As shocked as I was then, I realized that I have to know more about online marketing than just driving traffic to my websites. Of course, having a great number of visitors on your website can become a strong asset for your online business, but like I said before, this is not the most important factor in succeeding and making money online. Bellow are few things I learned along the road, keep them in mind and I’m sure you will get most out of your traffic. Yes, the quality over quantity principle is applied here too!

Approaching Users The Right Way

Is probably the most important tip in this list. While you can choose to spam the user with loads of popup banners just to draw his attention, you might manage it, but in the end that user will not return back to your website just because nobody likes popups. Personally I choose to believe that offering a one of a time opportunity, resource or advice for free does it better than any other. Don’t just annoy them with tons of banners, offer something worthy with every line they read on your website!

Choosing The Right Niche

Before you choose you start your website nice is vital to know people interests and to be able to predict a value of how much traffic you will receive and what kind of visitors you will have. For instance, having a website based on images will make users browse faster through your content and the most successful way of advertising would be based on images.

On the other hand, if you have a website based on text, the users will spend more time on your page and text ads will generate better results.

Traffic Sources

Many consider that no matter what traffic source you have, the result is exactly the same. I am here to say that if you agree with that, you couldn’t be more wrong. Usually, SEO traffic is the most natural and generous type of traffic because people get to your website as a result to being able to offer them whatever they seek. Major search engines like Google improve their search algorithms regularly so that only best results are shown and you get only the most targeted possible traffic.

On the other hand, let’s just say you find a link on a random website and see something catchy in it’s description. You click it and realize that there’s nothing for your interest. You immediately leave, and that’s exactly what most referred visitors will do.

Of course, considering how much social websites grew in the last years, I guess is safe to say that a good SMO campaign can do wonders for your online business too.

Keep Your Content Relevant

One thing that I was sad to notice is that many people have such great hunger for making money online that they don’t even care if they add irrelevant ads on their site. This way, I found lots of websites in tech niche promoting clothes, food or even pet articles with no relevance whatsoever.

Is only obvious for your targeted visitor to be interested in ads relevant to your content because he might be looking for a related product, a further advice or just wants to see a different point of view of what you exposed to him.

A small banner integrated in your article or just a friendly text ad in posts or pages can do way better than a popup banner if you manage to place them in a spot with high relevance for the user.

Create Multiple Income Streams

Nobody says you can’t use multiple advertising programs to help you increase your income. In fact, there are hundreds if not thousands of options to help you with the financial matters of your website.

You need to know which one fits best for your website niche and also choose a trusted one so that you don’t get any unpleasant surprises in the process. Bellow I gathered few programs along with some details about their category.

Affiliate Programs

They are very popular among internet marketers and one of the top income generators. Affiliates are usually recommended for websites or blogs that are able to feature products. Lots of affiliate programs are available, but some of the most recommended would be ClickBank, Commission Junction, NeverBlue. All of these programs are trusted and come with thousands of products and services that you can embed in your website, no matter what niche you have in mind.

PPC Advertising

PPC or Pay Per Click is the most popular type of advertisement in the online industry responsible for making lots of millionaires worldwide. No matter if your content is mostly images or text, the PPC programs can be a real income generator if you know how to place them properly. Of course, the number one PPC program that I recommend is Google Adsense.

In-Text Links

These are very effective for websites with a lot of text content. What they actually do is to associate keywords from your text with words bought by advertisers and include a double or simple underlined hyperlink. Two of the most popular and trusted services for In Text Advertising are: Kontera and InfoLinks

In-Photo Links

This is a very creative way to implement advertising in your website. If you have a website with a content that’s mostly based on images, then this is definitely the type of ads you want to approach. There’s one service very popular called GumGum which I recommend.

Page Peel Advertising

If you believe that in-image advertising is cool, then you should definitely check out the page peel advertising. These usually are scripts that you implement in your website and they will generate a cool page peel animation on your top right page which on roll-over will reveal an ad. Popular solutions are at HongKiat and PageEar

Sponsored Reviews

This is the real deal for websites featuring products or services. Usually app websites reported great income from this source. Two services I recommend ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews.

