I was standing outside an event at The Drake Hotel in Toronto last month watching the staff move wedding cakes into the lounge for some Canadian wedding design TV show. The bouncer wasn’t letting anybody inside – even Alyssa Cheung from Toronto Wedding Cakes was waiting until they were ready to do her spot.

At that moment a woman approached the security manager and asked if she could just get inside for a minute to shoot some pictures. “I’m a professional photographer’ she says and holds up an expensive digital camera with a long lens strapped around her neck. The bouncer smiled “Yeah?” and he pulled out a very small digital camera from his coat pocket, “So am I”, and everyone in the line laughed.

Professional photographers only need a website to completely reinvent themselves.

There are so many ways old school professional photographers can earn cash using their skills in combination with new resources and activities. These people have a real advantage – successful photographers have advanced training (which includes empiric training on the job), expensive equipment, and passion. The only thing missing from this equation is a decent website. A simple photo gallery displaying images accompanied by a Wordpress blog is all that’s required for online presence.

With a website and blog every photographer can be competitive. When surfing for opportunities, veteran shutterbugs should check out:

New Age Photographers Use Free Online Classifieds

Craigslist and Kijiji have become the most effective free classifieds in North America and perhaps the world. They offer deals on equipment and forums on techniques, and most importantly the sites are now filled with jobs. Armed with a good photo blog and perhaps and estore or even a simple Flickr photo gallery the applicant can leave links instead of trying to attach a resume or worse, write a biography in response to every job offering. The response rate on social media savvy applicants is much higher because most employers are now seeking such skilled workers.

Web Smart Shutterbugs Enter Photo Contests

So much online advertising now focuses on social networking that a new breed of photo contest websites and photo game sites have emerged to share sponsors’ coupons and prizes with smarter consumers. Social media photo contest sites like Competico and Votigo in California and Lenzr.com in Canada must not to be ignored.

Lenzr photo contest lets users register a profile and link back to their blogs so that every photo uploaded to the contest becomes an advertisement for the photographer’s skill. In addition to this incentive, the contest winners are profiled on the Lenzr blog and other media associated with the site.

Both Lenzr and Competico are serial photo contest websites wherein photos are rated by members as they compete for cash and prizes from businesses looking to buy buzz marketing.

Mazoolo photo game presents visitors with the interactive challenge of voting while compiling random challenges for members that upload their best work – this can pay money if you apply money to your account.

Mazoolo members don’t need to seek out contests – the website does that for them. It also reports daily how many contests their work has won, and in which matches their submissions placed second or third.  Check out the image below to see how my photo of Miss Teen Canada Siera Bearchell has won a match, lost a match, and broke even in the last three random events.

This results in an overall profit of two tokens. All photos are charged one token to enter a game. When a game is done:
#1 wins 2 tokens, the math: -1+2=+1
#2 wins 1.5 token,the math: -1+ 1.5=+0.5
#3 wins 1 token, the math:   -1+1=0
#4 and #5 lose 1 token

It’s interesting that this photo game site only allows members to vote on three contests daily; as such it cannot become boring or even much of a time waster and so is preserved as a pleasant experience.

Bloggers need Photographers Too

Good photographers often have a ‘photo blog’ because the two platforms can merge together so effectively. More than any other new vocation, the blogger or citizen journalist is often rated on the quality of their pictures in their articles. Smojoe writes that ‘a business blog post without a photo is like a dress shirt without a pocket.’ The whole entry looks incomplete if there is no image to contribute relevance or run counterpoint to the ideas in the text. And just like a shirt pocket, you can stick ALT text inside for robots to enjoy and thereby make your content more valuable in search engines.

