The following is a guest post written by Patrick Meninga of Make Money With No Work.  He recently built and sold a flagship website for $200,000 dollars.

If you follow a lot of “make money online” blogs, then you are probably familiar with traditional online marketing techniques.  A lot of what the A-list bloggers preach are things that worked in the past, but may not be working so great anymore.

Instead of just following the herd blindly, you might do well to explore these less conventional techniques.

These unconventional approaches are not just fancy ideas that I have about how to successfully market an authority website…..these are things I did which led to a six figure website sale.

1) Test your content

All of the A-list bloggers tell you to create “quality content.”  They harp on this idea endlessly.

But what is quality content, really?

What constitutes quality will vary from niche to niche, so the only way to know for sure is to test it.

Luckily, the Internet makes this remarkably easy to do.

My favorite method for testing content is to use paid Stumbleupon traffic.  For as little as five dollars per day, you can get an accurate measure of “likes” on each piece of content, and thus learn which of two articles gets the best response.

After creating a few campaigns to various articles, an iterative process should naturally unfold.  The “winning” article on your website should become a blueprint for similar content.

In this manner, you can craft new articles for your website that are instantly a hit with your audience, because you tested a variety of articles and found what receives the best response.

This also gives you a strong indication of where to direct new promotional campaigns.  Want to throw some serious traffic at a landing page on your website?  Test it again several other landing pages first, and use the “like” count to determine which one gets the best response.

Don’t just try to guess what “quality content” is for your particular niche–actually test it out and then start using the results to shape your content planning.

2) Build a community

Building a community sounds like a traditional marketing cliche, but it can still be an important step towards building a profitable website.

The reason this is an unconventional strategy is due to logic: You are not building a community in order to earn income from return visitors, instead, you are attempting to legitimize a search-dominated website.

What does that mean?

It means that a large authority site runs the risk of looking like a content farm, and increasing your percentage of return visits is one of the best ways to legitimize your website in the eyes of search engines.

Avoiding algorithmic penalties is a real threat these days, and building a community as a defensive marketing strategy is the perfect counter.

In addition to improving site metrics, building a community also gives you:

• A fan base that can help spread new content.
• Ideas for generating new content that better suits your audience.
• Auto-generated original content that helps expand the footprint of your website.

How do you go about creating this community?

Here was my four step approach, which led to a modest forum generating over 3,000 words of original content daily in only six months time:

1. Encourage commenting on your most popular articles.
2. Participate in those comment threads and be genuinely helpful.
3. Allow time for several of these articles to form active discussions in them.
4. Close comments site-wide and direct discussion to a new forum.

Bam.  Instant community formed.   Website legitimized.
3) Market your marketing
Most people realize that a website needs links pointed at it in order to be successful.

However, most will overestimate the number of links they need, while also underestimating the quality of the links they need.

What does this mean?

Because backlinks in general are difficult to obtain, many marketers tend to focus almost exclusively on getting the easy, cheap links, rather than working hard on obtaining the really juicy, authoritative links.

Cheap, manufactured backlinks are relatively easy to obtain.  Most can be created by trading a piece of original content for them.

Juicy, authoritative links are difficult to obtain.  Most will have to network with many others and create something amazing in order to earn such a link.

Therefore, one of the most powerful unconventional marketing tactics these days is to maximize your “good links” by supporting them with manufactured links.

This is a counter-intuitive approach, because most will hesitate to build links to content that is not their own website.

Obtaining premium links through guest posting, networking, or link bait will always be an important strategy.  But you can then maximize those quality links that you do obtain by manufacturing perfectly optimized, anchored links to those promotional pieces.

Unconventional success

My website was about a “real world” topic and I was grateful to sell it for six figures.  I do not think I could have made that sale without employing the three strategies:

1. Test your content and then refine future posts.
2. Build a community for legitimacy.
3. Market your marketing to multiply your wins.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

It is no secert that Newspaper sales across the country are down and newspapers are having a hard time adapting to new technology and customer trends. In this post I am going to use Fargo’s local newspaper The Forum as an example for my Newspaper Marketing Ideas.

The Forum has been around a very long time and because of that it has seen the twilight years of journalism come and now go. Some of its most prized sources of revenue are drying up and even disappearing completely. I can’t blame the people who are shifting their advertising dollars away from newspapers into other sources. When you get better value elsewhere, it’s only natural to pursue it.

Issues facing newspapers

One of the newspaper’s bread and butter sections is the classified section. The problem is some guy named Craig came up with an idea of a free online classified website. It took a while but now people are using it, a lot, even in small towns.

