Actually it’s my second month running a membership website but the first month I didn’t have a payment option set up yet because I wanted to test everything to make sure there were no bugs, security issues etc. On May 1st was when I launched the Premium part of my website Mixtapes.tv. The business model I used for my membership site is the Fremium model aka the “try it before you buy it” model. In this day and age plus the type of audience I’m selling to, this model works great. I believe my product was good enough so I didn’t have any issues with offering it for free and then later offering a upgrade to unlock more features.

A little bit about my membership site.

It’s called Mixtapes.tv, it’s a site where DJs, Artists, and A&Rs can upload and share there mixtapes for free. Users are able to sign up and download these mixtapes for free as well. The key to this site is knowing what parts should be free and what parts shouldn’t be. For example users can sign up and download 5 mixtapes a month as zip files but  a premium member can download unlimited mixtapes, another feature is premium members can download individual tracks but free users can’t. The method here is that you have to make the free service good enough for them to want to upgrade to the premium service. For example a user can use the site forever as free member to listen and download unlimited mixtapes. This creates user retention and will eventually lead to upgrades.

The money is in the re bill.

Don’t know how many affiliate marketers are reading reading my blog but if you’ve ever promoted ringtone offers, you must have wondered how some of these companies are able to pay affiliates $16 to $30 per lead on a $9.90 offer, that’s because within 3 months they’ve regained 100% return on there investment. Most users will not cancel there subscription because it automatically gets added to there cell phone bill and they forget about it, and since it’s only $9.90 they don’t really pay attention to the charge. This is why low subscription pricing is so valuable. Jeremy from ShoeMoney.com touched on something similar when talking about Gym memberships and how it’s the perfect business.

My First Month Running A Membership Website

The Premium part of my site went live on May 1st, and the first 7 days no one upgraded, LOL. I was like oh shit no one likes the site but then on May 8th my first premium membership came in. I was so excited even though it was only $5.99, it feels really good when someone wants to buy something you are selling. After that first sale the upgrades started coming in with a average of 2 sign ups per day. So far I’ve had one disgruntle customer which was not my fault but as a result of a server side issue between PayPal and Wishlist Member.

Results after 30 days

I know it’s not Yacht money but that’s not my aim at this point, right now all I’m doing is focusing on making the service the best it can be. If I achieve that then I won’t have to worry about making money because the product will sell itself. Now remember these members are now in a billing cycle and this month an estimated 30 more Premium upgrades will occur which will double the earnings the following month, the real money will be made months down the line with the compounded revenue generated through subscribers singing up month after month. So far over 8,000 members have signed up 32 of which are premium members, keep in mind that 60% of those members signed up the 1st month before the premium option was available.

Not to mention I really haven’t dialed this thing in yet, I’m still testing. I haven’t implemented follow up via email marketing,  special offers, advertising, affiliate program or anything else for that matter. 90% of the traffic going to the site right now is coming from my other websites HipHopMusicDotCom.com. and a little from ComeWatchMe.com, once the traffic from search engines starts to really pick up in a couple months I’ll start to look more like the competition, who has a whopping 20,000 premium members, so I know the market is very healthy.

In conclusion.

Don’t treat a membership website like a regular eccommerce website, it’s not a sprint it’s a marathon.You think of it that way and you’ll see the real profits in the long run, I’m going to be writing a post soon about how to set up a membership site and the right tools to use to get it done.

I’m out……Chozen

Since the year started I’ve been doing my internet business full time, and it’s been pretty good, I’ve launched two new sites one is a video site and the other is a membership website both of which I can say had successful launches. Below is run down of how my sites have been doing.

First of all let me address my original site HipHopMusicDotCom.com, this site has sure become quite the blog going from a ugly blogspot blog to now averaging over 2,000,000 page views monthly. Yesterday I did 33,000 unique visitors and almost broke 100,000 pageviews and the traffic isn’t showing any sign of slowing down. Even though the traffic is crazy that really isn’t where the success is with the website. The real success is the two new revenue streams I’ve able to create for the website, originally most of my earnings came from Google Adsense, InfoLinks and Adbrite but now I’ve been making money with selling direct ads and video ads.

