March 6, 2008

Wow… It’s been crazy

Hi there…

It’s been a while since I’ve put content on my blog…

I’ve got a ton of email from concerned readers and I must apologize to each and every one of you.

I was going to come up with a lame excuse… but to be honest, I just couldn’t come up with any.

I’ve just been super busy with a few major projects that have pretty much "eaten me alive".

Not to mention the fact that we have a new baby in the house!

But, do not fear!

Lot’s of super cool stuff in the works and I’ll be letting you in on the secret shortly…

All the best,

steven_signature.gif

 

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January 27, 2008

Tips For Blog Traffic - Trend Blogging Optimization

This is the second to the last video on Trend Blogging. In this video I will show you some tips on setting up your blog to receive traffic. This involves some very specific Blogger tips, as well as on-page post optimization that will help you rank in the search engines by letting them know what your articles are about. Although what I share with you in this video deals specifically with Blogger, you can use many of the same tips, particularly regarding on-page optimization, for other blog platforms. I hope you enjoy it!

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January 20, 2008

How To Remove The Blogger Nav Bar

Several people have emailed me with the question: "How do I remove the Blogger Navigation Bar?", since my case study Blogger blog doesn’t have one as part of it’s layout…

So I decided to create a quick Blogger tutorial where I go over how you can quickly remove the Blogger Nav Bar:

 

High-Res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)

Why do you want to reomove the Blogger navigation bar?

Simply because, if you use it for marketing purposes you are leaking traffic. In other words, you may be losing dollars because it gives people an alternative to clicking one of your links.

So watch the video and learn how you can plug this hole in your blogger blog.

Also be on the lookout for the "wrap up" of my Trend Blogging Case Study (and Blogger Tutorials) over the next week or so. It will be in two parts and include how you set up your blog to receive the traffic AND how to leverage web 2.0 to drive traffic to Blogger.

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January 12, 2008

It Starts With $5 a Day

Just about every single day I see a post in one forum or another about someone earning $100, $400 or $1000 or more per day from various Internet Marketing business models. 

And you know what, I applaud every one of you who have achieved these levels of success.

When you read some of these threads and reports it gets you thinking doesn’t it? 

At least it does for me… and I have the privilege of earning this kind of money online on a daily basis. 

I’m sure you know what I mean… as you read the story your heart beats a bit faster, your hands start to sweat and you get into the mode where you MUST KNOW what they did to hit their "home run" $1000 day, so you can copy their success. 

Which is great cause we all need to dream, set goals and have something to strive for. 

The downside of this is that we, more often than not, lose sight of our objective and jump into this new "trick" (e.g. business model) with reckless abandon, only to get disappointed yet again… And the reason for the disappointment is generally because of one reason… we keep jumping from one alleged money-maker to another. We’ve become "money chasers", constantly looking for the "secret trick" or the latest money maker that will give us the big payday… quickly. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty of jumping on the bandwagon and lose focus too… I get tempted constantly and sometimes even stray completely off course. Which is completely idiotic since "the bandwagon" generally deals with business models that are largely incongruent with my core competencies and business models. 

I’m sure some of you are thinking, "So Steve, what’s your point?" 

The point is, that instead of looking at hitting these “home runs”, we ought to be focusing on the basics of the game, moving the runners over any way we can and score because of "small ball" and good defense (to further the baseball analogy). 

So what are the basics, and the "small ball" as it relates to your business?

 
Well, that would of course depend on your business model. 

For me, my main income comes from Contextual Marketing (primarily Adsense and Affiliate products). So, the basics for me is to research a niche or product, create a small "micro niche" website, then market the site so I can start getting traffic from the search engines.

That’s it.

The “small ball” in my instance refers to each of these sites generating $3 - $5 or more. This may not sound terribly impressive, but when you consider that I have over 100 of these sites that pay me anywhere from $1 - $25 per day, it starts adding up.

 
Are you getting the picture? 

Some time ago I picked up a book called “5 Bucks a Day” by a gentleman named Dennis Becker. I picked it up during a WSO on the Warrior Forum and we’ve become friends over the past year or so. 

His book has set me straight whenever I start getting distracted (which is more than once…) and I make it a point to read it at least every 2 - 3 months. 

In any event, the basic premise of the book is that instead of focusing on the "home run", we as netrepreneurs ought to focus on creating $5 residual income streams on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, which will ultimately add up to $1000 days. 

