There are many benefits to blogging: keeping in touch with your client base, creating fresh content for your website, raising your company’s visibility in the search engines, raising your own corporate profile.

But how about making money from your blog? The buzzword is “monetising.”

Placing Google AdSense advertising on your blog has been one source of revenue for quite a while now. People click on the ads, you get the money.

Here’s another way to make money from your blog: paid for reviews.

I’ve registered my blog with ReviewMe and advertisers can buy a review on my blog, essentially paying cash for my esteemed opinion of their product or service. And of course, they’re also buying a valuable link from my website.

You can use the ReviewMe service either to buy links to your own site, or to sell links and earn a little extra money.

Now, I know you don’t want to be deluged with advertorial, but if e-marketing trends interest you, then you will want to read the Advertisement:

Basiclink.com, a web hosting company in San Diego, are trialling a marketing campaign where they are offering 11 lucky customers 50% off the price of their Shopsite Pro E-Commerce Hosting on Monday, 11 December at 11:00.

This promotion is capitalising on Amazon’s latest marketing campaign Vote for Deal where customers can vote for one of four cheap deals on offer. The deal with the most votes wins, and a few randomly selected folk who were lucky enough to vote for the winning deal are then sent a claim code to purchase the deal.

Basiclink.com are introducing this B2C concept to the B2B marketplace, and they claim to be leading on a trend that may set the tone for future business promotions.

What’s also interesting is that Basiclink.com are a local player, serving specifically the San Diego small business community. They’re using international e-marketing techniques to target their niche market. It’s a multi-pronged campaign; they pushed out online press releases, purchased inbound links from blogs, promoting the offering on their website, and I’m sure they’ve got email marketing in the mix.

So there’s an example of small business marketing lessons to be learnt from our SME cousins on the other side of the pond.

Getting inbound links from other websites should be part of your web marketing strategy.

Particularly getting high quality, relevant links.

If you need to boost your linking activity, then you should consider Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is a marketplace where you can buy links off a publisher’s website.

The benefits of Text Link Ads:

• you can choose from thousands of quality, niche publishers
• you choose the precise sites where your text links will appear
• you define the anchor text used to link to your site
• the links that are created are static html

And best of all, Text Link Ads are offering $100 in FREE Links based on a $125 purchase – meaning you need to spend about £15 to try out the service for a month.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

I’m working on some inbound linking campaigns, so here are some ideas for you to consider:

Take a look at the Internet Search Engine and Submission Directory for a reviewed listing of directories accepting submission of your site.

Go to Google and use search for portals or directories covering your specialist topic. Here are the results for a Google search for “construction portal” or for a search for “arts directory”.
As you browse through the portal or directory keep an eye out for the Submit Your Site link.

Other directories you should take a look at:

• Vile Silencer

Is it possible to damage your search engine rankings by having lots of spammy sites linking to your site?

More specifically, could my competitors get me “bowled out” of the search engine rankings by submitting my site (without my permission) to link farms and other bad quality sites?

This myth is called “Googlebowling” – and by the way, this has more to do with loud shirts and beer, rather than Freddie Flintoff.

Nope, its not possible to get “bowled out” of Google by poor quality inbound links.

Google make it absolutely clear that “links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.“

What will cause problems is when your website links out to these bad sites.

So don’t lose sleep over getting Googlebowled, but then again, don’t bet tempted to give links to unscrupulous sites only to get rubbish links back.

Link popularity is a measure of how many other sites have links to your site. in a nutshell it’s how many other sites have “voted” for your site by linking to it. Link popularity is an important measure of your web marketing strategy.

Marketleaps Link Popularity checker is a tool which allows you to compare how many inbound links your sites has, as compared against your favourite three competitors.

It’s irresistable – a very satisfying way to prove mine’s bigger than yours, so to speak.

Let me know what you think.

Susan