There are two ways you can establish yourself in order to have your site become well-known, grow a large user-base and earn the potential to make decent profits.

And it is not the usual time-wasting, “almost sold out but you’re in just in time” or “usually it would cost you $999 but for you, just $99” formula X being constantly advertised in long sales pitch pages.

It depends on how other search engines do in order to decide which ad will go to which position but Google does it through a bidding system with the keywords selected. The highest bidder for any given keyword will get the top positions. Generally speaking, the odds of being put there are directly proportional to the amount of money you’re willing to spend on the ad.

That so happens to be the catch: advertising has costs, which may or may not be viable, depending on the site.

The second one is Email Marketing.

As the name goes, you are sending emails of posts from your site, a promotional campaign you have created or something similar, directly to readers who agreed to receive your emails.

Email Marketing allows you to advertise products, let people know what’s new around you and what other media you’ve set it up to post, without having to do it manually and constantly.

Suppose you wanted your readers to get the new blog post in their inbox so they wouldn’t miss it. This function is already native in many Email Marketing Systems. You only need to configure the email template (the general look and layout) and drop the RSS link of your blog.

In this regard, and if you have a series of posts or emails already arranged to be delivered, this service will do the sending for you, 100% hands-free while ensuring you won’t disconnect from your regulars.

Let’s go through this by parts. First…

As always, webmasters who haven’t finished building their sites, sites with poor traffic or with posts being made on an irregular basis should probably fix those issues instead since this will, more often than not, require a financial investment. To get the most bang out of your buck, you absolutely need to ensure there will be something new coming into play on a regular basis to justify the service you hired.

If you don’t already have subscribers, that’s not a problem. Amassing them through your website is entirely possible and relatively simple. The TRI started its email marketing like that.

Spammers should go without saying and unless you own an e-store, overly commercial webmasters should also reconsider getting one. In the latter case, it’s a matter of changing the approach.

Even if a site is new and doesn’t have traffic but it is complete, has a few posts of its own and more of them coming then this is a definite plus.

The reason why I believe the lack of subscribers in an initial phase is not a concern is due to the quality vs quantity difference. 10 active subscribers are more likely to bring more life to the said website than 100 that barely read the emails in the first place.

Apart from the set of tools already given by the provider, like analytics, free images, integration with other platforms, surveys, etc.

With this, we’ve covered that not using Email Marketing Systems for website promotion may result on webmasters missing out on plenty of positive aspects that would help their startup grow another notch.

But these platforms have to be operated in the manner they were intended to. Using them incorrectly is worse. What follows below is a set of actions that can be considered misuse of this service.

This article raises some questions, along with the fact I’ve stated we’d thoroughly cover Email Marketing. But for the sake of keeping the series focused on the most common mistakes Affiliate Marketers do, we will not address them here and will make the appropriate posts on the Portal instead. in a timely manner, we will approach subjects such as…

Not using Email Marketing Systems – The Conclusion

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of acquiring and setting one up, there are alternatives for that, especially if you use WordPress.

Some plugins can deliver the new posts by email but to have a more refined control of how and when they are delivered and to create a complete campaign and segmentation of your subscribers, I don’t see another way that will be as effective.

When I go to work through the train, it’s very difficult to find someone who doesn’t have a smartphone glued to their hands, swiping their fingers up and down or talking during their entire trip, like the above image.

People are connected to a vast amount of reasons on their social media accounts and remain connected for long periods.

Many of them intended to be for businesses only but when the potential to attract all sorts of users became worth exploring, we got ourselves a brand new world unlocked.

What used to take minutes, hours, days and a few bucks, is now done instantly and for free.

Talking to someone on the opposite side of the planet only requires you to connect with the said person and presto! Even if one of them isn’t online, you can always drop them a message.

How convenient, huh?

In the same manner that a person will want to communicate with their loved ones, a corporate entity might want to try a closer approach with its customers and backers.

There are multiple approaches to reach that goal, such as telemarketing, if the intention is selling and direct mailing, to provide generic information, apart from already existing contact options where the client or supporter takes the initiative. But those two are becoming deadbeat horses. Not to mention people, in a general sense, don’t like receiving junk mail or being phoned all the time.

