Google recently updated their Google PageRank Toolbar, and Investor Trip went from a PR4 to a PR5. This is the first Pagerank Update for Investor Trip in a long time, probably at least 6 months or so.

Anyway, I’m looking for new sites to link to from my homepage (See the homepage at the bottom of the sidebar).

While most bloggers endorse creating a separate page for links, I believe that defeats the whole purpose of giving links. The goal is to funnel traffic and Google love to other blogs. Creating a seperate page is very ineffective at doing so.

If you have a financial related website, leave it in the comments and I will check it out.

In order to keep this blog running at optimal performance, I dedicate my weekends to performing routine site maintenance. This includes checking whether or not Google properly indexes all of my blog’s pages.

To my astonishment, 79% of my pages list in Google’s supplemental index. Google stores either duplicate or less significant web pages in the supplemental index, instead of placing them in the normal index.

How Do I Check My Blog’s Index Statistics?

Use the Supplemental index tool over at Seologs.com.

How Do I Get my pages back into Google’s Index?

Download the WordPress SEO cure plugin.

Extra Safety: Upload a Good Robots.txt File

To insure Google crawls and blocks specific files within your website/blog, make sure to upload a good robots.txt file. Not so Boring Life wrote a good post on getting your blog out of the supplemental index.

How many pages did you have listed in Google’s supplemental Index?

*Update: My new posts keep falling into Google’s supplemental index. Does anyone have SEO experience out there?

I have the honor of hosting next week’s Festival of Stocks, so get your submissions in early. This is a great opportunity to showcase your blog posts to hundreds of new readers, and possibly gain a few more feed subscribers. Next week’s edition runs on April 2nd, which doesn’t leave everyone much time. Nonetheless, you should submit an older article if you don’t have time to write up a fresh one.

Get Your posts in!

Want to Make Money With Your Blog? Find out 6 profitable ways to monetize your weblog.

Monetize Your Blog with Link Sales

Currently, I have sold 15 links on my sidebar to advertisers, which provides a decent amount of passive income. Selling links is advantageous for two reasons: they require little maintenance on your part and generate income on a monthly basis. I make money passively, meaning the income comes in monthly instead of a one-time payout.

You don’t have to convert buyers or generate click-throughs via third part advertisers either. The money is guaranteed unless your traffic dies, but I’m sure you do a great job at marketing your site.

Link Selling Resources

Text Link Ads – 50% publisher commission that’s negotiable, accepts most sites upon registering, owned by Media Whiz.

LinkWorth – I barely use their service but have sold 2 through them, decent network of publishers and advertisers, immediate acceptance into program, definitely worth a shot but is secondary to Text Link Ads IMO.

Digital Point Link Sales Forums – Offers passive income, not as much as TLA or LinkWorth but every little bits helps, increases your link sales volume when you command a lower link price.

Optimize Google Adsense Units on Your Site

Ah, King Google himself is my second favorite income source. Why? Because Google Adsense provides highly contextual ads that add value to my pages. The difficult thing about Adsense is that you have to find a medium that allows you to earn a decent income, but not alienate your readers in the process.

I’m no Adsense expert, but I’ve come to this conclusion about the Adsense program: You will earn big money as long as your ads add value to your pages. A lot of people don’t want to admit that fact, but it’s completely true.

Make sure you sign up with Adsense, and begin playing around with the ad formats, colors, options, etc. If you’re already a publisher, find an ad layout that blends well and switch around the placement to find a hotspot. Hotspots are locations where your readers spend a significant amount of time browsing.

You can find more Adsense Tips on my past post about making money from blogging.

Drive Affiliate Sales With Your Blog

For some people, these are big money makers, particularly those with exceptional marketing skills. I, on the other hand, have experienced limited success with affiliate sales, but things have picked up recently.

I use Commission Junction for most of my affiliate sales, but have also experimented with:

• ReviewMe
• Text Link Ads
• Cash Crate
• AGLOCO

The key to affiliate sales is matching products to the interests of your site’s readers. In other words, you wouldn’t promote computer games on a site for dog lovers.

