If you want to begin in a simple way not necessarily creating original content, here’s how to create the basis of a successful blog.

Keep in mind that: selection and aggregation of relevant content might be valuable as the original content creation.

Image Credit: luchschen

Start a blog on WordPress

The blog’s platform is important because it allows connection automatization on blogs you link on your posts and vice-versa (trackback).

The dilemma always lies between choosing WordPress or Movable Type, but if the choice for a platform consists on generating the higher traffic in less time, so you must start a blog on WordPress for a simple reason: it’s the one more frequently used and it offers a high level of customizing due to the several plugins and templates for every demand.

Select a few but relevant sources

Almost every blogger don’t generate self content, they limit to comment / translate / reelaborate the same news coming from the same sources (a.k.a. background noise, 1% rule, etc). It’s important to get them directly from the original sources skipping intermediaries.

Here there are 5 websites that constitute a good source pack on new medias, web 2.0, etc:

• Mashable
  News and articles on web 2.0 and social media
• Lifeshacker
  Great source on useful programs and advice on PC
• ProBlogger
  Specific advice on how to improve the quality of your blog and monetize traffic
• TechCrunch
  The best site to get in touch with start-ups news and new media backstage and rumors. News frequently travel as rumors by TechCrunch much before they get to public acknowledgement…
• KillerStartups
  It’s a social media specific for web applications and start-ups. Every new web-based service come by and users love blogs that post on new services on the web

If you post on other topics, you should obviously find relevant sources of your interest.

Metabolize the process of acquiring fresh news

To check and to evaluate new posts from several sources should constitute a very simple process since it may cause a great stress due to the information overload.

It should be as simple as opening the browser. And that’s exactly what you should do:

• create a homepage on iGoogle
  If you have a Google account of any kind, you can customize your homepage adding lots of content, including the RSS feed sources previously mentioned.

• use your iGoogle page as the initial page on your browser
  Evey time you open your browser you’ll instantaneously get the most recent news from the web
  

Select and publish the most interesting posts

Choose one piece of news a day from your sources and publish it to your blog.

1. Summarize the original article translating it from English
2. Add your notes and opinions
3. Always mention and link the source without hesitation
4. Always insert a related image to it

Another good idea is to insert links to other articles to get a better idea on the topic (in your blog or to an external link). That procedure generates incoming links due to automatic trackbacks and it offers a useful service to your readers.

Share only your best posts on social media

There are lots of social media that allow content sharing and getting traffic. Don’t go over the top and use one strategy that allows better results with less effort. Use SocialPoster to spread your post across social networks and OnlyWire to share your pages into the most popular social bookmarking websites.

Hint: do not post all your content indiscriminately. Share only the most interesting posts even the ones not written by you. This little strategy will help you gain reliability and get the attention of other users.

Resist to teasing

There comes a time when someone will tease you by saying all you can do is copy and paste articles and that your blog is a clone of this or that website: don’t bother!

To filter, to select with criteria and to suggest again the news published every day has become a procedure almost as important as generating original content.

If there was no one to do so, think of the amount of original news that would get lost in a global ocean of information without reaching the ones they were written to.

Some of the most popular and followed blogs do exactly as mentioned above. No doubt they do it in a structured and organized way, but what they do essentially is to gather, to select and to indicate news.

Watch, evaluate and evolve!

You’ll gradually learn how to understand what your readers search for and get to know their inclinations in a better way.

You’ll learn how to direct your researches, to select other sources, to focus, to create original news and to generate new kinds of content (audio, video, etc.).

You’ll also feel the need for tuning the instruments and to begin using more complete and efficient RSS add-ons. You’ll find more specific social media and learn how to use the ones you already work with in a better way.

We wish you good work. And remember: the ingredients for a recipe are only a part of the dish: it’s up to the cook to turn them into something good with dedication and passion.

PubMatic idea

PubMatic solves you your problem: it allows you to use at the same time the following affiliation programs:

• AdSense
• YPN
• ValueClick
• Komli
• Blue Lithium

Raising all revenues: that’s PubMatic system

Once subscribed to this service, you insert your account for any listed affiliation program. Then, PubMatic code will be used instead of the pay-per-click ones.

The system works this way:

1. All visitors open your blog page containing PubMatic tag;
2. PubMatic tests which one among all affiliation programs guarantees a higher revenue in that particular context;
   
3. Once verified which circuit allows us highest revenues (more CPC), you will be shown its ads.

A part from this, the control panel joins either statistics and revenues, that will be still controlled by each circuit (in other words revenues will still come from AdSense). This service, in beta version, is now completely free.