My girlfriend runs a dog running business in Fargo and is a former employee of The Forum. In an attempt to drum up business and clients, she took out a classified ad in the paper and waited for the clients to roll in. It cost her $140 for a one-inch by one-inch ad. Nothing happened. People just don’t look through the paper for certain information anymore.

The natural progression was to post a free listing on Craigslist about her new service. Sure enough, she got multiple calls, emails and clients from this free website. Can you see a problem here?

This is a problem for all the newspapers that make money off classifieds and ads.

The good news for newspapers sales is that most are small and pretty local. This is a great opportunity from them to mimic the actions of Craigslist and others and get people to their own website by offering a similar service.

But how will they make money by offering this for free? Simply, they won’t, other than through paid ad placements on those listings. For example, businesses might be interested in newspaper advertising where related companies have posted free listings. A little competition, perhaps.

At the top of its site, The Forum boasts having 9,308,484 pages for November 2009. All of North Dakota has approximately 641,000 citizens, by the way. All that web traffic is great for The Forum, except anyone going to its web site for the first time is greeted with a wall garden (login form). If you’re not a member, you must become one in order to read the article. I simply hit the back button. What a shame.

I bet that out of those 9 million “pages” viewed on The Forum, the number one page is its login page. How can that possibly help generate revenue? It doesn’t. One time I visited drudgereport.com and noticed an article about an Ozzy Osbourne concert in Fargo and how the local police used the concert to nab wanted criminals by offering them free concert tickets.

Drudge Report gets over 600 million hits a month! So, all of those people reading Drudge clicked to see The Forum’s story about Ozzy and instead they were greeted with a login screen! Epic FAIL! How many of those people do you think registered to read the article? I bet 1% did.

In fact, if you do manage to register, you were automatically re-directed back to the home page, requiring you to go back and find the original link to the article you wanted (I believed this has been fixed now). Most people aren’t that patient.

Newspapers’ sales are losing ground to other services that are free and widely available. This means that much more time and emphasis have been placed on newspaper marketing ideas. What we forget is where all of the newspaper customers originated from. Their rock solid demographic has changed dramatically. I can’t remember the last time I looked a phone number up in a phone book, and the same goes with newspapers. We rely on the Internet for all our information.

Newspapers once had the ability to call each and every one of the residents in their town through Newspaper Telemarketing. But as more and more people ditch their landlines for unlisted cell phone numbers, this has made it even more difficult for newspapers to reach the younger demographic.

I can think of a few ideas that would help newspapers to be able to compete and continue in the coming century:

Charge much more for printed copies of the paper.

Let’s face it. Newspapers have extremely high overhead with paper, gas, electricity to print, a big building and distribution centers to heat/cool. I would charge appropriately for the honor of having a printed version of the paper. As people quit paying the higher prices for the printed version, scale back the overhead to match.

Capitalize on the brand of the newspaper by focusing on local/regional news only.

The best thing newspapers have going for them is their local brand and recognition. They should leverage that by only providing local, relevant news that people in the surrounding area will highly appreciate. Local and hyperlocal blogs have been springing up in every town across the country for the simple fact that people love their local sports, travel, news, dining, nightlife and the like.

Why waste time with national or even regional news at all? Make the paper completely local with news no one else offers. Ditch the world news section.

Imagine the savings each paper would have by not paying the Associated Press and other sources for the use of articles from outside the area. I believe The Forum pays roughly 2-3 million a year for the honor of republishing AP articles in its daily newspaper. How many jobs and overhead could be eliminated by focusing on local news only?

People have the Internet and TV/Satellite for national and world news. It’s a fallacy that local newspapers have to republish national and world news. I can’t recall a national article I read in The Forum that I had not already heard two days before on Twitter and the day before on Drudge Report.

Open up the classified section

Make the classified section of your website open and free to the public like craigslist.com. Your newspaper already has the traffic and trust and most newspapers are in smaller towns and communities that don’t yet have a functioning Craigslist page. Right now, people in small towns have to look to the nearest mid to large city if they want to use Craigslist.

Allow people to post for free for x number of days and then charge them to post for longer periods of time or with featured preference like ebay.com listings. This way people with a coffee table can get rid of their goods and those who want more permanent exposure can have it at a cost. Locals and outsiders will use your brand to facilitate their transactions and bring traffic, recommendations and so on.

Open up contributions

People love to be heard and share their ideas with the world. Give them the ability to do so. Employ an editor to read over submitted pieces and publish them to the rest of the community. This will add more content to be searched by more people to increase overall exposure, relationships, drama and just about everything else you can name.

This process can be made easy by auto filters for submitted articles. Filter for correct content type, foul language, formatting and so on. Article submission sites use this software all the time to ensure a uniform format to articles and content being submitted. Then once the articles pass auto checking, a person reviews and either approves/rejects for correction.

