Greenpointers.com is very excited to be an online affiliate of our favorite local bookstore WORD. I am a major blog and online marketing nerd and read a ton of books on the subject. In an effort to monetize the website, I learned about affiliate marketing. After interviewing author Robert Anasi, I asked myself, if I write a great book review about a book I love, why not get a commission from the sale of the book?
I looked into it and via Amazon.com we can do this, but I want to keep it local! After some research I discovered that WORD has an affiliate program, so I put together a Books We Love page, where you can browse through titles we love that inspire this website. This page will grow as we review more books, but in the meantime, we have a few categories: Brooklyn & Beyond, Food (obviously!) and Blog/Social Media.
The book I am currently reading called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs is a book I highly recommend to anyone who has a website. And if you don’t have a website, you should have a website!
The idea is that “outbound marketing” is for people with a lot of money and no brains. A great example is commercials during the Superbowl. While these ads are well done, they are extremely costly and the method for reaching out to potential customers is in the form on an interruption. Inbound Marketing on the other hand is for the people like you and me: people with not a lot of money and a lot of smarts. With Inbound Marketing, using blogs (hey hey – you’re reading a blog!) and Social Media, you can cleverly get customers to come to you.
It works!
Understanding SEO, which is search engine optimization is critical! When someone searches for “awesome Greenpoint blogs”, I want Greenpointers.com on top!
I used a simple technique that took me 30 seconds to do and Greenpointers.com traffic is soaring. Want to know what it is? Look on top of your web browser. See where it reads: “Greenpointers: Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Best Neighborhood Blog?” It used to say “From Ash To Apollo And All That’s In Between,” a catchy saying that blog founder Justine created. While I love that saying, it doesn’t help us in that spot because that spot is critical for SEO. And each word is ranked by search engines in order of appearance, with “Greenpoint” being more important than “Brooklyn’s” and so forth.
So I searched around the back end of my WordPress blog system and it took me like a second to change it. And the results have been astounding! On Sundays, we don’t get a ton of traffic, like 250-350 visitors. Last Sunday, a few days after I made this switch, I got over 750 visitors in one day!
Aside from this technique there are lots of other great ways you can get found online for little or no money at all. If you have a website and the only person who checks it is your Mom, then pick up a copy or EBook of Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah and David Meerman Scott.
Thanks for sharing such great information !!
No problem! I see you have a website and I hope it helps!
Yes many websites are under-monetized. I have seen websites with traffic over 10.000 unique visitors per month, which fail to make money.
Yet, the traffic is the main problem for most of the websites.
Ps. Thanks for the post.