Locoed Web Development

If you have any of your blogs powered by WordPress then you are more or less familiar with the website called Weblog Tools Collection. Weblog Tools Collection is painstakingly forced in the face of each WordPress user through RSS feeds implemented into the admin’s interface. While those are editable, most average users would not know how to go about it to get rid of Weblog Tools Collection RSS feed and many of those who have required expertise simply don’t have time to deal with it and just put up with it. After years of WordPress use and concurrent exposure to Weblog Tools Collection through admin interface I’ve followed articles posted by this website and if I were to sum them up in a single word, I’d use “useless”. Information value, or just about any value provided by mindless ramblings of Weblog Tools Collection contributors is virtually non existent. You have nothing to take from it and after reading any of their articles you never feel like you have learned something valuable. It’s always a pile of senseless crap that does nothing but feed egos of people behind this worthless website.

Besides lacking value, Weblog Tools Collection contributors and admins are five star bullshitters extraordinaires. Devil would wear down six pairs of boots to find bullshitter extraordinaires of comparable qualities. In recent article written by Mark Ghosh titled “Are You Spamming Comments Inadvertently?” Weblog Tools Collection once again demonstrates that they don’t put money where their mouth is. The article talks about importance of comments and how Weblog Tools Collection values quality comments and how they reward quality commenters blah blah blah. The only trick is that anyone who’s ever commented on Weblog Tools Collection articles and didn’t deliver an ass kissing charade saw their comment marked as spam, deleted or modified (at minimum by having the URL removed). Hypocrisy of Weblog Tools Collection admins knows no limits in this regard. As a result, comments found on Weblog Tools Collection are of as low quality as articles themselves. Because the only way to get guaranteed approval of your comment is to post something like this:

Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. I could have never said it better. You are a God for bringing this up…

It is undisputable that Weblog Tools Collection admins are in it to feed their own egos and when their egos are hurt, they deal with it by utilizing their admin privileges. All that on a blog that’s forced into every WordPress user’s face. And then after all is said and done, Mark Ghosh has the nerve to come up and post an article about how the community is important to them and preach about proper commenting etiquette. Bullshitters extraprdinaires who perfected the art of bullshitting right there. Their biased, ego feeding comment censorship would be fine in my books if it wasn’t accompanied by hypocritical preaching on how commenting and comment moderating should be done.

Link building is one of the most important elements of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that can help you rank higher in the search engines which can result in more traffic to your site. There are several strategies one can implement which could lead to one way links to your website. In order to gain search engine juice, you want those links to be DoFollow as NoFollow links don’t pass on link juice and don’t help you improve ranking with most search engines.

Commenting on authority blogs is one of the ways to gain one way links. Below is the list of some of the best DoFollow blogs with Page Rank 6 (PR6) which is a high Rage Rank and a sign of a authority website. All of these PR6 blogs are DoFollow guaranteed – at least they were at the time of this post and for many years prior.

Please remember – links from PR6 websites can vastly improve your search engine ranking, however you have to put an effort into obtaining that link. Your effort consists of writing quality comments that expand on the topic discussed. Do not ever spam any blog. Always post relevant and well researched comments. It’s good business and it can also prevent your website from being blacklisted by spam fighting scripts. Let me rephrase it one more time – below is a well researched list of some of the best PR6 blogs with DoFollow comments. Do not ever spam these blogs. Only post quality comments and contribute to the topic discussed. Afterall, if you’re really trying to build a quality on line presence, you do not want to have your website associated with spamming, do you?

Without further ado, best PR6 DoFollow blogs commenting on which can significantly aid your SEO and link building campaign is below:

PR6 DoFollow Blog of a UK Journalist www.currybet.net
PR6 DoFollow Career Professionals Blog www.brazencareerist.com
PR6 DoFollow Travel Blog www.sirpi.org (expired/dropped domain, but Search Engine still treat is as valid PR6)
PR6 DoFollow Democrats Political Blog sayanythingblog.com
PR6 DoFollow International Socialism Blog links.org.au
PR6 DoFollow Market Predictions Blog www.midasoracle.org
PR6 DoFollow New Zealand Green Party Blog blog.greens.org.nz
PR6 DoFollow Economics and Infometrics Blog www.tvhe.co.nz
PR6 DoFollow Politics and Opinion Blog www.illinipundit.com
PR6 DoFollow WordPress and Blogging Blog weblogtoolscollection.com (mostly not worth it since they will keep your comment, but remove the link)

Important: I do not own nor control any of these PR 6 blogs. I’m merely sharing valuable information that most webmasters keep as top secret. Please don’t abuse this information and don’t ever spam any of these blogs.