If such a company wants to get close enough, without spending a fortune for the same effect, the solution is using the same platform as their users: Social Media.

Another one explained to him that, out of the emails sent, if some returned as paying customers, the company would have not only recovered some of their lost users but also made a profit, which would justify the effort.

Despite this example is referring to Email Marketing, which we will thoroughly cover in the future, the principle is the same for social network marketing.

Now let’s delve back to websites bearing what was said in mind.

We have established that:

What about webmasters? They can capitalize that traffic pool just as efficiently.

 If any given website doesn’t drive enough organic traffic, it will surely benefit from a fan page based on an active social network. If the fan page or even the main account is already active that’s a major plus for the site.

 It becomes a matter of simply dropping a link to a blog post or a relevant page of your site.

If you don’t already have a fan page or your main account is not very active, then you got work to do. This means your attention must be divided to the site and whatever networks you intend to use. However, this must be conducted in harmony and not place more effort in one in detriment of the other.

I’ve compiled below a few tips that will help you increase the interaction with your fan page. More may be added in the future as well.

Number one? Facebook. Should go without saying, really.

Discovering someone who doesn’t have an account in it should be one tricky challenge.

Apart from Facebook, things aren’t as straightforward and will depend on what type of media you provide…

Not using Social Media – The Conclusion

It’s dumb not to. Sorry to put it so bluntly but it’s true. How many Social Networks do you use? I’m willing to bet it’s more than just one. Then why not use your account to advertise your site or even create a full-blown fan page?

Sure, it’s another site to work on and ideally, webmasters would only have to care for their own. But the diversity it creates opens the door for plenty of opportunities. Who knows which one will bring the more benefits to you?

Let us know how is it going for you. Have you seen success in capitalizing the potential hidden in Social Networks? Have you just began your first steps on it? Or you don’t use them at all? Why?

The XXI Century World offers plenty of opportunities like we’ve never seen before.

When it comes to enjoyment, investments solutions, day-to-day services, technology… the possibilities are endless and the benefits too numerous to list.

There are plenty of places you can go there and things to get to fill your everyday needs. Nowadays, you can even do that from the comfort of your bedroom, within a few clicks of your mouse and you can have several tasks done effortlessly.

This is more noticeable with smartphones: where you’d need to have several different devices to send emails, take screenshots or record video/sound, call or text someone or play games can now be done with a single device, which would only require a one-time investment.

And they are available almost everywhere. Since a lot of folks cannot afford to spend any time without them, whether business-related or just for leisure, that need has to be catered for, right?

So, that means you have all that power within the palm of your hand. Such power increases even more with applications created for your convenience. Depending on how you can keep up with technological advances and your wallet allows you to, these are available for as little as $60.

Tech and gadgets are an easy one.

When consumers receive their paychecks there’s one thing (or set of things) that they seldom miss. It’s almost like clockwork and the main reason why many work for in the first place: the much-vaunted utility bills and related expenses, which too, are as varied as everything else already described.

By now, you probably have noticed the sad part of finances which is part of today’s topic:

There are plenty of ways to spend money.

We’d never have debts if we had as many income streams as money drains. But the idea of having a job for every expense isn’t feasible. It isn’t necessary either because, generally speaking, we earn more than we spend.

I knew someone that had 2 jobs and was looking for a third. 2 part-times earned her more than a single full-time job. Still, there’s only so much time will allow you to do and someone working long hours won’t have to time to spend the money they make, regardless.

Online it isn’t much different. It’s logical that more money allows you to do more things and so, having multiple income streams is the way to go in that regard.

That also safeguards you from losing everything in one go. When someone gets laid off, their income is cut entirely and they need to search for another job. But having a second minimizes losses since should one fountain run dry, there will be another to dampen the fall.

This is where things go wrong.

No one should put their eggs in the same basket; we never know when it might rupture. Prevention is as simple as getting a new basket, that is, other income streams.

Affiliate Marketers are always searching for new opportunities and money-making sites. I generally consider this a good practice. A program with few members has a better-earning potential if it takes off just nicely or one that has a great earning potential despite having a few years under its belt.

