7 Tips for Making Your Web Store Stand Out During the Holidays

The holiday season is probably the best time of year for you to really cash in on your web store.  But, making the most of the holiday shopping rush takes some careful consideration and planning on your part.  If you want to really make this holiday season special for your business, then read over these seven tips for making your web store stand out during the holidays:

The holiday season always proves to be a very stressful time when it comes to getting gifts to their recipients on time – not to mention the added cost of shipping when purchasing from online stores as opposed to local retailers.  Advertising free shipping is a great way to bring holiday customers in and inspire them to choose from what you have to offer.

Your SEO should be tweaked for the holiday seasons.  After all, holiday shoppers generally conduct searches using holiday keywords.  Therefore, it pays (literally) to add some keyword-rich, holiday-themed content to your web store, as well as update your titles and tags to reflect the holiday theme.

Create a holiday newsletter and send it out to your email contacts list in order to attract holiday shoppers to your site.

Make it super-easy for shoppers to find a suitable gift (and hang on to shoppers who can’t make up their minds)by offering gift cards.  Gift cards are also a great way to gain new customers (as some recipients of your gift cards might never have heard of your store before).

Give your website a holiday makeover.  If you can’t afford the time or money to deck the whole site out, then at least give your home page some holiday flair.

Be sure to add a special menu for holiday items.  Also, take note of what you feel are best-selling holiday items and feature them on your home page for easy customer access.

Shopping for the holidays is hectic.  There is a lot to buy – and a lot of people to buy for.  Make it easy on your customers by laying it all out on line in a way that is easy to find and understand.  Include shipping dates, return/exchange policies and refund information in plain sight on your home page.

There is a lot to do to prepare your web store for the holiday season, but it is well worth it.   The existence of your website won’t matter if you don’t make sure people know about it. Make the most of your online presence by following these tips and watch the holiday cash roll in.

About the Author: Donna Collins loves doing her holiday shopping online and is always looking for the most user-friendly web stores around. This year she’ll be shopping for Samsung phones, tablets, and other tech devices for her teenage sons!

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Making Connections High Intermediate: A Strategic Approach to Academic Reading, Second Edition (Student Book)

The series helps students gain insight into how academic text is organized and how to read effectively. Making Connections High Intermediate is a reading skills book aimed at students who need to prepare for academic college reading tasks. The book has four high-interest thematic units, each with multiple readings. Twelve reading skills and strategies sections give students insight into how academic texts are organized and how to read effectively.

Price: $32.00

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How I Started Making $3,000 a Month Blogging About Travel

This guest post is by Marcello Arrambide of wanderingtrader.com.

It has been about one full year since I started blogging about travel, and I have started to generate $3,000 or more a month via my travel blogs.

My very first post was published on May, 4th, 2010, and it was nothing but grammar mistakes and partaking in an activity that I really don’t enjoy: writing. I’m telling you this because even though I am a horrible writer, English os not my first language, and I need other people to proofread my work, I’m proof that you really don’t have to be the best at something in order to do make money via your blog. I have started to make at least $3,000 a month via my main travel blog, wanderingtrader.com.

Initially, I started my blog to capture traffic for a day trading business that I was running. I wanted to get more people interested in day trading and, well, get more sales. What it turned into was my own personal travel blog about my passion for travel, and tips about day trading and travel. My whole blogging strategy is based on exposure; you might have read my post about focusing on quantity of traffic instead of quality when you first start out.

There are a million posts on ProBlogger about making money blogging online and frankly almost everyone online makes money the same way. It seems there aren’t very many new ways that bloggers can make money from blogs. Darren wrote a great post on how bloggers make money from blogs if you are interested in learning your different options.

Instead of talking about ways to make money blogging I’m going to share how I managed to start making $3,000 a month via my travel blog in less than a year. I consider it ten months, really, since I took two months off when I got extremely frustrated by a small change in my blog design that crippled the traffic to my main blog. The list below is what I started focusing on, in order of importance.

There are some instances where you find advertisers, but for the most part advertisers find you.

Once you have the right criteria you are eligible for a range of money making options with your blog. The most important thing is getting your name out there. You want to try to focus on guest posts, SEO, and getting on every single blog list that’s related to your niche. The more people who see your blog, the more likely it’ll be that advertisers will find you as well. Below are some examples of the travel-related lists that my blogs are listed on on.

By working on exposure, authority will come naturally. You want to be careful how quickly you build your authority online, because you can’t become an expert in your niche if you only launched your website yesterday.

Creating solid authority for yourself, and advertisers will know that you have a website that is both legitimate and powerful in the niche you’re covering. If you achieve enough exposure, and have good authority, then you may be considered for things like a press trip. That’s a bonus that might be restricted to the travel niche, but you get the idea.