If you have video content and haven’t incorporated video ads yet into your site, you need to because the payout is far more lucrative that contextual based ads. So far I’ve been working with LongTailVideo Adsolution and ScanScout, I’m going to be writing a post that covers video advertising, video ad networks and pretty much everything else you need to know regarding making money with video ads.

The second revenue stream I’ve unlocked on HipHopMusicDotCom.com is direct advertising, since this year started I’ve been getting quite a few advertising offers. With the help a little Ad Manager plugin called OIO Publisher which I use to manage all my direct ad sales, I don’t think I’d be able to handle direct ad sales efficiently without it and you can expect to see a post about that coming soon.

Between those two new revenue streams and my existing ones I’ve been able to double my monthly earnings and I needed it since I’m on more expensive servers now.

As far as Music Video Cast is concerned, I haven’t updated since the year started and will never update ever again not since I’ve launched ComeWatchMe.com in January of this year. Music Video Cast will be deprecated and all the posts will be moved to ComeWatchMe.com after running MusicVideoCast.com for almost 3 years I think it’s safe to say it’s reach it’s limit as far as growth potential. It had a few big moments in it’s life span but I just couldn’t take it to the next level the way I did with HipHopMusicDotCom.com one of the reasons being that it’s just about music videos which is a very small niche with allot of other sites people would rather go to. I did manage to get it to the top of the second page of Google for “Music Videos” which brought it allot a traffic and continues to but that’s the past and ComeWatchMe.com is the future.

ComeWatchMe.com was lunched on January 15th and since then it has been doing very well, in only 4 months it’s doubled the traffic that Music Video Cast receives. In about 3 years video ads will be everywhere this will be a multi billion dollar industry so I’m gearing up and preparing for that growth from now. Video ads will be in 2013 what Google Adsense was in 2003 and just like Adsense it’s the niche sites that are going to really benefit from this market, instead of trying to be the next YouTube people should focus on building niche on demand video sites. This is what I’m doing with ComeWatchMe.com at the moment, I’m focusing on video ads on the site currently but there is one contextual banner ad on the site but the focus is video ads and it’s already showing good numbers. I expect big this from this site in the future.

The other site I launched was MixTapes.TV at the end of March, this site has been something I wanted to start two years ago but didn’t have the tools or money to do it until now. The original name was MixtapeCast.com to match MusicVideoCast.com then I changed it to MixtapePlayer.com which was a great name until the end of last year I saw MixTapes.TV for sale on Sedo, I won it in a auction for $150.00 which is a steal for a top level domain, with this name combined with my SEO and Social Media skills I guarantee you I’ll be number one in Google for the search term “mixtapes” by September. It’s a subscription based (my first one) site built around the very popular niche of “mixtapes”. The launch was pretty crazy so crazy that I ended up moving to a new server because it just couldn’t handle the traffic. In one month I’ve already had 3,300 sign ups, I was on the second page of Yahoo for “mixtapes” in less than 2 weeks, 70,000 unique visitors, 160,000 pageviews and 200,000 media streams. Currently this site is my main priority and I’m working very hard to make it profitable before the summer is over.

I also officially have my company name now which is called “Covanant” not to mistaken with Covenant though they have a similar meaning, Covanant stands for a “Solemn Promise To Excel In Business”, yeah I invented (patent pending). I’m going to be launching that site soon. The logo is below..

That’s pretty much what I’ve been up yo since the year started, which is why I haven’t been able to update this site as much as I would like but I’ll promise that from this point I will try my best to do at least one post per day. After all I do plan one day to turn this site into big business as well.

That’s it for now, later………….

Chozen.

Ad.ly is the first network to accommodate all Twitter users, they have a large number of high profile celebrities but there is also room for the little guys with only a few thousand followers. Some of you who have already joined the network a while back might remember that campaign NBC had for upcoming shows one of which was True Blood (love that show) which I think everyone at the time got paid to tweet about the season finale which was $290 for a Tweet, yeah that’s right one Tweet. Some Users are even getting upwards of $5,000 per tweet,and this is just the beginning.

