs or personal blogs that lacks traffic. They typically cost less than $100.
However, today, I saw start-up blogs that are designed better than the established ones, updated with better blog post’s quality than many blogs on the blogosphere, and are created with all the plugins and tools needed to start making money online.
The unique start up blogs often come with additional add-ons, such as forums, directories, or ebooks.
The price tags of those start-up blogs are also increasing, both in the pricing ranges and in the amount the winning bidders paid. I’ve seen this later generation of startup blogs have been won at anywhere between $200 and $500.
This new trend brings many site developers re-prioritise their projects and start focusing on building start-up blogs.
I don’t know how about you, but I recommend you to stay away from autoblogs, micro sites (that usually sells ebooks and software scripts) and web directories.
Automatic updating blogs are hot, but could be not as valuable as today in 2009 due to the duplicated content penalty by the search engine and ethical issues.
Moreover, as blog readers are more and more knowledgeable, they will avoid non-unique blog content at all cost – this will affect the autoblog’s incoming traffic.
Micro sites are those one-page sales page of ebooks or software.
They DO produce considerable money, but in my opinion, they are usually sold after they make some money for the initial owner – and in micro sites, sales tend to decline fast, as their main characteristic is red hot in the beginning, and eventually they become ’stale’.
Bidding directories, link directories, and somewhere-in-between directories were hot, but not in 2009. The supply surpasses the demand, and this will decline the value of web directories. Moreover, Google is said to penalise directories for a suspect of link farming and buy-and-sell links for PageRank.
So web directories are not good web investing materials.
Again, my pick is blogs.
I also fave web businesses that support a larger sites, such as Twitter conversation manager for Twitter, Application Add-ons for Facebook, etc.
So, what’s your choice of web business investing in 2009?
Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