Another important piece is the pre-sell page where you basically explain the benefits of the product you choose to promote. Your goal is to highlight the positives and negatives about the product, so your readers can make an educated decision about his or her purchase. The pre-sell method will definitely increase your conversion rates.

An example of a pre-sell page is my Cash Crate Review.

Affiliate Resources

Commission Junction – provides the largest network of affiliate programs on the web, everyone should join this program.

ClickBank – I don’t have an account with them, but have heard good things from time to time. It’s worth a look.

Amazon Affiliate Program – you can link to products or place banners on our page, they just released a new contextual program that links to product automatically, I would give them a try.

AuctionAds – displays contextual eBay ads within your site. You can set the keywords before hand, and show relevant products to your viewers. Works very well for product related sites.

Monetize your Blog’s RSS Feed

RSS Feed ads will boost your revenue numbers, especially if you have a large feed audience. Most of your RSS subscribers will keep track of your site via RSS or e-mail, and will only visit your site to explore a specific post, contact you, or comment on an entry (Feedburner allows you to track RSS click throughs to your site for a monthly fee). Feedburner’s FAN network connects you with potential advertisers who decide to run banners advertisements throughout your feed and website.

FAN network serves mostly geo-targeted (at least in my experience), meaning they only appear in specific geographical locations across the world. This can be a challenge if advertisers target ads for Canada, but most of your feed readers reside in the US.

Text Link Ads offers Feedvertising, their version of ad campaigns for your RSS Feed. You can sell text link ads in the marketplace or run your own ads. Unless advertisers are willing to pay a premium, it’s best to run your own affiliate or site links. It’s an additional way to earn extra affiliate income or promote your own products.

Feed Ad Resources

Maki wrote a fairly comprehensive guide on monetizing your feed.

Earn Blogging Revenue with Site Reviews

ReviewMe presents unlimited income opportunities to those who write high quality reviews and return value to the advertisers. You can charge upwards of $500 gross for a review, but you only get to pocket 50% of the revenue at the moment. I suspect high earning publishers use leverage to increase their percentage of the profits.

Site Reviews Resources

ReviewMe – You want to spend some time concentrating on Reviewme because that’s where the big money lies.

PayPerPost – A distance second to Reviewme, better suited for blogs with lower traffic levels.

Sponsored Reviews

Build A Niche Ebay Store For Your Blog

If you blog on a specific niche and/or topic, you can make money by adding a relevant ebay store to your blog. Simply build an ebay store to instantly make your blog more profitable.

Once you create your niche store, make sure to link to your store from every page on your blog. Your visitors will read your posts, then see what your ebay store sells. If a visitor makes a purchase on eBay through your store, you earn an affiliate commission. It’s an easy way to earn money without actively selling products on your blog yourself.

Manage Your Ads Unit Online

RMX Media’s online software is great for managing your banner ads, including Adsense blocks. It creates a live auction for all your advertisements according to CPM, and displays the highest paying ad. I give it two thumbs up.

Do You Know About A Worthy Income Source?

Well, tell us about it already, so we can all enjoy the love!

Update: Added to the reviews section (Hat Tip to Maki).

Update: Added Amazon Affiliate Program to the list.

Update: Added Auction Ads. (Hat Tip to Technified)

Good luck, and continue to make money with your blog.

When readers comment on my blog, I always follow their URL to check out their blog as well. As you know, there are many talented bloggers out there, many of whom are regular commentators on Investor Trip. So I went to visit my top commentators’ blogs to see how their weblogs were coming along.

Posts from Top Commentators

• Forums for Investors – Savings Advice.
• Money Markets: Investing in Short Term Securities – Rant About It.
• The Best IRA Investment Options – The Sun’s Financial Diary.
• Tips on Picking Stocks for the CNBC Stock Challenge – Project Stocks.
• A Hidden Gem: Synta Pharmaceuticals (SNTA) – Baby Biotechs has pique my interest on this stock.
• The Mistake of Timing Equity Markets – Fire Finance.
• Thoughts on the 21st century Millionaire – Money Monk.
• Review of Apple TV – Technified. Apple TV looks awesome!
• Should You Move from blogger.com to WordPress? – LifeYes, you should.