I was once like you – a newbie webmaster trying to make things work by learning the basics but the amount of information as well as misinformation was overwhelming. I understood the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) immediately, but when does one start when they want to learn all it’s tricks? Many years have passed since and I have gained thorough and comprehensive understanding of all aspects related to Search Engine Optimization and started dominating search engines for keyword phrases of my choice with ease.

True enough – I’m a real SEO expert with verifiable track record of success – my own website that are ahead of the game, not some dubious third party owned sites with questionable search engine ranking. As such, I do not offer search engine optimization services to anyone. Think about it for a second: if someone is truly a SEO expert, why oh why would they promote somebody else’s website? SEO requires lots of work and is an ongoing process. If I’m gonna put so much work into dominating a particular keyword phrase, I better make sure it is my own site that reaps the benefits, not somebody else’s. That always leads me to question true intentions behind all of those SEO experts who offer their services for insane amounts of money. It just makes no sense someone would build a business against their own.

Enough theory though – the fact that you have landed on this page means that you are looking for a free tutorial and free tips on Search Engine Optimization for newbies. And I will gladly share the basics with you. Because sharing is the essence of life. I would like to however stress, that my tutorial and tips will only and solely include facts, no fiction. There will be only and solely proven and verified information shared herein. I am in this for the long run; I do not need to and want to trick anyone. You can count on the information provided 100%. Let’s quit blabbering and cut to cheese, shell we? I just need you to note one thing – there is so much to SEO, it would be impossible to cover everything I know within one tutorial. This SEO tutorial is meant to introduce Search Engine Optimization basics. Experienced webmasters will still find many valuable tips here, however the premise is built around the basics, so new webmasters who do not know where to start have a place from where to take off.

Search Engine Optimization Basics

The basics of and idea behind SEO are simple – to attract quality readers and potential clients to your website. Afterall, if you invest all that time, effort and money into launching a beautiful website, you want to see it grow and do well. And as webmaster I know that there is nothing frustrating than having a better website with better product than someone else, but that someone else gets all the traffic and reaps all the benefits of it, including financial profits. That’s where SEO, or Search Engine optimization comes in – SEO is a set of tricks and techniques you utilize in order to help your website rank higher in the search engines. The higher up your website ranks for relevant keyword phrases, the more qualified traffic you could get for free, without advertising.

There are currently estimated 1.3 billion internet users. 85% use search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo to find websites of interest. Online spendings of these internet users have been growing year after year exponentially. That means that these internet users use search engines to find products they are looking to purchase and the websites that have the best search engine visibility (aka the websites that are listed on the first page) have the best chance of earning this business. Here’s the rub:

• Less than 25% of surfers go past top 10 results returned by the search engines
• Websites listed on first page of search engines get 80% more traffic that website listed on page 2

From above listed facts it is apparent that high search engine rankings for keyword phrases related to your niche can mean a lot of business for your website. Since you are likely competing against thousands or millions of similar websites each striving to get that customer, unless you have properly optimized your website, your competition is likely ahead of you and harvests all the business driven by the search engines while your sites stoops there with hardly any traffic.

