If you are not aware, our SeededBuzz community includes writers who have published eBooks. In fact, this article was inspired after reading a Seed planted by Joseph Rinaldo over at Read Rinaldo . He published the eBook “A Spy At Home” which you can download from Amazon.com for $1.99.

Why should you write an eBook?

When you hear the term eBook, you might automatically think of electronic versions of published full-length novels that you can download to your Kindle or iPad. However, eBooks can also be the equivalent to pamphlets that are informational and cover specific items. It is the latter that this article focuses on.

EBooks are a natural extension of your website. You’ve already established a following because people enjoy what you have to say and respect your opinion, so why not put that into a format that can reach others? Let’s spend a moment to see what an eBook can do for you.

Identify you as a credible authority on a given topic: You have spent months, if not years, building your website focused around your niche topic. In that time, you may have written 20 very popular posts that are constantly drawing visitors. This popularity shows that your readers value your opinion.

By taking those same points and compiling them into a single eBook, you can begin to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. For starters, you become a published author – something that many do not attempt to become. Secondly, your eBook becomes a reference material for those who would rather trust an eBook than simply a blog article. And lastly, with an eBook that mirrors your most popular articles, you create credibility to your leadership within your niche, which can lead to increased readership and branding.

Expanding on your topic: In many cases, online visitors tend to have an attention span to read about 500 – 700 words before moving on to the next article of interest. Consciously or not, bloggers tend to write within these boundaries (the average of the five most recent Seeds is 492 words.), making it a challenge to fully cover a topic in detail before losing your reader. With an eBook, however, the reader is already someone who will put in the added time to read a larger section of text.

With an eBook, you can not only cover the content that was in your popular posts, but you can further expand into the “nuts and bolts” behind your topic. In turn, your eBook becomes a practical reference tool for the readers who are looking for the detailed information, rather than a blog post that only scratches the surface of the topic. Not only does this help your readers to better understand your niche, but – as noted above – leads to identifying yourself as an authority on the topic(s).

Reaching a broader audience: How do you achieve your goal by creating a larger audience to your site? One thing you can do is write an eBook and upload it. If you upload it to your site, encourage your readers to download the file and share it with their friends (word-of-mouth advertising can be more successful than paid advertising). Another option is to upload it to some of the free eBook hosting sites, such as Lulu.com. This is a great way to reach audiences that typically do not read blogs.

Return on your investment: Beyond simply increasing your readership, eBooks can also lead to an increase in site revenue. If you happen to monetize your website, you can realized increased revenue through CPM advertising, affiliate marketing, as well as creating a larger pool of reader e-mail addresses. With CPM (cost per mile) advertising, the increased in viewership results in increased page impressions, meaning that your site will receive more revenue.

If you participate in affiliate marketing, you can include your personalized links into your eBook, directing the reader to your advertisers’ websites. If the reader of the eBook has already accepted you as an authority on the topic you are writing about, then they might be willing to sign up for whatever site you are directing them to more so than simply displaying the link directly on your website.

The last point would be the reader e-mail addresses. Depending on the type of website you are running, direct marketing via e-mail addresses (as through newsletters, special announcements, etc) can be a major source of revenue. By having readers register with your site in order to obtain your eBook, you create a larger pool of addresses for you to build your customer base. And since e-mails can be forwarded, the potential for continued growth is limitless.

This is only four reasons why you should consider creating an eBook to see if it is right for you and your site. For those of you that are interested, in my next article, I will provide you tips on “how” to go about creating the eBook. If you have already created one, please share your experiences with the rest of the community.

One of my hopes for all of the SeededBuzz users out there is that they see a return on their investment. It takes a lot of time to build a quality website, and you should see both an increase in web traffic as well as a monetary return for all your hard work. I’ve already addressed the importance of Inbound links (backlinks) and increasing your exposure to popular media outlets through BlogBurst (which has now been taken over by Demand Media Studios). Now I would like to introduce you to inLinks.

I have a question for you. Do you want to make “easy money?” If you’re like me, whenever you hear those television infomercials mention “easy money,” you naturally start to question what they are pitching. They throw out the pitch like “Buy my special book to learn how to become rich,” all the while the person is becoming rich by you buying his book. With inLinks, there is nothing to buy, and you don’t need to change the way you approach your blog

In this case, when I say easy money, I mean you do not have to embed a set of specific links into your article that looks out of place. Nor do you have to take up a sponsored article that require you to force unique key words into a sentence (where there is no grammatically correct way to do) for only $1.00. What InLinks does is it searches the text of all of your articles – no matter how old – and matches them up with keywords their customers want to pay for. When a match occurs, inLinks automatically updates your article by inserting the link for you. In short, they do all the work for you (and for more money).

For example, let’s say you are writing an article about iPods or a special program that is giving away free Sony PSPs. InLinks has a customer who wants to link their website to the keyword “iPod giveaway.” When inLinks finds the existence of “iPod giveaway” in your article, they will automatically create a special hyperlink for you.

