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The New 30 Day Challenge ? It?s Now ?The Challenge?
'); document.write('Sorry for the late news… But if you did the 30 Day Challenge last year with us it’s time to jump on this years model. And a lot has changed. Instead of just 30 days to build your business (and make $1) this year it’s going to be something like 3 months. Why? Well Ed says a lot of people got overwhelmed by the pace so he extended it… and is giving a lot of breaks in between “modules”… so it will be easier to keep up. Hey if anyone is doing this years Challenge we’d love to hear what you think. Jump in and lets us know the latest from your site-building efforts. For those who want to join in, it won’t be hard to catch up. I highly recommend if you are thinking about building your first site, this is a great way to go. As a matter of fact my daughter is going to give it a try. Maybe we can get her to tell us about her experience. Here’s where to go to get started… http://www.challenge.co/ And remember, it’s all FREE. Such a deal! '); document.write(''); document.write('

How To Make A New Post In WordPress
'); document.write('Making new posts in WordPress is pretty easy. But to give you a bit of a jump start here’s a video that gives a quick explanation for how to do it. Note: Click on the image to enlarge the video. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Market Samurai Research Tool
'); document.write('The best Keyword Research tool I’ve ever used is Market Samurai. In fact it’s more than a keyword research tool, it’s a market research tool. By that I mean it gives you the tools to check monetization options and also get very specific information about your competition very quickly. Market Samurai For example… Of course you want to know how many searches are being done on a keyword. And of course you want to know what the other variations are for a phrase. Market Samurai will do all that PLUS tell you what the AdWords bid price is for a keyword, all within one search tool. SEO Competition But my favorite tool is the SEO Competition tool. With it you can find out if the Top 10 sites on the first page of Google are beatable or not. This tool will tell you how old a domain is, how many indexed page are on a site, as well as the typical SEO criteria like whether the keyphrase is in the URL, title tag, head tag, and Meta Description. Add the fact that it will tell you how many backlinks a site has and you’ve got a very powerful tool. Market Samurai offers a Free Trial too so you can check it out before you buy. Click here to go check it out at no charge. I guarantee it will blow you away. Market Samurai Videos A great thing about Market Samurai is they have some of the best instructional videos ever. Not only will you learn the tool but you’ll learn lots about how to do Keyword and Market Research. Believe me you’ll love this tool. '); document.write(''); document.write('

A New SEO Idea For Us:
'); document.write('I had an email today about a technique that could increase traffic sales. I wanted to run it by some of my fellow gurus to get their opinions as well. We learned when we were building our website that we should name our photos with keywords. I worked hard on my site to be sure that I did use a good keyword on each photo. I get a good portion of my traffic from “image searches.” Today, I read an article about the fact that when someone comes to the site via an image search they get a different view of the page with the photo at the top instead of just the regular page. The article states that if you add a small bit of code between the “head” tags that you will get more visitors to stay on the page and thus more sales. I am somewhat afraid to go adding code to my website without getting some other opinions. I will attach a link to the article so that some of you can read it and see what you think. You can see it here: http://www.RaineDocs.com/llg135/googleimageshacks If you get a chance to check it out, please let me know your thoughts. Lynda http://www.slip-resistant-solutions.com. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Website Mistake # 2 ? Inadequate Keyword Research
'); document.write('If I had a nickel for every time I heard… “My site doesn’t get any traffic.” or… “I get traffic but nobody buys anything.” Well I’d have a lot of nickels. Here’s a couple of questions I usually ask… “How much time did you spend doing market and keyword research?” “Did you check to make sure there weren’t hundreds of thousands of sites that already were built around your main keyword?” “Did you make sure people were actually making money in that niche and there were good monetization partners?” “What do you have to do to get on the first page of Google for that keyword?” THE Most Important Part of Building A Successful Online Business Without a doubt proper Market and Keyword Research is the most important part of building any online business. Do it right and you get easy traffic and start making money right away. Do it wrong and you could waste months or even years. What Size Mountain Are You Climbing? What happens most of the time is people pick a niche that is way too competitive. It’s like choosing to climb a 20,000 foot mountain when you thought you were climbing a 1,000 foot mountain. They get part way up and wonder why the top is so far away. They thought they’d be there by now. That’s when people just give up, even though they’ve already invested hundreds of hours and who knows how much money. The only thing that’s worse… They get to the top and realize that there’s no Pot of Gold waiting when they get there. The sad thing is, both of these website mistakes could have been avoided. Find The Sweet Spot In A Niche The Sweet Spot is that ideal place in a niche where the keyword phrase has enough demand to get traffic but not so much competition that you can never get on the first page of Google for that keyphrase. Nice place to be eh? Yes, but it’s getting harder all the time. More and more people are building websites and trying to find a way to work at home and maybe quit that day job. So more and more websites are being put up. The Sweet Spot is getting harder to find. But it’s still there. It just makes it that much more critical to do thorough keyword research. Don’t Forget Commerciality An often neglected part of keyword research is not only finding keywords that will get you traffic, but also finding keywords that have enough “buying intention” to make money. Keywords that can get you traffic are not so hard to find, but many of those “low hanging fruit” actually have very little monetization potential. Sure “turtle propagation” may get you some traffic but how many of the folks that type that into Google are looking to buy something? Probably not many. In fact, give it a try… Type “turtle propagation” into Google. You’ll see over a million websites about it but not one single AdWords ad. So at least half of your keyword research should be spent checking for monetization potential for each phrase you research. You’ll want to start by making sure there are people buying paid ads for the keyword in Google. The paid ads are the ones over on the right on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). If people are paying for that keyword they must be making money. And also check to make sure there are either products you can sell or affiliate programs that pay well. You could find some keywords with plenty of products but are people buying those products online and do they offer a good enough commission so you can actually make money. Those First 30 Days Are Just A Test Even if you do plenty of research and think you’ve found some good money-making potential you won’t know for sure until you test your conversion rate. What’s that? Of the people who come to your site, how many click on your sales links? Of the people that click, what percentage actually purchase something? If it takes hundreds of visitors before you make a sale then something’s wrong. You want to convert at least 1% ideally… in other words 1 in 100 who go to the sales page actually buy. If you can’t convert visitors to customers at that rate then you may have found a niche with no buying intention. It might be time to pull-the-plug before you waste any more time. Don’t Waste Your Time For many, it takes months and sometimes years to realize the niche they chose is a dead end street. They spend months climbing up the mountain and realize they are nowhere near the top. Before you spend what will be hundreds of hours building a site, why not do the work and thoroughly research your potential market. Trust me… you’ll be glad you did. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Website Building Workshop Meeting ? 10/4/2009
'); document.write('We had a meeting today at the Computer Society Resource Center. We had a freewheeling Q&A session. Questions discussed were… How do you track outgoing links? How can you check your PageRank for a page? What is PageRank? Getting High Quality Back Links Here’s the video from the meeting. Click Here To Download This Video Click here to download the PDF file “How To Get Backlinks“ '); document.write(''); document.write('