How we measure authority is something of a debatable issue, since most of the lists on the web have some kind of limitation. Either way, when I have asked people specifically about this they have repeatedly given me the same information:

As I explained earlier, there was a time when I got extremely frustrated and just gave up. A redesign to my blog caused me to take a giant hit from Google, and I was extremely annoyed. I just gave up!

If I didn’t take that two- or three-month break, I might have been on my way to making double what I make now. The tactics I’ve outlined so far helped me in the very first month that I started to make money with the blog. I’ve now nearly doubled my income using the strategies I’ll share below.

When you get started blogging, you have to understand that you are the new kid on the block. There are people I know personally who have been blogging for five to ten years, and I call these people the Rat Pack. They’re the cool kids on the block that you want to get to know and work with.

How did you feel when you met that new kid in your class back in school? The way for them to succeed was to avoid being pushy or asking for too much. They had to be part of the community.

I made the new-kid mistake of approaching people the wrong way, and asking for things I shouldn’t have. Luckily I had a few bloggers point me in the right direction, and that allowed me to get to where I am today. Be engaging, but not demanding. Be interested, but not needy. It’s all about being part of the community and not trying to force your way into the cool kids’ group.

By interacting with the Rat Pack, you’ll open yourself to an extensive group of people who already know how things work and can share best practices. Since these people already have exposure, that may allow you to take a shortcut when you are ready to start making money with your blog. By talking to other bloggers in the field, I went from zero advertisers to having a list of over 60. Use the tools above for exposure and authority to find the Rat Pack in your niche.

I’m busy, the guy at Mcdonald’s is busy, your kids are busy. I get it, you’re busy. When I first started blogging I was running a day trading business, traveling around the world, day trading, and running my blog. How did I handle all of this? I hired help. I found what now is a team of employees overseas that I pay to do a lot of the admin and back-office work for me.

The old adage is really true: it takes money to make money. While you may not have hundreds or thousands of dollars to invest in getting someone to help you, you may be able to afford, say, $100 a month. Understand that your time is money. By outsourcing mundane tasks—even if it’s just a few hours’ work a week—you will free up your time to do more important things, like creating quality content and thinking of better ways to make money with your blog.

The one goal I had for my blog was to break even. Any business or blog that you create should at least break even. You’re not going to be doing something for very long if you keep losing money. I pay a team of two people a total of $510 a month for roughly 45-50 hours a week of work. Just imagine the things I can accomplish during that timeframe!

After you have successfully started making money with one site, you can continue on to other ventures to increase your income and your online empire.

Think about expanding to other niches online. My main niche is travel which is absolutely massive. I now am branching out to my other passion, which is day trading. I have started an Online Day Trading Academy to help others, and now I can blog about day trading and travel across two sites, which will significantly increase my exposure online.

What about you? Are you making money from your blog yet? Which of these strategies do you use?

Day Trading from 8 different countries Marcello Arrambide has begun to chronicle his travels around the world on his Wandering Trader Travel Blogs site. He has traveled to over 40 countries in his lifetime and is currently exploring South America. You can find out more about Marcello on his Facebook Page or RSS.

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You should write about making money blogging on Make Money blogging [misconceptions new Bloggers have # 3]

This post is the third in a series of studies of misconceptions and myths about blogging, that many new (and some experienced) bloggers about blogging.

We have already discussed the misconceptions that blogging superhuman effort takes (or is simple!) and that you daily on your blog should books.

Contemporary misconception is all about money. It is one that I hear every day when I observe what people are saying about making money from blogging.

Only people who sell make money blogging resources, make money blogging.The most profitable topics to blog about his blogging tips of making money blogging.It is impossible to make money blogging on "normal" everyday topics.

The reality is that most people who talk about making money blogging those trying to create a name for himself in that very niche. I think part of the creation of authority and credibility is to show what you are doing, so that bloggers in this niche are often not Wars of their revenue share.

On the other hand, many bloggers who are making a living from blogging in other niches don't have an avenue through which to talk about it, or don't want to (for privacy reasons or because they don't want to warn the competition to their success).

As a result, is the impression that new bloggers often get that nobody is making money blogging with the exception of a letter about writing.

Let's see some of the realities of working in this niche.

