TJantunen.com

www.travelwithachallenge.com

It is said in the Bible that it is easier for a needle to enter the eye of a camel than no that’s not right. It is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a rich man than nope. It is easier for a rich man to enter a camel no I imagine the camel would kick up a fuss so that can’t be it.

Anyway, there’s something about not getting into heaven if you’re rich. That’s a horribly blanket statement, no? What does that say to all of us trying to earn some decent wonga? Stop trying?

It does make you think, though. As a freelance writer, what exactly am I writing for? Getting rich from writing is obviously a genuine possibility, but it’s not going to happen for everyone, and is that really the aim? I mean, how many words do you have to write at $2 per hundred words to get your first Ferrari? Oo, let’s work that one out – LOTS.

Busy fool

It’s now been over a month since my last blog. I’ve not been away; I’ve been busy. There’s another saying that springs to mind about “busy fools”. I feel like that. It’s very difficult when you have bills to pay and mouths to feed to power down and take less on. If you do so, then the stress of working too hard is easily replaced by the stress of not earning enough. It’s Catch 22.

Tumblemoose has recently written a couple of spot-on blogs about burnout, and we can all learn from what he says. I think one of the key issues is being able to recognise when you are doing more than you need to because you have set your expectations too high. Are you working to pay the bills and make a little extra on top, or are you slogging away because you’ve decided you must hit a certain level of earnings to consider yourself successful?

I’ve mentioned this before – that attaining success can distract you from the truly important things in life. Personally, I’ve had a real love-hate relationship with my past struggles for success. I’ve loved having goals to go for and those moments when I have felt I was nearing them, but I have truly hated the feelings of inadequacy for the distance still left to travel, my impotence to move any faster, and my sense that I “deserved” to get there quicker than anyone else.

Reaching your writing goals can be a noble aim, just so long as you don’t become blind to the signs that your journey is perhaps becoming bone-shakingly bumpy.

I always remember a story a friend of mine once told me regarding riches. He’s a very successful entrepreneur who made plenty of money whilst still very young, but couldn’t opt out because … he didn’t know why, he just couldn’t. He ended up having some heart issues whilst still in his 30s and developing a stress-related facial tic which he still has.

It’s all Greek to me

Here’s the fable: A rich guy goes on holiday to a sleepy Greek island and every day sees a smiling fisherman go out for two or three hours and return with his catch. After a week, the rich guy has to say something; he just can’t work out why the fisherman looks so happy and thinks he must be an idiot. He goes to him as he returns to the beach, and says: “I see you go out every day for a few hours and can’t help thinking you’re not working right. How about you treble your hours and treble your catch? Then you can make more money. Then after a while you can buy another boat and employ someone else to help you. You can then both go out for seven or eight hours a day, and with the extra money you can buy another boat, and so on. Give it ten or fifteen years of hard graft and you can maybe get to the point that you can have a fleet of boats working for you, then you can kick back, only go out fishing for a couple of hours a day for fun, and spend more time with your family.”

The fisherman smiled. “Like now?”

(He was a well-educated Greek fisherman who was fluent in English, okay?)

from Freelance Writing

Download audio file (Jeremy_Pepper.mp3)

Jeremy Pepper, a public relations specialist, was a speaker at the first Audience Conference on Friday, November 6, 2009 in New York City.

Jeremy’s bio: Work in PR/Comm/Marcom. Have lived and worked in Detroit, Scottsdale/Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco Bay Area. Have a dog. He’s great.

Get details on the Audience Conference at http://www.theaudienceconference.com/.

More Audience Conference audio available at http://geekcast.fm/archives/category/audience-conference/.

This post originally appeared on the Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

Read and comment on Jeremy Pepper at the Audience Conference 2009

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Related posts:

1. Frank Roche at the Audience Conference 2009
2. Dan Farber at the Audience Conference 2009
3. Audience Conference, Part Deux

from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

This is a guest post by Tony Hue. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

… produce amazing content.

… use images to enrich their posts.

… understand the importance of beautiful web typography.

… know how to appeal to large audiences.

… utilize social media effectively.

… practice good SEO.

… visit other blogs and write comments.

… can effectively express their personality into writing and not sound like a robot.

… have an Archives or Sitemap on their blogs.

… incorporate rich media into their content.

… blog about something they are passionate about.

… know how to attract relevant backlinks.

… cite their sources whenever necessary.

… create helpful 404 pages.

… make it easy for readers to subscribe to new posts via RSS or email.

… minimize advertisements to reduce distractions.

… allow readers to easily share their latest posts via Twitter, Facebook, and social bookmarking sites.

… separate themselves from the competition by using a custom design.

… create an About and a Contact page.

… encourage readers to engage in conversation.

… write interesting headlines.

… guest post on other blogs.

… include a search function on their blogs.

… know how to optimize the speed of their blogs.

… know how to make their blogs look exactly the same across all browsers, even on IE 6.

… respond to readers’ questions.

… backup their blogs regularly.

Say what?! Your blog doesn’t fit any of these descriptions?! Shucks. Well, better start working on it.

Inspiration by CSS-Tricks.

About the Author: Tony Hue is a broke college student mired hopelessly in mountains of debt. Send him a check by visiting his blog LonePlacebo, where he writes about social media, technology, and his hilariously sad life. He’s also on Twitter @loneplacebo.

from Daily Blog Tips

Website readers will generally skim a page for relevant information. They will probably only read every sentence if they find something interesting and appropriate.