Immediate business as result of high search engine ranking is however only one of several positives SEO delivers:

• If you rank high in the search engines, your website immediately gets recognized as “authority website” which helps branding immensely.
• If you rank for relevant keyword phrases, you know that traffic delivered to your site by the search engines is already prequalified and as such these are potential customers. Imagine you have an online store that sells equipment for mountaineers. If you properly optimize your website for search engines, then you could rank high for keyword phrases such as “mountaineering supplies”. So if you rank high for this phrase, you’re gonna get a lot of visitors sent to your website by the search engines who are on the internet searching for mountaineering supplies. That prequalifies them as potential customers. The would be worthless to you if your website was about BMW exterior accessories, but proper SEO delivers traffic you want.
• ROI can be easily tracked – there are free tools available that allow you to see how much business you’re getting from people sent by the search engines as result of proper search engine optimization
• and perhaps the most powerful aspect of SEO – cost savings. Once you have achieved high search engine ranking, your site will continue receiving pre-qualified traffic for as long as your search engine ranking is retained. If you were to get this traffic through means of advertising, the cost could add up to insane numbers

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Search Engine optimization is a complex and ever changing science. To succeed, you will need to combine several elements that must work together with each other. Some of the most important and most basic, but fundamentally essential will be covered below. They are: SEO Keywords, SEO Writing, SEO Link Building, SEO On Page Optimization, Measuring Results. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe each of the elements in full detail, however let’s take a bit closer look at each of them anyway:

SEO Keywords

Good Search Engine optimization starts with keyword research. Remember how I mentioned above that surfers who use search engines to find websites about Mountaineering Supplies would be worthless to you if your site was about Exterior Accessories for BMW Vehicles? This is of course an over the top example that’s not very good. Bottom line is – for your search engine optimization campaign to be successful; you must research your keyword phrases thoroughly. You want to make sure you are targeting right keywords – you must know what phrases exactly people search for and what phrases deliver most prequalified customers.

SEO Writing

SEO Writing, also referred to as Copywriting is a skill on its own. Even if you get pre-qualified customers to your website, the sale is not guaranteed. Your page where the surfer has landed must contain text that will make the surfer feel confident that this is the product they want and this is the provider from which to purchase. However ability to write sales letter is not the same as SEO writing. SEO writing is called SEO writing for the reason and the reason is that the text is especially tailored to make your website look to search engines like it is relevant to the keyword phrase a surfer is searching for.

Search engines strive on the fact that they provide surfers with “relevant results”. The moment a search engine starts displaying results that are NOT relevant, the surfer will lose confident in search engine’s ability to offer service they are after. There are several criteria search engine’s algorithm checks to determine whether this particular page is relevant or not. Proper text which contains phrases surfers search for may make this page look relevant. Hence if you write your text for the page in a way so as to make it look like it’s relevant to a particular keyword, it may help you get ranked higher by the search engines. Besides, search engines love text. It’s one of the fundamental aspects that determine relevancy of pages. Always make sure your writing reflects that.

SEO Link Building

SEO Link Building is also referred to as Off Page SEO Optimization. It’s called Off Page because it has nothing to do with the content of the page itself, yet it can affect your search engine ranking. The premise is simple – the more pages link to your page, the higher your page climbs on the authority scale in the eyes of the search engine. Number of links is just one part of it – it also makes difference what authority the page that links to you has. One link from an authority page could boost authority status of your page more than 10 links of low authority level.

Link Popularity (a mixture of how many links your page has and how authoritative these links are) can make or break your SEO efforts. Search engines generally consider pages with many incoming links “trustworthy”. It’s a popularity contest, if you will and just as in real life, also search engines like popular kids. Links can both drive traffic to your site and can help you rank higher. Getting links can be a tedious and long lasting process but a good way to start is by submitting your website to directories, social bookmarking sites, or asking other webmasters for link exchange. The number of ways you can get incoming links are countless – some work better than other. You will often be against established websites that already have many links and it will be a tough task to outdo them, but nothing is impossible in the online game.

Aside from how many links point to your page and how authoritative they are, search engines also look at relevancy of the links. A link from related website can boost your search engine ranking more than a link from completely unrelated website, even if that unrelated website has higher authority status.

On Page SEO Optimization

While Off Page SEO Optimization is essential in order to boost the authority status of your page, On Page SEO Optimization is also important to make sure search engine spiders (small programs that scan your website for the search engine to know what it is about) can penetrate all content properly. If your coding is too messy for a spider to index your page, it’s gonna leave it before it’s properly cached. This means search engines will not know fully what your page is all about and if they don’t know what it’s about, they will not return it when someone search for something, even if they search for stuff your website is related to.