How Do You Get Links?

Easy. Start leaving comments, so I know about your website/blog. Make sure you leave valuable comments that add to the conversation, and you’ll receive link juice on Google for your site via the comments, top commentators section on my sidebar, and during linking edition like this.

Thanks to Connected Internet’s recent post on increasing blog comments, I added a site-wide Comments RSS feed for my RSS/Atom users. Now, when you leave a comment on my site, you will be notified about any and all replies without having to visit the specific post you commented on again. This is a great feature since I often leave comments on other blogs, but have no efficient way of tracking any replies to my thoughts. With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), communication between people gets a lot easier.

RSS Is Your Friend

Everyone should use RSS because it saves you tons of time, and drastically reduces the need to manually type-in URL addresses. Your favorite sites should already have RSS feeds, even if you didn’t know about them already. By using Google’s feed reader, I can selectively browse through hundreds of articles, picking the ones that interest me. On average, I check up on over 40 sites daily in less than 30 minutes. Most of that time is spent actively reading the posts. Just imagine if I had to type-in 40 different web addresses, and then search for newly updated content. That would be a waste of time and bandwidth!

I suspect a lot of my readers already utilize RSS , but for those who haven’t tried feed readers, you are probably wasting a considerable amount of time by browsing the old fashion way. So, start saving time (and money), and join the web 2.0 revolution.

Recommended Feed Readers

• Google Reader – Google offers the best feed reading capabilities hands down. I highly recommended their aggregation services.
• Bloglines – Very capable feed reading service. Only #2 to Google IMO.

I’ve only used Google and Bloglines for RSS services, but there are plenty of other aggregators out there as well. Try searching Google for “rss reader.”

If you’ve noticed an increase in contextual links on my post pages, that’s because I signed up with Kontera ContentLink ads and added their contextual ad links to my blog. Kontera sends plenty of ads to my single post pages, too many if you ask me. So this is a short-term experiment at best. The advertisements become an eyesoar if you see too many per paragraph/page. Max # of Ads Filters would solve this problem in a snap.

Do Kontera Ads positively effect the reader’s experience?

Update: Word travels fast on the internet! Christopher Brown, Director of Account Management at Kontera, sent me the following e-mail:

In reviewing some of our sites, I noticed your page

http://www.investortrip.com/experimenting-with-kontera-ad-links/

Our algorithm provides us a number of ways to customize how we mark on
your pages. Would you be interested in working with me to customize the
look and feel of our ContentLinks on your pages?

Please let me know.

Now, I’m having second thoughts about Kontera. Management did not have to contact me directly on the same day I joined the program. In terms of customer service, Kontera gets two thumbs up!

I was searching through my MyBlogLog community, and found some great posts from my community members:

• Accept and Recognize Your Mistakes
• E-Trade Adds Global Trading Options to their brokerage services
• Trade4Cash Monthly Income Update
• 9 Fallacies of the Poor
• The Heavy Cost of Payday Loans
• Great WordPress Plugin for SEO
• Are You Sirius (SIRI)?

MyBlogLog has taken off in terms of growth since Yahoo! acquired MyblogLog. The new blogging community introduces me to tons of great blogs everyday. Best of all, You can find out who visited your blog, and return the favor. This is the easiest way to find interesting blogs, related to your niche.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve invested a substantial amount of time in my blog to turn it into a website. The majority of the investment was time, along with a couple dollars here and there to secure logos and headers. Here’s what I learned about spending your time wisely, investing money in your blog, and making money from your blog. Hopefully fellow bloggers will find these tips useful, and pass them on.