The thing is that no one knows what affiliate programs will rise or fall and some affiliates join them based on what they hear what others say about it because someone said it’s easy and they will earn a lot of money effortlessly or simply because they need. Decisions founded in emotion and not reason.

It’s much easier to join 5 or so programs now, to figure out what your next move will be later – which is the Call-To-Action most of them use – than getting to know whether the said opportunity is suitable for you.

Generating multiple online income streams should be made in a manner you can scale up when the comfort zone is reached. Getting ahead of yourself will only lead to incomplete, abandoned projects and loads of frustration.

Consider there’s this month old site that sells ads and affiliate links but only has 3 blog posts and isn’t even completed. It will bring a lot less income, if any, than one that is finished, updated and has been around for more time.

What the webmaster needs to do first is to finish its layout and toolset, update it and start getting regulars. The readers he/she obtains then represent the comfort zone; where the dialogue goes both ways instead of just from the blog. At that point, the said webmaster can figure out what to do in order to monetize their traffic or increase the traffic even further.

With affiliate programs, the principle is the same: you shouldn’t join more than those you can manage, especially those that have a paid membership.

Getting rich quick is entirely possible and there are plenty of legitimate opportunities on the internet and on the outside. An interesting example of that is the FOREX Market: once available to small elites but now within the reach of almost all users.

It’s possible to generate 4-figure profits within the hour, which despite being insufficient to make you a millionaire but it’s more than enough for a cruise ship trip. A fine way to break the ice, if you ask me.

A case I remember when thinking of this post, was the webmaster on V7N sharing his story about he earned $197, give or take, through an affiliate link from his month old website.

We now have a notion of what’s possible from these examples and other REAL overnight stories.

But what those success stories don’t always disclose is usually what keeps everyone from achieving the same success. Let’s be honest here: it takes a lot of effort to find a gold mine and explore it. If somebody managed to find one that could be mined, they’d sell the gold, not the mine, right?

The untold aspect that sets apart the many that don’t earn any money from the few that do lies in knowing the difference between “rule” and “exception”.

In short, rules apply to everyone or are meant to be in effect for the majority. Exceptions are made when the rule is incompatible with a specific case.

Multi-Level Marketing programs have affiliates that join early, create learning centers, resource stores and all sorts of aids and media to advertise their referral links and the services they themselves provide.

This enables them to earn money from the affiliate program and the small empire they created to help others do the same, all at the same time as they earn from multiple streams.

This lets someone earn more than sufficient to work full-time in it.

To contrast with the above, MLMs also have members that don’t earn as much as the ones above but get extra pocket money or even a secondary income source. Either that or, more frequently, don’t earn anything at all.

It’s not difficult to guess right which is the rule and which is the exception. Albeit somewhat of a doubtful finding, the correspondent Wikipedia article corroborates with this view.

When you stumble upon a page where a fellow tells you a story of how he/she created this program that prints them money from overnight, it isn’t necessarily a hoax. It might have worked just perfectly.

Yet, I would hardly agree any given system is “proven” to work because it made one person rich.

The same system won’t work wonders for everyone and I don’t think it is supposed to. Why? Because a number of factors come into play:

Among others.

Still, people don’t always glance at this checklist to know if they have what it takes to make something from the program they joined beforehand and simply cling onto the hopes of closing the month with an inflated wallet…

…When in fact, that wallet belongs to the masters who created that program they signed up for while these affiliates leave empty-handed. It happens a lot in this industry.

That alone is very frustrating, isn’t it?

Expecting large returns was always an issue in affiliate marketing. But on the opposite side of the scale, did the affiliate put enough effort to really anticipate such big compensation?

From everything I’ve written so far in this series, this is not yet another symptom of what happens in a webmaster, affiliate or user would consider the appropriate course of action:

This is the root of all of those problems and others I am yet to write about. More concisely it is…

Yes. I’m serious. Stop reading right now and go ahead. Look for any business, restaurant, shop, big or small, take note of 5 things the store has. Write it on a piece of paper if you can’t memorize all 5. Then come back.

Got it? No? Then take a second look. Ready? OK

Which one of those characteristics, objects or details about that store can be obtained for free or take very little effort or time to make? Or to own?

See, to get a store like that, first, you need to decide what business type you expect to have. In the WINTEMO example, it was a laundry place.