Stock Photo Websites

Do not use websites that require you to pay cash to join, or that want to sell you a system that comes in a box. You will find the same quality of opportunity for free by searching for it – enter the name of the system into Google and read what others have written about the work. Today, online, its never been easier to sell stock photos – I sell prints to Dreamstime.com and have put other images on istockphoto. These websites have both adopted a points currency that can be converted to US dollars. This allows individuals to share, buy and sell images more quickly and efficiently. Other designers I know a swear by Shutterstock and I’ve heard some people talking about SXC in the same

Citizen Journalists

DigitalJournal.com and Associated Content and Orato.com and even Triond.com and Helium.com will host homemade ‘news media’ and opinion articles and will actually pay photographers very small fraction of the revenue accrued through advertising on the pages they create on site. Photos are invaluable here because a good image could vault the piece to the front page of the index and more readers equals more money.

Photographers with photo blogs are perfectly positioned to siphon the readers from these amateur news portals and into their domains where they can sell images, and take some ad revenue in affiliate marketing relationships. Perhaps it was just this type of citizen journalism that the woman at the wedding cake convention was attempting when she tried to enter the venue ahead of the attendees, but somehow I doubt it.  In this bold new age of user rewarded content, the most successful photographers are active participants who harness their passion to build online social capital for their own photo website merchandising enterprises.

Let’s start with the simplest paid to click. There are thousands of advertisers out there trying to get people to view their products. In recent years a growing trend has been online advertisements. Normally these advertisements are placed on a highly visited site and if you click the advertisement 100% of the profit goes to whoever owns the website. However there are a few sites out there that will let you click on the ads and then share the profit with you. The job description is fairly straight forward: open their websites, click on the ads, and receive a few pennies. To make more money you can usually either upgrade to a better membership level or get referrals from others. You then receive money for ads clicked on by your referrals as well as yourself.

In the end paid to click is a good way to make money is you have a lot of patience or don’t mind initial investment, but can be slow. If you are interested in Paid to click here’s a few good sites for it:

NeoBux – http://www.neobux.com/?u=p

LemonBux – http://www.lemonbux.com/

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Next let’s take a look at the online article writing possibilities. Ever had an Idea and want to put it online to see if you could make some money off of it but you weren’t technically inclined to do so. Now the answer is here. There are a few sites out there that will take the articles you submit to them and put them up on their various websites in a mass blog style. You then receive between 50-70% of all the money from add clicks and page views. A few of the site will even pay you just for publishing an article.

The advantage to article publishing sites is that once your article is up you will continue to receive money from it basically forever. You do however have to be a decent writer and know what topics will get the most page views. Here is a few good article publishing sites:

Triond – http://www.triond.com/

Helium – http://www.helium.com/

Everyone is interested in one number – the number that appears in the affiliate commission check. They ignore almost all other numbers. When they get a commission check of $1000, they are happy. They forget the fact they have spent $500 in PPC advertising. They also forget they have paid for domain, web host, web designer, web copywriter, etc. They hardly ever think about the amount of time and efforts they have put in. When everything is taken into consideration, the amount you earn as commission can be less than that you have put in.

Important Numbers to Watch Out for

CTR – This is the number of clicks you receive per 100 impressions of your PPC (Adwords) ad. A high CTR suggests your ad is performing well, capturing attention of potential customers.

Maximum CPC (Maximum Cost Per Click) – This is the amount you are willing to pay per click your ad receives. Bid high and your ad will move up. However, a top position doesn’t translate into quicker sales. It is because, the top ads are clicked by people who have no intention of buying. They are like hunters who first shoot before fixing their target.

Conversion Rate – This is more important than CTR. This number tells you how many visitors have converted to customers. It is usually between 1% and 3%, with some exceptions of up to 10%. If your conversions are lower than 1%, you are doing something horrible. With tweaking of your ads, maximum CPC and your landing pages, you can push the conversion rate to above 3%.

Cost Per Sale – This amount is the key. For convenience, we can assume the cost is only for PPC advertising. If the cost per sale is $10 and the commission you get is $20, it is good. However, if the cost per sale is $ 10 and your commission is $12, you may not be making a profit at all. To reach this amount, calculate the total amount you have spent on specific campaign. Divide that number of sales.