Checkout the video from their Launch back in September. It includes some pretty big celebrity endorsements like Dr Drew, Chamillionaire, Tony Hawk, and many others:

A few days ago Ad.ly launched there referral program where if you refer your friends to Ad.ly you make 12% of whatever they make, and with the Ad.ly Race, the person who gets the most people to sign up for Ad.ly wins a Free 13’ Macbook Pro (2nd and 3rd place will also get a free iPod Touch).

Ad.ly already ran successful campaigns with brands like NBC and Sony Pictures and are working with brands like Dell, Hilton, The Olympics, and Maserati to bring more high quality ads to there publishers. They are also launching our self-serve engine soon, which will allow more advertisers to participate. These guys are making all the right moves and doing all the right things in the Twitter advertising space and by the looks of ,millions of dollars will be passing through this company in the upcoming months.

Don’t miss this plane, sign up for Ad.ly

About eight months ago I decided to set up a fan page for my hip hop blog (HipHopMusicDotCom.com), I didn’t do much with it until I noticed I was getting fans most of which were most likely referred by my friends who I initially invited when I first launched the page.

It wasn’t until September 24th that I really started to see the benefits of using Facebook fan pages. Since that date I’ve been averaging 1,000 new fans per month and averaging 1,000 + visitors per day which has increased my overall traffic by 14 percent. At this rate I’ll be averaging 2,000,000 page views per month by December.

So Here’s How You Get It Done
First thing to do obviously is to set up a fan page for your website, now I’ve created multiple fan pages for the same site in addition to building pages to promote specific products but that’s not what we are trying to accomplish in this guide. That’s more advanced and I have a separate guide for that coming up. In this guide I’m going to get you up and running with one site first. So after you set up your fan page, give it a name which would most likely be the same as your website. Before you start driving traffic to it or invite anyone fill up your fan page with some content first. You would think something like that would be a no brainier but seeing as I’ve been invited to so many fan pages that didn’t have any content I take it that this must be a common mistake.

First thing you need to do is to add a logo as the fan pages profile pic, add some external links, post some articles in the notes section, and make a few status updates. It’s also great if you add videos, if you don’t have videos of your own just go to YouTube and find some videos related to your site’s content and post them. This is good since the videos play right within Facebook, the fans love this. So now that you’ve got a active Fan page it’s time to start promoting your fan page.

The first step is to create a fan box for your website, there a few different customization options you can choose for your website. You’ll find that this simple step will be one of the biggest factors regarding your fan page getting new fans on a daily basis from the already existing traffic on your website. You might be asking what’s the point of having visitors that already frequent your website everyday as a fan? Well it’s simple it’s no different from having them on a email list (the money is in the follow up). The only difference is that following up is more instantaneous, think of your Facebook fan page as a “social follow up marketing platform”. 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day, those are unbelievable numbers. This is where web users hang out and this is where the traffic is so even though your readers come to your site every day why not have them come to your site ten times a day. With every post you make on your fan page it shows up on all your fan’s news feed therefore keeping your brand in front of your target audience.

Another thing you should do in regards to your website is to add a Facebook share button. They are a bunch of services out there that does this.

That’s all you need to do as far as your sites concerned, now lets move on to Facebook, by now you should have invited a few friends and gained a couple fans from your website depending on your site’s traffic. If you don’t already have existing traffic on your website don’t worry, the next couple of steps will help you get traffic without already having any traffic on your site. The next thing I did with my fan page is to create a simple competition, it wasn’t so much a competition so much as it was a call to action with a deadline.

And It goes a little something like this.

“Thanks to all the Facebook fans for joining our fan page, we just started this and we want to do it real big, and we need your help, our goal is 1,000 members in 1 month”

That one little status update has lead to new fans who have never heard of my site before. Needless to say I broke that record, I actually ended up getting 1,300 fans the first month.

Write Creative Content
Some really easy ways to create reactive content that will evoke a responses from your fans is to ask questions.

Eg: “When was the greatest era for Hip Hop Music, the 80s, 90s, or now?”

This lead to an overwhelming amount of responses, this is still one of the most discussed status updates to this date. Another way to create compelling content is to create lists.

Eg: “The top 5 greatest lyricists of all time?”

