How to Monetize Your Blog with Adsense

Google’s Adsense is one of the easiest and surest ways to monetize your blog.  You are able to direct your targeted traffic to sites they would be interested in, and you get paid for the clicks. It is a surefire way to make money with your blog. You don’t need to go out and figure out what offers are focused on the readers of your post, Google does it for you.

The challenge of using Adsense is getting the code inserted in every post. This is especially tough if you have a blog that you have been posting to for a long time. If you’re like me, you sometimes forget that important step of inserting your money making code, and by the time I notice, my post has aged and the initial traffic jump for a new post is already past.

You could go into your Wordpress Theme, and modify the code so your Adsense code is always on your posts. I’m not a big fan of tinkering with my theme code when it is working great, and looks good.  The other option is to install an Adsense plugin for Wordpress. You then tell the plugin what your account code is, and the plugin takes care of inserting the Adsense code on every post, even all your historical posts. I love to see revenue start coming in from my old posts without needing to go back and work on them again.

Here’s the steps to install the Adsense Plugin for Wordpress that I use:

1. Open your Wordpress administrator page.
2. On the left side panel, Click the tiny arrow on the plugin section and click “Add New“.
   
3. On the search field, type “Adsense Manager“, hit the “Search Plugin“. On the search result that appears, click “Install” on “Adsense Manager“. The plugin description window will appear. Click “Install Now” to begin the installation.
   
4. Click “Activate Plugin” once the installation has finish.
   
5. Once you have activate the plugin, go to your Wordpress administration control panel and click “Adsense Manager” under “Settings” tab.
   
6. On the “Getting Started” page, click “Manage » Ad Units” link. Go to your adsense management account, Create a new ad unit, Copy the ad code generated to “Simply paste your Ad Code below and Import!” box and click “Import to New Ad Unit”.
   
7. On the next page, define your adsense appearance. Once you are done with it, hit the “Save Changes” button. And you are done.
   
8. This plugin is also supports most Ad networks including AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, AdRoll, Commission Junction, HTML Code, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo! PN and WidgetBucks.

After you install the plugin, make sure you test on your theme. There are a few Wordpress themes where the plugin will place the Adsense Ads incorrectly. If this happens you have a couple choices, modify or replace your theme to work with the plugin, or of course, if you’re playing with the theme, you could modify it to insert the ads.  Using the Adsense plugin is the easiest method for me.

For most marketers the easiest, quickest way to start making money is to create blogs, use the Adsense Plugin for Wordpress, and start getting money from Google every month.  Take our simple steps above, and monetize your blog today.

Contact Form 7 : Easiest Way to Add Contact Us Form

Having contact with your readers is a very important part of any marketers day. Many of your readers want direct contact with you through email, and not in the public arena of comments. If you, like many new marketers, add your email address to your blog, the next thing you know, your email box is full every time you look and none of it is important.  Someone has harvested your email address from the blog and is spamming you. This makes it almost impossible to find the legitimate emails among all the junk email. There is nothing that loses a sale faster than not answering someone’s email.

If you don’t give your readers an easy way to email you, you will lose potential sales, and a possible follower. You can’t afford to lose a potential sale, that you have worked so hard to bring to your blog.

The easiest solution is to add a contact form to your blog, but you need to make sure you choose the right contact form and install it properly, to avoid possible contact form spam. The contact form I use is Contact Form 7 for Wordpress. It is easy to install, and you can even integrate it with a Captcha box to eliminate possible spambots. Adding Contact Form 7 will allow your readers to fill out a simple form, enter the Captcha, and click the button to send you their questions by email. It solves the issues of easy contact, and helps eliminate the potential spam flood to your inbox.

Here is how you install Contact Form 7 on your blog:

1. Logon to your Wordpress admnistration page.
2. On the left side control panel, click the tiny arrow on the Plugin section and click “Add New“.
   
3. Put “Contact Form 7” on the search field, click the “Search Plugins” button and click “Install“.
   
4. On the installation Window, click “Install Now“.
   
5. After the installation process has finish, click “Activate Plugin“.
   
6. Go back to the “Add new” plugin page. Type “Really Simple Captcha” on the search field. And repeat the installation process which mentioned on the step 3-5.
   
7. After the CAPTCHA plugin is installed, you can start to create your contact form by clicking the Plugins > Installed > (Contact Form 7) Settings.
   
8. Click “Add New” to create a new form. And click “Untitled” to change the contact form title.
   
9. By default, you already have “Name“,”Email“,”Subject“,”Message” fields provided on the form coloumn. To add the CAPTCHA field, click “Generate Tag” on the right side of the form coloumn and pick “CAPTCHA“.
   