If you have spent $100 for driving 400 visitors to your landing page and 10 of them have bought the product, your cost per sale is $10. If you get a commission of $20 per sale, you have made a profit. If only two of the visitors have converted, the cost per sale is $50. However, you have no profits. You may also have lost your money to maintenance of your website, paying for designers and writers and your time and efforts to setting up the campaign.

Read the first two mistakes here:

Affiliate Marketing Mistake 1: Choosing a Bad Product

Affiliate Marketing Mistake 2: Using a Powerful Marketing Channel the Wrong Way

Anyone can sign up for an account at Clickbank.com and start promoting several thousands of e-books a.k.a. information products on every imaginable topic. Everyone is looking for information. Information products sell well. People buy information products in spite of their bad financial conditions.

Some are looking for information on removing rust stains from their satin shirts, while a few others will be looking for information on setting up a website with WordPress. In between, there is information products that teach people buy real estate, improve credit ratings, lose weight, and what not.

In essence, people are looking for information that can solve a problem or two. Some want to lose a few pounds of fat. Some want to improve their credit rating. Some are just like you. They want to make money from the internet. They are looking to download the latest breakthrough information products on Adsense™ income boosting, affiliate marketing techniques and more.

Affiliates can promote all those products to the desperate people – willing to shed ten or fifty bucks on a e-book that promises something.

You are promoting the e-book or information product as an affiliate only. Once the merchant sells the product, he or she will send you your affiliate commission. In addition, information products convert much faster than material products. Since there aren’t any costs involved in storage, handling and shipping of products, the merchants can offer you higher percentage of commissions.

Information is an abstract product. You can’t physically verify the quality of the product. In other words, the product goes even if it doesn’t deliver what it promises. This makes information products the best products to promote – as an affiliate.

Unique and Updated Content

Keep your website updated with unique content. It’s almost always the content, which gets people back to your site. It is also very useful to get noticed by the search engines.  Keep the content focused, yet key word rich.  Don’t flood your site with useless garbage, you want to hold the readers attention.

Link Back to your Site

You should be able to get as many link backs as possible to your site. For this participate in forums, start blogs and respond to other blogs. Make useful posts and place your signature at the end of each post. Most forums allow a web URL to be placed as a signature. You can also find some good websites which relate to the content in your site and place their links on your site. After placing those links, send a friendly e-mail to the administrator giving the link to that page where the link of the site is posted and make a humble request to link back.

Submit Content for Other Websites

Write quality content and distribute freely to other websites and article directories. Place your link back to a page which relates to that topic, in the about author category. These articles will most likely be used by websites seeking free content. This will increase your traffic and most of the people who read the article will click on your link, for more useful information on your site.

Check for Broken Links

Always check for any broken links and fix them on regular basis. Search Engines hate sites with broken links and particularly when a search bots crawls in to the link and finds it broken, you might even lose your indexing with the search engine. This is because search engines constantly monitor your sites for fresh content. When it tries to scan the page and finds that it cannot reach the page, it assumes that the content is removed. Hence it removes the entry from its data base.

These basic tips can increase the traffic to your website and probably keep a steady increase for years to come.  However, many more creative ideas can be applied depending on the web content.

Image via Wikipedia

How To Start Your Internet Marketing

Internet marketing can sometimes seem quite intimidating. An hour or two reading about SEO (search engine optimization) and keyword saturation, can leave the mind quite numb. There is so much material out there to plough through that the whole idea of doing your own internet marketing can appear quite daunting. Finding a starting point is sometimes the hardest part because of the sheer volume of internet marketing information out there.

First of all you need a website to market. This can be as complex, or as simple as you like. You just need somewhere to act like a ’shop front’. Once you have done this you can start learning about internet market.

Keyword Articles Will Get Permanent Links

The truth of the matter is that it need not be difficult. A carefully designed internet marketing strategy and the will to put the plan into action can work wonders in a very short time. Keyword articles are an excellent way to start off your campaign, they cost nothing and they give you permanent links on the internet.