This link is automatically placed within your article and looks like any other link (rather than some that places two lines under the key words). In exchange you will receive payment for that link for every month the customer wishes to pay for it. When their time is over, the keyword becomes available for their next customer to purchase. The same holds true on a topic you might have written 3 years ago.

With reoccurring payments, and the possibility of having more than one advertiser purchasing links in the same article, you can quickly start earning some decent cash without any extra effort. In fact, inLinks accounted for 55% of my revenue last year.

Give it a try for a few months and see how much you can earn. Click here and fill out their brief registration page to get started. After that, all you will need to do is add a simply code somewhere on your site (it could even be in the sidebar). InLinks will do the rest.

One of the most popular methods used by junior and advanced bloggers alike to make money online is through Google AdSense. Almost any website you visit, be it a small-time blogger to a large news site such as CNN’s news page, will have or had used Google AdSense at one point in their history. The reason for this is the ease of use and customization.

Google’s AdSense service is popular for two reasons. For starters, AdSense works by mining the text on the webpage that the ad is located on to find a set of key words. These key words are matched with the terms Google’s advertisers are wishing to associate their product and services with, therefore, your site will display relevant content that your readers might want to click on and explore. So, for example, if you wrote an article about visiting Manhattan, you might find advertisements for travel agencies or special events that are happening on Broadway.

The second reason it is so popular is that it is easy to use. All a person needs to know is how to paste a section of code into your website in the location where you want the ads to be displayed. After that, Google does the rest. Because it is so easy to use, there are so many bloggers who subscribe to and use Google AdSense. With this large pool of users out there, Google can bring in even more advertisers to into their service, creating a wider variety of products and services to be matched up with your content.

Depending on your post placement, website activity, and the relevancy of the topic to the ad, the rate at which you earn money can vary. For example, on my niche political website, I just received my first $100 check from Google this month after three years of running the ads. Other users that I know of earn at least $100 in a year. If you are interested in giving this service a try, implement it for three months and look back to see how much you are earning. If you are making more than $10 in just a few months, it might be worth the space on your site to let the ads run (unless you are able to sell that space for more to direct advertisers).

One of the goals of SeededBuzz is to help you make your articles work for you.  SeededBuzz is a fantastic way to increase the web traffic to your site by allowing you to promote your own articles. The more articles you Seed and Buzz, the more likely the community will discover your site and Buzz your work. Another way that SeededBuzz helps is by providing you tools for you to use to increase your exposure (and revenue).  So I want to introduce you to  a service called BlogBurst.

As stated on their website, “BlogBurst [is] a syndication service that places blogs on top-tier online destinations.” What BlogBurst does is it uses your RSS feed to pool your articles with articles written by other users for professional media organizations to reference. If the media likes the article written, they can take the article and run it on their website, giving you greater exposure. But exposure isn’t the only benefit.

BlogBurst keeps track of how many times your article headlines are displayed on the media outlets websites, which they use to rank your activity against others. At the end of each quarter, those authors who rank in the top 100 of headlines displayed will earn a cash award. The minimum payout is $50.00 USD, and the maximum is $1,200.00 USD.

In 2009, I was fortunate to be in the top 100 with my website U.S. Common Sense. During the Second Quarter (April 1st through June 30th), my articles received over 800,000 headline impressions through the BlogBurst service, with my articles being read over 870 times during that period. During that period, my work was picked up by many media outlets including:

• Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago Sun-Times, Post-Tribune, Lake County News-Sun, SouthTown Star)
• Cox Ohio (Dayton Daily News)
• FoxNews (Fox Business)
• Houston Chronicle
• Palm Beach Post
• Reuters
• Time Warner (Road Runner)
• USA Today
• Wall Street Journal
• Ziff Davis Enterprise (eWeek Microsoft Watch)

I finished in 93rd place (I peaked at 80th) at the end of the quarter, earning me $50.00. Not a bad result for simply writing articles that were an interest to me. The following is a chart of the activity of the site during that period:

As you work on the articles you plan to Seed, or on Seeds that you are Buzzing for fellow community members, why not let those articles go to work for you behind the scenes?  Quality work will always draw attention and lead to increases in audience.  Put SeededBuzz and BlogBurst work together for you.

NOTE:  BlogBurst is a free service, though there are certain requirements that your site must meet before being approved (much like with SeededBuzz).

I have just picked this up from Techcrunch but thought is would be interesting to anyone serious about allowing others and themselves to make money from their original content.

Flattr is a social micropayment service which allows you to give (and receive) small amounts of money to producers of content you like and/or use – could be quite a utopian dream, but if it gets enough of a following from people who give and take it could work well. Follow the link to get a full explanation from either Techcrunch or Falttr directly, but at the moment they are still in beta invite only mode.

Have you ever thought to consider how different searches either go hot for a short period of time and then die down or are seasonal and only used at specific times of the year?

I know bloggers who make small fortunes from identifying new unique trending topics and either creating new blogs for them or pages within their own blogs for those keywords.

They target them for one reason only. They are often easy to rank for than established terms as there is no established search competition.