I do lists all the time because there easy to come up with and the fans never get tired of them. The trick to creating lists on Fan pages is to not give them choices but let them come up with the list themselves, this way more people will respond and it will keep the discussion going longer. The aim here is to keep the discussion going, why? Propagation. You see with every response a user gives on your Fan page shows up in their status feed and on their profile so there friends will all see this as well. So the more feedback your fan page receives leads to more propagation through out Facebook which leads to more fans which leads to more visitors to your site.

Sync Your Facebook Fan Page with Twitter
This is a really cool feature Facebook recently added to fan pages that gives you the ability to automatically update your Twitter account via Facebook.

Promote Your Fan Pages In Groups
A great way to get more fans is to promote your Fan page on Facebook groups related your topic. The cool thing about groups is that the group is more democratic than a fan page. When you post something in a group it’s visible to all the group members. This is not the same when you post on other peoples fan pages because your posts don’t show up in the main feed of the fan pages so no one really sees it, don’t waste your time on posting on other fan pages.

Get More Fans with Prize Giveaways.
Another way that is guaranteed to increase your fan count is by giving away prizes. With my particular audience here are some prize competition campaigns I’ve done

“Two tickets to the Jay-Z concert on 9/11 Free to whoever invites the most fans by the end of the day.”

“The new Jay-Z album is a instant classic, we are are giving away a free copy to anyone who refers the most fans today.”

These work every time , that second one lead to 100 fans in a day. I have a Facebook App set up to track who refers the most members.

Facebook Ads
I didn’t use this for my Hip Hop site but I’m currently implementing it into other fan pages that don’t have existing traffic….If your looking for instant gratification, instead of waiting months to get fans. Facebook ads are very cheap and you can get a great deal for very little. You can turn a $300 campaign into 5,000 fans and you could then double that with the tips you’ve learned in this guide and you’d never have to run another campaign again. When you create a fan page ad just don’t make it look like a ad. Here’s a rule of thumb to go with, the description you gave to your fan page and the image you used when you created it should be the same for your ad campaign which Facebook can automatically do for you.

Study Your Stats

Once you have a couple hundred or thousand fans, start checking your stats more frequently to see what’s creating the most feedback and interactions as well as demographics and more. This will gives you insight on what type of content you should be creating for your fan page. I must admit I’m quite impressed with Facebook fan page stats no other social network provides this at least not for free.

And that’s pretty much sums up Facebook fan page marketing, I have a few other posts coming up about marketing on Facebook, this is just the beginning.

Thank you for reading Chozen…

In many instances Blogger serves as a starting point for most Bloggers, a place where they can start blog with little to no risk and if it turns out to be a blog that has the potential to be a business then they can then upgrade to a self hosted service like WordPress .org. Though they’re many Bloggers out there that make a full time income with blogs hosted by Blogger. In this guide I layout the steps to creating a blog that is scalable. People use Blogger for many different purposes such as affiliate sites, news sites, video blogs, gossip, music blogs, photo blogs or a simple online journal or diary which was the original purpose of a blog, but that was a long time ago and the times have changed. Here’s how to set up Blogger correctly or at least just the smart way.

Finding A Good Domain Name For Your Blog
In many cases people use their name as their Blogger name, or they pick a name that doesn’t have much relevance on the web. Now lets say your blog is about “Web Design”, it would be smart to pick a name that relates to that topic but not only related to that topic, the name should also hold relevance and by relevance I mean that people should actually be searching for those keywords you decide to put inside your domain name. The easiest way to know what people are searching for on your particular topic is to use the Google Keyword Tool the same tool used by advertisers who want to advertise on Google.

Above is a screen shot(click for larger image) of a search I did using the Google Keyword Tool, as you can see the search volume for “web design” is very high which means it’s a very popular topic on the web. It would be wise to pick a name that is related to those set of search terms (keywords) above. The search term “best web design” seems to have a nice healthy search volume so obviously your Blogger name should be bestwebdesign.blogspot.com but that’s most likely taken so try variations like best-web-design.blogspot.com or try adding a extra word like BestWebDesignTips.blogspot.com, if your unfamiliar with Blogger and you don’t know what “.blogspot.com” means it’s simply the sub domain name that Blogger gives you when you create a blog which is the same if you created your blog on WordPress.com your site name would be BestWebDesignTips.wordpress.com. Using “.blogspot.com” with your domain is not a good idea and below in the next step I’ll show you why.

