Internet marketing is huge right now, as is the concept of driving Internet traffic. Everybody is jumping on board, and with good reason! If you have a website, you need to be on at least the first two pages of search results. If you’re not, you might as well be on page 1,000. Just because you have a website does not mean that people are seeing it. Having a successful website takes a lot of work and there are many things you can do to drive traffic to it. 1.  Learn About HTML When I first started writing on my | Continue Reading...

Note:  Today’s post is authored by Lucia, Sverve’s Brand Relationship Manager.  She is in the business of bringing our brands up to speed on how best to work with our influencers.  Brands and influencers alike will benefit from this inside look at Sverve’s campaign models…because in addition to everything else, influencers…YOU are a brand.  As a blogger, you have something – be it your writing, technological skills, or social media savvy – that you want to grow and promote.  Or maybe you have an actual product that you create and want to market.  In any case, please enjoy this post | Continue Reading...

Hi, friends!  I’m Amy, aka One Artsy Mama, and I’m thrilled to be here today to share with you a few of the best tips I’ve learned about forming successful, long-term alliances with brands.  When I first started my blog, my sole intention was for it to be a place to share the things my son and I created.  I had no idea at the time that blogging could ever turn into a business endeavor for me, or that two years later, I would be able to fund my son’s private school tuition with my blogging money.  I’ve had a lot | Continue Reading...

The recession isn’t over yet, and most of us try to avoid spending. For many years, eye-catching banners promising us the best of this and that did their job: Caught our eye and snagged our credit card numbers. It was easy to spend and get more credit.  Now that the credit has run out and many of us are in debt, we’ve developed a new skill. I call it ad blindness. This means that now we are able to browse the net for things that we’re interested in and completely ignore the banners, no matter how flashy, noisy and eye-catching | Continue Reading...

Have you ever wanted to start your own link party but didn’t know where to start?  Or if you’d even have the time?  Want to find out how to do it? The pros of starting a link party are obvious: 1.  You get lots of traffic to your blog 2.  You get to connect with a lot of great people and see blogs you didn’t know were out there 3.  Freedom to make your own party choices I would say there is only one con: 1. Time – generally it is more time consuming but once you’re in the swing | Continue Reading...

Affiliate Model. What do you think of when you hear those words? It’s one of those terms with which many are familiar, but few can succinctly describe. Plenty of small businesses, including Sverve, use affiliate campaigns to gain brand visibility, new sales, or users.  In a nutshell, they hire a blogger (or a hundred of them) to promote their business.  The blogger is then paid for consumer purchases…or sometimes just for clicks…that originated from his or her site. Simple enough, yes? Well, no…not exactly. The process is not always seamless.  Sometimes bloggers are hesitant to engage in an affiliate campaign | Continue Reading...

Often times when I sit down to write a new blog post I hurry through it to get all of my ideas out before I am distracted. And most times I am so excited to be finished that I just want to hit the publish button. But then I go back and read or have my husband read it and it is riddled with typos and simple errors that shouldn’t be there. I have come up with a checklist for myself that helps to eliminate having to go back and correct these issues. I have two different lists that I | Continue Reading...

I used Blogger for several years for a personal/family blog and for the first year of my No Holding Back blog. Blogger is a fine tool for anyone just blogging about their life. But if you’re trying to monetize and build a business, or if you want to implement cool features but do not have the time, patience, or knowledge to do those things, WordPress.Org is definitely right for you. These are my top 5 reasons why you should make the move to wordpress: WordPress.org is the premier blogging platform: Large agencies and businesses use it. As I looked at | Continue Reading...

Do you have a button or banner for your blog? You might have more than one – perhaps one for your blog itself and then several others for your popular posts or weekly features such as a linky party.  You can add these into your posts and sidebars – but their real value can come from asking others to post the button on their site, thereby advertising your site and drawing in more traffic. Have you ever wondered how to produce that little box with the code you can grab to display a button?  You can make this easily for yourself.  Here’s how: You’ll need a button.  The standard size is 125 x 125 pixels.  But 150 can | Continue Reading...