You good money blogging about blogging. It is true — there is money to be made in this space. Teaching others blog and that a life of it can be profitable. I make enough to live (and some) from ProBlogger every month, and know of at least five or six other bloggers in your niche that on a comparable level would be. As with any subject that has nothing to do with money, this can be a lucrative niche.It's been a busy niche when it comes to finding readers. As a result of the success of a number of (and the public service broadcaster of results), many others joined the hunt for market share in this space. I have not seen figures on it, but I suspect that the result is that it is one of the more crowded niches. As a result, can break into the niche and making a name for yourself can be tough.It's been a busy niche when it comes to products. If you want to make money in the niche Make Money blogging by releasing a product, there are not only a lot of other blogs, but a lot of products that you will have to compete with. Not a day goes by when I'm not approached by another blogger like me to their e-book, course or tool ... Again, it is difficult to distinguish, and I suspect that many bloggers already have bought just enough products, and are not so interested in buying more.There's a lot of suspicion about the topic. Thanks to the nature of the subject has a lot of suspicion about it. Unfortunately, over the years, this niche has attracted its fair share of dubious characters and those less-than-ethical and transparent tactics have used to make a name for itself. This has a lot of suspicion among the public about the niche. I'm kind of glad about this suspicion, I like a lot of people who've seen scammed, but it makes this a tricky area to work in. My recent ban on (and then reinstatement) of YouTube seems to have occurred because many in the niche were tarred with the same brush (most of the accounts had made an end of videos including the words "make money online").Bloggers are perhaps more reluctant to spend money than other target groups. Let us be clear: I'm not calling you cheap! But one of the factors to consider in this area is that the barriers to entry for the blogosphere (unlike other hobby) are very low. You can setup a blog for free, there are thousands of blogging themes, tools, and how-to instructions there for free, and there is plenty of free help within the niche. As a result, many bloggers don't come to their blogs with the expectation of having to spend a lot of money. This can affect the bottom line for those who try to operate in this niche (I will touch on this more below).

I'm not going to pretend that all other lucrative niches. I know a lot of bloggers with decent readerships that are struggling to make money, because their subjects do not lend themselves for monetization. However, my experience teaches me that there is definitely a lot of opportunities in other niches, and that in many ways they can make it easier to make money than the niche blogging tips.

Personally, I have found it a lot easier to build significantly larger audience and higher profits in other niches. My photography blog has about five to six times the readership of ProBlogger, and is more than five to six times as profitable.

The niche photography is very competitive, but there are some other so quickly including:

The market is larger: There are a lot more people around who own cameras than blogs.The audience is more of a public expenditure: I mentioned above that since blogging has low barriers to entry, bloggers are often less likely to spend money. Photography is a little different. People increasingly spend thousands of dollars on cameras, they buy photography magazines and books, they enroll in courses ... There is just more of a willingness to bring in that niche.The audience is not as suspicious: While people still a healthy suspicion of online marketers in this space, there are fewer barriers on this front.

This assessment is not only relevant to the photography space — plenty of other niches are also bigger and his audience that more be used for expenditure.

This is probably not the place for a full exploration of how a niche for your blog (I will also be some links below for more information about that). My general opinion is, however, to choose a topic on which there is a healthy demand for content (it's hard to have a successful blog about a topic that nobody but you bought) and that you know something about (and preferably have a passion or interest).

My co-author on the ProBlogger book, Chris Garrett, last year on the day of the training ProBlogger presented in Melbourne, and used a slide which I think is a great Visual at this point:

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Why your Blog is not making money

This guest post is by Moon Hussain of Experiments In Passive Income.

This post comes from the bottom of my heart.  After coming in like a cowgirl blogging newbie and failing with making money online with my blog, I have figured out what lead to my blog bringing in $0.00 most months.  To think I came into the blogging world with a typical “make money online” blog and with the mindset that I’d blow everyone away with loads of affiliate income rolling in was foolish.

Pay close attention, because what I’m about to reveal here has the power to make you a full-time income.  The stuff we both have been dreaming about.  Make notes. I want you to walk away with a plan.

If you don’t think that’s such a bad thing, that’s probably because you are a new blogger, probably less than six months into blogging.  Let me tell you: after a year of providing good content and not making money, you will come to a stop.

Churning out quality content two to three times a week takes a lot of time.  After plugging away for over a year, I can tell you providing quality content is not enough!

It’s only one part of the equation.

If what you are reading right now is bringing you down or you think it’s “too much work”, then stop wasting your money on hosting fees and kill your blog now.  If you want to make money with your blog, it’s about to get good.

I hope you said business plan, I really do.  Instead of lecturing you on how bad you have been by not having a business plan, I’m going to show you with a real, live case study:  my own blog.

In the last year, I never had a business plan for my blog.  Not a written one, anyway.  Here was my thought process over the last year: “I’ll build niche sites, blog about my experiences, I’ll make money from these sites, people love to learn how to make money so they’ll absolutely, feverishly flock to my site!”