If your page has a relevant title tag, a relevant high level heading, if pictures have relevant alt tags and your HTML structure is clean and descriptive, search engines will know what your page is all about and will not feel afraid to display your website in their search results.

SEO Analytics

Measuring performance of your SEO campaign is as important as the campaign itself. You must know what performs and what doesn’t, otherwise you could be focusing your time and effort in directions that bring no results. Some strategies work better with one demographics and don’t work with another. Free scripts developed by experienced companies can help you keep track of your SEO campaigns. Google Analytics is a good way to go – I use it on each of my websites. However there are other scripts as well which may work better for you – ClickTracks, Woopra, or any other could work for you.

Search Engine Optimization requires complex approach. Each of the elements described above is essential for success. The article would be way too long if I were to describe each element in detail so keep that in mind. The tutorial was meant to introduce the basics of Search Engine optimization to new webmasters or webmasters who are just starting to learn the secrets of SEO. There are other SEO strategies, some more advanced than other and each can deliver results. I hope this tutorial was helpful and will get you started on your way to becoming a SEO expert. Even the most experienced SEO guru started from nothing. It would have been an article like this one I had read when I was first introduced to SEO. Just keep in mind, search engine algorithms which determine results always change and as such, SEO changes with them. It’s a never ending process. Once you start with it, you can never stop. That’s the beauty as well as the curse of it all. Ahh well….

It is astounding how much worthless advice can be found on the web. If you are not a seasoned coder, you can find yourself facing simple dilemmas which can turn into a nightmare if solutions offered on various websites don’t lead to actual solution of your problem, only cause more problems and frustration. And that’s what I found to be the case with excluding posts from one particular category (or more categories) from your WordPress powered blog’s main page. I have been contacted by several people asking me for help excluding category posts from their WordPress blog, each of which was tearing their hair out as their tried many suggested solutions you can find across the web, but they either don’t work at all, or exclude the category, but break something else (mostly bust your title tags which are the most important part of your on page SEO).

Why Exclude Categories in WordPress?

There are several reasons why you may need to exclude category posts from your WordPress blog. One of the WP blogs I have built used a “Video of the Day” feature. The blog normally focused on different subject matter, but the owner wanted to offer his readers an extra feature to keep them entertained so he introduced the Video of the Day page. He would be posting one cool video each day and had them all listed on a dedicated page, however he didn’t want these Video of the Day posts mixed up with main topic of his website. So he was looking for a code to add to the WordPress theme which would exclude all posts from Video of the Day category from his main blog page. It turned up being a pain in the neck finding out the tutorial or ready to use code that would safely and reliably exclude that category.

How to Exclude Category Posts in WordPress – Tutorial

To exclude posts from a particular category in WordPress you first need to create that category and then mark down the category ID. It is very easy to do, just follow these steps:

• go into Posts > Categories
• create New Category (skip this step if you are excluding a category which already exists)
• click on Category you want to exclude
• mark down the ID number of the category – you can see it by taking a look at the ULR of the page in your browser’s address bar. It is the number at the end of the URL, right after the equal sign. The URL should end with something like this &cat_ID=xx where xx is a number (note, it could be a single, double or triple digit number, depending on how many categories your WordPress blog has. Some blogs could get four or five digit number. Just mark down the number in full as it appears after the equal sign)
• go into Appearance > Editor and click on the file called “Theme Functions” (functions.php) listed under the Templates on the right hand side
• paste the code below into your functions.php theme file, right before “?>” part at the end of it, replace “xx” with your category ID you have made note of and click “Update File”.