Using A Top Level Domain Name
If you one day consider taking your blog to the next level then building a brand should be your number one priority. Having a name like bestwebdesigntips.blogspot.com is not very professional and many Advertising companies don’t even accept sites with “.blogspot.com” in the URL. Once you’ve signed up with Blogger and have created a name for your blog the next step is to purchase a TLD (Top Level Domain) such as .com, .net, .info, .us, .org etc, so instead of having bestwebdesigntips.blogspot.com your URL should read BestWebDesignTips.com, BestWebDesignTips .net and and so on and so forth. Why is this important? Lets say one day you decide you want to move your blog to another service or you want to hot the blog your self on your own server, you won’t be able to move the domain name bestwebdesigntips.blogspot.com because that belongs to Blogger and all the marketing, promotion and link building efforts will be lost, but if you use your own domain name that you own then you can move that to wherever you please and thus protecting your brand.

Setting Up Your Top Level Domain With Blogger
Blogger gives you the option of purchasing a domain name from right inside Blogger for $10/year, do not buy your domain name from Blogger. Even though you may have a professional top level domain it’s still hosted by Blogger and that means if your blog gets deleted for whatever reason you will also loose that domain name. Instead use a service like Godaddy to register your domain which gives you full control over your domain name. Once you’ve registered your domain name with Godaddy setting it up with Blogger is quite easy.

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You’ll be directed to the Domain Manager page.
3. Click the domain that you’d like to use with your blog.
4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records link at the bottom of the section entitled Total DNS.
5. Click Add New CNAME Record in the box labelled CNAMES (aliases). If you’ve already created a CNAME record for your blog’s address, click the pencil icon next to the existing CNAME record.
6. For the Name, enter only the subdomain of the address you want to use for your blog. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your address, enter www here.
7. Enter ghs.google.com as the Host Name. Specify a TTL or use the default setting of 1 hour.
8. Click OK, and then click OK again.

If you don’t use Godaddy they are other domain name services out there that can do the same but since Godaddy is the most popular, easiest and just happens to be the service I use for all my domain name management.

Once you’ve finished the above steps you’ve completed the most important part of setting up your Blogger blog, below are a few other steps you should take when setting up a Blogger blog.

Giving Your Blogger Blog A Professional Look
The default themes that come with Blogger are ugly plain and simple, If you want your blog to stand out you’ll need a professional looking design. They are many places online where you can find really great looking Blogger templates the most notable resource is BTemplates .com which has hundreds of free and professional looking blog templates, they have templates that are so well designed that it makes your blog look more like a website and less like a blog.

Keep Track Of Your Visitors
There is no point to having a site and not have statistics otherwise your just shooting blanks in the dark, unfortunately Blogger does not come with built in site statistics but they are tons of free website tracking services out there. The most popular and widely used service is Google Analytics they provide in depth statistics about your visitors and the best part about the service is that it’s free. Sign up for a Google Analytics and add your tracking code to your blog to start tracking your visitors.

Keep Track Of Your Subscribers
All blogs come with something called a RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary), it’s a way for visitors to subscribe to your blog and get updates as soon as you make them. The problem is that when they subscribe to your blog there is no way for you to know how many subscribers you have or what there reading. This is where Feedburner comes in, Feedburner is a RSS feed tracking service that Google acquired a few years back for 100 million dollars, it tracks and keeps a count of how many subscribers you have for your blog it also provides allot of other in depth stats about what your subscribers are reading, it also has a cool Email feature where visitors to your blog can subscribe to your RSS feed via email and receive updates from you right within there email inbox.

Now that people is how you set up a Blogger Blog correctly!

thank you for reading, Chozen.

They are various uses for URL direction services, some include:

1. They shorten the ugly, long and hard to remember URLs/
2. Great for promoting Affiliate Programs if you don’t want to keep track of multiple domains.
3. Use to track multiple URLs to see how they perform/
4. Sent in emails to shorten longer URLs that sometime break depending on the email client.

