PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It involves the basis of you paying to get visitors to your blog or product page. It allows for maximum control over where your visitors come from, how many you want in a day, conversion rates, creating multiple campaigns and other various points.

Multiple campaigns is one interesting factor for PPC. You can make many different ads and test what works and what doesn’t. Effectively allowing you to increase the potential of your traffic and even sales.

PPC is ideal for short term traffic or for people pushing products online, such as Internet Marketers. To name a few ad companies we have, Google Adwords, 7search, MSN AdCenter, Adbrite, and dozens more.

Tip – For the best results you’ll want to use multiple sources when dealing with PPC. This is especially true for Marketers.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves your blog’s ability to pull in visitors through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This is basically getting visitors for no cost, but it takes a lot of hard work to achieve high numbers.

There many factors to consider when attempting to increase your traffic through SEO. Content, backlinks, keywords, headers, clean code (backend), Sitemaps, meta, keyword saturation, and more. Each one can make or break your search engine ranking which can kill your traffic.

Tip – Content and Backlinks are KING!

So which is the way to go? That’s something that cannot be answered easily. It really depends on your needs, or your abilities, or even your goals. I’m not saying PPC is easy but it’s definitely easy compared to SEO.

PPC is ideal when you are pushing products online, trying to earn extra revenue. It’s important to track your results and ensure you are earning more than you are spending.

SEO is ideal for those who simply want more readers and even ad revenue. It’s a good steady source of traffic and when done properly can boost your visitations to unbelievable numbers… numbers you would be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on with PPC.

We’ve known Rebecca for a little over 3 years, and seen her site grow from a personal hobby blog to something that is now her full time job, working from home and doing what she loves!

Tell us about yourself. How long have you been blogging?

I set up my first blog sometime around the end of 2003. I was just one of those typical ones where I linked to articles I liked, talked about my favorite music, pets, etc. After a couple of years of that, I got bored with it and took it down. In mid 2006, I got the idea fir what eventually became ElasticPop.com

How long did it take you to get your blog launched?

I would say it really took me about a eighteen months. Because my blog is a Blu-Ray/DVD review site, it took time to make contacts with the studios and PR firms that provide titles. In order to convince them that I could write and publish the reviews, I wrote for some established blogs before soliciting material for my own.

How many hours per day do you spend working online?

During the week, anywhere from 7-11. On the weekends, I try to cut it down to half that, but It doesn’t always work out that way!

What are your favorite revenue sources?

Google AdSense, Commission Junction, Amazon Affiliate Program, iReel

How long did it take you to see real profits from your blog?

That took a good eighteen months, and I’m always looking for ways to refine and increase profits.

What were some of the challenges you had to overcome to see your online visions come to life?

For me, I think the biggest thing was remembering that the site needed to be accessible to people, no matter their level of computer expertise. My first impulse was to build a site with all sorts of bells and whistles, but in reality, a clean speedy site is more likely to be revised.

Any particular methods to generating traffic you could share?

Use Social Networking! Twitter your posts, put them on Facebook and make sure you’ve set up an RSS feed. Outside of that, Make sure your URL is in the signature of every email account you have. Also, you might consider having business cards made up and giving them out, posting them on bulletin boards of business etc. Another great thing to do, is visit forums related to the topic of your blog, participate in discussions, leaving your URL.

What are some online resources you could recommend for people looking to becoming a Professional Blogger?

These are sites I keep bookmarked.

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

Did you ever think you would be successful?

I hoped I would, but I had a fair amount of skepticism going in.

What’s the most common mistake(s) you see other bloggers make?

While it’s important to choose a topic that is popular, it’s equally important to choose something you’re interested in. Too many people choose something they clearly aren’t passionate about, and the site dies before it really gets off the ground.

What’s the best advice you have for would-be bloggers out there?

If you’re going to be a professional blogger, it’s best not to expect overnight success. It’s a lot of hard work, and growth tends to come in increments. However, if you are in it for the long haul, it can be a rewarding experience.

Any future plans you would like to share?

I’m in the midst of getting my forum up and running, so I hope my visitors will come on over and join the discussions!

Thank you Rebecca for taking your time to answer our questions! We wish you best of luck and great success!

In the world of online marketing, it’s common knowledge that a visitor makes up their mind about a website (either to stay or leave) in the first few seconds.

So what makes a good landing page? Something that catches the reader’s attention. You want to give them just enough to make them stay without overdoing it. Pages packed with endless amounts of irrelevant content tend to foreshadow your site and make it appear less relevant than the information they’re looking for.

Google Website Optimizer is a tool that nearly every internet marketer, blogger and guru find invaluable, and best of all, it’s entirely free! It can help you improve the effectiveness of your website in getting a return on your investment. By allowing you to test different versions of your site content, you can determine what will best attract users and lead them to convert on your site.

Landing pages are what will make or break your visitation. They give the world a summarized view of your blog, allowing your readers to decide immediately whether to stay or to leave.

With that, you won’t be surprised to hear about Google’s latest innovation, Google Voice. So what exactly is Google Voice? At its core it’s a voicemail system, but it definitely goes beyond that. They’ve implemented countless features that will revolutionize the way you use your phone.

Google Voice gives you a local phone number of your choosing that’s able to call up to six phones simultaneously, allowing you to have one phone for several devices. Additionally, Google Voice makes speech-to-text transcription a reality. Call settings can be created in a number of interesting ways. You can forward your Google Voice number to one device between specific hours, and if it’s not within those hours, it can forward to another device or ignore calls all together.