10. Choose your desired image size, background color and foreground color. After you complete the setting, copy and paste both codes which shown on the bottom to the left form coloumn on HTML format.
    
    
11. Scroll down to the Mail section on the bottom and change “To” Address to your email address.
    
12. After you’ve done with the setting, go back to the top page and click “Save“. Copy the code which shown under the title to your blog posts, pages, or widgets.
    
    

How to Show Related Posts in Wordpress

Many of the new readers to your blog came looking for one piece of information where your blog is listed on the search engines.  Once you have them to your blog, you want to keep them reading, and looking through your posts. But since they came with the intent of reading only one thing, how do you keep them interested?

If you have other related posts, wouldn’t it be great if they could just click a link in the post they are reading to find more information to satisfy their curiosity? As we know, that is not the way our Wordpress blogs work, we would need to search on Google again, or just browse through your posts looking for more information. Once they are back at Google searching again, the chance of us getting them back to our blog immediately is not very high.

You can quickly change Wordpress to add this feature for your readers, keeping readers on your site for a longer time, giving you more opportunity to market to your readers.  The best way to add this feature is to install the Related Posts Plugin for Wordpress.  This plugin adds a box at the end of each of your posts, showing the other related posts on your blog. The plugin determines what articles are related by examining your titles, tags, body, and categories. You can choose which one of these critera are used, or you can use all of them.

The best way to learn more, is to see the plugin in action. Here’s are the steps to install it on your blog:

1. Login to your Wordpress administration page.
2. On the left panel, click the tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New‘.
   
3. On the search field, type “Yet Another Related Posts” and hit the “Search Plugin” button. Once you see the search result, click “Install” on the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin“.
   
4. The installation Window will appear. Click the “Install Now” Button to begin the installation.
   
5. Once it’s finish, don’t forget to click “Activate Plugin” to enable the plugin.
   
6. Browse your FTP file, copy the sample templates file on “wp-content/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/yarpp-templates/” into your “/wp-content/themes/default” directory.
7. Installation finish. You could go to “Settings > Related Posts (YARPP)” to modify the plugin setting based on your needs and your plugin is ready to be used. Check out each of your blog post to see the result.
   

The related posts plugin works great for extending Wordpress, and helping your users find more posts, but it is not as powerful and efficient as Google’s search algorithm.  You will need to take a little extra time, making sure the tags for related articles are matched so the posts show up in the related articles list.

Using the related posts plugin is going to keep your readers on your site longer, building more trust, and in the process more sales. Spending the few minutes to install the plugin, and to keep your tags in order, is a small investment for increasing your sales and readership.

Allowing Your Reader to Subscribe for Comments

How often do you have readers on your blog leave comments, and you reply asking them a question, and they never come back? You know interacting with your readers is one of the best ways to keep them coming back, and to turn them into buying customers. But how do you get a commenter to come back and read your answers? How will they know you have answered?

One of the best ways to get great interaction with your readers is to offer to email them the answers to their comments on your blog. Of course you don’t want to spend your time only sending an email to one person, if many people are interested in yours, or other readers replies. You can accomplish this task easily, and without much work on your part, by adding the Subscribe to Comments plugin on your blog.

The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows your readers to subscribe to the comment section of your blog. This way they get your answers to their questions directly to their email inbox. Which will help you draw them back into your blog.

The Subscribe to Comments can be installed by following these steps :

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.

   

3. Type ‘Subscribe to Comments’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’

   

6. Just like installing thread comments plugin, you don’t have to do anything else after this plugin is activated, unless you want to customize it. To customize, click ‘Subscribe to Comments’ on Setting section (bottom-left of your screen).

Subscribe to Comments definitely will help build up your conversations with your readers, but you should know, sometimes the emails go into your readers Junk or Spam folders. This depends on their settings, and possibly the settings of their ISP. You may want to recommend on your blog that they add the email address to their safe senders list, or into their contacts list. Most times this is not an issue, but if a reader complains, you’ll know your answer.

Your subscribers stay in complete control of their subscription, and can change their settings by returning to your blog.

You will enjoy the benefits and fun of continuing conversations with your blog readers.  Building a two way relationship increases your fun, increases their trust, and by doing so, increases your bottom line profits.

How to Make Threaded Comments for Your Blog

If you’re like most of us internet marketers, you use blogs as one of your most important promotion tools. You use it to post your messages, and to interact with your readers through the comments on your posts. You want your readers to become very interactive with your sites to keep them coming back for every new post.

The problem most of us face with the comments is our answers are hiding far down the list from our readers questions. On a forum or discussion board, the questions and answers flow right after each other in a nice threaded format. Making it that easy for your readers to find their answers, and for other readers to be able to follow the flow of the questions and answers. A threaded question and answer format makes your site a much better resource.