VDirect
vdirect.com, vdirect.net, webrally.net, snapto.net, getto.net, emailme.net, netbounce.com, netbounce.net, oneaddress.net
VDirect offers two types of service: either choose a domain name from the list and get http://username.domain and http://www.username.domain (along with a username@domain free email address) or else register a domain name with them and get full www.domain.com redirection! (the latter option is also open to you if you already own a domain name). VDirect also offers statistics on the number of people visiting your site through the redirection link. All this is free and ad-supported, though you can choose to remove the ads for an annual fee. Sadly, the range of “standard” domain names is fairly limited.

WebAlias
sail.to, up.to, way.to, got.to, escape.to, and several more
WebAlias offers a free URL redirection service with both subdomain (NAME.domain.to) and subdirectory (domain.to/NAME) style addresses. The service also provides detailed traffic stats on visitors using the redirection URL.

Opt.to
arrive.to, directme.to, surfin.to, tunnel.to, mouse.to and over 100 other domain names.
Free URL redirection service with a wide choice of domain names. Offers both subdomain.domain.to and domain.to/subdomain/ forms of the URL.

TinyURL
TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs. Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.

ShortURL
shorturl.com, vze.com, filetap.com, mirrorz.com, alturl.com, spyw.com, funurl.com, mp3update.com
This service offers free URL redirection of the form user.domain, and all you have to do in return is place an 88×31 button on your site. The service itself doesn’t include advertising, but does include URL cloaking, statistics, support for META tags and more…

Beam.to
beam.to
Offers free URL forwarding of the form beam.to/sitename. You must place a small (88×31 pixel) button on your page in exchange for using the service.

CJB.net
Free URL redirection of the form domain.cjb.net. Popup ads are shown.

Has.it
has.it, does.it, knows.it, shows.it, makes.it, owns.it, rules.it, says.it, rocks.it
Free URL redirection service that provides a subdomain of the form yourname.domain.it, plus a matching yourname@domain.it email account with 6MB of storage. The service supports the inclusion of META tags for search engine positioning, and also offers URL cloaking. Best part is that there are no ads!

HotRedirect
hothere.com, coolhere.com, homepagehere.com, mustbehere.com, onlyhere.net, pagehere.com, surfhere.net, zonehere.com
This service offers free URL redirection of the form user.domain and also domain/user. It lso offers various statistics on usage of a given redirect link.)

IsCool.net
@yoursubdomain.iscool.net
Free URL forwarding. For a fee you can remove the banner ads.

Just.As
sayhi.to, anyone.to, goin.to, then.to, introduce.to, amuse.to, good.to, visitme.to, fancy.to, amaze.to and many other domains
This free redirection service offers two types of url: yourdomain.domain and domain/yourdomain, as well as free email of the form yourdomain@domain

MyDomain.com
This incredible service allows you to take full control over domain names that you own, free of charge. You can specify the URL to which you want the domain name to forward, choose from “stealth” redirection (where the destination URL is hidden) or normal redirection, point the domain to an IP address and set up one or more email forwarding accounts. You can also specify advanced domain name properties such as MX records and mail servers.

NE1
ne1.net, r8.org
Free subdomain-based URL redirection service (yourname.ne1.net or yourname.r8.org) with both cloaked and direct URL forwarding options. With the cloaked option, you’re able to specify the metatags to be included at the top of the page. The service is ad-free.

OnTheWeb
ontheweb.nu, kwik.to, isthebe.st, rr.nu, byinter.net
You get lots of choice with this free redirection service: you can choose from 2 different addressing schemes and 4 different ways of displaying your new URL. You can choose yourname.domain or domain/yourname, and how you want ads to appear on your site.

Shim.net
shim.net
Free URL redirection service that includes URL cloaking (the target URL is hidden), forwarding to dynamic IP addresses, support for search engine META tags and more. There is also a matching free email service.