A prefect example of this would be you could be at your home office between 12 PM and 8 PM, but are still available to take calls afterwards until 10 PM. Then after 10 PM let’s say you don’t want to receive anymore calls. Well, Google Voice allows you to set what device(s) you want to be reached at during those hours and then set a Do Not Disturb for after 10PM. Finally you can relax at a time that works for you.

While Google Voice remains predominantly a free service, advertisements are present, particularly when using Gmail. Placing outgoing calls with Google Voice is free with the exception of international calls. The purchase of calling credits is necessary to make calls to other countries. But not to worry, Google’s prices are competitive, especially for the quality of service they provide.

If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

This post however is not about consumer products and cheap cell phone plans, don’t worry. It is about taking payments online. If you have a personal website or a blog, you’ve probably heard about PayPal. If not, PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. Up until a year or so ago PayPal was pretty much the only choice for someone who wanted to accept payments online in a matter of minutes, without dealing with merchant banks, payment gateways etc.

Today, PayPal has a competition from Google with their Google Checkout service. It is just as easy to setup, and even faster (based on my experience) to pay for a product or a service. In fact, one of Google’s requirements is to let your visitors buy something on your site or pay for a service with one click of a button! We all know Google makes great, solid products and services, and you can rest assured Google Checkout is just as good as any other Google product. Again it’s all about choices, so if you’re already accepting PayPal on your site, why not add Google Checkout and present your visitors with a choice? Who knows, maybe you’ll increase your sales by gaining a share of Google Checkout fans.

Another benefit of Google Checkout is the ability to link it to your AdWords account, and any time you run your AdWords it will display Google Checkout logo making your Ad stand out from other sites that don’t accept Google payments on their website or a blog. It also adds trust and recognition to your site, which is a must for any e-commerce site.

It is full of great articles. They’re so easy to read and usually not a single one is boring and full of useless information. Entrepreneur’s website is just as good in terms of content, and they have a Twitter and a Facebook account where you can talk directly to the editors and provide feedback or ask questions. I highly recommend signing up for a subscription, following them on Twitter, and becoming their Fan on Facebook where you can get an additional dose of amazingly useful information.

What’s your favorite magazine, and why?

There was even a movie released last year called Julie and Julia (available on DVD) that’s all about blogs and cooking. Since it’s about blogs I just had to watch it :) You see, I started working with blogs in 2002 (you can read more on our About Us page) and just a couple of years ago you would have to really look hard to find a magazine or a book that mentions blogs. Now it’s all over the place which is both shocking and exciting at the same time. To me anyway. Before people used to say “If you don’t have a website you are not a real business”, and today it’s “If you don’t have a blog you are not a real business”. Amazing how far blogs have come.

It is fun to watch getting Fortune 500 companies become our blog hosting and consulting clients. Companies like Adobe, TIME, Cisco, Washington Post, CapitalOne, Harvard, Expedia, National Geographic, and many others. Over the years we’ve assisted many companies and individuals with various blog requests, and I’m really looking forward to helping many more in 2010, and years to come.

If you don’t have a Blog, Facebook or Twitter — you should really start one. It’s fun, and to some it’s life-changing.

So I don’t blame you if you are using (or wanting to use) Gmail as your business email — I do and I’m loving it. But my absolute pet peeve is when I get business cards that have someone@gmail.com or someone@freeservice.com — it doesn’t look professional, in fact, it kind of looks cheesy. Well you are in luck. Not too long ago Google started offering a service called Hosted Gmail. It’s now called Google Apps. It allows you to map your own domain name to a set of Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Videos and more.

By mapping your domain name to Gmail you can use you@yourdomain.com instead of you@gmail.com and you will be able to send and receive email using the familiar Gmail interface. The service is free, it comes with a web based control panel where you can create additional email accounts, adjust various email settings, and more. Each email account you create comes with a little over 7 GB of disk space. So if you’re hosting your blog on a shared hosting account with a limited amount of disk space, you can configure your domain name to use Gmail for your email, and get so much more disk space at no additional cost. In fact, if you need more disk space Gmail has a Premier Edition (for a fee) which gives you 25 GB of space and 99% SLA (reliability). The service is also redundant, which means if your hosting account is having some issues and your blog stops working — your email continues to work!

I’ve helped many customers with that kind of configuration, so if you have any questions post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them all.

Once installed and activated, someone accessing your blog with a mobile device will be served with a mobile version of your blog. One caveat is it won’t look like your original blog, however it will display all your blog posts and even comments. To some, not having a matching design could be the deal breaker, but if you think about it – mobile devices have small screen, slower connectivity to the Internet, and if someone is trying to access your blog with their phone they’re most likely just interested in your content, and not your beautiful blog design. If it eats you alive not having your custom design, or you would like to make your mobile blog more personal, you can always customize it to include your logo, change the colors, etc. The possibilities are endless if you are not afraid of getting a bit technical.

By making your blog mobile-friendly, Google will place a little cellphone icon next to your blog when someone is searching for something on Google and your blog shows up in Google’s search results. This makes it clear that your site has a mobile-friendly version. Perhaps this will make your blog stand out from other sites that don’t have a mobile version. So what are you waiting for? Give it a try! The plugin is free and I believe it is definitely a must have.