For a more detailed description as for subscription, implementation and control, you should read Micheal Pick article.

PubMatic: risks and advantages

Strictly speaking, most publishers have a huge interest in increasing their blog revenues, increasing AdSense revenues that during years revealed to be the most well performing and steady one.

Still have to understand whether PubMatic can be useful for this goal or instead it just does an idle comparison among ads profits deriving from different affiliation programs (as it really seems to be).

On the contrary, it could be a very good tool to start considering new independence strategies from AdSense so to avoid any unpleasant situations as many people had in the past (as for instance Master New Media case, or the bad experience I personally ran in the period November 2006 – January 2007).

So, I tried some sort of Web feedback. Cris Adams says on Webware.com to be very disappointed from the very low assistance level he received and from the impressions and clicks misalignment of PubMatic compared with AdSense report.

ItaliaSW.com is even more categorical: “Is it suggested for Google Adsense? NO, here you have all the reasons”, and a list of problems follows:

• Lost impressions for too much engaged servers
• WordPress troubles
• Impossible to delete one’s own account

Use it or not?

The choice is a personal one, even if I think it is quite unsafe to give one’s own good working affiliation account to such an unstable service.

A part from this, the possibility of doing an on-the-fly comparison for ads performances of different pay-per-click affiliations (and in different contexts) has a serious importance particularly for online marketing and advertising.

The version 2.0 has been recently launched and it allows the bulk-editing for key-words relative to several active campaigns on AdWords and friendly systems. In few words, it allows you to research, change and manage all passwords relative to the campaigns from several advertising platforms.

It supports visitors’ tracking and management of new banners formats on Google. It also brings a simple and intuitive interface.

More than just for final users, it’s a great tool for advertising agencies and online advertising which generally run several ads campaigns on different networks. Clickable pro 2.0 offers a 15-day trial period and has two subscription plans: US$129/month or 5% of campaigns investiment for an investiment higher than US$2,500.

However, focusing only on keywords might not only not give the expected results, but even damage promotion to the extent of precluding the site occurrence among search results.

Most important is instead to consider a specific parameter calculated by Google through different evaluation factors: site ranking.

What is site ranking?

It can be described as the importance of a site. Generally, one thinks site ranking is calculated on the basis of how many times it is linked by external pages. This is only partly true.

Links quantity has only a slight influence, since the importance of a site is determined not exclusively by absolute parameters but also by values interpreted over a period of time.

First factor: the age of domain name

Many domain names are created and kept active only for a short period, namely the time needed to carry out massive span actions using a domain which is closed once the operation is completed.

This is the reason why the domain age is an extremely important ranking factor: the longer a domain stays active, the greater the chance the ranking increases.

Second factor: site updating.

It’s not only important to update contents, but the way the updating is performed.

Content changes are not considered by Google as a renewal index. Indeed, modifications are monitored with accuracy over a limited period of time in order to determine updating frequency and quantity.

The reason is straightforward: massive cotent modification made over long periods could simply denote a graphic renewal of the site, while small but frequent changes to text are a probable index of constant maintenance and information updating.

In case this is noticed on your site, after a period of silent “evaluation” the ranking raises.

Third factor: external links.

It’s usual practice to exchange links in the hope of getting a ranking increase; however, also in this case, Google watches, records and evaluates with great attention and for a specific period, the development of the situation.

As a result, the sudden appearance of dozens or hundreds of links to your site in quite a short time doesn’t help; on the contrary, you might run the risk to be rated as a “web spammer”.

Avoid as much as possible reciprocal links, being them possible signals of a specific agreement.

Google considers positively external links, but on condition that reciprocal ones are a relatively small number or they increase at a reasonable pace over time as a result of a natural growth of users interest towards your contents, and above all that linked sites’ subject is somewhat related to your contents.

Fourth, essential factor: grammar accuracy and writing plainness

Google records, monitors and evaluates. But how can software be able to assess main topics in a site, or judge whether search keywords are related to its subject or not?

Search engines use particular programs which “understand”, on the basis of text contents, the main subject of a site.

Normal for a human being, it’s not quite so for an informatics system made of cold and stiff algorithms: anyway, programs of this kind are nearly always able to precisely detect a subject out of a text through grammar and logical analysis. Once this is done, previously described actions are triggered.

