Killer Tips On How To Blog On Huffington Post

This post will show you how to blog on Huffington Post. 

Huffington post offers talented and semi talented writers an opportunity to blog on their platform. They have two classes of bloggers, paid bloggers and free bloggers. To get a paid blogging gig you will need to apply for the job just like you would apply anywhere else. If you just want to blog for Huffington Post without being paid continue reading the rest of my post. 

How To Get a Blog On Huffington Post

Apply Directly From Huffington Post Website

On the HuffingtonPost.com site, on the right towards the bottom, it has a button which says "If you have something to say" say it on Huffington Post. Click it, fill in the info they request, and they get back to you. They will require you to provide writing samples. Develop a basic portfolio of your best articles and be ready to submit it.

Target Huffington Post Editors

Find the name of the editor for the vertical [section] where you would like to submit your blog. Their emails are always their name followed by @huffingtonpost.com. 

Send them the first 400-500 words of your blog post in the body of the email, not as an attachment. You should get a response fairly soon.

Be A Prolific Commenter For Huffington Post

I have heard prolific commenters have been rewarded with writing gig. Although am not sure how true it is. If you take this route make sure your comments are lengthy, factual, insightful and unique. If you do that somebody may spot you and invite you to write for them.

  

Advantage of free blogging for Huffington Post. 

Readers for your blog 

Huffington Post has over 35 million monthly visitors. Those visitors view over 1 billion pages on the site. What this means is your blogs have a very high chance of being seen and read inside Huffington Post than when you blog for your own independent blog. 

Support For Huffington Post Bloggers.

Huffington Post has an internal system to teach you the best ways on how to write for internet. They will teach you, how to write killer headlines, how to write sticky posts, and most crucial, how to write articles that attract visitors from search engines such as Google and Bing. 

A free blog can be a stepping stone to a paid blogging gig. If your writing is world class expect their talent spotters to invite you to paid bloggers club.

Whatever route you take, Good Luck!

Free & Premium Wordpress Business Templates

A well designed wordpress template for your business website can go along way in boosting your business. A well designed wordpress business template for a small or medium sized business should be pleasing to the eye and get a customer to buy your product or service.

The following Wordpress Business templates achieve those goals and more.

My Product Template

MyProduct is a great template for businesses looking to promote their products and services online. MyProduct comes with five unique colors schemes to help insure that there is a style that suits your needs.

Purchase Myproduct for just $39 from elegant themes.

Nova Business Wordpress Template

Nova is a sharp, simplistic design that makes for an intuitive user experience. This wordpress business template fits well with a consultancy. Nova’s biggest strength is its homepage, which allows you to organize your content into two areas. This business template comes with multiple slider variations that breath new life into the design.

Purchase Nova small business template for just $39 from elegant themes.

Leanbiz Wordpress Template

If you sell electronics, tablets and computers you need to give this wordpress business template a look.  LeanBiz is a lean, mean, business template. Its layout is simple and professional and the homepage is sleek and to-the-point. The beautiful homepage slider creates a clear call to action and allows for countless slide variations. LeanBiz is a great theme for those looking to give their website a clean new look.

Purchase Leanbiz business template for just $39 from elegant themes.

Some Free Wordpress Business templates.
It is hard to find a free business worpress template that is pleasing to the eye but I found the following that are not so good but not bad.

The SevenFive

This template is best for small businesses looking to build communities and share information with its users. Posts can be organized in a variety of formats including collected photos, tweets, and straight-up news posts. The lack of a huge header image or brand-focused landing page, however, makes this template less useful for showcasing products.

Snapshot Biz Template

Snapshot is another photo-heavy wordpress business template best used for showcasing your products. This small business template provides an elegant solution to giving a product overview if you don’t feel like downloading a marketplace widget. There is ample room in each photo box for a detailed description but not enough for substantial news posts.

5 Proven Ways To Make Money Blogging From Home

There are 5 proven ways to make money blogging from home. This list is for the best ways to make money blogging online. 