So where can you find which keywords are trending?

For the purpose of this post I am going to avoid talking about recurring seasonal keywords like “Christmas presents” and focus on new trends.

Here are some great resources that can used to identify trends and inspire new blog posts and Seeds:

Using Twitter To See Trends – What’s the Trend does a weekly roundup
Using Wikipedia To See Trends – Trending Topics does a great job of helping you see what’s hot and going to get hotter
Google’s View On What Is Trending – A search related list would not be complete without mentioning one of or in this case, two of their tools so for those of you who may not be aware of Google Trends and Google Insights, they are awesome!

You’ve written your post and now what?

You need to make sure you’re post is optimized. Here’s a useful checklist:

• Is the meta page title formatted to include your trending keywords?
• Does the post title contain your trending keywords?
• Does the first paragraph contain the trending keywords?
• If you’ve added an image does the alt tag contain the trending keyword?
• Have you linked to your post internally from either part of your navigation or other posts?
• Have you managed to get links from other websites to your post using your keyword or post title?
• Have you managed to use Twitter, Digg, Stumble or other social networking / bookmarking sites to link to your post?

If you can say yes to all of these you’re in the game and you’ve got a good chance of ranking for your target terms. However you’ll need to be aware that your ability to rank highly is affected by your general domain authority as well as specific optimized pages, which is why creating ongoing Buzz is so important.

If you would like to write a guest post here we’d love to hear your idea for a post so please contact us.

I read this post about struggling to make blogging make money with great interest. It raises some really great discussion points some of which I’d like to pick up on in this post.

The first area for discussion is which Seeds are getting Buzzed. Looking down the list we have a mix which I have categorized as:

Like Minded Friends

Here’s a link to a popular Seed called The Top and Bottom 3 worries of this parent It has been Buzzed 3 Times because:

1) It’s got an audience – we have a growing number of parenting bloggers
2) It’s a good Seed – It asks a question, appropriate to nearly everyone and set-up further debate

It’s therefore no surprise that other parenting Seeds have also attracted Buzz.

This then begs the question – what are we doing about populating every category with sufficient members to get all good Seeds Buzzed?

The good news is there is a great plan, the question is when, and we could do with your help to help us finalize our thinking.

We’ve been impressed with Seed numbers and had hoped for more Buzz. The question that remains unanswered is why aren’t members Buzzing more? To help us we have created a Poll. Would you take 30 seconds to answer the questions.

Whilst waiting for the answers to the Poll we’re also creating email alerts to tell members when Seeds worth Buzzing have been planted. We hope everyone finds this useful.

When we’ve made the Buzzing process as efficient as we can we’ll throw everything we have at finding as many members as we can to make this the best blog marketing community around.

At the moment we have a few hundred bloggers kicking the tyres of our new community. Imagine 20,000 + bloggers taking part and you can see how great Seeds may be able to attract serious amounts of Buzz.

Please click here to view the Poll.

It’s All About Timing

Another Seed type that appears to work well is the date sensitive Seed. Here’s some examples:

How to make her Valentines unforgettable and What’s the point of the iPad

Contentious

Then there are Seeds written on subjects best described as contentious like Censorship? It just so easy to carry on conversations that incite opinions like this.

Interesting

Then there’s Seeds that ask genuinely interesting questions like ‘Can internet friends ever be as good as real-life friends?‘  Once again, this is a Seed that has been written to inspire further debate and be written about.

The next area of discussion is how to make money blogging. I don’t intend to go through all of the possible ways here, but am happy to link to sites like Probogger, that offer great advice on revenue generation. Instead I’d like to focus on the ingredient that makes all potential blog revenue streams possible – traffic!

I have reviewed over 1,000 blogs in order to select the first few hundred founding members. What made me chose one blog over another were the same ingredients that enable blogs to grow their traffic. They were:

Great content

If you don’t invest in great editorial, people won’t come back – you can learn a lot about the styles and subjects that make one blog more popular than another by checking out the top blogs on Technorati. You’ll also learn a lot about what makes successful blog posts from discovering the formula to writing popular Seeds. I strongly believe they are the same.

SEO

Google provides all top blogs with a massive amount of free traffic. It does this because in Google’s eyes the blog is influential and relevant to the keyword being searched for.

You become influential by having other blogger link to you – Buzz! You acquire relevant traffic by doing keyword research and writing about topics that get searched for – check out this post to see what I mean.

Together the ingredients can be a recipe for huge increases in traffic.

Sociable

Part of the DNA of a great blog is it’s desire not to just talk at people, but to talk about people and be inclusive. To be sociable. Blogs that just publish posts at people and aren’t making friends by linking to other website aren’t really behaving like blogs and aren’t likely to be very successful. So if you’re not Buzzing and making friends, I hope you’re being Sociable with other bloggers in other ways.

Finally, by writing a great Seed that asked a great question, you made me sit at my desk for an hour and write a Buzz post. You have a new fan and have earned a link to your blog that Google will take notice of, and the bonus is I am promoting this Blog as well, proving it works! So well done and thank you!