You simply write articles containing keywords that will lead internet search engines to them, and syndicate them via various websites. The articles contain your contact details and the readers they attract are potential customers because they are actually searching for the information on your website.

Social Networking Sites Can Boost Your Readership

An even easier, but time consuming way of internet marketing is to join up to social networking sites and post links for others to follow. Simply join up to these sites, make some friends and go from there. You do need to spend a bit of time maintaining accounts and reading what other people have posted there, so that they reciprocate. The rewards can be huge because your ten friends may have ten friends each to pass your interesting link to. The friends of friends pass it on and there’s a kind of snowball effect. Watching a website, or article go viral and get thousands of view is internet marketing at its best and simplest.

There are many other ways to start internet marketing, but you don’t need to be a marketing guru to succeed.

1st Reason

I’ve heard many writers assert that they just write for the joy of writing–nothing more, nothing less. That should absolutely be the first and the last reason a person writes. If a writer doesn’t enjoy writing, the other reasons for writing aren’t going to be reason enough to continue writing.

2nd Reason

Sharing your writing with others is a close second on the list of reasons to write. Creation in a vacuum is at best ineffective–at worst, pointless. A writer should be writing to share, assist, and inspire others. If we and others don’t find value in our writing, then we need to reevaluate our goals for being writers.

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3rd Reason

The third reason to write is financial. For many, their love of writing and sharing their ideas is enough, and they don’t seek to be rewarded financially for their efforts. For others, though, their objective is to make writing into an income stream–perhaps even a part- or full-time career. Seemingly, the cards are stacked against the writer seeking to earn money at the craft, though, in part because of a deeply entrenched, yet misguided, way of thinking about creativity and money.

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Wrong-Headed Ideas About Creativity and Money

There is an all-too-often-accepted mindset that asserts that if you earn money for what you truly enjoy doing then you are selling your soul. Where did this wrong-headed idea come from?

Being a savvy business person does not mean that you are no longer bringing forth valuable, inspiring, creative work to share with others. This negative way of thinking about money and the creation of art does a huge disservice to creative individuals who seek to become professional writers, musicians, artists, and so on.

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Sites Where You Can Promote Your Work

Since I started writing for Triond, I am gradually learning more about marketing. I’m discovering that to be a successful freelance writer, you must find a balance between writing articles and promoting the articles you write. In a nutshell, readers are vital to the success of a writer.

I’d like to share a few sites with you where I have found it to be effective to promote my work. Obviously, there are numerous other sites where you can also promote your work. If you would like to, please share the sites you promote your work on by leaving a comment.

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Twitter

Twitter is one of the easiest ways you can promote your work. In fact, you can set up your Triond account to automatically post tweets about your just-published articles to Twitter.

To increase the effectiveness of Twitter, you will need to gain more followers. To do this, start following people who you are genuinely interested in. In turn, many will begin to follow you.

In addition to tweeting notices about your new articles, also tweet helpful information about different topics you write about, freelance writing, ways to earn money, and so on. If you are providing helpful tips and/or interesting information, you will attract more followers.

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Facebook

Facebook can be a highly effective way of promoting your writing, especially if you have a lot of Facebook friends. However, I have been resistant to posting links to my work on Facebook. I don’t want to go from using the site to exclusively connect with friends to just promote my work. However, I think I’ve found a good middle ground with this. In my “Information” section under my profile picture, I added my Triond profile page. I also periodically upload a link to certain articles I think would be of interest to my Facebook friends.

Note, there is a Triond application that will automatically post notices about all of your new articles to your Facebook wall. I have chosen not to use this, but it is available for those who would like all of their articles to appear on Facebook.

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Fark

If you publish funny, bizarre, strange, ironic, weird, or offbeat articles, then consider posting links to your material on Fark. Fark is an anti-news news site that receives about 4 million unique visitors each month.

A few links submitted to Fark are approved for posting on the main Fark page. Articles that are approved often receive thousands and thousands of views. Sometimes the servers on which these greenlighted articles are hosted “fark,” which means they crash due to the high volume of traffic generated.