List of ways to make money blogging

1. Making money with adsense using your blog.
2. Landing public speaking gigs through your blog
3. Selling your print book / ebook through your blog    
4. Affiliate marketing using Niche sites.
5. Selling training and courses.

Making Money with Adsense.

Before Google was founded, the only way to find advertisers to advertize on a website or blog was to contact advertisers directly. Google introduced Adsense program and making money from blogging became easy. Once you join the program you are given a small code to install on your site and Google will serve relevant ads to your site. You focus on writing great content for your blog and Google will take care of finding advertizers for you.

To make money with adsense your blog site will need to have content plus traffic. The rule of thumb is you will start making money when your blog starts getting 300-500 visitors a day. 

Affiliate Marketing Using Niche Sites.

E-commerce sites such as amazon.com will pay you to promote their products on your blog sites. With affiliate marketing, you promote products on your site and when those people buy those products from your site, you are paid a percentage. Amazon pays 4% the price of the product. 

Bloggers have set up sites focusing on specific products. From watches, sunglasses to web hosting. When a site is focused on one single product or service we call that a niche site. 

The formula for success with niche sites is just like above - Content + Traffic.

Selling Print Book / Ebook Through Your Blog

If you have a self published book you can start blogging to promote your book. You don't need to ship the book yourself, you can distribute the book through amazon and direct readers to purchase it from amazon.com.

If you have the time and money, you can ship the book yourself. This model is time consuming and requires capital but you will keep more profits for yourself.

Landing public speaking gigs through blogging

Another way to make money blogging is to use blogging to show case your expertise in an area. People who appreciate your talent will contact you to offer you speaking engagement. 

Selling Training Courses

The last way of making money blogging online from your home is to use blogging to promote a training course. For example if you are good in Golf, you can develop a golf training course and use your blog to promote it.

The way it works is, you use your blog to share the obvious training tips and request your readers to purchase  advanced courses.

How To Get Facebook Likes & Fans For Small Business Website Page

Techcrunch has a case study on how one guy got 100,000 Facebook likes for his blog fan page. It basically took about 30 days to get 100,000 fans. Sounds unbelievable? But its true.

To get those fans, he spent $6,000. At a cost of 3 or 4 cents per Like.

James Altucher, the blogger who showed this amazing results used a tool from fanNewscast.com.  A Facebook application that makes your small business facebook page for your small business look like a Google News Page. 

The application makes your page look like this,

The application makes your FB page a source for the top trending stories at any given moment for Innovation, Inspiration, Healthy Lifestyle, Entrepreneurship etc.

Even if someone was not interested in your product or service, they could still Like your page and always know they can come back to see these top trending stories in their favorite topics for any moment in time.

FanNewsCast then make ads targeting people interested in these topics. 

Results after 30 days.

Free Tip for getting Facebook Likes and Fans For Small Business Website.

Using fannewscast will cost you money but James shared a tip that requires only your time and effort. He recommend posting interesting images on your Facebook page. Users love sharing image. And when your fans share your images, the images are seen by their friends.

To read the whole article go to http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/23/how-to-get-100000-facebook-likes-for-your-blog-fan-page/

Killers Strategies of Making Money With A Website

A website is a good platform of making money. The success of websites such Amazon.com, zappos.com is evidence that there is money to be made by creating a website to sell products.

This article will show you top notch strategies that you can use to make money with a website. 

1. It is better to sell a specific product than all product

Don't try to be Amazon.com. Try to sell every product under the sun is bad strategy. Targeting everyone is basically equal to targeting no one. Be specific about your target audience. It is easier to make money when your website is focused in selling a single product.

2. Website Development Platform

My favorite website design software is WordPress. Wordpress comes free of charge when you purchase web hosting.  Wordpress will full fill most of the small business website requirements.

Benefits of wordpress,

•     You can manage your website really easily without the help of a coder
•     You can enhance your website using plugins
•     WordPress websites usually get indexed in the Google pretty fast

3.  Website Template / Theme Design

The design you choose for your website will determine whether customers will buy from your website or close your website. Your strategy for designing a money making website should be; the design should tell a visitor what the website is about. If you sell sunglasses you should have images of eye wear everywhere.