Forget an internet entrepreneur … I’d be an internet rockstar!

In my mind, this was the ideal plan that was supposed to take place:

Seem familiar?  Yeah?  In all honesty, you should be scared.

That was my business plan.  Officially one and a half years into blogging, I am in the process of formulating a much more concrete business plan.  And now I cry looking at my old “business plan”.

Blogging about a topic, however passionate you are about the subject, does not make a business.  It is a platform that can help spread your expertise.  You can use it to connect with your ideal customers.  Here are some key questions you need to ask yourself:

How can I take my blog from “just a blog” to a blog that generates me business?What do I know about my blog’s main topic? How can I showcase my expertise about this topic?Why are people reading my blog? (Is it entertainment, education, a particular solution they are looking for)?How can I take the answer from question #3 and answer it with my expertise (question #2)? (Result: a product or service you can serve your audience).

Before you jump the gun, before you can do much with any of the above, you need to figure out the missing pieces.

Let’s backtrack a bit and work through the process…

For me, it happens to be my email list.  I have a super-tiny email list.  My goal is to increase the number of people on my email list and to help them resolve something that I have experience with.

Sure, they say it’s not the amount of people on your email list but the type of people on your list (whether they convert or not) that matters. I agree. But no one can say that having a good number of quality people on your email list is a bad thing.

These people are the ones who want what you may have to offer.  Your work, your services, your expertise, your products!  I know this isn’t a new revelation but stick with me.  Trust me when I say this, I’m ahead of 90% of you…

In case you are one of those stubborn bloggers, read the next few lines carefully.

Name three big bloggers you know.  I pick Darren as one.  How about the other two big bloggers you have picked. Do they have an e-mail list?  You bet your inexperienced butt they do! An email list is how Darren launches super profitable ebooks and courses and leverages his traffic.

If you haven’t picked up on the importance of having your own email list, the rest of this post is useless.

We have backtracked one step. But we have more work to do.  If all of this seems overwhelming, grab a piece of paper and pencil.  I guarantee you will have a comprehensive plan before you leave this page!

The so-called “blogosphere” has evolved and people (smart ones, that is!) are no longer willing to give up their email addresses just because you asked.  No sir!  The only way you’re about to get those email addresses is if you have something people want.

For example, if by the end of this post I have helped you by constructing a cohesive business plan for your blog, you’ll want to read more of my content. Because I helped you. Because you liked what I had to say. Because you want more.

And if you haven’t noticed, it’s not just one guest post I’ll be publishing to build my email list.  You should be seeing me around.  In other words, after you create a free report, you need to find big hubs where your ideal customers are hanging out!

Create a list of five big sites and blogs where your readers are.  Expose yourself (*ahem* with your unique posts) multiple times.

I’m doing the exact same thing right now.  I am exposing my content to new readers who don’t know me.  If you have “kind of seen me around”, then the more I expose my work, the more chances I’ll have of getting your attention.

It’s how all of the big bloggers roll; you just weren’t paying attention or think that your blog will surely take off after one of your posts “go viral”.  Hah!

What I’m discussing with you took me a year to figure out.  Ignorance isn’t bliss, apparently.  Here I have my sexy, newly defined business plan:

You can bet my plan is even more specific than this.  It may seem exhausting but this is precisely what you need.  In fact, I have goals written down for how many people will join my list in June, July, and August, and how much money I expect to earn in each one of these months.  I’m also in the process of designing my survey and constructing my consultation reports.

Before you leave, answer the following questions and construct at least a rough diagram of your business plan:

Do you have an email list?Do you necessarily need to grow your email list? If so, how exactly will you do that?  How many guest posts?  Start writing down guest post ideas.What kind of service or product do you want to offer?  What would you be excited to provide people with?Survey your growing email list.Can you come up with a service, membership site, or ebook that you have experience with?

Write down your answers.  Get super specific.  No one else can do this for you.  If you don’t do this, your blog is dead.

After you write down your answers, you need to create and stick with a plan.  Remember, if you want to earn an income from your blog, you need to treat it like a business and must have some sort of business plan.

Would you rather create your own detailed business plan for your blog … or leave it to lady luck to make your content go viral?  (By the way, in case you didn’t know, viral traffic like Stumbleupon doesn’t convert and sucks.  Sure, it’ll make you feel cool for a day or two but that’s about it!)

I would love to hear your business plans in the comments section. Bring it!

Check out Moon Hussain’s blog, Experiments In Passive Income, where she discusses details about how to build your own income generating niche sites and blogs.  Download her free ebook, To the Moon & Back, in which she details all that she learned about niche sites over the course of a year.

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