Time: Set the Foundation

Write high quality content

You’ve probably heard this for the millionth time, but that’s because good content never gets old. Lately, I’ve tried to write content that’s original, timeless, thought provoking, and highly useful. It’s all about creating value for your readers. If you constantly provide value, your readers will return the favor by frequenting your site often.

Develop a comfortable posting pace

When I first started out blogging, I would post 3-4 times a day to get my blog noticed quickly. Although my traffic was getting stronger every day, the quality of my content suffered. Remembering #1, quality is more important than quantity, at least in the blogosphere. Don’t worry about keeping pace with TechCrunch or other mega sites. I subscribed to their feed for a total of 2 days because their updates kept clogging Google Reader. I prefer giving readers 1-2 posts a day, instead of overloading my readers with several mini posts. Can I get an amen?

Customize your theme

Theme customization will set your blog apart from the masses. When I picked out my WordPress theme, I knew I had to build upon it. So I bought a header for $5, designed a site logo, and went from there. It took me a while to customize my blog to perfection, but what’s important is that I made the necessary changes.

Tip: Design your blog as an extension of your own personality and tastes. My favorite color is blue, could you guess?

Read Other people’s Blogs

Reading other people’s blogs via Google Reader has really opened my eyes to blogging. Back in October, I was a clueless blogging newbie who had no idea what a track back, ping back, or blog roll was. I credit my progression as a blogger to the following sites:

• ProBlogger – Tons of great tips on blogging in general
• John Chow dot Com – Help with advertising, blogging, and marketing
• Steve Pavlina – Great read on all personal development topics
• JohnTP.com – Resourceful tech and blogging news
• Get Rich Slowly – Money management tips
• CopyBlogger – Tips on writing effective copy and articles

I pull up these feeds on a daily basis because these guys are all experts in their fields. If you’re going to learn about blogging and other related topics, you might as well learn from the best.

Communicate With Other Bloggers and Your Readers

Start reaching out to other bloggers via e-mail, forums, message boards, blog comments, AIM, Yahoo! messenger, or even by phone. Considering that more than 55 million blogs exist, there are plenty of people that you can connect with. Forming relationships can lead to guest posting opportunities, tips on advertising, blogging advice, and other valuable resources.

I think forums provide unlimited opportunities for networking and communication. There’s usually someone surfing the forums no matter what time it is. Here are the forums that I like the spend time in:

• Digital Point Forums – A large webmaster’s network.
• Money Blog Network Forums – Forum for financial bloggers.
• MSN Message Board Community – Tons of financial information, plus bonus participation from lead MSN writers.
• Search Guild Forums – SEO tips and info. They provide great tips on my Google indexing problem.

I enjoy forums so much that I decided to host a forum here on Investor Trip. I know everyone has a lot to say regarding investing and general personal finance, so here’s your chance to connect with global investors all over the world.

Read Newspapers, Newsletter, Books, and Magazines

Lately, I haven’t done a great job of reading printed resources, but I am committed to reading the newspaper daily in 2007. There are so many great articles and opinions floating around in printed resources that everyone should get there hands on at least 1 or 2 resources a day. Don’t have time to read the paper? This is where the internet works in your favor. The best thing about the internet is that many of these resources can be read online. We no longer have to pay newsstands for literature. So bookmark your favorite printed resources, and read them often.

Validate Your X-HTML Markup

When the Apple iPhone (?) releases, do you want your blog to show up on the internet browser? Of course, you do. So make sure your HTML is correct, or your blog will be look terrible on most browsers. Don’t rely on Firefox to correct all those mark-up errors. I use a combination to XHTML markup services to catch any and all errors. Try W3C Markup, and download the WordPress XHTML validator. Don’t use WordPress? Try W3 Schools as an alternative.

Optimize Your Images

Slow loading images are a huge bummer. You can prevent this by using PhotoShop’s Save to the Web feature, but I have no interest in having Adobe programs clog up my hard drive. I use Dynamic Drive’s Image Optimizer Tool. It’s simple to use, and you can upload images from your computer or from the web. Once you upload the images, the tool gives you 10 different image options, based on quality, to choose from. I often choose quality: 70 because it cuts the image size in half without reducing eye appeal.