Code to Exclude Category Posts in WordPress

Use this code to paste in your functions.php file. It should be pasted right before the ?> part which should be the part of the exiting code. Replace “xx” in the code provided with Category ID you have made note of before hand. This is absolutely essential as you must let WordPress know which category you want to exclude for it to work. If you forget about it and paste it as it is provided below with xx instead of a Category ID, your category poses will NOT be excluded! Make sure you keep the minus sign (-), only replace “xx”, nothing more.

function exclude_category($query) {
if ( $query->is_home ) {
$query->set('cat', '-xx');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Excluding Multiple Categories in WordPress

Sometimes you may wish to exclude more than one category from your main blog page. To do it is again very easy, you just need the Category ID of each category you wish to exclude. Post that Category ID along with the minus sign right before it in the same space as other category IDs, but separate them with spaces. So the final code would look something like this:

$query->set('cat', '-9 -53 -98 -484');

An example of code above would exclude posts from categories with following IDs: 9, 53, 98, 484

How to Exclude Categories from Archive Pages in WordPress

Sometimes you may also want to exclude category posts from archive pages. Or you may wish to have a category excluded from both Archives and Main Blog Page. Both of these are easy. The code for it would be as follows:

To exclude category posts from Archive pages, replace second line of code with following code:

if ( $query->is_archive ) {

To exclude category posts from both Archive pages and Main Blog Page, replace second line of code with following code:

if ( $query->is_home || $query->is_archive) {

That’s it. I have written this post in a way so even a new blogger could understand it and hopefully it helps. These codes definitely work with WordPress 2.7 through 2.8 but will also work on most older versions of WordPress.

Check out this video tutorial with great tips on how to build a high traffic blog without killing yourself. That “killing yourself” part is the most interesting one. With millions upon millions of bloggers out there busting their nut to capture a reader, blogging is a highly competitive venture. So how does one build a high traffic blog without killing oneself? You will be able to find many answers and great tips in the video tutorial above.

The video is 50 minute long and features a presentation speech by Tim Ferriss, owner of The 4-Hour Workweek blog and an author of the best selling book with the same title. The video tutorial covers a wide range of topics, including frequency of blog posts, through use of blogging tools all the way to building a community. It’s well worth the watch, it can teach you a lot and definitely serves as great inspiration tool.

For your information, this video tutorial was recorded at the WordCamp San Francisco, which is an event put together by the WordPress community.

You know good design when you see it, but what exactly makes good website design? What do you as a web designer need to keep in mind in order to make sure your design is “good”? It’s easy to pinpoint a well designed website once it’s complete, but where do you start when you’re building a website from scratch? Let’s take a look at some important points a designer should keep in mind in order to make sure his/her design is a good one:

Proximity

Proximity is one of the fundamentals of good website design. All elements that are related to one another must be placed within the same area. Human brain associates information it perceives based on proximity. A viewer will be able to categorize the information on your website better if elements that are related to each other are placed close to each other and vice versa – elements that are NOT related to each other should NOT be placed close to each other.

If you keep your website design organized with proximity principle in mind, you will help viewers to understand your website. If surfers can’t clearly comprehend information your website provides, they are less likely to read the content and respond to it. Disorganized information is also information that will be forgotten. Proximity helps keep information organized which can ultimately lead to engagement of the viewer.

To better understand proximity, take a look at any website and focus on your eyes. See how many different parts of the website your eyes will have to fall on in order to understand how the website is organized. If you can immediately recognize main areas of the website, such as:

• Header and Main Menu
• Sidebar with Additional Navigation
• Main Content Area

then the website is well organized and each part has elements that belong to it in good proximity. Some websites are more complex so there could be more than 3 areas to focus on, but it still should be easy to recognize them and be clear what their purpose is. If let’s say part of main menu is here but some important elements of it are at a totally different spot – that’s not a good website design.

Repetition

Repetition is consistency. Well designed websites use many of the same elements throughout the site. Whether it’s the color scheme, the font, the way corners are rounded – having these elements repeated throughout the website ensures that the pages “belong” with each other. Consistent pages appear professional and trustworthy.

You can take the rule of repetition a step further and adjust the aspects of your design to your company logo. For example if your logo uses red and black font, have the website designed so titles are in red and articles in black font. Or if for example your logo contains what appears as X and Y axes of a graph, built your website with elements of X and Y graph axes integrated into the design. Just keep in mind that overdoing it with repetition is not good either.

