Most sites are disappointed by the nickels and dimes that come in from advertising. If your site gets massive amounts of traffic, it can work, but if not, you’ll want to find a much more profitable source of revenue.

But most of us find that it’s not all that easy to translate high-quality content from your blog into a high-quality product for sale.

Four or five years ago, you could have slammed together an ebook over the weekend and created a decent income with it. But in the current environment, buyers are more careful with their money, and you’ve got an awful lot of competition.

The good news is, most of your competitors still think it’s 2003, and most of their products are astoundingly lame. And there are still lots of buyers who need to solve their most pressing problems.

So there are still plenty of opportunities to monetize with an ebook. But it has to be terrific.

So what makes a terrific ebook?

For an ebook to work in this climate, it needs to:

• Solidly address the problems, concerns, or desires of a well-defined target market. Vague, fluffy or irrelevant junk isn’t going to cut it.
• Be a meaningful extension of the relationship you’ve already created with your audience.
• Stake out a compelling position in the marketplace.
• Reflect the confidence of top-notch content.
• Provide an exceptional return on investment for buyers.
• Be supported by an intelligent marketing system that fuels your customers’ need to buy.

The enemy of the successful ebook

So to create an ebook that works today, you’ve got a few more steps to take.

First you’ve got to research your market. Then you need to build a list and drive buying readers to your blog. (There can be a big difference between fans and customers.) Then research, outline, and actually write the book. And then you’ve got to figure out the whole launch thing: creating buzz, recruiting and managing affiliates, writing a sales page.

We bloggers are pretty good at taking action. We can do any of these things individually. And to tell you the truth, none of them is all that hard.

But take them all together and we find ourselves overwhelmed.

Before we know it, it’s been six months or a year, and we’re still trying to make it happen. Not because it’s beyond our abilities, but because without a detailed map, it’s easy to get lost in the process.

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Someone sent me the question “Why Social Bookmarking? ”

And I thought to myself: “Um. Why not?”

Since I’m not really sure what they meant by that, I’m going to assume that this person mean “Why should I use social bookmarking in my business?” – with a full understanding of all the risks associated with “assuming”.

I figure that if you’re reading this, you have that question, or a similar one.

There are three reasons:

1 – More links

2 – More traffic

3 – More credibility

More links are always a good thing.

Think of links as the road traffic that moves through the web. If there are no roads to where your business “lives” online, namely your website, it’s far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you.

That’s true whether you’re talking about search engines or links from other sites. Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword.

In addition, the “nicer” the road, the more traffíc will flow through it – think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes.

Improved traffic, also good.

From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted. Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they’re going, and why they’re interested in getting there.

It’s like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That’s what pulls them in, they see a headline – and to get to the story they are compelled to take another action.

The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we’ll go with another analogy.

Let’s say I made a movie and I thought it was fantastic. If I hadn’t met you before, and I tell you, “hey, I made a kick-ass movie, come see it!” – you may come see it, you may not.

It depends more on how much time you have and if you’re interested in that kind of movie, or even how nice of a person you are, than my opinion.

Why?

Because I’m the one who made it, so you can’t know whether to trust my opinion, at least in relation to how much YOU might like it. Of course I think it’s great, but I have no way of knowing whether you will.

Now, if you knew me and my taste, and how alike our tastes are, you may be a bit more inclined. So if I’m, say, Michael Bay, and you liked my last movie, and my new movie is on the same type of thing, you might go see it based on the trailer alone. You know you’re taking a gamble but it’s a safe bet.

Now watch this.

Your best buddy, the one who likes all the same things you like, the one you hang out with and trust the most, calls you on the phone and says:

“I’ve just seen the best movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I have to see it again. When are you free, I’ll come pick you up.”

The only thing that could make that deal sweeter is if your friend has also said “My treat.” At least as far as recommendations go, the person who knows what you like the most is likely to be the person whose advice you’ll follow.

If you know that friend, and that person has similar tastes, or at least knows what you like, you’re more likely to see the movie.

My sister and I have similar tastes in movies, but I’m a little more patient with beginnings and endings and like more indie-fare. Yet, no matter how many times I have suggested we watch a movie together that she ends up not liking as much, if I rave about a movie, she’ll at least give it a chance.

Now, let’s take that back to social bookmarking. Imagine you can find hundreds of people, all over the world, with tastes similar to yours, sharing information you wouldn’t find yourself.

Or maybe you can just connect faster and more frequently for suggestions from people you already know. Wouldn’t you be more likely to follow their suggestions than some stranger?

That’s the power of social bookmarking. It’s put a technology behind word of mouth sharing of web sites that anyone can use.