The key to getting traffic from Wikipedia is to simply post external and reference links. I’ve spent quite some time posting up many different types of links to see which ones would get removed and which ones would remain. In general as long as the content is related to the topic the links will usual remain on the Wiki page. Now of course there are some exceptions to the rule for instance if your linking to copyrighted content the link will quickly be removed by a moderator, Try to keep post rejected links to a minimum be eventually those links will automatically get remove and if they will you’re a spammer they will ban you by your IP address so you can’t edit and Wikipedia articles anymore. Judging by how quickly I’ve seen links removed from Wikipedia I figure there has to be at least a thousand moderators at any given time of the day to handle the millions of submission they receive daily.

Since my site is music related I was mostly on the artist’s song pages. Once I started getting traffic I needed somewhere to send that traffic which is when I decided to start promoting music affiliate programs specifically ringtone affiliate programs. I’ve had some success with driving traffic to ringtone affiliate programs but it’s a bit tricky, for instance I send traffic to ringtone affiliate programs for Fontonia, Thumplay and SendMeMobile. I split test to see which one converted the best and to also see what links would get removed. Fontonia turned out to be the preferred choice because they had the highest payout.

The moderators removed all the links that pointed directly to ringtone sites, so that was out of the question. I found a way around this by adding a song section to Music Video Cast song whenever a new song was released I would write a small review about it then add affiliate links to purchase the song, album or ringtone. I would then go to Wikipedia place the link in the “Reference” or “External Links” section with the title “Artist X new Single Review” or something to that effect. These links were never removed and over time generated referrals through affiliate programs as well as more visitors to my site and  more click through on ads.

So just like Pay Per Click or anything else you have to have a landing page of some sorts to send the the visitors to , The sites that usually get the most traffic from Wikipedia are usually blogs and news sites, whenever I would make a blog post about a artist and then list it on Wikipedia those link would never get removed. There are rules to blogs as well though for instance your site has to be a top level domain (i.e. yourwebsite.com) and not yourwebsite.blogspot.com, yourwebsite.typepad.com or yourwebsite.wordpress.com. I use to do this with my old blogspot blog and those links always got removed, in some rare cases they remain due to moderator oversight.

One of my colleagues drives a large amount of traffic to his video game blog using the same technique I use by posting video game reviews then submitting it to Wikipedia. The advantage of using Wikipedia as a traffic source is that it’s instant, there is no need for you to rank in the search engines for any keywords since Wikipedia has done all the hard work for you.

Music Video Cast is currently averaging 1500 referrals monthly for iTunes now of course those referrals are usually only 20 to 70 cents each. I also average 150 referrals for Amazon MP3. The cool thing about Amazon is if that if you send visitors to purchase a product and they don’t but end up purchasing later on you still receive a commission. I think but I’m not sure I think that last for ninety days so if they buy a book next week and then a DVD 3 weeks after that you still get credit even though you originally sent them there to go purchase a MP3.

The amount of traffic you can receive from Wikipedia is not to be taken lightly and even though Twitter is the new marketing craze don’t forget include what still works into your website promotion efforts.

Most Marketers, Bloggers, Media/News companies and Businesses have already realized the advantages of using Twitter help build their brand. I just implemented Twitter on my music blog this month and I’m averaging 30 to 40 followers daily, We are now half way through the month and I’ve already received 1500 visits from Twitter and that’s with just over a 100 followers.So how do you get traffic from Twitter to your website or blog?

1.The first step of course is to get a twitter account.
Be sure to invite all your contacts this will get you instant followers.

2.Add Twitter to your website.
This is how you will receive most of your long term traffic, be sure to make is easy for your website visitors and blog readers to post your content to Twitter. There is a service called TwitThis that makes it very easy for bloggers to add Twitter functionality to their site. It gives visitors to your site the ability to easily post your content to Twitter similar to how the Digg This feature for Digg.com works, this is called a Retweet . Every time some one Retweets your content it will be displayed on your site showing the number of Retweets your post has received. There are quiet a few tools available that allow you to integrate your site with Twitter but TwitThis is the most popular and one of the simplest ways to get it done.

3.Tweet about Everything.
Now some may say to only Tweet about the most interesting content or posts on your website but from my experience I receive more visitors from Twitter when I tweet all my posts, of course this will not increase the amount of retweets you receive. In most cases you never know which posts will get retweets being that what you think is valuable content your followers might not.

