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A contest blog. You see them everywhere. Why? Because getting content is so easy. You don’t have to find topics or even write it yourself. People will submit the content. You just have to sit back and relax. So having a contest blog is really easy.

Having a successful contest blog is not an easy thing to do. ContestBeat achieved this goal and it’s now in the TOP 10 of the contest niche.

But why contests? Are they any good? Yes they are. Case study: Domprofesor.com. Contests are great promotion methods. They increase traffic, links, rss readers and all stats in general. Before I started the contest I had 100 incoming links and 50+ RSS subscribers. After the contest I now have 250+ links and 300+ rss subscribers. So contests create awareness and build buzz. And in the long run it’s the best option.

Now you know what contests are all about, let me tell you more about ContestBeat. I chose CB because they had no fee for submitting a contest to them. Other contest sites that have CB’s coverage and viewers ask for a $10-$50 fee to post about your contest, while CB does it for free. Also what attracted me was the site’s design. Clean, crisp, big fonts, everything you need to make a site user friendly. And most of all, if you don’t know nothing about how to create a contest they have the greatest advice page, telling you all the right things and no bull.

So if you want more traffic, more buzz, more links and more subscribers, better start a contest instead of paying for any kind of advertising. And if you want to start a contest, better use ContestBeat.Com.

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CPC advertising. That’s what it’s all about. A well written ad can raise your sells while a poorly written one can empty your pockets. Furthermore, a good ad will even cost you less (about 20% less). So without further ado here are some things you should take into consideration when writing an for AdWords or a similar network:

• Keywords and Key Phrases: if your desired keyword has too many competitors or a high price there are 2 things you can do: 1) pay more to get seen or 2) be smarter than your competitors and pay less for the same results. Ok let’s be more specific and work with examples. Let’s say you want to advertise on of those $47 Money Making Programs, you can imagine that the competition is fierce. So first of all don’t use keywords, use key phrases. The reasons key phrases are more powerful than keywords is because the are more targeted. Imagine that keywords are like a shotgun that fires lots of projectiles but they spread while they travel more distance, while key phrases are like a sniper rifle - one shot, one kill, every shot hits it’s target. Back to our example, let’s say that your Money Making Program is for moms who stay at home. Using the keyword money your ad will appear whenever people search for anything containing money (bank money, spend money, how much money do I need to…, mortgages and stuff). And anyone who clicks on your ad coming from a search like this in just curious not interested. However if you use the key phrase “make money for home based moms” or something similar your ad will be highly targeted and whoever comes to your site through that ad is interested in what you are advertising.
• Keyword Typos. If you are advertising (like in the example above) for the keyword money the price will be really high. But you should take into consideration the fact that typos happen very often. But the price for the keywords moneu or monet are really low. When using typos as keyword make sure the letter that doesn’t belong there is placed near the correct letter on the keyboard.
• Negative Keywords. These are actually something good. Using phrases like “xOxOx is a scam“, “is xOxOx a scam?“, “xOxOx sucks” or “xOxOx doesn’t pay” will actually send more visitors to your site. This works because the people who search for things like this on the web are already aware of your program, they want to buy it, but they are not sure yet, they are a bit suspicious. But it costs way less than the original keyword and it will send buyers to your site.
• Ad Title. Using special characters in your ad title will make your ad special and it will get noticed faster. For example, we have the following ad titles: Make Money Online and >>Make Money Online<<. Which one will you click on??? The second one of course. You can use stuff like >><<, — –, oO Oo, it’s up to you.
• Ad Content. Make sure you use your keyword (in our case money or make money) in the ad content.
• Ad Content Again. Forget what you already know. They are all wrong. When it comes to AdWords ad, less content is more. How this works? AdWords provides you with 3 lines of text. If you can use only 1 text line (the middle one) to write your message your ad will get noticed, guaranteed. The blank space will get it noticed. Because everyone uses all the 3 lines your 1 line ad will pop into the eyes of any reader.
• Ad Placement. Again forget what you already know. You don’t want your ad to be first or second. Why not? Because you will get casual clicks, most of them coming from people who say “What’s this??? Hmmm, I’m going to click on it.” If your ad is 3rd or 4th this means that everyone who clicks on it is interested, because they are searching something and they are really SEARCHING for it even on lower spots.
• Landing Pages. Don’t start an ad campaign without a landing page (I will talk about landing pages later).

Now that is almost it. Maybe I forgot something, I don’t know. But the fact is I told you in a few words what a $47 ebook would tell you in 80 pages.

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What is advertising? In my opinion advertising is all about lying. Who does it best. Yesterday I saw an ad saying “Get a site in 30 seconds“. I thought that’s great, even the price was great (at a first glance). But the thing is you don’t get a site in 30 seconds. You just get a template. That is like someone advertising to sell a house which is really just a bunch of walls with no windows, no electricity, no plumbing, no nothing. You can’t use a house like that. Just like you can’t use a site which is just a template. The content is missing. And a site without content is nothing.

But advertising won’t tell you this. Advertising won’t tell you the site you are about to buy is really only a template (which you can also get for free). Because the main principle of advertising is to be misleading. They don’t say get a TEMPLATE in 30 seconds. They say get a site in 30 seconds because it will give you the impression that they are offering so much more. Everybody offers templates, but how offers a full site?