Optimize Your Permalinks for SEO

When I first started out blogging, I adopted the conventional /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ permalink structure, and thought nothing more of it. After reading a ton on SEO, I realized this move was a huge error. The numbers prevent search engine crawlers from reading your permalinks effectively, so lose those numbers. The /%category%/%postname%/ is more search engine friendly. If you use WordPress, I recommend installing this permalinks migration plug-in.

I don’t know much about migrating permalinks for other blogging platforms, so I suggest either consulting with your host or seeking help in a web forum. I recommend Digital points forums because you’ll receive help almost instantly.

Speed Up your loading times

Studies show visitors exit pages that take more than 10 seconds to load. If your blog takes more than 10 seconds to load, you’re losing a large number of readers, potential feed subscribers, and maybe even long-term visitors. I use this Web optimization tool to calculate how long my home page will load on average, depending on a visitor’s connection speed.

Currently, it takes 15 seconds for my pages to load for 56k speed surfers, so I need to work on a bit more.

What’s your Site Report Card?

I came across this fun tool that calculates your Site Report Card using links, HTML checks, page load times, mega tags, spell check, and keyword analysis as grades. My report card score is 8.33/10 at the moment. Do you score a perfect 10?

Money: Invest a little to earn more money

Translate your blog into different languages

Over 65% of internet users reside outside of the U.S., and many have troubles reading english-only blogs. I suggest translating your blog into multiple languages. After experiencing a bit of success and frustration withTranslator Pro, I have decided to go the normal Google translator route. But there should be an update of Translator Pro available for release very soon, so I am impatiently waiting for the newest update. It costs around $30, which is a one-time fee. After that, you gain access to all future updates. It’s a pretty good deal in my opinion. But if you want to save the $30, you can use Google’s translating power to your advantage.

Translating your blog makes your writing available to the whole world. Think about that for a second, your voice can be heard around the world with the click of a country flag. Pretty cool, huh?

Pay a designer to make structural changes within your blog

I am in the process of moving my blog from www.investortrip.com to www.investortrip.com/blog/ because I want to build upon my top level domain. The easiest way to make changes without breaking anything is to contract out the work. Why should I risk ruining 4 months of work because I’m cheap? I’m willing to pay whatever it takes to make these changes as harmless as possible. So when you’re faced with design issues, it’s best to hand the work over to a professional.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

A good way to bring new visitors to your blog is to use PPC advertising systems like Google Adwords. My blog hasn’t generated enough revenue yet, but I plan to participate in a few campaigns in February. Right now, I’m reading up on Adwords tutorials to make the most money out of PPC campaigns. It’s possible to generate say 50 cents for every 25 cents you spend. That’s a 100% return on investment that I’d love to pocket. Of course, Adwords isn’t the only option. As the competition for internet advertising market share intensifies, new competitors are beginning to emerge. Here’s a list of Google advertising alternatives.

Think Expansion

Consider growing your blog into a website if you’re experiencing success with your efforts. You already get good traffic, so why not expand upon that? Many of your readers have lots to say, but are limited to posting relevant comments about your blog posts. You may consider adding a forum to your site. For every person that posts in your forum, it’s a link back to your blog/website because you added a link in the footer of your forum. Now, I know a lot of you are thinking, “lots of bloggers fail at adding forums, so why even try?” I’ll give you one reason: you aren’t those bloggers. See yourself as an individual that’s capable of achieving whatever you set your mind to. If a forum doesn’t fit well with your blog, consider adding a resourceful directory, and encourage people to add their sites. There are tons of ways to add value to your blog by expanding your internet footprint.

Market Your Blog

Set aside a pre-specified amount of time per day to market yourself and your blog. Your marketing efforts may consist of responding to comments, buying PPC campaigns, or interacting with Digg users. Whatever you choose to do, work hard at it, and use your time effectively. I currently reserve 1 hour a day to marketing my site. Sometimes I fall short of my target, but the important thing is to reserve time for marketing. Marketing is an ongoing process that never ends.