Search Engine Optimization Video from Affiliate Summit
'); document.write('This is a video from Affiliate Summit. Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive, is an SEO expert who presented there. He talks about what are the important SEO factors to him. Here’s what he considers important… Site Search Architecture Title Tag Valuable Backlinks Meta Description Site Maps (the HTML kind) Domain/page name He also talks about what are the SEO factors that have become obsolete. There are some very surprising points he makes. I watched the whole video and said to myself… well much of what he says are totally unimportant factors are ones that many folks still sweat over today. Then I noticed this presentation was from Affiliate Summit 2006. That was scary. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Website Mistake # 1 ? Building The Site For Yourself
'); document.write('Probably the biggest mistake website owners make when they build their site is making the site about themselves instead of for their visitors. What do I mean by that? For a site to be successful it must do two things. 1. Meet potential customers where they are now 2. Quickly convince visitors that you have what they are looking for But most site owners build sites about them. They think the more they talk about themselves and tell visitors how cool they are the more sales they will make. But your visitors don’t want to know how cool you are, they want to know how cool you are going to make them. That’s why your site must be about your visitors and not you. Meet Your Customers Where They Are Now Where are your potential customers? There in the search engines trying to solve their problems. If you can’t connect with them there then you may never be able to get visitors to your site. This is why keyword research and Search Engine Optimization is so important. A big mistake site owners make is assuming that people will find their sites automatically. Understand Their Problems The first thing you MUST do is understand what the problems are in your niche. The more you understand those problems the more you can connect with your prospect’s and convince them you can help them. If they sense you truly understand them they may begin to trust you. But first… Keyword Research Once you understand your prospects problems you must determine what keywords they will use in the search engines to begin to solve those problems. This is where Keyword Research comes in. The keywords they use will mostly be about their problems. Occasionally they will be about a particular solution they may already be aware of. If you offer that solution you may be able to use those keywords. At any rate, using your understanding of your niche and your customers you can choose a range of keywords that you think they will use. Then you must use keyword research to determine the best ones to use. You don’t want ones that are too competitive and already have lots of sites using tPhem. And you don’t want the ones that are being used so infrequently that you can’t get much traffic. You must find the sweet spot where there is enough demand but no too much competition. Once you know those keywords you can build your site around them. Search Engine Optimization is the techniques you use to let the search engines know about the content on your site. Once you fully optimize your site using a wide-range of SEO techniques you can connect with your prospects at the search engines. Convince Your Visitors You Have What They Are Looking… Quickly Now that you know all about your niche’s problems and how to solve them, it’s time to convince your visitors. The only reason they come to your site is because they hope you can help them. If you can’t they will be gone in seconds ? and off to your competitor’s site. Make It A Straight Line From The Keyword To The Solution Visitors will get to your site from the keywords they use in the Search Engines. That keyword implies a need or a question or a problem. That page must immediately convince them that you have what they are looking for otherwise they’ll be hitting that back button and be gone. So be absolutely sure that your page doesn’t waste their time or offer confusing navigation that makes it difficult to find the answer they are looking for. Your page must be exactly about the keyword they typed in. If they type in “best golf clubs” your page better be about the best golf clubs. If it’s about “golf instruction” then you not only run the risk of them leaving but of never coming back. You’ve just lost theri trust. If there are implied solutions that their keyword points to, make sure your site offers that solution and puts a link to in an obvious location on your site. It’s About How You Treat Your Visitors I’ll leave you with a great quote by Dale Carnegie that puts customer-focused marketing in perspective. You can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get them interested in you. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Do You Need To Submit A Sitemap To Google?
'); document.write('It’s been common thinking for years that to get your new website indexed on Google you MUST submit an XML sitemap to Google. But much like the keywords meta tag myth, it appears this is something that is not really required. Here’s what they say… “Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.” Well I guess that’s just one more thing we’ve learned about Google. It will save you a little time. Time that you can spend on more productive tasks like getting back links, monetizing, and creating more content. Here’s the link to Google’s Help Page about it. '); document.write(''); document.write('

Well It?s Official ? Google Ignores Keyword Meta Tag
'); document.write('It’s been a rumor for a long time… And actually most professional webmasters already assumed it. But Matt Cutts, “spokesperson” for Google has made it official. Here’s a bit of what he has to say. Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking? A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present. Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag? A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag. Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags? A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets. Here’s a video that goes into more detail. '); document.write(''); document.write(''); document.write('

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