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John from My Family Loves It asked me to outline my general procedures for monetizing my blogs.  I decided I would answer this in a few parts, and focus on different concepts in separate posts.  Anyway, for now, I’m going to focus on finding direct advertisers for blogs.

For many bloggers, the only way they seek out direct advertisers is by placing “Advertise Here!” banners on their pages.  While this works for many, you are generally required to really sell your advertising real estate, even after someone has contacted you.  Most bloggers don’t realize that you could have already pre-sold your blog’s ad space to several potential advertisers.

For me, I generally look through the affiliate programs I have done well with, and who, as a result, have done well with me.  If I’m pulling decent numbers, I will contact them directly with some options to remove the affiliate company from the mix.  Remember, most affiliate companies, such as NeverBlueAds and Share-A-Sale, take between 20% and 40% of the true price paid to affiliates, so many merchants are *very* willing to work out a direct agreement.  This usually translates into them saving a bit of money, and you making some extra, which is perfect for everyone involved, save for the affiliate company.

When finding direct advertisers via any method, of which there are dozens, remember to do the following, or you will have a very difficult time getting started:

• Adequately track your traffic.  Use Google Analytics, Mint, or something similar.
• Ask other bloggers tons of questions!  As you know, I can help you if you shoot me an e-mail or IM me.
• Pay attention to affiliate revenue, click-through-rate, and conversion rate.  You want to show that your traffic actually converts!

The beauty of building relationships with advertisers directly is that you can launch more creative campaigns on existing sites, and also have advertisers jump on board when new sites are launched in the future.

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I get this question a few times per day, and while I normally direct people to buy SEOBook, which is a great guide to SEO practices, I decided to make a three-part, extremely basic guide to search engine optimization.

Search engine traffic is considered to be the most valuable traffic available to website owners. Giving interested internet users the ability to search for, and subsequently find, research, and utilize an appropriate provider is the very basis of search engine technology. It isn’t often a simple process, but search engine optimization can be broken down to three basic factors: inbound links, technical optimization, and content. This article will focus on the first of the three, inbound links.

Inbound links play a very important role in assigning value to pages on the internet, and in turn, helping search engines decide which pages should be listed, in which position, for which search strings. While there are many concepts that come into play within this basic category, I consider the most important to be referring page authority and anchor text. It has been my experience that these two factors play a major role in whether your website will receive any love from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other big search engines out there.

Referring page authority refers to how heavily weighted a specific website’s reference of your site (read: link) is. There are several quick and easy ways to determine how beneficial a link from a specific website will be. First, check the site’s Google PageRank. PageRank is a metric used by Google to determine a page’s value, based on the quality of the incoming links to that page, the quality of the incoming links to the pages that link to that page, so on and so forth. Google PageRank operates on the assumption that high quality pages will receive more links from other sites than pages that are crap, which may often seem short-sighted. It is, however, the motivation for many optimization specialists, due to its effects on ranking.

Link anchor text is a much simpler concept. It basically consists of the text that is hyper-linked when someone links to a webpage. For example, if 100,000 people link to your website using the text “SEO Is Fun”, there is a great chance that you will show up towards the top of the search results when using that search string. A great example of this is when thousands linked to WhiteHouse.gov using the anchor text “miserable failure”. Sure enough, before it was manually overridden, searching “miserable failure” on almost all major search engines resulted in a biography page on WhiteHouse.gov being the first listing.

Understanding how link building works is important, but it also very important to build relationships within your community. The bottom line is, you will get link love from people who love you, or in some cases, those who hate you. I prefer the former, so I spend much of my time being helpful to other bloggers, commenting, and leading people to sites I enjoy reading. If you do the same, you’ll be well on your way to building your site’s reputation by way of inbound linking, and in turn, your organic search rankings will improve.

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I actually received this question this morning, from two separate people.  Abel from Parent Wonder and Dan Denney were wondering what I did to build traffic to Stay At Home Dad, Geek Style so quickly.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with that site, it has generated over 10,000 unique visitors in its first 45 days of being online.  Obviously, that isn’t a *ton* of traffic, but most bloggers are just looking for the 50 or so visitors they can expect to see each day.  Anyway, here is my “Top 3″ list of things you can do to promote your blog with minimal expense, and get those first 50 regular visitors coming to see you each and every day.

1. Get Out There and Comment!
In my opinion, this is absolutely essential for a new blogger.  For most of us, if someone we haven’t seen in awhile (or ever) comments on our blog, we’re going to head over and see what they’re up to.  It is important that your comments actually add something to the discussion, and aren’t there purely to show your name and URL.  “Good post” comments piss most bloggers off (well, they piss me off, anyway), and aren’t well received.  The rule is, if your comment will make no difference in the conversation, or will mean nothing to the blog owner, don’t post it.  If you’ve got something worth saying, go for it!

2. Write Content That People Will Link To and Read Forever
On Stay At Home Dad, Geek Style, there are plenty of posts about my daily life, but I try to make about one out of ten be something relatively timeless.  If you can write something that people will react to, whether it is in two months, or 15 years, you’re on the right track.  Obviously, the normal, daily content is important, but you want to write content that is timeless, when possible.

The reality is, when news pops up within your niche, *everyone* is going to blog about it.  Unless you’ve got something very interesting to add, there isn’t really a reason to post anything.  Often, when big news comes out, I will write about literally anything else, because an article about anything other than the big news story will pop out of the screen when people see my blog, or run through their feeds.

3. Run A Contest Or A Give-Away
One of the big reasons that my DevDad blog has picked up so much steam is because of the contests I have run on it.  When you give something decent away, people will literally flock to your blog to get in on the action.  Sure, it’s cheating, but it works!  DevDad.Com is less than two months old, and is already Top 40,000 on Technorati.  Perhaps more importantly, despite being brand new to the “stay at home parent” scene, my “name” is pretty well recognized.

When you make your first contest, just remember that the smaller the prize, the easier it needs to be to enter.  People aren’t going to make a 10,000 word post on their blog to win a free t-shirt!  You don’t have to spend much on your give-away item, but make sure it is something that the people in your niche would actually want.  If you run an iPod blog, don’t give away a Zune.  If you run a digital photography blog, don’t give away ten free rolls of 35mm film.

Using the three tips above, you can almost guarantee yourself 1,000 unique visitors per month.  Just get out there and become a part of your niche’s blog community, and you’ll be just fine!

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Since this site has been live for all of three hours, I decided to answer a question I receive very often. Hopefully it will save many of you tons of trouble when you get your blogs set-up. While there are several ways to accomplish this, the most effective is in the form of a 301 redirect. There are many reasons to want to get this done. Most importantly, in my opinion, is the fact that Google will actually assign PageRank to both your http:// address *and* your http://www address. This can result in search ranking that is not optimal, and PageRank that is lower than you would otherwise expect, based on your site’s qualifications.

Instead of a long explanation of how it works, I’ll just show you the code to make it happen. Provided that your host has Mod_Rewrite enabled, you should just be able to change the example to reflect your domain name, and add it to the end of your .htaccess file. For more information about this, please feel free to Ask A Question.

To Forward http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com, use the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

To Forward http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com, use the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=Permanent,L]

That should do it! Using this method will ensure that your Google PageRank is always the highest number possible, and as a result, can yield increased traffic through search engines.

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