Use Right Plugins

Some plugins come with the spam proof system incorporated so knowing how to pick them can save you from a lot of unnecessary trouble. Devstand has commenting system based on Akismet which is unbeatable and website forms based on Contact Form 7 and cForms III.

Akismet

Is a plugin that comes with every WordPress installation by default along with Hello Dolly plugin. Both of them were developed by Automattic, the team responsible for creating WordPress. Akismet might seem like a simple plugin, but it was voted to be the best anti-spam solution available for WordPress. All you have to do is to go to Akismet.com and get an API key to activate it and start running. Akismet will stop all of the spam comments in no time keeping you safe and offering you a way to manage multiple spam comments at once.

Contact Form 7

Like I said, this is the solution we use on Devstand forms. Contact Form comes with an easy to manage user interface and saves you lots of time because it doesn’t require any code to be written. As a solution for the spam submissions, Contact Form 7 brings Quizes in forms or Captchas. In order to use captchas in Contact Form 7 you will need to install the Really Simple Captcha plugin.

Add Captcha and Questions

Since spam comments are usually sent by bots, we want to bring a system that prooves whoever coment’s is human. The simplest way to do that is to use a captcha or a question-based system. A captcha will ask the user to enter a string of hard to read letters, thing that is impossible to do by a bot. You can also use a plugin to ask math questions or you can create your own required fields in which you ask a question.

Captcha

It comes with a simple name, but it’s most definitely not one of them. Captcha brings comprehensive solutions for your spam issues wheter we talk about protecting the comments sections, submission forms or whatever page comes with user generated content. The plugin helps you create and embed a captcha image with ease while requesting no coding knowledge on your part.

Math Comment Spam Protection

Having a not so easy to read captcha system in your website isn’t always very user friendly. If you are looking for another way to keep spammers away, but at the same time keep your visitors entertained, then Math Comment Spam protection is the tool you need. This plugin does a pretty simple and effective thing, it asks your commentors basic math questions so that they can prove they are humans.

Think Twice About Adding Dofollow Attribute

Not long ago we answered a question about adding or not adding Dofollow attribute in comments. You can check it out here, but when talking about ways to avoid spam, adding dofollow is a big NO NO! One of the main reasons making people create spam bots is because they think that sending spam comments will bring them backlinks and increase their traffic. Knowing that you offer dofollow comments will make them even more interested in spamming you blog with unwanted content.

Disable Comments and Enable Auto-Moderation

That’s an obvious thing to do, but when I say disable comments I don’t mean you should stop comments for all articles in your blog, but for the older ones where you feel that no genuine activity will show up.

Auto Moderation

WordPress offers a system which filters comments based on your wishes. For instance, WP can add a comment to queue automatically just because it contains 2 links or because it contains a restricted phrase or email. You can control this by accessing the discussion section in WP Admin -> Settings -> Discussion

Replace Commenting System

The standard commenting system available on WordPress is quite amazing and professional, but if you want to skip dealing with spam content, then you might want to test another options too. One of the main benefits of using an comment system hosted elsewhere is because it provides multiple ways for users to comment including their social media profiles. There are plenty of services like these, but we highly recommend using these ones bellow.

Disqus

Is the most popular comment hosting service with over 50 million registered users. The developing started in 2007 as a Y Combinator project. Now, Disqus offers advanced social integration tools, community boxes and spam proof comments. All of these are available for free.

Get Disqus for free

IntenseDebate

Is an advanced blog comment hosting service bought by Automattic (WordPress developer company) in late 2008. IntenseDebate has a very user friendly interface and brings a professional spam proof system too.

Get IntenseDebate for free

Livefyre

Very popular and easy to use comment system used by sites like: Fox, MTV, TheNextWeb or AOL.

Get Livefyre for free

Ban Spammers

One thing that many bloggers don’t actually know is that WordPress brings a blacklisting system to help you ban the unwanted people and bots. All you have to do in order to ban someone is to add his email in the list and WordPress will make sure he will never disturb you again.

Just like Auto Moderation, you can add emails to blacklist by going to WP Admin -> Settings -> Discussion

The mobile era is here and the traffic received from mobile devices grows exponentially. If you want to have a better chance to survive in the new era, you have to adjust your website content properly and learn to make your website light-weight while keeping it interesting and filled with things that matter.

