The Blog Of Oussama Messaoud - Ways to make money online -

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email or in a reader. Thanks for visiting!

This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com - a site where you can find affiliate programs to make money online.

Anyone who has an income-producing affiliate marketing website wants to optimize traffic to that site. Obviously, if people don’t visit your affiliate site, there is no possibility that a sale will be made. In order to drive people to your affiliate site, there are a lot of techniques that can be employed. One of them is link building or external search engine optimization techniques.

When someone is looking for something on the internet, they will generally go to a search engine page. Let’s use Google as an example. They will type some keywords into Google’s search engine and let Google find them some relevant websites. Will yours be one of them? Well, that depends if you’ve optimized your affiliate site for a maximum number of Google “hits,” or occasions that Google will find your site among the very first when someone types in a relevant search term.

Optimize with Relevant Links

There are many ways to optimize your affiliate website for Google hits, but one of them is to provide lots of relevant links to sources outside of your web pages. Google will generally rank sites higher when they provide lots of external links, but ONLY if those links are relevant. Google software has gotten pretty sophisticated over the years, and it will often actually penalize websites that offer dozens of unrelated links from its pages.

Not only will Google penalize websites, may it be an affiliate marketing site or not, whose external links are not relevant, but the users of your website will quickly become disenchanted with your site if every time they click on what they believe is a link that will take them to further viable information about their topic of interest, they might wind up on a totally unrelated site selling something they have absolutely no interest in. Using lots of unrelated links will lose far more customers than your affiliate marketing campaigns are trying to generate.

Links should be carefully chosen for the relevance not just to your site as a whole, but to the individual web page on which they reside. For example, one of the pages on your site may sell books relevant to the subject of your web pages. Maybe you have placed an external link on that page to the personal website of the author of one of the books you are selling. The link will provide interesting information for customers who may be interested in purchasing that particular book from you. Linking to the author’s site will give your customers something extra, and then a return link on the author’s site will send those customers back to you if they wish to purchase the book.

Placing external links should be very carefully considered. You don’t want to link to competitive sites that could actually take business away from you. You only want to link to “value added” sites where your customers can find something they can’t find on your site, such as some added information or perspectives on their subject of interest.

Always Get Something in Return

External linking should be a two-way street whenever possible. For example, you may link to someone else’s site if they return the favor and link back to yours. As in the case above, with our author, it would only be wise to link to his site if he did not offer any competing links for purchasing his book. For example, you don’t want to send people to his site, only to have him link them to Amazon to purchase his book.

All external links should be routinely updated and verified. Maybe at the time you linked to that author’s site, he did not offer an online shopping cart for his products. But a few months later, he decides to upgrade his site with those items. You don’t want to still be linking to his site if he’s going to be stealing your customers once they get there. So, make it a routine practice to check out all links every month or so to make sure they are still acceptable to your site’s overall purpose.

You also want to ensure that those links are active. Nothing is more frustrating than to link to a site that no longer exists. You don’t want to put your customers through this frustration, so respect their time by verifying any external links appearing on your site.

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

After a crazy month of July, Blogging Idol competition is over. Eventhough I didn’t win the competition, I won 15 new subscribers which is an incrase that never happened before, moving from 7 subscribers to 22. If my numbers are this low in terms of RSS, it’s because I didn’t give this blog what it deserves in terms of time and commitment. Last 2 months were crazy with a lot of new things happening on both the professional and personal sides. Now things are getting calmer and calmer, I think I should concentrate on making this blog a nice place to be, with useful information, ideas, tips and a pleasant place where interested readers can gather to discuss hot topics. The Blogging Idol proved that with a very very small effort (close to nothing), I managed to triple my RSS count. I guess if I commit and dedicate enough time and energy (dedication again, right Javo?) , nice things can be done on these very pages.