The good news is, you can make your Wordpress blog comments threaded just like a forum.  Your readers will love the ease of finding the answers, and the easy flow of the comments. You will need to install a simple Wordpress plugin to extend the features of your comments. If you follow these steps, you’ll have it installed and running in just a few minutes :

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.

   

3. Type ‘Wordpress Thread Comment’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’

   

6. Once your plugin is activated, you can customize it by clicking ‘WP Thread Comment’ on Settings section (bottom-left), but this step is optional. You will have threaded comments soon after this plugin is activated.

I want to make sure you understand, there is one big thing you will need to watch out for. Each reply to a comment indents slightly to the right. This isn’t a big issue, unless you have a very active readership who comment and reply to each other. Then you will see your threaded comments slowly moving to the right, and they may end up traveling off of your normal screen size. You will need to evaluate the habits of your readers to see if this will cause problems for your blog.

Threaded comments for your blog, will make your blog more interactive and easy to read, bringing your readers back to check their answers, and becoming an active part of your community.

Using All-In-One SEO Pack to Change Title of Your Post

Every post you make to your blog is an opportunity to address your market in a new way.  But by default, Wordpress uses the same title tag on every post you make. For most of us, the little blurb we put in as a title tag on day one, has nothing to do with the message I’m sending my market today. The default title tag does not reflect the content of my post for the search engines, either. This is one reason you may find blog posts in Google that are listed as one thing, but when you visit the post, the topic is completely different.

This is an issue you need to solve for your Wordpress site, you are a professional marketer. You need every post to appear unique is you want the greatest benefits for your marketing effort.  You need your blog posts to be optimized for the search engines if you want to get the best rankings, and to avoid the duplicate content penalties.

The best way to solve this issue is to use one of the SEO Plugins for Wordpress. The one I recommend is the All-In-One SEO Pack. It optimizes your title tags making them unique for each post, it automates the creation of Meta Tags, and helps you avoid the duplicate content penalties. It is one of the most critical plugins your can add for your Wordpress blog. The best news for new marketer, you don’t have to tinker with the settings, you install it and it just works.

Here’s the easy steps to get it installed:

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.
   
3. Type ‘All In One SEO Pack’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’

   

6. After your plugin has been activated, click ‘Go to the admin page’ to enable it.

   

7. On the admin page, click ‘enable’, type your ‘home title’, ‘home description’, ‘home keywords’, etc. Don’t forget to click ‘Update Options’ at the bottom of the page.

   

By installing the All-In-One SEO Pack on your WordPress blog, you will increase your relevance to the search engines, making each post more unique. Your posts will be listed in the search engines with proper information.  Get it installed today, and you no longer need to worry about manual editing of your tags.

Installing Google Analytics on Wordpress Blog

Are you using Wordpress for your marketing?  Do you really know what posts are popular?  Do you know what keywords brought visitors to your blog? How did your visitors get to your site?

A common mistake a new internet marketer makes is not gathering statistics about their blogs starting on day one. Getting feedback on what posts work, and what keywords are producing your traffic, allows you to focus on your markets desires, and target the proper offers for making real money.

The solution is to add Google Analytics to your Wordpress blog. With Google Analytics you will be able to track where your visitors come from by country (sometimes this is really eye opening), what browser they are using, how long they stayed on your site, and many other factors. You’ll also be able to see what sites sent you the traffic, if it is the search engines, the social bookmarking sites, another website, or even if people directly typed in your site’s URL. This information is critical to planning your future posts, and for determining where you need to promote your site.

Many people have not used Google Analytics since they are convinced they will need to put the code on every page of their blog. Luckily there is a great Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress which will place the code in every post for you.

The plugin is very simple to install, here are the steps you need to follow :

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.
   
3. Type ‘Google Analyticator’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’

   

6. Don’t close your blog, but now login to www.Google.com/analytics using your Gmail account. If you don’t have it, create it first.
7. If this is your first time on Google Analytics, you have to fill the ‘New Account Signup’ form until you have this code on your screen. Copy the tracking code given :

   

   Otherwise, just click ‘Add Website Profile’ on your existing Analytics account and you will find the tracking code after you type your URL.

   

8. Back to your Wordpress, click ‘Google Analytics’ on Settings section. Make it enable, click the ‘Authenticate with Google’ link to make the stats appear on your dashboard and the last thing to do is… type your tracking code.

   

   

9. Click ‘Save Changes’ on the bottom of your screen. Done! You will see your stats on your dashboard.

While Google Analytics is a great tool, it does have one minor issue for a marketer.  The statistics are not real-time. If you start a new marketing campaign and were wanting to watch the statistics through the day, you cannot. You will need to wait until the next day to see your results.