In this article I’ve just collected some of the tips you can do for your website without deteriorating your content, without affecting your website design in any matter and without changing your articles. These are simple site-wide tips you can use for your WordPress blog and for any other website platform. If you are using WordPress though, you might find some useful tips to improve website speed.

Get Rid of Unnecessary Heavy Elements

Heavy code means more requests for your server to handle and when I say heavy code I don’t mean simple HTML tags because those are executed easily. Some of the things that might do your website bad are:

Unnecessary JavaScript and jQuery

These are usually used on fancy navigation options, page sliders and pretty much everything with nice animations. If you have lots of these and you think that you can give up some of them, then you will most definitely increase the speed of your website.

Loaded Sidebars

Some people decide to “drag” all kind of large media files on sidebars instead of creating a page for them. The sidebar is usually created to be displayed site-wide and therefore, if you have a loaded sidebar your users will have to load that large sidebar every time if you decide not to separate the sidebar from content, of course.

iFrame or Not?

iFrames are not very SEO friendly, and also they can create you problems with the page loading time. While a simple iFrame from a page that contains only the content presented in the iFrame is good and can be integrated nicely, an iFrame from a page with multiple multimedia elements, loaded with lots of heavy code can increase the time for page load. That means that whenever you choose to display a portion of a heavy page in iFrame, you actually add the entire page to your current page load time.

Reduce The Number of PHP Requests

Usually, themes created for certain content management systems come with php functions to automate the process of changing content sitewide, but sometimes is not about site-wide settings, but only for certain pages of your website. If you believe that you can replace those PHP functions with HTML code, then doing so will reduce the number of server requests and as a result you will get a faster website. Keep in mind that every bit of code counts when you work on optimizing the website speed.

Check out the WordPress SEO article to see how you can do this in WP.

Page Cache

If you run a website powered by PHP and MySQL, then page caching is a step you have to take. Page cache transforms all of your articles or PHP pages into static pages. This means that once you apply cache on pages, you reduce the number of requests that would have been send to the web server making your page load faster and not having to send requests every time someone accesses that particular page.

Split Your Articles Into Pages

This is a great idea if you have articles containing a large number of multimedia content or files that are very large. You can create multiple article for this or if you use WordPress, then you can use the <!–nextpage–> function. This method is also very good if you want to increase the number of page-views for your site. You must be aware that if you choose to use the nextpage function on WordPress, the SEO  for that article will be highly influenced.

First of all, you will have same description for all the pages in the post and the link juice will mostly go to the first page of the post and if. That’s why, if you are interested in SEO, I recommend creating a new article.

Optimize Images

This is a step that requires lot of attention especially because these are usually the ones with larger size. Plenty methods of optimization are available, but some of the most important ones are:

CSS Image Sprites

Combining images in CSS sprites means to add multiple images in a single one making the web server load just one image instead of more and reducing the number of requests.

Image Compression

Hearing about image compression makes some people think about the pixel reduction of the image. Well, you don’t have to worry about this because in this case we are talking about the size in bites. We talked about image compression in the past and we have also created a collection of most popular image compression tools available. This process is free and it helps you compress images without losing quality.

Assign Proper Image Formats

This matters very much especially because image formats come with image quality. While a .png file has an exceptional quality and structure, a .gif file comes slightly less quality as it is intended for small sized images. So, if you want to add small buttons, icons use the .gif files. For images in the post you can use .jpg files and for high quality images you should use .png (remember that .png’s are very large images).

CSS

One of the most important aspects with optimizing the CSS files is to avoid the @import function. This will add one more requests to server for loading those particular files instead of loading just one.

Besides that, you can reduce the size of the file by writing color codes using just 3 letters instead of 6, write just position without mentioning top, bottom, left or right. (Ex: #fff instead of #ffffff ).

Use a CDN

A CDN or a Content Delivery Network is usually a web server created to store your multimedia or large files making them more accessible to users thanks to faster delivery. One of the most popular CDN servers is MaxCDN.