Goals for the month of August 2008 :
For the month of August, I am setting some goals :
-> Reach and exceed the milestone of 100 RSS subscribers, finally : I have been struggling with the RSS count so much and it’s the blogging idol that motivated me to do the effort. Now I don’t want to stop in the middle of the road. I need to work on this crucial aspect.
-> Reach the Top 200K in Alexa : I am now at 874k. Two months ago I was at 300K, but with my procrastination and laziness, I dropped to 1 million plus. Now it’s getting on the low again and I am planning to move things faster in the same direction.

As you notice, I put no revenue goals. I must first manage to get the basics before I move to setting goal on revenues.

I will share all my techniques and strategies here on the blog, so that everybody could benefit from the positive and negative learnings. So I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed to be sure to miss nothing from it. (This is already one of the techniques, I hope you’ll make it work :))

I would be very happy to hear from you on what strategies you are using if you have similar goals, or even if you just wish to share what you know.

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

It happened July 20th, 2008. First time ever I win a blog contest. It’s called Exposure Contest and it was held by Mr. Javo. Here is the announcement :

It feels good to be among the winners. And the text link I won is worth $10 which is the price of such a link on Mr Javo’s blog.

The contest was launched by Javo in order to increase his RSS subscriptions for the Blogging Idol contest. It’s a scrambled word contest, where he sends a new letter of a 10-letter word to discover with every new post, and this letter is only visible through the RSS feed. So all I did was  putting the letters together after 9 posts and guess the word : DEDICATION. And I was among the first 3 to guess right.

So thanks to “dedication”, I actually won. Which is a nice life lesson given by this contest and Javo. Dedication is what makes a loser a winner and what makes difficult endeavors easy. And it’s very true in blogging as in general life matters.

This also drives me to talk about the contest as a powerful tool to reach punctual goals. Javo is doing great in increasing his RSS count and I think the contest contributed a lot.

Anyone has something to share about how dedication made him succeed in something? Or about contests and how they helped achieve some goals?

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

Since I joined the Blogging Idol contest, I am looking for ways to improve my RSS subscriptions count. I tried several things, amongst which offering 30 ec for every email subscriber. I succeeded to double my count from 7 to 14, but this is far from being satisfactory. Seeing the way the competition is going, my chances of winning against some blogs who went from 0 to 100+ (following the rules or not?), are really really small. However, I would like to use the contest to motivate myself increasing the number of my subscribers and the goal I am setting for myself at the end of the month of July is 100 subscribers.
So, I am offering a deal : I will subscribe to the RSS feeds of everyone who subscribes to mine. In order to track that, I think we should use Email subscriptions. I will email everyone who subscribes so that he/she sends me a link for his/her blog and I will subscribe.

This will help creating a network of reciprocal readers, and serve our blogs by increasing their subscriptions count. Uniting can help our smaller blogs reach their various goals. And if you could spread the word about this initiative, it would be great and we can create a community just like “U Drop, I follow” that helps increase our readership. Of course, anybody willing to join the initiative commits that he/she is going to do his/her best to offer quality content to readers. It’s not just about numbers; everyone is looking for good articles and for an added value. Anyone willing to join the community, please leave a comment on this post with your URL, so that I can keep a list of everyone offering the reciprocal subscriptions and make them easier to find.
So go ahead : Join the community and subscribe to my RSS feed. I will get back to you within 24 hours and will subscibe to your RSS. I also created a little button for the initiative, that anyone can use on his/her blog to show (s)he’s a reciprocal subscriber.

Thanks everyone and let’s grow those numbers.

Project Wonderful - Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.00

rssHugger is a new tool that allows you to promote your blog’s RSS feed and have a bigger exposure which increases the chances of having new subscibers to your feed. In fact, rssHugger offers you the possibility to have your RSS listed on their website for 10 years, in exchange of a honest review about the service. For those who do not want to write the review,  rssHugger offers a paid option of a one-time fee of $20 for the 10 years.