To get it going, you have to rent the space, handle paperwork, taxes, buy equipment, a couple staff members, cleaning supplies, print and distribute pamphlets to let everyone know you’re opening, and other things between those lines.

You might be able to turn a restaurant in a laundry shop within 24 hours, but that’s gonna take you a lot of effort. Financial and time efforts are only the biggest ones.

It’s important to have some goals set up as a guideline, especially when it’s a continuous work, like the job of a webmaster. To help you define yours, I’ve compiled a short list of aspects I consider to be of utmost importance.

Expecting huge returns – The Conclusion

Can you have it all? The answer is yes. But getting it all in one go without any effort to obtain what you wish to receive, probably will never happen.

And let’s face it: if we got everything we ever wanted for peanuts, we’d be very likely not to appreciate it. People tend to put more value and cherish what took them blood, sweat and tears to get.

This process is also needed since it teaches us skills we’ll need further ahead.

Give us your opinion. Are you a webmaster that once investment too little or too much? Did it work for you or have you missed your objective?

Before giving Blogger and other free sites commonly used by new webmasters a rest, we’ll dissect another common practice that generates poor results, which is being inconsistent in how their blogs are used. This is tied to site layout though it also demonstrates a lack of willingness to step out of the ordinary.

In past posts, I’ve shown some examples of what other webmasters are doing in their sites that negates their potential to really grow and have a community of their own. Now, I’ll show one of my own.

The first WINTEMO iteration made on Blogger is still online. Seems I forgot to take it down! And from there to what the TRI has become today, plenty of things have changed.

Click the Image to enlarge and see what is wrong on that site.

All pages have the same layout as if every page and post was a single-page site. On top of that, the site did not possess much helpful content.

From there, you can’t access other pages, or jump to the blog, which frustrates users trying to browse the site. And nobody likes wasting time.

Now compare the same with the TRI’s Portal and the difference in the layout will be evident: you can go to the forums, the gaming corner and here since the links are always available; the blog allows you to preview older posts…

In other words, the Portal is uniform whereas WINTEMO was not.

Surely you have checked different Wikipedia articles of a given subject, like cars, Countries or flower types. Almost all of them have the same appearance but the contents differ.

This facilitates reading since users browsing the page will already know where to look for the information, where they can check the latest posts and how to jump to new ones. We can call this process “standardization”; to make the entire site, or parts of it, conform to an easily recognizable pattern.

In turn, that pattern gives out a professional outlook and working on your site’s image is (or should be) an important concern.

Betting on uniformity is a form of consistency.

When the articles are easy to find, readers are always on top of everything new added to the site. And this isn’t available in WINTEMO.

Unlike what people normally expect from a poor-looking site, it had brand new posts every week, almost every day; sometimes even more than once a day. This is important when a website is new.

Websites like The Huffington Post, with a single blog, attract millions after millions of hits. Why? Because they are already established in their niche. And even then the site is updated frequently

Now, try it yourself and see which one comes first.

Feeding fresh new articles, content, media or anything else users can consume on a regular basis facilitates the discovery of your website. Because the content they produce is in such high demand, those are sites that a freshly created page will show up on the top search engine results seconds after being posted.

Keeping up a posting schedule might help in that regard. If like me, you’re a solo writer, it becomes much harder to write new articles every single day, but it’s still doable.

A number of strategies can help you regain that consistency or start having a stronger, more noticeable approach to the Blogosphere. We’re going to cover a few of them right below:

These tips will help you get the most important rule of thumb for all new Bloggers: to write at least one new post, EVERY DAY.

To get the most organic traffic to your site, you’ll need to be constantly updating it. New bloggers should do this as much as possible.

Lack of action will only cause your site to be completely ignored. If you don’t have anything new to show for, people will simply look for the action elsewhere. But quantity is only as important as the quality of your posts and then… we’ll just have to say that having none is better than filling numerous pages with trashy, repetitive nonsense.

Starting over is very difficult if you a bad reputation is there to haunt you when compared to beginning from square one.

How does this relate to you? Have you discovered your site lacks consistency or doesn’t conform to a standard you defined in the past? We are open to your opinion and would love to hear it.