The Google Analytics for Wordpress will give you the important information you need to monitor and market to your niche. Without accurate data, you are throwing darts blindfolded, with Google Analytics, you’ll have a laser focus, and start hitting the marketing bulls-eye.

Adding Social Bookmarking Buttons for Your Blog Post

Nothing beats having our readers help promote our content. If they really like what we’ve said, or produced, we want to make it very easy for them to share their excitement with the world. The problem is, many of your readers are not willing to spend the time and effort to login to the social bookmarking sites, then copy and paste URL’s. How many of your readers do you believe will open a new window, go to Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Propeller, and other sites? If we really want them to bookmark our sites, we need to simplify the process.

You can make it easier for your readers to social bookmark your content, by adding one of the social bookmarking buttons plugins. Adding social bookmarking buttons to your blog, allows the reader to click a single button, which launches the social bookmarking site, and fills out a portion of the entries for them. These plugins normally include over 50 of the best social bookmarking sites in their list, with the most popular ones displaying as the buttons in front. This makes it more likely our excited readers will bookmark our site, which gives us more traffic, and more rankings.

Here is the steps for you to install my favorite social bookmarking plugin:

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.

   

3. Type ‘Social Bookmarking Reloaded’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’.

   

6. To customize this plugins, click ‘Social Bookmarking R’ on Settings section.

   

7. If your blog is in English, change the ‘Display Title’, ‘Add’ and ‘to’ string. Also, if you want this buttons appear on every single post you have, choose ‘when a single post is viewed’.

   

8. Click ‘Save’.
9. You can choose which social bookmarking sites you want right on the bottom side of the ‘Options’ section and don’t forget to click ‘Save’ button once you choose it.

While the social bookmarking buttons are a great addition to your marketing strategy, it is not a total solution. It is great for having your readers bookmark your posts, but does not allow you, the marketer, to automate your social bookmarking to a variety of key social sites. For you this would still be a tedious task. Just adding the button is usually not enough, you may need to ask your readers to bookmark your post if they find it helpful. You’ll find that not all of the social bookmarking sites carry the same benefit, Digg is more powerful today than Delicious. By having a wide range of options for your readers, they may not bookmark on your preferred bookmarking site.

The good news, by using the social bookmarking plugin, you will definitely increase the percentage of readers who will take the time to bookmark your posts. This will give you a great boost in traffic, and as we all know, added traffic can mean extra dollars in the bank.

How To Use Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status

Every internet marketer faces one big challenge, leveraging your time on the important social media sites.  To keep in contact with your followers, it seems like you are always bouncing back and forth between the two giants of social sites, Facebook and Twitter.

Many times the message you send on Twitter is the same message you want to share on Facebook.  So you login to Twitter, type your message, and update your status.  Then it is off to Facebook, login, then retype the same message and update your status.  I’m sure your time is as valuable to you, as mine is to me, and retyping or even the “cut and paste” of the same message is frustrating.

Luckily for all of us marketers, there is a good solution to this problem.  You can use Twitter to update your Facebook status by using the Twitter app for Facebook.  By adding this app, you can login to your Twitter account through the application in Facebook.  When you post your update, it uses Twitter to update Facebook status, and updates your Twitter status, simultaneously.  That makes for nice time savings, and makes me feel much more efficient.

The easiest way to add the Twitter application for Facebook, so Twitter can update your Facebook status, is by searching for Twitter on Facebook, you’ll find the application on the first page of your search.  Make sure you choose the option to allow Twitter to update Facebook, or you’ll end up only updating Twitter.

To have this feature on your Facebook account, do this following steps :

1. login to Facebook, and click ‘Applications’ on bottom-left of your screen.
2. click ‘Browse More Applications’

   

3. type ’selective twitter status’ on search box and click the application

   

4. click ‘Go to Application’
5. type your Twitter username and click Save

   

6. click ‘Allow’ then click ‘Allow Publishing’ to continue the process
7. That’s it..! Any tweets you post that end with #fb should now update your Facebook status.

If you want to remove this feature, just click ‘Applications’ as you did on step #1, then click ‘Edit Applications’ and click ‘X’ on right side of ‘Selective Twitter Status’. You won’t be able to update your Facebook status from Twitter again after removing it.

There are some negatives with this approach.  First, it is a one way process.  Only Twitter can update Facebook, you cannot send a message directly in Facebook and have it update your Twitter status.  Secondly, since we are stuck with Twitter for the dual updates, we are limited to only 140 characters.  I’m not sure about you, but many times I want a message longer than 140 characters.  This leaves me with using Facebook for my longer messages, so for some updates I still have to do the two sites differently.

Using Twitter to update Facebook status using the Twitter App for Facebook is just one way you can leverage your time, and efforts in your social media marketing.