You can also use a cloud hosting service to keep your website files. In fact, you can even connect your WordPress blog to Dropbox as a content delivery network.

Check out the website speed

See what’s your current website speed ranked and see how much has improved after applying these rules. Google has a special service created by Google Labs which gives you insights on your website speed and what you still need to do in order to improve it. They also have a version created to help you optimize your website speed for mobile devices too.

go to Google Page Speed

Like Twitter, Pinterest is preparing to start a social revolution based on a followship system that continues on the next level. Having many followers on Pinterest doesn’t just mean that you get authority on the site, but you also get more exposure for your online business and a dedicated active community on your side. That’s why, as a smart online marketer, you want to settle the ground in the early times so that you can enjoy great benefits when everybody is on Pinterest.

Since Pinterest is based on visual objects, it is only obvious to get best results for pins that are appealing.

Free Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers

Is not always the fastest way to bring Pinterest followers, but if you are dedicated and really enjoy spending time browsing Pinterest’s content and don’t have money to spend, then you should approach it!

Twitter Principles

Just like Twitter, Pinterest is a social community based on followship and that’s why you must be very interested in offering users what they really want…followers. So, by following others people will notice you and as a sign of appreciation they will follow you back in no time. Now, I’m not saying you should start following like a freak, but try to find people with similar interest and try to build a bond with them.

• Use Hashtags

Yup…hashtags are quite popular on Pinterest too, and like on Twitter and Google+, these are the ones helping users to easily find your content. So use them, but try to be relevant and don’t overdo it.

• Talk About Popular Pinterest Subjects/Users
  

Popular means that there are lots of people in…which means huge opportunity for you to explore. Get in the buzz by mentioning popular people, events, subjects. Use the “@mention”!

Comment

Being active is vital in every social community because that shows your followers and other members that you are interested in doing great things. Besides that, commenting on others Pins means feedback for others which in most cases means a lot especially if that person doesn’t receive lots of comments.

Picking popular accounts can bring you even more exposure and if your comment is relevant and comes with great arguments, you can even bring a large number of their visitors to your Pinterest.

Organize and Pin

Personally I like to focus on just one niche for my every Pinterest account because it allows me to better focus on what really matters and helps me provide better content for my followers. Of course, this doesn’t mean you need to do the same thing for your account. In fact, you can pick as many subjects as you wish and spread them in as many Boards as you wish, but keep in mind that you need to handle all of them with ease and provide users best experience.

My advice would be to start simple and grow from there. Spend some time on creating or picking a pin that can easily go viral. This will bring you lots of attention and as a result, you will get tons of followers.

Sync Your Pinterest Account With Social Websites

This is a vital step if you want to obtain best results on Twitter, Facebook and also keep a place open for the new Pinterest. You can easily synchronize the Pinterest account with Facebook and Twitter by going to: Your Account -> Settings -> Simply Click on to Link Facebook or Twitter to your account. You can also add Pinterest to your Facebook timeline as long as you don’t decide to post the same story manually.

Once you synchronize Pinterest with Facebook and Twitter, you get access to many possibilities including the friend messaging/following option which allows you to send as many Pinterest invites you wish and also to follow your Facebook friends who are already on the platform. The following process is almost instant and since they are your friends, it’s a huge possibility to follow you back in no time.

No Spam, Be Professional, Be Cool!

Nobody likes spam and definitely nobody likes weird and unappealing. So give your pins viewers reasons to follow you by setting up some ground rules. Schedule a time for posts, they shouldn’t be to often, but at the same time you have to keep your account updated. Personally I believe that 1 to 5 pins/day are ok! By doing this, your user will get used to your posting schedule and visit often.

Paid Ways to Get Pinterest Followers

Trading money for time is always best option, but you should also have the certainty that those money are invested in a smart way and you will receive best results. Bellow I have listed some of the most secure and reliable ways to drive followers to your Pinterest account.

Buy Followers

Easy, fast and in most cases it does not require a large sum of money. In fact, buying followers for Pinterest is quite cheap and I’ve seen some great websites out there providing quite professional services too. Among them you can check:

• PinterestRepins

A serious service created to offer repins and build a serious viral marketing campaign for your business

• PublicMonkey

One of the greatest deals when talking about followers. They are new in the industry but already rocking the place! You can get Pinterest followers in a jiffy, a great number of Facebook fans and some other SEO services too at a great price.