Making Money from your Blog: Put your income on Auto-Pilot

Primary Blog Income Sources

These programs are your big money makers. Mine are:

• Google Adsense
• Commission Junction

You should take the time to decide which program will become your primary sources of revenue. Once you have that list, start optimizing your ad placement. Here are a few tips for Adsense:

Adsense Optimization Tips

1. Blend the ad background with your template background. Ads that contrast are nothing but eyesores.

2. Make the ad title slightly darker than your normal links. This will make your ads stand out, yet blend with your template as well.

3. Make the text and URL of the ad the same color. For example, view my 300×250 ad at the bottom of this post.

4. Place your ads where your visitor can see them. This might be directly after a post on your blog, at the top of your sidebar, or just below your header. Wherever you end up placing the ads, use Adsense channels to track ad performance.

5. Use Section targeting to send highly relevant ads to your blog.

6. Always consider your visitors first. I try to be sensitive to how my readers will react to ad placement. It’s never a good idea to clutter your site with ads. In the long term, you’ll lose traffic, so be very careful.

Recommended Adsense Reads:

• Problogger’s Adsense Tutorial
• John TP’s Adsense positioning tips
• Digital Point’s Adsense Forum
• Google Adsense Blog
• Best of 2006 – From the Adsense Blog

Affiliate Marketing Tips

1. Provide your honest review on affiliate products. If the product sucks, let people know. Nobody wants to buy junk.

2. Make it easy for visitors to purchase the item. I try to point all my affiliate links straight to the product.

3. Make it easy for visitors to contact you. If you’re easy to contact, more people will trust your word.

4. Cross-promote affiliate products. For example, I could just point visitors to brokerages, but I have extended upon this by selling investing books, investing software, and computer products as well. You must have a computer to check stock quotes.

Additional Affiliate Info:

• Problogger Affiliate Section
• Digital Points Affiliate Section

Secondary Blog Income Sources

I put less emphasis on these revenue sources, but they still have the potential to become primary sources one day.

• Text Link Ads
• Amazon Associates
• FeedBurner FAN Network

It’s important to add different revenue sources to the mix. You’ll find out that Google Adsense has its limits once you experiment with other programs. Currently, Adsense only accounts for 40% of my revenue. I expect this number to decrease as my blog gets older because secondary sources should pick up and add a nice chunk to my revenue mix.

The best part about my 5 revenue sources is that they are all on auto-pilot. They make money 24/7. That’s the level you want to reach – when your blog makes money while you catch some ZZZs.

If you take anything from my revenue model, take this: experiment with different sources and choose the best ones for your blog.

To wrap things up, you’ll learn a lot if you read lots of information, ask questions, and interact with people. That’s what the International Network (Internet) is about – connecting with people, sharing information, and passing it on just like I’m doing in this blog post.

Problogger is at again, and this time, it’s a holiday “review/predictions” group project.

Since there will undoubtedly be an overwhelming number of submissions, I’m going to pick out and list all the money related entries as well as my personal favorites in this post. The project deadline is December 21st, so I’ll keep updating this list up until the deadline.

Earlier today I submitted my post from this morning, “Stupid Ways You’ve Lost Money in 2006,” and it should show up on Problogger by tomorrow.

There are also some great prizes that will be awarded to the winners. I’m personally gunning for the Nintendo Wii.

Here’s the first batch of tasty submissions:
Day 1

• Top 5 Money Topics for 2006
• Top 10 Sports predictions for 2007
• Biggest Blogging Mistakes for 2006

Day 2

• 2007 Apple Releases
• How Not to Be a Successful Blogger

Day 3

• Top 3 Soccer Stories of 2006
• Blogging and Money: 6 predictions for 2007

The winners have been posted on Problogger.

[tags]problogger project, blogging project, win prizes, blog contest[/tags]