And deals with exactly what I’m trying to express in this short post. (Dennis takes this to a whole another level and shows you tips and strategies on this stuff in his book). In any event, it had a pretty big impact on how I think about this business, even though I was practicing what he teaches in 5 Bucks a Day already.

I hear more from people complaining that they earn a measly $5 per day in AdSense from their ONE niche site…

 
OK, so what if it’s just $5 a day?

That’s an average of $150 per month, which will pay for my web hosting fees, internet access AND gym membership every single month (with a little money left over). 

Just make one of these $5 businesses a week for a year, and you’ll be able to earn $250 or more every single day. That’s nearly twice as much as the median household income in the US in 2006.

 
What does this mean for those who own that ONE five dollar site?
 
Simple…

If you stopped your love affair with the ONE website and created a process map of the steps you took, you might be able to shed some light on exactly how you accomplished it, and eventually replicate the "success" (of creating a $5 daily income stream) at a faster rate. 

And if you’re unsure of how you got there… then find material that deals with this aspect of the business and apply them to your existing frame work instead of writing the business model off completely and trying another business model from scratch. 

In other words, if you have been able to make one $5 income stream chances are pretty good that you can duplicate it. It might take you a week or two in the beginning, but after a while it will become second nature and you’ll be able to crank a couple of them out in a day.

 
If that was the case, how many of these would YOU build? 

You could easily create 5 - 10 of these a month… in your spare time. Which would mean you could earn $750 - $1500 extra by your 2nd or 3rd month (or at least within 6 months)!

 
How would that change your life?

Let me put it in simpler terms: Do you think you could find and market one product as an affiliate, whether it’s an ebook or a physical product, that profited $5 a day?

Does that sound difficult to you? 

If you’ve managed to sell one product EVER, you should be able to do it again without too much effort. And the more times you do it, the easier it gets.

 
So what you need is a mental makeover. A paradigm shift. 

Stop jumping on every single opportunity that comes you way and look at creating these tiny little daily income streams by expanding on your current skill set.

Try this exercise: Sit down and take each of your monthly, quarterly and yearly expenses and break them down into a daily figure. For example, if you have a car payment for $300 / month, divide it by 30 (which give you $10 per day). Keep these figures handy as they should be a constant reminder of the task at hand. Once you’ve created an x number of $5 projects, you can cross one of the expenses off.

$10 per day for me is only 2 micro-niche sites that need to perform at $5 per day; or setting up a few PPC campaigns using long tail keywords that can net me an average of $5 per day. 

So, let me ask you this question: "Can you use some of your current skill sets to create a $5 per day residual income?" 

If the answer is yes, all you need to do is create a plan of action, stay focused and EXECUTE.

Once you know how to create $5 income streams using your current method (in your sleep), add another method to your arsenal… and do it again.

Sorry for the rant.

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January 9, 2008

Free Money From Wordpress.com

This is fresh off the press and is a case study that has been active since January 2nd, 2008.

This time I’ve chosen to tackle Wordpress.com.

This particular case study actually came about by accident, and although Wordpress.com did NOT pay me directly I still got "free" money from Wordpress.com

Let me explain.

I am currently beta testing a new page generation script for a friend of mine, which uses RSS feeds to populate parts of the page (to give it fresh relevant content). And while I’m all for using RSS, I don’t particularly like to "give away" traffic to the links back to the originator of the feed… I really look at these more as a "leak" in my sites than anything else.

I decided that instead of giving away traffic to competitors’ RSS feeds, I’d rather create some blogs on Wordpress.com and post some articles on each that I could pull RSS feeds from. This way I could control my own traffic and minimize "leakage" and provide my page with 100% relevant content.

By the way, in case you’re not familiar with Wordpress.com, it is a "hosted" version of Wordpress, as opposed to a Wordpress blog that you host on your own server, and is similar to a Blogger blog in that it’s a free service where you can create as many blogs as you wish. I personally chose Wordpress.com because: 1. it’s free; and 2. it creates xml feeds, while Blogger creates an atom feed which was not compatible with the script I was using (unless I passed the atom feed through a service such as FeedBurner).

But I digress.

Once I created a handful of these Wordpress sites I noticed that some of them started receiving traffic immediately, which was quite curious.

So, I decided to test it. 

I built a Wordpress.com site on a very narrow topic, actually a product range (brand / model) in the "kitchenware" category. Sorry, I don’t want to reveal the product / niche as I’m still doing independent testing on a specific monetization model.

