Using email to promote your website or product can be powerful. Even more powerful than blogging. You can reach a large base of people in a second. However to be successful you have to do it effectively.

Be Careful of Spamming

I’ve asked the question “Isn’t Email Marketing Spamming?“. I still think it is, but nonetheless email marketing is used everyday and can be a good thing.

Grab Your Targets Attention

Recently I received two emails that can be regarded as “email marketing”. They each had the goal of me to check out their blog. One I didn’t respond to. The other I responded to and built a relationship with them.

The First:

Hello, my name is (removed) and thought you might like to read a very insightful pots i made for my blog about how to increase your subscribers.

I’d like it if you could express your honest opinion about it, you can see it here (url removed)

The email wasn’t personal at all and “post” isn’t even spelled right. It made me want to NOT visit the blog.

The second:

It’s Matt here from ContestBeat.com, where one of your previous site competitions was featured.

I just wanted to get in touch regarding any future competitions you might be holding. Besides from being able to submit them free to the site, I have just finished a a couple of posts that could really improve the success of your contest. They are as follows:

10 Tips to Run a Better Blog Contest

Why Run a Blog Contest?

The posts draw my own experience in blogging about contests each day and I am sure they will make a difference to you, so please feel free to check them out. Also if you feel the tips might be something your readers could benefit from, (either when they run their own contests or enter in to your next one), please don’t hesitate to spread the word!

Matt has already done something for me by featuring our contest. Why would that give me any reason not to check out his posts and possible offer a positive contribution to them via a comment or a post of my own?

After this email I responded and he ended up featuring Blog about your Blog for his new project which I wrote about here.

Being Effective

The two emails are pretty different but each had the same goal. They wanted to promote their posts and gain more readers. Matt was obviously effective when doing this. He’s already offered or given me something free, that is enough incentive alone for me to want to visit his blog again.

To be successful at email marketing the goal isn’t to email everyone in the world and hope for the best. It’s about being effective.

To try to find another way to earn money online I have been experiencing with NeverBlue Ads. There are different websites you can promote and each one has it’s different terms and payout.

Earning Money

I have yet to earn money with Neverblue Ads. My banners get click throughs, but they just aren’t converting. There isn’t many things that would fit here to promote, but there are plenty on Its All Free Online. Their freebie and survey section seem to have the most offers to promote.

Depending on your niche you can easily work one of the promotions into a post and promote your post.

Super Affiliate

Zac Johnson has posted about NeverBlue Ads before. In his latest post, he reports that he was able to earn 10,000 in a month through this program.

He has most success with PPC campaigns which is my next experiment. Not only will I be able to send traffic to my website, I can also potentially earn money by doing so. Sounds like a win-win situation for me.

Neverblue Ads Affiliate Program

If you aren’t much for promoting products, if you can earn by getting affiliates. I haven’t seen Neverblue Ads advertised much.

Each person you refer will get you 2$ or 2% of their earnings. I would recommend going with the 2% as I’ve had troubles for the $2 converting

Has anyone tried this program?

Signup to NeverblueAds today and Make More Money!

Organic search traffic is essential for any blog that is hoping to monetize with ad programs like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, etc. Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in garnering your share of search engine traffic. How a search engine perceives your site is very crucial in this.

In our day to day blogging we link out to several sites. Search engines follow these links (unless you specify rel=nofollow tag) and assumes you give a positive vote to the site you have linked to. Likewise, other sites link to your site as well. Depending on the quality of the site you are linking to or the site linking to you, your search engine ranking can be affected.

So, how do you go about checking for good links and bad links in your blog?

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker

This excellent tool scans the url you provide and checks for bad links and flags problem areas in your site. After it has scanned all the links in your site, it shows the total number of links, number of unique links and number of questionable links.

Here are a few things this tool shows:

• Link Density: It refers to the number of links in a single page. A high number of links (over 100) in a single page will be looked at as a red flag according to Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Bad Neighborhood Warning: The tool shows a warning if your blog has an anchor text in a link to a usually spammy industry like sex, gambling or pharmaceutical. This is probably just a false warning. For example, my post titled ‘Check for Sex offenders in your area’ threw a warning flag even though it was a genuine post.
• Blog Spam: If a page you have linked to is in a domain which is appearing as a link from a lot of blogs, it could be indicative of blog comment spamming. My recent link to buymybrokenipod.com was flagged with this. In fact, my links from Blog About Your Blog is flagged as Blog Spam by this tool as I contribute as an author as well as a commentator quite often.
• 404 Not found: A handful of these isn’t usually a problem. To a search engine, a site that returns a lot of 404 errors would means lower trust factor. So, you may need to check the 404 errors in your site and correct the errors.

As you can see, this tool is not 100% fool proof but it can give you a very good overall idea of who you are linking to and how a search engine spider will look at your blog. For eg. my archives page has links to all my previous posts and shows 306 links. I had previously used robots.txt file to stop the bots from spidering this page but I’ll have to recheck if it’s still working.