Obviously enough, if we don’t structure our contents in a clear and exact way, Google will not waste time “trying” to detect the subject, to the contrary, it will ignore us and, as a consequence, not even check for updates, link or other factors.

You can check my funny italian slang here (I’m @ikaronet)

About the Manifesto, i report an important point  from the official page;

Many people on twitter want to add social media consulting or claims of social media expertise to their little bag of tricks. This is quite prevalent now. Indeed there seems to be a wave of people seeing social media consultancy as something they can just breeze into and use to make money from naive clients.

This ruse is assisted by the fact that it is difficult to prove social media expertise, but rather easy to claim it. One obvious way to lay claim to twitter expertise is to amass a large number of friends and followers. Another is to seek high rankings in the various twitter ranking systems or on twitter leaderboards.

These systems and leaderboards reward twitter account holders with increased scores for certain supposedly valued twitter behaviour. Generosity scores are based partly on the number of retweets that one tweets. Frequent publishing of the @names of others is considered generous as well. It is not hard to realize that retweeting a string of @name recommendations is a generosity ranking bonanza—a huge payoff in just one tweet…

The point is: is FollowFriday spam?

First of all i wanted to verify if it works: i sent 15 twits via Twitter with users recomendations. In 10 minutes i loose 10 followers and i got 4 new ones. So, it seems that i loose just 6 followers but the matter is about quality, not numbers. So, my little experience says that Follow Friday does not work.

I loose followers who was really interested in resource sharing because of the noise that i generated with my twits, and i got 4 followers that probably will never interact with me. People follow people using follow friday just to increase their followers number and cheat the game.

To be fair i have to say that not everybody act in this way, but most users do. This concept is expressed perfectly into the Manifesto.

Another important point is that the problem is not ethical, but pretty practical. I have “just” 400 followers and on friday it’s almost impossible to follow the twits because of FFriday.

How can i read the suggestions of my followers if there are hundreds of nickname running on the timeline each 10 minutes? It’s noise hiding signal.

But also i believe that it’s people who create situations. There nothing bad or good, is the way we act that make something bad or good.

So, there is no rule to follow. We just have to act on ourselves to change the way we interact with others.

This Manifesto could be a good start point to seed a conversation in order to discover the best way to interact between ourselves…

What do you think about it? Did you ever use Follow Friday to increase your followers number? Tell us something about your experience.

1. AdSense

AdSense  is the best pay per click affiliate program for sure. The best features are the huge announcement variety and the very effective contextualization mechanisms. Another strong point is his dynamism, which rewards the most authoritative web sites with a higher click remuneration and penalizes web sites with poor contents. This mechanism is called Smart Pricing and update the price for click each week.

• Ads type: text ads
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no.
• Language: almost all
• Earnings type: Pay per Click
• Advantages: Reliability and optimal remuneration
• Disadvantages: Possibility of being banned due to events outside of your control
• Take care about: Smart Pricing. Adsense can provide a hug earning range: it can make you rich, or really sad.
• Payments: Check, wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.google.com/adsense/

It’s one of the most popular links exchange and text ads advertising program. It displays announcement blocks like AdSense, but not in contextual way. It is possible to select network Ads or only direct links, which advertisers buy on the publisher web site. AdBrite recently introduced InLine advertising (links to the words of web page text).

• Ads type: text ads, InLine ads and Intertitial
• Ads selection: selected by categories
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: almost all
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click and Pay Per Impression
• Advantages: it manages text ads and links selling in the same time
• Disadvantages: Lack of ads for non-english web sites.
• Take care about: Video ads are recently available
• Payments: check
• Subscription: https://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/register_form.php

It’s an affiliation program for contextual ads and inline ads. It has a good advertisers variety and the earning chance is not bad. Most common languages are available, but each language has its own web site with enrolment rules, tos etc.

• Ads type: annunci testuali e InLine
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: almost all but Portoghese (strange…)
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click
• Advantages: Nice interface for ads customisation. Good earnings.
• Disadvantages: No clicks number into the reports
• Take care about: Support seems slow
• Payments: Wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.miva.com

It is one of the most popular contextual affiliate programs for InLine ads. Unfortunately he only accepts sites in English language. I am testing it from little and it seems to have a good performance, even if it’s not comparable with AdSense earnings. In any case it’s a good AdSense competitor. It allows to highlight the text on which contextualize and display Inline ads. It can be used together with AdSense like the others InLine programs (but it’s always better ask for confirmation to the AdSense support).