I recommend you purchase a premium e-commerce wordpress theme.

Check out the post : Top 10 Ecommerce Wordpress Themes and Templates

4. Content For Your Money Making Website

Following are the most important pages for a website designed to make money.

    Home

    About

    Services

    Testimonials

    Contact Us

    Blog

First of all you must have all the above pages on your website as bare minimum and secondly make sure these pages are easily accessible through your main navigation.

A blog is not a must but research shows, companies that blog get 55% more traffic. You can use the blog to connect with your customers. 

5. Capture E-mails And Send Out A Newsletter

Make an effort to get email addresses of your buyers. You can then use the email to send them a newsletter with information on future promotions and product announcement.  If someone buys from your website today, he is more likely to buy again and again.

The trick with getting people to part with emails is to offer them something free. It can be a gift voucher or a report. A strategy that have seen work is offering people an opportunity to enter a competition to win a free voucher or free stuff (that is if you can afford it).

6 Connect Your Website with Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Use social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic back to your business website.

Place social media buttons on your website so that visitors can easily connect.

5 Things To Do As You Prepare To Register For Facebook Ad Network

Facebook won't confirm they are cooking an Ad network to rival Google 5 Things To Do As You Prepare To Register For Facebook Ad NetworkAdsense. But there is growing evidence it is only a matter of time before they launch their own Ad network. Facebook recently launched Facebook exchange - which creates targeted ads based on users' activity on the Web and now it is being reported Zynga.com has started running Facebook Ads. Anyone smell an advertising network? I do. 

Anyone using wordpress may have noticed the recently launched Official Facebook plugin for wordpress. The plugins enables a floating banner on your side bar. For now the banner shows related post. Am wondering : is this a preparation of adding relevant ads?

When Facebook Ad Network comes out I will be among the first to apply and register with it. 

I use Google Adsense across my network of sites and I think every owner of a blog site should prepare to register with Facebook Ad network the same way we do with Google Adsense.

5 Things To Do As You Prepare To Register For Facebook Ad Network

1. Traffic : Traffic : Traffic

Make sure your website or blog has enough Traffic. From my experience with Google Adsense, A site starts making money when you starts seeing daily visitors in the range of 300 - 500. My business rule is I start running contextual ad only when a site crosses 200 daily visitors.

2. Captivating Content

Great content will get you traffic. Your content should be meaningful and enrich the readers. Before hitting that publish button, ask yourself. How does this post benefit the reader? 

3. Content That Attracts Advertiser

Your blog should be in a niche that has a rich pool of advertisers. If the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better.

4. Follow Terms And Condition. 

Google Adsense has lengthy Terms and condition document and Facebook being Facebook, I don't expect theirs to be any different.  Don't waste time trying to game the system by running illegal software designed to boost your impression.

5. To summarize things, Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen – you’ll waste all your other hard work.

Facebook Ad Network Vs Google Adsense

The long rumoured Facebook Ad network is here. Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories Are Now Running On Zynga.com. The change was first noticed by Inside Facebook and it has the media speculating up a storm about whether this is the beginning of Facebook's battle with Google Adsense.

Facebook has not official confirmed they have launched and Ad network but all evidence point they are planning one. They recently luanched Facebook exchange.  Which creates targeted ads based on users' activity on the Web -- but swore that it wasn't an ad network.

I have no doubt Zynga is being used as a test bed to test the waters before being unleashed to big and small sites.

The news of a Facebook Ad Network will be a welcome news to small and big publishers who have been yearning fora rival to Google Adsense.

There have been many wanna be competitors to Google Adsense but all of them have fallen short. Facebook is the only serious competitor. Facebook has deep pockets and best of all billions of data to serve relevant ads.

How Facebook Ads Look

Personally am excited by the look of this ad block. Google Adsense does not have images next to their contextual ads and this has limited CTR. If Facebook allows publishers to run this type of ads expect some very high CTR.