Also, check out my previous post on Free tools to Check the Health of Your Blog.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous and incremental process. Tools such as the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker can be a great addition to your toolbox that help with making your blog a little bit more optimized.

I would love to hear about any other tools you use in the pursuit for SEO nirvana! Drop a comment below if you have one.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable. (RSS)

I wasn’t able to get this on video I apologize. Instead of waiting forever to tape it I went ahead and drew the winners.

The way it will work is first drawn will choose which prize they want, second gets second choice and third gets what is left.

The winners are:

1. Laura211 MP3 Player
   
2. LauraWilliams 125×125 Banner
3. International Freebies Full Website Review
   

Congrats to our winners. Remember they have the choice of three prizes that include, an MP3 player, a 125×125 Banner for 1 month, and a full website review by adsense tracker.

I am happy to say our contest generated over 40 entries! This easily put us in the top 5,000, and we are close to breaking the top 4,000! I have been looking for a great sponsor to put up a prize for our next contest. I should be putting up our next contest soon.

Thursday night is always busy for me, Survivor, Ugly Betty and CSI. Shame on me for forgetting it’s friday, comment friday!

I’ve got so many article ideas that there isn’t enough time in the week to write them all. I will hopefully be announcing the comment friday winner, and the contest winners all tomorrow.

I just wrote a pretty good article on Having Integrity While Blogging that I’d love more comments on. This week for comment friday tell me about anything you want to. September just ended, Oct is beginning, then Halloween. How exciting.

A-List bloggers have been called into question about promoting all of the new services. Many are promoting a service or website regardless, just as long as it can make them some money. How is one to know if a website is going to make money or not if you’ve never made money with them before? How can you call Agloco a “money maker” if it hasn’t made you money?

Why I Didn’t Promote WidgetBucks

I already wrote about why I didn’t jump on the Blogrush and DealDotCom bandwagon. Just as several others did, I received a tip from Jim Kukral about the launch of WidgetBucks. I chose not to promote Widgetbucks and I’m glad I didn’t. Besides that it reminded me a lot of dealdotcom, there are a few other reasons. Andy Beard covered them very well in his review of Widgetbucks. He also chose not to promote it either.

Jim did a great job of promoting the website, the buzz was great, with the power of blogging. However doing such a great job I knew it would be very well covered and over-hyped.

Does a Blogger Need to be Careful What They Promote?

Blogging Experiment has started a great discussion about this topic. Problogger just mentioned the article and it has generated quite a few more responses now, over 30. I got in on the discussion very early and wrote several comments about what I thought.

I think bloggers should be careful on what they promote and how they do it. By offering a generic promotion that I’ve read elsewhere a dozen times is really a turnoff. By offering something unique or a different outlook on the program, I may be more persuaded to sign up under the referral link.

Most importantly you should be honest, don’t promise your readers that they will make money etc, before the website even launches (agoloco + dealdotcom) or before you’ve made money with them.

Honest and Integrity Blogging

With all of the drama going on and bloggers “selling out” to make a buck, I think reputation, honesty and integrity will become even more important.

On a closing note, “CheapGirl” one of our regular readers, recently wrote about Blog about your Blog in a different way that I’ve seen before.

“I really enjoy reading Matt’s posts. He’s very honest about what’s going on in the internet world of blogging.”

I’ll always do my best to make sure that stays true.

I tried to get in touch with Darren before his contest went live, but I wasn’t able to.

Darren of Problogger recently asked for sponsors for his contest. He came up with 54,000$ worth of prizes from 115 sponsors. He couldn’t even accept all of the prizes! Luckily Blog about your Blog got in there in time and put up a 125×125 month ad and blog analysis for a winner.

Finding a Contest Sponsor

With the overwhelming response to that contest I’m sure there are plenty of people who wanted to put up a prize got left out. That’s where Contest Beat comes in.

After coming in contact with Contest Beat through email I mentioned our post about sponsored contests. He then came back with a post for me about sponsors looking for contests. I’m not sure if he had the idea before, but I think it’s a good one. The list is small right now, however I expect more people to get interested with it. Sponsoring a contest can be very beneficial.

Why You Should Sponsor a Contest

There are many reasons to sponsor a contest, and I want to list several possibilities.

• More links to your website
• Buzz created
• No promotional work involved
• Playing to a new group of readers
• Gain more readers and subscribers
• Build your blogging network

By simply putting up the prize, it becomes the bloggers job to promote their contest. To provide the maximum results for the blogger and the sponsor it could take a little bit of marketing, but that has become a lot easier with contest blogs like Contest Beat.

For very little work you can get good exposure, especially if you can sponsor the contest with a great prize. More bloggers will be willing to participate. Contests have become very popular that just by hosting or sponsoring one you will almost automatically gain several links.

If you are also looking to sponsor a contest, make sure to contact contest beat to get on his list.