The Lady Programmer

How does a business benefit from search engine optimization services?

Search Engine Traffic: The Holy Grail

At first I’ve always looked upon search engine traffic as the Holy Grail of website visits. I still consider it as the Holy Grail, because over long term, search engine visitors had always found the older posts contained in my blog.

I’ve ventured into blogging in the meantime to learn some SEO skills along with new web design skills. Search engine optimization is something that some freelance web design jobs require. I had to learn a bit of SEO to make myself profitable in this career. Along the way, I realized that it is possible to profit from doing blogging gigs.

try any of the listed keywords beside each site in Google search

Don’t Easily Topple at Google’s No. 1 Search Ranking Spot

Bigger businesses who need to promote their online presence needed better exposure. Thus, they require the help of search engine optimization consulting services such as those from ThinkBigSites.com to help them out. I’ve realized that many hands are needed to really optimize a big business site for stable and better search engine rankings. For one, an army of bloggers can help build a buzz to improve a business website’s rankings with the right keywords.

A small website made for a small business can profit from a little SEO made by a single webmaster; but to really be consistent in the search engine rankings then it is best to invest in search engine optimization companies.

A business listed at the top of Google search engine always gets the best exposure. Once it gets noticed it gets a good number of visitors. Among those visitors some of them will be doing business deals.

Here is another opportunity to those interested in earning from blogging. SponsoredReviews is another good site to get paid for doing reviews, perhaps if you ran out of doing paid opportunities with PayPerPost.

I’ve decided to show the highest earnings that I’ve received from SponsoredReviews to demonstrate that this site is NOT a scam. My highest payout was almost a hundred dollars for a 15-day span. Nowadays, I had been very quite picky with the opportunities that I select: I want those that gets the interest of readers and would fit well to the topic of my blog; this is why I have nothing on my current earnings summary.

Payout at SponsoredReviews is faster than that offered by PayPerPost’s 30-day delivery of payments: payments come into the specified Paypal account following a 15 day cycle pre-determined by SponsoredReviews.

highest earnings taken out at SponsoredReviews (I neglected to take care of myself during that time).

The only means of taking out earnings from SponsoredReviews is through a Paypal account. SponsoredReviews automatically puts these earnings into one’s specified Paypal email account when payday comes. I only used a personal Paypal account to withdraw such earnings.

that payout above in a Paypal transaction receipt

click the logo above to sign up for Paypal, if you don’t have one

This paid review site has a straightforward way of getting opportunities: a blogger gets to bid to qualified opportunities. Paid reviews come in as minimum as 50 words. The lowest reviews offers cost $5. There are also plenty of advertisers coming into the sites, so I often get to paid to do reviews and such.

opportunities at Sponsored Reviews

Advertisers handpick bloggers who had expressed their interest to blog an opportunity. Once that an advertiser approves an opportunity, an email is sent to the blogger to inform him that a bid has been approved. An approved bid could mean an income for the blogger: he or she gets to write a review about the opportunity through a single blog post that meets the specified requirements. SponsoredReviews give only a deadline of 7 days to finish an approved opportunity: I think that is more than enough to do approved paid reviews for the site.

Note that the bidding price is not the actual payment that a blogger can receive from SponsoredReviews. 35% of the bid price goes to SponsoredReviews. The rest goes to the blogger.

actual payment to the blogger

A good site statistics is almost always a must in doing paid reviews. SponsoredReviews also maintains its own SR ranking system but I don’t think this is given much importance by advertisers. To get more opportunities advertisers primarily prefer sites with good Google pageranks. Alexa traffic ranking, Yahoo backlinks and Technorati are often seen as second important qualifications in doing paid reviews.

Click this badge to sign up with SponsoredReviews

Do you want to know more about doing reviews in PayPerPost? Here is the recent post about earning paid reviews with PayPerPost.

Do you want to find out whether a phone call is legitimate or scam?

I’ve spoken previously about sites that work with a community’s participation, and I think this is another important one. Caller Identifier is a helpful way of looking up clues behind a caller’s identity by simply entering a number to look up at other people’s opinions about that given number.

It is possible that a number is not listed yet, so if you feel that you want to warn others about a disturbing call then Caller Identifier is a good way to inform and warn others.

Oh! “The Lady Programmer” has a new URL!

Some of you noticed that new URL that my blog had. Some even made the URL changes in their blogrolls even without my request. Thanks so much and I am happy to see that.

I made a very careful research before I decided to make the move to my own custom domain. I wanted to make sure I do things right. The experts had always said that I would do the right thing if I do a 301 redirect so I don’t have to lose the search engine rankings. To do a 301 redirect I had to manipulate the domain manager in my GoDaddy account.