And what about those web hosting ads. Only $2,99/month. You’ll be thinking “Great, I’m gonna pay $6 for 2 months and if the site is working out I’ll get more“. But this is misleading again. Because most web hosting providers won’t allow you to buy just a month of hosting. You will have to buy at least 1 year so I don’t see why (I’m just kidding) they advertise their price like this. But of course, instead of saying $36/year it’s better to say $3/month. I wonder why they don’t say just 10 cents/day - that would be even better.

My conclusion is that advertising doesn’t sell products (contrary to popular belief), the product sells itself. Advertising just leads to the product. If the product isn’t good enough it won’t sell no matter how much advertising it gets. So if you have a product you want to sell and you want to advertise it, try to squeeze the most out of your ad. Use whatever you need to get that lead to your product. That’s why you see all those ads saying “make $3000/day - no experience required“. That’s just something to get you interested, coz the product will be crap.

It doesn’t pay to be a saint in a world full of whores.

Popularity: 35% [?]

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A while ago i was writing a post about Blogrush and Entrecard. This was a few days after i discovered EC. It worked nice (so i thought). However, in time, my opinion has changed.

ENTRECARD IS THE SAME CRAP FREE ADVERTISING CAN OFFER.

But what else should you expect from free stuff. For people who don’t know what Blogrush is I will tell you immediately. Blogrush is a program that will send readers to your site (or so says it’s admin) for free. The only thing you have to do is place a widget on your site that displays links from other sites. This is something like link exchange without the backlinks. At first glance this could work, but it doesn’t. You place the thingy on your site and wait. And wait, and wait. Your latest post is displayed 5000 times but still no one click on it. So it’s goodbye free traffic. The reason why this system doesn’t work is because your posts get displayed but no one sees them. This is because everyone can (and will) place the widget on a almost invisible position. Nobody wants to use their good space (used for advertising) for some crazy widget. This was the almost invisible position, because you can use the absolutely invisible position. You can place the widget in an iFrame and set the iFrame’s dimension to 0×0 pixels. The Blogrush spider will find the html on your site but no one will see it. Great. So in my opinion Blogrush is doomed. It will fail.

As for Entrecard… It also sucks. When i found EC I was excited it worked. It sent visitors to my site. And that’s just about it (you should keep in mind the fact that autosurf programs also give you free visits). The thing is EC sent visitors to my site, but not readers. 95% of the visits EC sent me just bounced off after dropping their card. Dropping what card I hear you ask? Entrecard’s system is based on a liason between webmasters. Webmasters get in touch with each other by dropping their card (something like a business card). This way you get credits to your account and you can display your ad on other sites in the network. Besides getting credits from dropping your card, you can also get credits from people (webmasters) who drop their cards on your site. Anyway, most of the people over there get their credits by dropping their cards on other sites. And this is more and more like autosurf.

So to continue my story… I a couple of weeks I had the amount of credits needed to display my ad on a popular site like Problogger or JohnChow. Getting on a site like this means huuuge exposure. But the problem is big sites never have free ad space. You’ll have to wait 12-14 days. Patience is a virtue and I have it. So i have waited 14 days for a free spot on Problogger. The wait time was 1 hour. I was getting anxious. My site was going to be on Problogger. Great. But the only problem I had was that the waiting time remained at 1 hour for the whole day (23 hours to be precise). And after that all the ad spots were again full for 14 days. So I guess there’s something going on in here. I think you must know the right people to get featured on a famous site.

So the conclusion is that Entrecard is nothing but an autosurf program that gets you visitors not readers, and only if you people in high places you can use it at full capacity.

So the final conclusion is: all the free advertising methods tested by me so far (Blogrush, Entrecard, Adgridwork) don’t work any better than any autosurf system.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Before I get started with this article you must know that Affiliate Marketing needs promotion. Any kind of promotion you can provide.

Blogging is not normally an activity for earning profits, or so it may seem. Many bloggers post blogs to inform other people of any news or information about anything under the sun. Blogs would be a pathway to personal expression or a means of teaching others. Whatever the use, all blogs have a tremendous business potential.

For affiliate marketing to be productive, it must have good exposure and a lot of visitors. This can be achieved by combining it with blogging.

Blogging is a great way to attract web viewers especially if the blogs have interesting and quality content. In a business sense, blogging can be a tool for advertising and in this case, affiliate marketing. If you are able to come up with a good and popular blog, chances are that when you put ads for affiliate marketing on your blog there will be many readers who will click on the ads. The more readers who will click on the ads, the better the chances of landing sales which would ultimately bring you profit through affiliate marketing.

There are other methods for advertising, but blogging is more advantageous. For one, blogs are free and can be easily made unlike hosting and creating a website of your own. Another perk is that search engines usually prioritize indexing blogs with good content over websites. Blogs can also serve as tools to bring web traffic to websites. This can be done by putting links to partner sites or to your own sites if you have one. Web features such as RSS Feeds allow readers to be notified upon addition of new blog content allowing affiliate marketing ads to be visible and reachable to more people as well as attract new ones.

Be aware that the internet is flooded with all kinds of blogs created by millions of bloggers. There are simple text blogs, photo blogs, and video blogs which contain their own specific content. In blogging, you should focus on one specific topic in order for you to specialize or be an expert in that specific niche. Creating blogs in your own unique way can bring you popularity and avid readership and from there, making money blogging is really just a matter of focus.

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