Alignment

Elements which are in alignment with each other appear cohesive to the eye. We have all seen websites with the text and/or graphic placed randomly within the layout. If you aim for good website design, you must never place anything arbitrarily. The connection between visual elements of your website must be apparent. That human brain naturally appreciates if items on a page layout are aligned.

Take a look at any website that naturally strikes you as well designed. You will notice that elements on it are aligned with each other. There usually is one main elements and several smaller ones that complement the main one. Those smaller elements will always be in alignment with the main element both horizontally and vertically.

Proper alignment adds to solidity of any web design. This principle of alignment applies in many other aspects of industrial production, not just web. You can see it in furniture, electronic devices, automotive designs, etc. Good website design needs proper alignment of elements the same way everything else does to be appealing.

Contrast

Contrast makes design “interesting”. Two elements that are not the same should be distinguished from each other with the means of contrast. For example – title of your article should be significantly different from the text of the article itself. It could be different in more than one way, for example a title could be bold, while text is light, the size of title could be larger than the size of text and it also could be a different color form the text. Adding contrast to your design will help organize the content into easily navigable hierarchies.

If you’re going for contrast, go for a lot of contrast. Contrast will make the page more interesting and easily scannable. This is important as it helps the reader to understand how the information on the page is organized. If reader doesn’t have to work hard to figure this out, they are more likely to stay and read what you have to say.

Good Website Design

Proceeding were four of the most important aspects of good website design. Websites that follow these principles have cleaner, more professional look. Check it out for yourself – next time you stumble across a website that strikes you as well designed, remember these four principles and notice how they are an inconspicuous, but solid part of that website. Good web designers know it and follow it on every bit of design they are a part of. Now you know it too. Apply it to your websites and see your readership base grow and retain.

Vast majority of websites is created with profit in mind. Let’s face it – it costs money to create a website, it costs money to host a website and it costs time (time is money) to maintain the website and keep it updated with fresh content. As such, webmasters who enter the online game face this important question – how do I make money with my website? How do I at least break even? What do I need to do to start generating revenue out of money and effort I put into my website(s)? To answer these questions, let’s take a look at some of the most fundamental ways to make money with a website:

Contextual Ad Networks

Contextual ad networks provide simple ways to start making money with your website right away. Once you are accepted as a publisher (publisher is a website owner who will be displaying ads on their website) to a contextual advertising network, you will cut and paste a code provided to you by the program on the page(s) of your website and that code will start displaying relevant ads without your need to do anything more.

Contextual Advertising Networks have teams of experts working to attract advertisers who pay them money to drive traffic to their website. As a publisher, you will be used to dedicate space on your website where these ads are displayed and each time a visitor to your website clicks a link that is displayed, that visitor will be redirected to a website of an advertiser who paid money to the Contextual Ad Network to get traffic and now that you have sent a surfer you will get a share of the revenue that the advertiser had paid.

There are several Contextual Ad Networks that a webmaster can sign up for. They each work differently and have different advertisers but they are all basically the same. As a publisher, you would simply place the code that was generated for you on your website and the program takes care of the rest. These codes are programmed to analyze the content of your page and will attempt to display the ads that are most relevant. This way you don’t have to do anything as relevant ads will be displayed automatically.

The most used Contextual Advertising Network is Google AdSense ™. AdSense is used by millions of webmasters worldwide and is generally regarded as one of the best Contextual Advertising Networks available. There are dozens of other Contextual Advertising Networks, such as AdEngage, AdBrite, BidVertiser, Clicksor or other. It’s often a hit and miss situation so it’s best to try a few of them and see which one performs the best for you.

Affiliate Programs

Using affiliate programs is another of many ways to make money with your website. While Contextual Advertising Networks pay webmasters based on clicks they deliver to the advertisers, Affiliate Programs work strictly on “per action” basis. That means that you will get paid a commission each time someone you have referred to advertiser’s website makes a purchase.

Affiliate marketing is popular with advertisers because they get promotion and traffic which could result in sales without any initial cost. As we have discussed above, advertisers who use Contextual Ad Networks must pay for the traffic they will get. Affiliate websites don’t pay anything up front, they will simply cut you a share of the money they had made out of the surfer that was referred by you.