The Cost of a New Domain

It does not cost much to own a domain. Get your credit card or Paypal account funded with only about $10 and you can have a .COM domain with a free email account with the domain suffix (oh… you can now email me at gem [at] theladyprogrammer [dot] com). .INFO domains are the best buys on GoDaddy on sale: the domains only cost $1.49. If you want to save even more, use a coupon code from coupon sites and apply that before checking out (I was able to save a dollar!). UPDATE: A $10 .COM domain is good for one-year ownership.

In Blogger, it is also possible to own a custom domain but I have decided to go for the GoDaddy one because I wanted to have my own email account with the domain and do a little bit more tinkering with the email.

Why Did I Made the Move?

I think that it is now proper for me to have this blog sitting out on a new URL, after all this blog of mine is getting to be big little blog or a little big blog. It is finally getting noticed and I am very glad that I have a community of readers in this blog.

I made a careful research and the 301 redirect is the right thing to do for any website or blog with nice ratings on Google pagerank, Alexa rankings, Technorati rankings and other rating systems that bloggers are very much conscious of.

A new domain is a clean slate. At the beginning it would have no rankings and my blog would seem like a new blog that was just created. Check on any pagerank checker site and you’ll see that this new URL does not have any pagerank. My older domain http://theladyprogrammer.blogspot.com has a PR3 ranking as I am writing this. The 301 redirect would simply tell all search engine bots that I have moved to a new address, and a permanent one.

Image credit to Viajar24h.com

Losing the Precious Rankings

I would temporarily lose the rankings for the meantime. These experts say it would take me several weeks to a few months for the new domain to acquire the ranking of my old domain. Since the old domain still sits on a PR3 rank, any visitors who came to my site from Google would still see my site and information would still be ranked the same.

The Proper Way: The 301 Redirect

301 redirect also saves me time from running around to everyone then begging on my knees to change the old URLs in their blogrolls or blog post links. But to anyone who can spare the time, I would really appreciate if you take some time to take off the old URL and use this new one.

Of course, I would not have made this ultimate move without the support of my frequent readers – active commenters or not. You’re the ones whom I could thank for the growing success of this blog. Thanks to all!

Do you own a custom domain? Or are you considering one for your blog?

Don’t mistake this post for the very first “I signed up for PayPerPost” $20-worth of opportunity that PPP gives to its new members. I’m not getting paid by IZEA to promote their site in this post. I am grateful to them because they had already given me huge earnings from simply doing paid reviews. I hope PayPerPost would NOT eliminate my blogs from doing paid reviews: there is ongoing blog audit happening at PPP.

That was the total amount that I had already earned from PayPerPost since I’ve signed up with them. It is not really much. Top earners in PPP get more than $1000 each month. Most of the paid reviews I’ve earned here was from another blog.

All of these earnings go out to my Paypal account. Paypal is the only way to take out earnings from doing paid reviews, so anyone living in a country that supports Paypal well can sign up with the site and begin to take opportunities from the site. I did not even need a premium or business account to simply receive all the earnings; all I had is a personal Paypal account. For those in the Philippines, if you are interested to know more about it then visit this page and look under the category Paypal.

Click this logo to sign up with a FREE Paypal account:

How to Earn from Paid Reviews

In the beginning PayPerPost began an alternative concept to earn income from blogs: it is simply out to be an alternative for bloggers to earn instead of earning little from advertisements provided by Google Adsense, Chitika, Adbrite and other similar ad networks. I had to admit that even with a good traffic for several months on this blog, I have not earned much with Google Adsense.

PayPerPost allows bloggers to get paid to do reviews on a product or service. Each paid review can run to as little as 50 words to a full 300-word review. The lowest amount that can be earned from doing reviews is at $5.

A blogger simply submits his or her blog to get approved. The approval is done manually; usually a blog gets reviewed within a few days. Not all blogs qualify for doing paid reviews with them. Some of the requirements are: that the blog should not contain offensive content such as nudity, violence, political issues, and that it should be written in English. The blog eligibility written under the PPP’s terms of service contains a full list of blogs that are qualified for doing paid reviews.

Once that a blog is approved, the blogger can start taking opportunities that his or her blogs are qualified for.

Which opportunities are available for blogging?

There could be more than a hundred of available opportunities that bloggers get to see in a day, but my blog qualifies for a fraction of the opportunities that are available. The main factors that affect my qualification is my blog’s Google page rank, Alexa ranking and Realrank. The Realrank is an new internal ranking system used by PPP that is entirely dependent on the traffic and influence of blogs throughout the blogosphere.

Of all the metrics that PPP had placed, I still find Google page rank as the most important metric. A better Google page rank means more opportunities are available. Blogs sitting at higher Google page ranks are qualified for higher paying opportunities that cost even more than a $100. A Google page rank of 7 on a blog is very high; advertisers are willing to pay big bucks to bloggers with blogs sitting at higher page ranks.

My humble blog only sits on a page rank 3. Indeed, what I had posted previously about a $100 review is NOT something that I see on my account everyday!

You can join with me in PPP if you get to review this post.