This process allows for a community to have hundreds or thousands of extra articles written for their site every year. Meanwhile, you collect revenue from the ad placements, gain extra traffic, links, etc.

Employ successful local content producers

One of the smartest things AOL has done in the last couple years was to buy up and enable further already successful blog sites. It simply looked at sites that were already successful and poured in resources to help expand those sites’ growth and revenue. This can and should be done on a local level.

There are bloggers in the area of every newspaper who are operating a successful blog about any subject you can imagine. Pay these bloggers to do what they do under your umbrella. You gain their readers support, interaction, favor and can possibly send them much more traffic, increasing their/your revenue, traffic and the circle continues.

Pick up the top 10 bloggers and their sites in the area along with their readers and now your local papers is attracting attention from all over the world. Here is where local pays on the world stage.

Triple the opinion section

Another newspaper marketing idea would be to expand the treasure trove of free content and participation known as the opinion section. People love to voice their opinions, and people like to hear others complain. Why not publish every letter to the editor and every editorial that comes in rather than picking and choosing? There’s nothing unique to a community quite like the opinion section of its newspaper.

Newspaper marketing

Newspaper circulation has been in decline for the past two decades, and signs for the future are not looking good. In order to increase newspaper circulation, more emphasis should be placed on marketing. Newspaper marketing jobs might be the only newspaper jobs available! Still, other newspapers outsource their marketing to a newspaper marketing agency. Either way, newspapers need to make big changes.

Conclusion

Eyeballs matter. Get the eyeballs and you’ll have newspaper advertising dollars. Newspapers used to be the only source of news for an area, but that has changed. Newspaper sales show how much the industry has changed.

Newspapers now have to fight for their readers now against everyone nationally, locally and worldwide. Focus on what you know best – your local community – and you can’t go wrong. When you have a solid base, expand into other areas. Tap the local talent because those are the people who matter the most to you. Can your newspaper compete against Drudge Report for world/national news online? No, so compete where you can win and focus all your energy there.

It would serve newspapers wisely move to a method of advertising control and brokering verses relying solely on subscribers. If newspapers combined marketing magazines, billboards, and local niche website such as blogs all the way through mega sites like Facebook. They would better serve their advertising base, by increasing exposure and managing advertising dollars across all local platforms.

Journalism isn’t dead. Journalism has more opportunities than ever before, but the energy has to be focused where it can make the most impact. That’s survival!

*top image from http://andygreenhaw.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/newspapers1.jpg

This is a guest post by Dalirin is a blogger that likes blogging about how to make money online. He has also written about his number 1 way to make money online.

If you are interesting is submitting a guest post, please visit my guest poster page to find out more info. Now on to the the good stuff.

If you are in the make money niche, your aim is to make as much money as you can. A make money blogger can make money on his blog by selling a product, being a consultant, doing paid review, affiliate marketing or putting ads on the blog. Apart from putting ads on a blog, the other means of making money is not easy for a new blog. Only if the owner is an experienced SEO blogger, he would find it hard to rank his blog for his keywords.

I said that the other means of making money from a blog is difficult for a new blog is because almost all new blogs has little or no traffic. With the little amount of traffic it gets, I doubt if it would sell any product or make money from affiliate sells. If there is a sale, it is pure luck (luck also exist in blogging). But with ads on the site, the blog owner is able to generate some income.

When is Ads Recommended on a New Blog?

I would recommend it as soon as your first post is live. This is good so that your readers gets accustomed to the ads. Then it is there choice if they want to become ads-blinded or not. Having ads early would tell your reader why you are blogging. I have seen websites that changed their design to include more ads and their readers were complaining. But before the site became popular, no one complained about the ads.

Will You Lose Readers?

I would say No. This is because the reader is reading your blog for your content. He wants to get more information about something. He is not reading your blog to increase your monthly views.  You would lose readers when the ads interfere with their readings such as forcing them to take an affiliate survey before they can access your content. This is your fault. There are other bloggers they can read or get the information from.

What type of Ad should be Used?

Use CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression) such as adsense on the new blog. You can also use affiliate banners as an Ad. This would enable you to make some few money. Trust me, it is small, but when you receive your first click, you would be motivated to work harder. With affiliate banners, you may be lucky that a reader was looking for a service or a product. Then the person decide to buy from your affiliate link.

I don’t recommend paid text link because you would not be able to see an advertiser. No advertiser would want to advertise on a blog that has little traffic. The advertiser might feel that them advertising on the site is the same as the advertiser going to get a new site and linking to their site.