I just subscribed to rssHugger today and I hope it will help me gain some extra subscribers, which I need for the blogging idol contest.

I will keep you updated on my experience with rssHugger, so stay tuned (by subscribing to my RSS feed for example:)).

In order to increase my RSS feed subscription count, I am giving away 30 ec for each email subscription. This is not a contest. EVERYONE who subscribes and leaves a comment on this post will receive 30 ec sent to him within 24h. No randomizing, no draw. Email subscription = 30 ec.  Make sure to subscribe with the email you use for EntreCard, since it’s the email I will use to send the credits.

Instead of going and dropping your card like crazy on 30 blogs, just subscribe and get the credits in less than a minute. Even if you are addicted to dropping, there is a daily limit and you can use an extra 30 ec with no effort.

So, go ahead, subscribe and tell people you know, who need those EC credits to do the same.  I want to get rid of those ec. I know you want them. They are yours immediately if you just subscribe.

My hosting service provider were kind enough to allow for an extra week, for me to pay the hosting fees. So before I go any further, I would like to say THANKS to my provider : AccuWebHosting and for their billing department who answered my request in few minutes and gave a positive follow up.

This gives me an extra week (June 16th) to raise the money necessary to keep the blog up and running. So I am extending the contest where you can contribute with $1 and enter a draw to win half of the money collected.

So please guys, go ahead and send your dollars and spread the word so that we make it happen.

Here is the button again :

Ok ! I need the blogging community right here, right now. So here’s the situation and let’s get straight to the point : I do not have sufficient funds in my PayPal at this time to pay for my hosting service for the next month. My hosting company sent me an email today saying that if I do not pay “at the earliest”, they will have to shut down my account and thus my blog will die. (Update here)

I tried to get people I know, that have PayPal accounts, to send me the $1.5 (Yes just One freaking dollar and a half) I need to pay for this month and then I would have time to find another way to fund my account. No one seem to have money in their PayPal. The reason why it’s so difficult for me to put money in my account is that Tunisian Credit Cards are not accepted (They are only valid in Tunisia, because we have strict laws about having hard currencies leave the country, and my PayPal account is Amercian, from the time I used to live in the States). It’s a big mess.

So as of now, the situation is very URGENT and I need that $1.5. So I figured out I could ask the blogosphere for that amount and see if someone could borrow me that money. Then I thought, instead of asking, I will put it as a contest, where willing readers would buy $1 Entries and then a draw will determine a winner that will win half the collected sum. The other half will go exclusively to the payment of months of hosting service for the blog.

During all the months I will be able to buy with that money, I will put a mention on the top of the blog saying : “This blog is brought to you by :”, followed by links to all my fellow contributors.

The only condition to enter the contest is to buy the coupon before Wednesday June 4th June 16th (Update here) , at Noon EDT. Any money received after that time will be sent back to the sender because it will be too late and it won’t make sense anymore to accept it.

Please contribute to this challenge and make it happen. And if you could spread the word, I would very much appreciate it. The “Buy Now” button follows.

Thanks everyone ! And please leave a comment so that everyone knows how many people contributed and keep track of the collected sum of money.

In the sidebar, look for the “$1 for 30 Days Links” widget and get your 30-days link in one of the Top Spots, for just $1. That’s less than 3.5 cents/day.
And to make it even more fun, a monthly draw will pick one of the buyers to get a full refund of the $1, and thus enjoy a free 30-days link.

Sounds interesting huh? The blog hopping project is the new concept suggested by Winning The Web. It was inspired by the Bar Hopping concept and consists in inviting the bloggers to hop from blog to blog, commenting and sharing with each other ways of improving their blogging experiences.

Every week, a blog will be featured in Winning The Web and bloggers will be invited to visit it.

Even more interesting : The featured blog of the week chooses the one that will be featured next week. Competition will be crazy!

I love the concept and invite all of you bloggers to join. As far as I am concerned : I am in!