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Other Sites to Promote Your Work On

I’ve also dabbled on the following sites, though my knowledge of them is still in the early stages:

• StumbleUpon
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Reddit
• Shetoldme
• Dropjack
• Digg
• Propeller
• Mixx
• Newsvine

You can learn more about these sites from other Triond members by simply going to the “Explore” section on Triond. Triond writers are an invaluable resource to learn more about how and where to promote your work.

To successfully promote your articles on social networking sites, you must invest time, energy, and patience into learning your way around each site, learning each site’s protocol, and building a network of friends. Best of luck!

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Related Articles

Triond Etiquette 101: Do’s and Don’ts for The Triond Writer

Want to Publish Your Book? Advice From an Editor

The secret to this, as anyone will tell you, is to promote your work, and the best way to do that is to spam.  Anyone who uses the Triond forum (or any other, for that matter) has seen this.

Hey!  I’m new to the forum, and would love some positive feedback! Please read my poem!

(url here)

And while this may garner a few hits, it as a rule is a waste of effort.  There is a science to spamming; simply doing a drive by tends to be rather ineffective.  Here are a few basic steps to ensure that if you drop a url, people will actually read it.

• First, do your research.  This doesn’t have to be an overly time consuming act, although like anything else,  you’ll get out of it what you put into it.  As I have said in other pieces,  there are forums and chats for everything under the sun.  For example,  if you’re writing a piece on Major League Baseball, Google ‘baseball forums’.  Obviously the more you find, the more opportunities your article will have for attracting viewers.
• Set up a profile. Take the time to add a photo and fill in the little bits and pieces about who you are. Many will have a place where you can promote your home page.  A profile offers you an appearance of legitimacy.  Blank profiles, as a rule, do not attract viewers.
• Take the time to chat, even if it’s only briefly. Create at least some kind of presence in the forum.  I have  I around 2 dozen forums I use regularly, and I leave a window of a couple of hours each week to do what I call ‘forum surfing’… bouncing around, dropping into conversations, basically letting myself be seen.
• Add friends if it’s an option.
• Give your articles interesting titles.  Something that will pique reader’s curiosity enough to click on them.

• There are obvious exceptions.  I did a Michael Jackson article the day he died, and put it everywhere, because people were talking about it everywhere.  But for the most part, following these steps will take you from the tier of a few hundred hits to that magic four figures status.  Good writing!

Related Articles

Writing for Money: Selling Our Souls?

The Easiest Way to Get Thousands of Views for Your Articles

A Guide to The Triond Forum

Image via Wikipedia

Ok so you want more web-site traffic. Who doesn’t right? Many people build a web-site and have not a clue on how to get customers to there site. Some just build it and hope people just stumble upon it. And the sad part about it is that the site is not even going to get off the ground.

Like the saying goes, “If you want to make an omelet you got to crack some eggs”. If your site is going to be a hit then you’ve got to put in the work. First way and maybe the easiest way is by word of mouth. Start by introducing your site to your friends and family. Inform the people who live next to you about your site. They might be interested in what ever you have to offer.

Then there are business cards that you can have made for little or nothing. You can even put up signs in a high traffic area of town about your site. You can also pay google to get the word out about your site across the world wide web. Another good way is to dress up nice and go down town to your local businesses and give them a print out of your web-site. And the more personal face to face introductions are good promoting your business.

These are just some friendly hints to help you succeed.

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With this program, advertisers can reach the growing number of actors involved in web gaming. For example, in anticipation of a sporting event a vendor can use the technology of Ad-sense for games to keep your logo in the web game that accompanies this event and to reach its relevant demographic as a result window. 

Ad-sense for Games delivers video ads based on intended placements, as well as image or text ads on contextual targeting with keywords and tags supplied by developers and publishers information. Advertisers are charged on the basis of cost per impression or cost per click and ad revenue split between Go ogle and game developers or publishers.