Pay Others to Promote Your Pins

Fiverr, eLance, Freelancer.com or whatever you choose can bring you professional pin promotion which can result in a nice amount of traffic and why not…followers and authority on Pinterest. Just a simple search on Fiverr for “Pinterest” brings up lots of results and all are for just $5.

Why do you think WordPress is chosen by many leading international companies to promote online and why you believe that nowadays WordPress is on everybody interested in online conversations? The answer is simple: The options provided by WordPress are those that a website needs in order to succeed online – simplicity, professionalism and an incredible community that improves the platform every day.

With that said, you should know that WordPress excels in an area confronted by many marketers every day. This is of course SEO and getting the best results and traffic from search engines.

What Makes WordPress to be SEO Friendly?

As you might know, the essence in SEO lies in simplicity and speed. Search engines like Google appreciate very much websites focusing on the offered content and also those that load quickly and are prompt for their users.

1. Simple and Perfect

WordPress developers have placed great importance on the simplicity offered and concentrated their work so that the outcome will be perfect. You can check out and see that every standard option and design meets all the requirements at HTML Validator or CSS or even the Feed Validator.

2. Fast

Unlike other content management systems WordPress knows how to distinguish between what is truly necessary and what is not relevant. Therefore, the WordPress structure is simple and build based on clean lines of code.

Keep it simple and clean and WordPress will be the fastest way of generating content online.

3. Has great modifications build for SEO

In over 8 years in which WordPress was able to provide the best and most interesting options for bloggers and webmasters, they managed to build up a community of developers that now includes hundreds of thousands of members.  Many have decided to devote all of their developer work to improve the platform. Among them you can find many SEO experts who have developed extraordinary tools for online promotion and SEO.

4. On WordPress you can edit every piece of content

This is very important because in order to create a good website optimization you need the ability to handle the content as you wish adding being able to add meta tags or descriptions for each post. Also the title is important, the text of each item and images require your optimization too. Unlike any other CMS and thanks to the community, WordPress allows you to do that with ease.

How to make my website simple and perfect?

The best designers in the world are using WordPress as a blogging platform, so it seems only obvious to me  that WordPress themes have the best ranking. Also, you should know that SEO professionals spend great amount of time in order to create a theme that will be minimalist, but at the same time it will manage to give users what they need.

Everything depends on you and if you want to offer visitors a good experience or whether or not you want your site to appear as one liked by search engines. Certainly  I am not exaggerated and say that there shouldn’t be a photo in your website content or an ad placed on your site, but when they are everywhere, they confused visitors confused. Actually, that’s one of the main reasons why search engines love simple and organized websites.

If you would like your website to have a simple theme, nice and also free, then one of the best places to get it is to go to the repository for WordPress themes. Some other verified and trusted theme creators are WooThemes and ElegantThemes where you can find some great looking designs simple and perfect. Of course there are many other theme creators out there, but these two I know and worked with and I can say that I am pretty happy with their creations.

How to make WordPress even faster?

Search engines love speed, in fact not long ago Google launched a campaign to test the speed of websites and help webmasters with techniques to improve it and rank higher in search engines. Learn more about Google Page Speed...

In addition to this, WordPress developers have devised several plugins that will make all dynamic pages to static pages and becoming easier to process and as a result your website will become faster.

Another factor that can aggravate the website slowness is due to plugins. Do not get me wrong, plugins are essential, but when there are too many conflicts start to happen and they can cause your site to move more slowly.

That’s why you should consider:

1. Deactivating useless plugins
2. Make sure you have the plugins up to date
3. Don’t install plugins that are not trusted by the WordPress community

You should also know that whenever a PHP call is made, it requires your web server attention and that’s why the process can take longer. You can optimize this by converting some parts of the PHP code in WordPress themes and add static HTML. Remember that you shouldn’t do this with all files in fact, I highly recommend you to backup your files before even starting to modify anything.