• Ads type:  Inline
• Ads selection: contextual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: English
• Earnings type: Pay Per Click
• Advantages: It allows to customize the underline colour
• Disadvantages: It accept English web sites only
• Take care about: it’s impossible to update your user data online
• Payments: check
• Subscription: http://www.kontera.com/mainform.aspx?type=1

It’s a Pay Per Performance affiliate program; it pays each time a user performs a specific action (lead, buy, contact etc). It has a huge list of publishers with a big number of banners, images and textual announcements to be manually inserted into web pages. You need to be authorized by each advertiser in order to promote their services. Imho it does not work on content web site.

• Ads type:  Images,  Flash movies and text
• Ads selection: manual
• Minimum traffic amount: no
• Language: Almost all
• Earnings type: It depends from advertiser (sell, lead or other. There’s few pay-per-click ads)
• Advantages: There’s a lot of publisher with terrific ads management tools
• Disadvantages: I don’t trust their stats.
• Take care about: When an advertiser does not pay Tradedoubler, the publisher (you) is not paid. It happens too much time in my opinion…
• Payments: wire transfer
• Subscription: http://www.tradedoubler.it/pan/login?action=register

Google has recently opened to Inline affiliate programs together with AdSense, but with the limitation of different layout and colours. If you want to take this chance you would in any case follow the rule number 1 of each AdSense publisher;

1. Ask for confirmation personally to the AdSense support
2. Print the positive answer
3. Keep it in a secure place, in case you’ll unfortunately need to use it

They could, however, constitute a valuable alternative and create a second leg to stand on in order to avoid depending on one source only.

But, let’s speak clearly: banners and graphic ads can’t compete with contextual ads on blogs, unless…

… you find a system to hyperlinks relevant keywords in every post, instantaneously and on-the-fly.

Image Credit: cre8tiv88

Now things would become interesting because, with only one action, you can add a remarkable amount of links. Check out how to proceed in each one of the cases:

• On a CMS developed in PHP
• On WordPress
• On VBulletin (one of the most common forum platform)

Generating links on-the-fly with WordPress: the Cross-linker plugin

Cross Linker is a great plugin for WordPress that generates links to determined keywords when the post is visualized without changing the source code (download version 1.3.2 here). Besides specifying the keywords with relative URLs for the link, it allows you to:

• ignore keywords included in determined tags
• insert the nofollow option in the anchor text
• search for the keywords to be linked also on comments

and much more.

Geek Auto linker Lite 4.5.0 for vBullettin

It’s the analogous plugin for that popular forum platform. It’s much more simple than Cross-linker for WordPress, but is executes its job perfectly. To download it, you need to register in the forum.

Generating links dynamically in a generic CMS developed in PHP

If you don’t have WordPress or vBullettin, but you do have a CMS in PHP, there’s a source you can use as a base to be perfected and adapted to your demands:

$anchor_keys["anchor1"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation1″;
$anchor_keys["anchor2"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation2″;
$anchor_keys["anchor3"] = “http://www.site.com/path/to/affiliation3″;
while (list($anchor,$link) = each($anchor_keys)) {

$key_linked=”<a href=”$link” rel=”nofollow” style=” … “>”.$anchor.”</a>”;
$post = preg_replace(‘{b’.$key.’b}’, $key_linked, $post,3);
$post = preg_replace(‘{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
$post = preg_replace(‘{(<A[^<]*)’.$key_linked.’([^<]*</A>)}i’, ‘$1′.$key.’$2′, $post);
}

This code performs the following task:

1. Before viewing the post, search in the text the words to be used as anchor texts indicated in the array $anchor_keys
2. Once you find them, link them to the corresponing URL
3. Check if they’re not a part of a link (as an anchor text or URL), if so, it removes the link that’s just been created
4. Preview the post

Cautions

You’d better not exaggerate on this possibility and avoid forcing links not relevant that send the user to unexpected places. If, for example, you spontaneously link Skype to your posts, you could, in some cases, do it through an affiliate program that recognizes a commission. The user will get to Skype.com anyway regardless it’s a direct link or not.

Furthermore, it’s advisable to use the nofollow option for affiliate links since, even they forward the user to a relevant content, they do so through an intermediate path that is not relevant, and they could play not very pleasant games from an SEO point of view.

In relation to the most popular affiliate programs, I suggest two among all:

• Commission Junction
  I’d dare to say it’s the number one affiliate program in the world
• Tradedoubler
  It has all kinds of advertisers