Because of this, you need to write in a slightly different style than you may be used to; long, convoluted analogies won’t keep readers – no matter how inventive they are.

So, you need to try and keep each sentence accurate, to the point and concise. This is not always as easy as it sounds, because we don’t speak like that and almost never think like that. Don’t overstate things, but also don’t assume your readers know everything.

Punctuation and paragraphing can really help with this, as sometimes a lots of short sentences can sound stilted. The key isn’t necessarily short sentences, just relevant sentences.

For example, instead of:

“Make sure after you’ve washed your car you dry it with chamois leather, or the water will leave unattractive streaks all over the windows, which can even lead to driving visibility problems.”

Try something like this:

“Remember to dry your car with chamois leather after washing. This will prevent unattractive water streaks and will leave your windscreen clear for optimum visibility.”

Alysa Thomas
Content writer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

Search Affiliates: Partners or Parasites? presentation from Affiliate Summit West 2007, which took place January 21-23, 2007 in Las Vegas, NV.

• Michael Jacobs, VP Products & Services, iMarketing LTD

Using real world case studies of Search and Affiliate integration, we will strike down the popular myths of search affiliates, and discuss how to integrate and improve ROI across both channels.

Note: the companies and positions listed above were current as of the time of the conference. Some of this information may have changed since then.

Video: Search Affiliates: Partners or Parasites?

This post originally appeared on the Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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Disclosure policy for the Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Related posts:

1. Straight Talk on Search Engine Optimization
2. Debunking SEO Myths
3. Magnify Adds How-To Search

from Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below.

Iam asks:

I keep hearing about this “smart pricing” deal related to Google AdSense ads, but I am not sure how it works. Could you explain?

Smart pricing is a feature that Google has inside its AdWords platform (which is where advertisers can buy clicks and impressions both on Google search results and on the content network) to ensure that advertisers will get a good value for their money.

Here is how it works: Google will analyze the results that the advertiser is getting from all the pages and websites where he is buying clicks. These results may be product sales, newsletter sign-ups or whatever goal the advertiser has for his ad campaign.

If Google finds that a certain website (i.e., this could be your website if you use Google AdSense) is producing good results for the advertiser, then the site owner will earn an amount per click that is close to what the advertiser is paying – meaning that Google’s share as a middleman will be small.

If, on the other hand, Google finds that such site is producing bad results, the smart pricing mechanism will trigger, giving a discount on the value that the advertiser is paying per click by automatically reducing his bid amounts. This discount will come out of the pocket of the site owner, who will be paid a smaller amount per click.

It is not completely clear how Google tracks the performance of the clicks coming from a specific website, but it probably takes into consideration the keywords that triggered the ads, whether or not the visitor returned to the site after clicking on the ad and so on.

So how does this affect you as a web publisher/blogger? Well, if you use Google AdSense to monetize your site you might want to pay attention to the ads that are being displayed there. If you get too many unrelated ads there is a chance that your clicks will be seen as “low performance” ones, reducing the amount you’ll earn per click. To solve this problem you can use an AdSense feature called section targeting.

It might seem that this is an evil feature to reduce how much publishers earn, but in reality Google uses it to ensure that advertisers will get a good return on their AdWords investments. And if they do they’ll spend more money there, giving publishers more opportunities to earn.

from Daily Blog Tips

An SEO developer’s role and job is to get a website as high up in the rankings as possible using different website optimisation techniques. This in turn should generate more traffic. This is generally where the role stops.

As a PPC Manager it is our role to get the ROI possible for a campaign using different Pay per Click optimisation techniques, pausing terms that do not create the desired ROI etc. But our role does not stop there. We can deliver quality, highly targeted traffic to the site, but if it fails to convert then we have not achieve the best ROI possible. So it is also our job to advise and recommend changes to websites to improve usability and conversion rates.

Paid search and usability go hand in hand. Unlike natural search where you are attracting free search, with paid search you are paying for every single visit, one way or another. To correctly analysis a site’s performance you need to install some type of tracking software. Google’s Analytics platform is free and very detailed. It is also just as important to link this correctly to your AdWords account. You can do this by making sure that both your AdWords and Analytics accounts have the same user name and both have admin access. Once this is done, log in to your AdWords account and click on Reports >> Google Analyics >> Link account and select the website in the drop down menu.

This will now successfully tag all your AdWords traffic with the Campaign, Ad Group and Keyword.

Philip Pollock
PPC Account Manager

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

I received an email from Google AdSense team yesterday announcing that Google is going to allow Google-certified ad networks to compete with AdWords advertisers to show their ads on the AdSense Content network. I’m sure every AdSense publisher have got this email.

This seems to be a good news to the webmasters and bloggers who use AdSense to make money on their site. The AdSense publishers used to display ads of advertisers from Google AdWords network only, allowing other advertising networks to compete with Google AdWords advertisers for ad exposure could lead to more high paid ads to be shown on the AdSense publishers’ site. So the AdSense publishers can earn higher pay per ad click which means higher AdSense earning.

But, anyway this is just a little theory I came up on my mind, not sure this will happen. I’ll be monitoring my AdSense account to see if there is any positive impact. But one thing that can be confirmed is that the AdSense publishers will have more ads to shown to their website visitors.

from Make Money Online