And they do.

Now all you have to do is learn how to be the person or company everybody is spreading the word about. Which is another conversation altogether.

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option. via

Want more traffic to your blog?  Of course you do.  But how do you get it?  It’s a question that many bloggers struggle with, but thankfully there are several fairly easy ways you can start today to grow your blog’s traffic.

Here’s ten quick and easy ways you can start boosting your blog’s traffic today:

1 – Develop a regular posting pattern, and stick to it. This is an easy step that simply requires you altering your existing behavior.  Do some research into your blog’s traffic patterns.  If your blog is like most, you will probably find that you get the most traffic during the week, especially from Tues-Thurs.  So make a point to post on these days first.  If you can crank out more posts, then add in the next days based on traffic.  But you want to make sure that you have new content appearing on the days when your traffic is highest.  And once you start posting on those days, do your best to have new posts up EVERY week on those days.  If you want to have new posts up on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, that’s fine but make sure they are up every week so your readers are ‘trained’ to know when new content is coming.

2 – Create a series. Let’s say you are a florist and you have a blog to help promote your business.  Every Wednesday (for example), you could have a new post on how to care and extend the life of your flowers once you get them home.  This way you know that you will have at least one post topic set for every week, and you can also run it on your best day for traffic.
3- When it comes to links, be a giver. Here’s a nice little exercise, go back over the last week, and count the number of blogs that have linked to yours.  Now go back to your blog and count the number of blogs that YOU have linked to over the same time-frame.   Are more bloggers linking to you, or are you linking more to others?  Get in the habit of looking for outstanding content that you can bring to the attention of your readers via links.   This not only means you will be creating better content on your blog, but you will be bringing your blog to the attention of other bloggers.  Which means they will be more likely to link to you rblog in the future.  Which of course means more traffic for you!  What you could also do is incorporate the ‘Create a series’ idea from tip #2 above, and say every Thursday have a post with links to other blog posts that you found interesting over the last week.

4 – Encourage comments and highlight your best ones. Let’s be honest, when reading a blog post, many of us will scan to see how many comments it has received.  If a post has 8 comments, the odds are you will want to read the post, if for no other reason than to read the comments.  If your post has more comments, that means your readers are making its content more valuable, which means it has a better chance of being linked to.  Also if a reader leaves a really great comment that sparks more comments, add that comment to the end of your post, with a link to the reader’s blog (if they have one).

5 – Share your knowledge. If you are exceptional good at something, anything, share your knowledge with your readers on your blog.  It can be anything from social media marketing to model-making to basket-weaving.  Even the most common-sense tips can work if just one reader can find value in your ideas.  Think of ways you can share your knowledge to help others.

6 – Contribute on other blogs. Notice I said ‘contribute’ and not comment.  All comments are not created equally, and if you go to every A-list blogger in your industry and leave the same ‘Hey great post, thanks for sharing!’ comment, the blogger and that blog’s readers will all see right through you.  Instead, look for a way to actually contribute a meaningful point to an existing discussion.  This way you can actually learn something, and you will be helping to create valuable content for the blogger, which makes them FAR more likely to start commenting and linking to your blog.

7 – Add your blog’s URL to your email sig and any profiles you have on other social sites. This seems like common sense, but so many of us forget this simple step.  But it’s important because if you become a ‘power user’ on another social site, such as Twitter, then you are probably talking to a completely different community of people than those that read your blog.  So it only makes since to add a link to your blog so that these people that find you so interesting on Twitter, can follow your posts on your blog as well!

8 – Make it easy to bookmark and Digg/Stumble-Upon your posts. Many bloggers have links at the end of every blog post that let you quickly and easily submit those posts to social-aggregator/bookmark sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us.  If you want to boost your traffic this is a great way to get your content in front of new eyeballs.

9 – Blog about breaking news first. Set up custom Google news searches for topics associated with your industry, so that you know about news as it breaks.  If you can get that hot news story on your blog first, you greatly increase your chances of boosting your traffic, and of also having that story become popular on aggregators such as Digg, Megite and TechMeme.  And sometimes it helps to just know the right people and contacts.  Remember what news source broke the YouTube acquisition by Google?  It wasn’t the Wall-Street Journal or CNBC, it was the blog TechCrunch.

10 – Let your reader have a say in the content you create. Who better understands what content appeals to readers, than the readers themselves?  So what tips do YOU use to boost your blog’s traffic?  This list is hardly comprehensive, there’s bound to be dozens of tips and tricks that I didn’t mention that you smart people are already using with great success on your blogs.  What did I miss?