Depending on what type of website you own, Affiliate Programs can make you more money that Contextual Ad Networks, but can also make less (or none). With Contextual Ad Networks you get paid for each click a visitor to your website makes, regardless of whether that visitor buys something on a website to sent them to or not. This often ends up being only pennies per click. Whereas with Affiliate Programs you always get a cut from what the surfer you sent to advertiser’s website spends. So if it’s an Affiliate Program with 50% shared revenue, and you refer a person who spends $100 on advertiser’s website, then you could get as much as $50 by just referring this one person. However you could also end up sending 100 people and none of them makes a purchase, in which case you won’t make not even a measly penny.

As with all ways to make money with your website, it’s worth giving it a try and see whether Affiliate Programs work for the type of traffic you get to your site or whether you’re better off sticking with Contextual Ad Networks.

Amazon.com or Ebay.com are one of the most popular Affiliate Programs. Many webmasters are able to generate thousands of dollars a month referring surfers to Affiliate Programs. If you have a niche website with niche traffic, signing up for an Affiliate Program which offers products in your niche would likely make you more money than by just using Contextual Ad networks.

Direct Sales of Advertising Space

If you are able to get advertisers to purchase ads on your website directly, then you end up keeping 100% of the profit. Direct Ad Sales are the most profitable way of making money with your website, however getting advertisers to spend money on your site, out of all can be more challenging than it seems. Once you have established your web presence and are considered an authority, getting Direct Ad Sales becomes fairly easy and can make you a lot of money.

There are many ways you can make money by selling advertising directly. You can sell banner sports on your website, you can sell text links, you can sell paid reviews – the possibilities are endless and for as long as you offer good value for money and advertisers see return in revenue, this could be a highly profitable way to make money with your website.

As an alternative, you can join TextLinkAds.com which is a website that will assist as a middle man between you as a publisher and an advertiser. TextLinkAds.com takes care of all communication with advertisers and can help you determine attractive asking price for your “website’s real estate”.

CPM Advertising Networks

CPM Advertising Networks are very similar to Contextual Ad Networks, however in case of CPM you get paid per impressions you deliver, rather than per click (per click advertising is referred to as CPC – Cost Per Click). CPM stands for Cost Per Mille and refers to cost per 1000 impressions. Depending on quality of traffic, you could make around $1 per 1000 impressions however sometimes you could only get $.10 but sometimes it’s $10. How much you can make per 1000 impressions depends on the position of your ad, the size of your ad and what network you’re using.

If you have a website with high pageviews (forums tend to have high page views, for example) CPM Advertising Networks could be a great option. However most quality CPM Advertising Networks are very picky about their publishers and unless you have a very high traffic website, you may not be able to get accepted. Following are some of well established CPM Ad networks you can try to apply with to be a publisher:

• Tribal Fusion
• Casale Media
• Right Media
• Burst Media
• Advertising.com
• Value Click

Selling the Website

Selling your website is one of the ultimate ways to make money off hard work you have put into making it a success. When your site grows in popularity and gets steady flow of traffic and starts generating revenue, it becomes an asset which has value. As such, you can sell it for profit. When it comes to websites, the value of a website is often determined by monthly profit which is then multiplied by 12 (in other words, you could see your website for the amount of money it would make in a year).

However, profit a website generates is not the only indicator of website value. YouTube was an operation which cost millions of dollars per month and was making none. Yet it was sold to Google for $1.65 Billion. Even though it wasn’t making any money, YouTube had a lot of steady traffic and popularity was undisputed. The owners sold it in the right time and made nice nine figures.

There are other ways which can be used to make money with your website but they are outside of the scope of this article. I will get back to those at a later time. This article outlines the most used and the most popular ways to make money with your website because they are easy to implement and you can start generating money with some of them as soon as your website has been launched. Monetizing your website is a whole science which requires constant studying of the market trends and of your traffic. I hope this article covered the basics of making money with your website and can get you started with earning your first on line dollars.