1. 1.       Optimize Title

If you start editing your header.PHP file, you will see that there is a function calling the title of the website and description:

<?PHP bloginfo(name); ?><?PHP bloginfo(description); ?>

You can easily replace this with the HTML version which is much faster and it looks like this:

<title>Your Website Title</title>

1. 2.       Optimize Feed

You can find something similar to this

<?PHP bloginfo_rss(‘url’) ?>

And it can easily be translated into HTML like this

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName

1. 3.       Optimize URL

Even the URL of your website is shown using a PHP call.

<h1><?PHP bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>

In HTML will be

YourWebsiteName

Of course, there are certain disadvantages when you choose to use the HTML version instead of PHP call, but these ones are made because the theme designer doesn’t know what’s the name of your website or what RSS feed you have.

Make code cleaner and compress it

Did you know that you can compress all the nasty JavaScript and CSS code in order to build a much cleaner and good looking website? Well, you can and the process is extremely easy and also fast. Again Google Code is the one that comes to help us by offering the Closure Compiler which helps you compress JavaScript fast and free.

Make images to load fast

If you intend to post more pictures, it is essential to keep in mind search engine optimization and keep in mind that search for images is very popular even though most people don’t talk about this.

Compress Images

We talked about code optimization importance, but you should know that image optimization is also very important.

As a result to this, you should use .GIF images for the ones with few colors which are small and .JPG for ones with many colors. I also choose to create images with 80% quality if they are JPG’s and GIF’s I use only with small buttons or small icons.

Let’s see some great plugins that will help you with making wordpress static .

W3 Total Cache

When it comes to cache options for WP this is definitely my favorite plugin and is also the most popular plugin cache for WordPress.  Its functions include database caching, pages caching and even to minimize the size of your pages. It is used by Mashable, Matt Cutts, Smashing Magazine, Yoast and lots of other online gurus out there. This plugin will also do all the changes without any of your efforts and it will even modify the .htaccess settings for you. Download W3 Total Cache

Another great caching plugin is WP Super Cache which is pretty similar to W3 Total Cache.

How to add my tags and edit pieces needed for a good SEO?

It is well known fact that for a good search engine optimization you should be very careful with every piece of content that you post. Therefore on WordPress you can automatically choose to have article templates, add meta tags such as description and keywords, have customized page titles and of course add description and alt tags to images.

1. 1.      Optimizing Text and Links

I’ll start with a plugin that I use very often and who managed to bring very good results to my websites just because it gives me optimization tips automatically for each published article.

SEOPressor

Unlike the other plugins in this article, SEOPressor is not a plugin that you can get from the official WordPress repository because is premium. Is a great plugin, but unfortunately is not available for free. It provides relevant information about the density of words in your articles, offers tips on how to optimize your title and what type of paragraph you should add. Personally I believe is worth your money and you should try it. Buy SEOPressor

Platinum SEO Pack

Is called Platinum Pack because it is the ideal tool for SEO and allows you to automatically work around your site SEO like no other. If you know the “All in One SEO Pack” WordPress plugin, you should know that this is much improved version having support too.

Simple and fast, Platinum SEO pack allows you to adjust your general settings for the website and meta tags, title description for each page separately. Platinum SEO Pack allows you to choose which pages you’ll assign with no-follow and which pages do-follow. Download the Platinum SEO Pack plugin

Breadcrumb Plugin

You can see a great example of the utilization of this plugin on most popular websites, is that text which you can see at top looking something like this “Home > Articles > WordPress” showing where is positioned the page you are currently browsing. Get it from here.

1. 2.      Optimizing Images

That’s probably the easiest part of the entire tutorial and you should know that even though it might seem unimportant, adding an alt text and a title to images is vital – without these search engines will not even see your images. Search engines love text and so the next plugin gives you everything you need automatically.

SEO Friendly Images

This is definitely the greatest plugin I know used to optimize images for search engine results. SEO Friendly Images will add the alt attribute to all of your images uploaded using WordPress. This way, search engines will be able to see them and as a result index them. Get SEO Friendly Images

Will I get any results using these techniques?

Of course, this entire tutorial is not much if what your site offers to users has no value. But, with this arsenal behind your online business is impossible not to get exceptional results.