4.Make sure your site is Mobile Ready
Something most people forget is that Twitter was originally made for the Mobile community and allot of the visitors you’ll receive to your site will be from cell phones and other mobile devices. By making your website mobile ready you will be able to monetize that traffic by serving mobile ads.

5. Follow other Twitter Users With Related Content
Try to find as much Twitter users as possible that have similar content to yours, the more you follow other Twitter users the more authority followers you’ll receive in return and will evidently gain you more website visitors. For instance if some with over 10,000 + followers retweets one of your posts this could lead to a chain reaction of retweets that will undoubtedly drive more traffic to your site. Apart from getting more followers and visitors you now have a new content source, if your following hundreds or even thousands of twitter users with content related to your own, your will always have fresh content and new ideas for your site.

6.Create Semantic Content
Calls to action (as in: “please ReTweet”), while they might sound cheesy, it works very well to get ReTweets. Making lists always works great, the longer the list the better but not in every case but in most. More importantly the quality of the list is your best bet to gain more retweets. Offering free stuff is always good, writing something about Twitter works very well too I’ve seen even negative references to Twitter receive tons of retweets. Blog posts of course receive allot of retweets. Timely content (content with short relevancy span) such as News often receive the most retweets for the simple fact that News spreads faster than any other type of content.

The concept of Twitter is almost a no brainier and done right this could quickly become a major traffic source to your site. The site is still in it’s infancy stage and is growing rapidly if you have not implemented it yet into your blogging and marketing efforts you should get that done as soon as possible.

Sooner or later, someone’s going to type your name into a search engine. What do you want them to find? Nothing? These are people who want to find you, and if you don’t have a website then you’re letting them down – they expect you to be online. For many people, you might as well not exist if you can’t be found with a search engine. Not having a website is like not bothering to get listed in the phone book. Whether it’s customers or old school friends you’re hoping for, very few people are going to find you if you aren’t online.

2. Websites Cost Next to Nothing.

Once, it cost a lot to run a website – but those days are long gone. There are ‘pay as you go’ services out there now charging as little as $1 per gigabyte of bandwidth. If you’re sensible about the size of your pages, that dollar could last you a whole month, or even longer! If you don’t want to pay for design, it’s never been simpler to do it yourself, or find free software to do it for you. Really, it’s never been cheaper to have a website than it is today.

3. Websites are Great Advertising.

Whatever you’re advertising – your services, your products, or just yourself – a website is a great way to do it. Every other kind of advertising going costs a premium, especially if you want to target a specific kind of person, and there’s no guarantee that they’re paying attention. Websites are like brochures that are free to reproduce, interactive, and quickly distributed to people who are already looking for them. No advertising medium even comes close to the ease-of-use and effectiveness of a website.

4. A Website is a Worldwide Presence.

On the web, it doesn’t matter whether someone is next door to you or on the other side of the world – they can see your website just the same as anyone else can, at no extra cost to you or to them. Phone and post both cost enormous amounts long-distance, but a website lets you send information anywhere without any extra effort or expense. You can make friends and contacts in places you’ve never been and will never go – suddenly, working globally is no more effort than working locally.

5. Your Website Can Make You Money.

There’s a lot of money on the web, and it’s not hard to get some – the longer you’re online for, the bigger your share can get. If you have something to sell, you can sell it worldwide, thanks to credit cards. Doing business online eliminates almost every overhead there is: all you need to do is have the goods. If you’ve written something useful, you can put it out there with a few ads. You won’t get rich overnight, but you can set up a steady trickle of income… and there’s no limit to the number of trickles you can set up.

6. Your Website Can Save You Time.

Giving out information takes time, whether it’s on the phone, or in brochures, or even if it’s just emailing your family. Websites are designed to save you time. All your family and friends can read your online diary (known as a weblogs), but you only had to write it once. Customers can see your whole product catalogue without ever needing to talk to you or visit you. This is the power of the web: things on it are written only once, but can be downloaded endlessly – a good website runs itself, and keeps being useful to people for much longer than you’d expect.