These are the actual results over the past week:

Wordpress.com Case Study

As you can see, this past week I’ve had 361 views (this does not include my own visits to the blog) spread over 4 blog posts. It might not be very impressive, but what’s really surprising and cool about these results is that I did no marketing of these pages, whatsoever…

Zip, Zilch, Zero, Nada…

All I did was post the content and went on my merry way.

I’m sure you’re thinking… "There’s got to be a trick to this."

Actually… no.

So what exactly did I do?

  1. I created a blog called xyzreviews.wordpress.com. (replace xyz with product name of choice)
  2. Then I named the blog: "All About XYZ", with a tagline like: "The Best XYZ Info Online".
  3. I changed the sidebar widgets (go to Presentation -> Widgets) to include only: Recent Posts and Links.
  4. All of my Post Titles had the product name in it.
  5. As you can see under "Totals", I only have 4 blog posts. I did not write a single "unique" article All the posts are repurposed content, i.e. PLR articles I’ve had on my hard drive for a LONG TIME! I uploaded each article "as is", no re-writing or editing of the articles. Again, I wasn’t really worried about duplicate content when creating these blogs since I was originally going to use these blogs solely for RSS feeds.
  6. Once I copied the article over, I proceeded to use a sub-headline (the first sentence of the article) using my product name. Each sub-headline was bolded and used as an anchor text link that linked to an affiliate product.
  7. I bolded and italicized several instances of the product name (as well as synonymous words). I also sprinkled some anchor text links throughout the article that pointed back to the affiliate product.
  8. I made sure to tag each post using the "Tags" area (this is located just below where you post content). For tags I used the product name, the brand name, the product name + review (e.g. xyz reviews). As you can see above, I only used 6 tags, which I used for every blog post.
  9. Click Publish!

That’s it! There were no other tweaks to the codes, templates… anything. Also, there was no other monetization to the site besides the links to my affiliate product page.

Note: When using this method, it is important that you create blogs around products in demand. Otherwise nobody will care to search the tags…

This simple exercise netted me $42.76 in commissions from CJ.com this week (that’s $6 a day for those that are counting). Not bad considering it took me less than 15 minutes to create and publish. By the way in case you’re wondering, this is not an anomaly. I’ve been able to recreate four other blogs that have experienced similar results.

So, where did the traffic come from?

Believe it or not, more than 90% of the traffic came from the tags I placed in Step 8. The rest came from search engines (long tail keyword searches).

Just imagine what Wordpress.com could do with some promotional activities…

So, if you have been slighting Wordpress.com in your marketing activities, perhaps it’s worth another look.

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January 4, 2008

Is Web 2.0 Working For You?

During my Trend Blogging case study I ended up tracking some statistics regarding the "effectiveness" of Web 2.0 sites, and to what extent they were contributing traffic to my blog.

Even though I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods I used to drive the traffic to the blog, I wanted to share with you guys my findings…1. because I found it interesting and thought you might want to know some of these numbers, and 2. because you should know which web 2.0 sites you should be spending more time on.  By the way, I will be writing a separate blog post on the actual methods and reasons why I received a significant amount of traffic on this blog in the next week or two.

Ok, so let’s start with the Web 2.0 properties I used during my Trend Blogging case study:

As you can see, I did not actually use some other popular Web 2.0 services such as: StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Furl, nor did I use Onlywire or spend the time building pages in the various Web 2.0 communities (such as: Squidoo, Hubpages etc.)… for no other reason than that I was being lazy. 

By the way, in case some of you did not check out my case study on Trend Blogging, you should know that the blog was centered around the Entertainment niche.

So, how did it all play out? Check out the stats taken from Google Analytics below. The results are based on approximately 20,000 visitors visiting the blog over a 3 week period of time. And notice that the majority of my traffic came from organic search results (Google Search), not Web 2.0. I have highlighted the Web 20 properties with a red box.

Web 2.0 Case Study

As you can see:

  1. Digg is the "winner"! It drove in the most traffic by far and served 6.34% of overall visitors to my site (out of approximately 20,000 visitors).
  2. Propeller was the runner up, driving in about 2.5% of the overall traffic. You’ll notice that the propeller.com url show 2.35%, however there were sub-categories not displayed that served some visitors as well.
  3. Shoutwire served 1.73% of the visitors, which was surprising.
  4. Sk-rt drove in about 0.2%
  5. Plime and Reddit served an insignificant amount of traffic (only a handful of referrals each). The low amount of referrals from Reddit was surprising as it’s often considered a "decent" web 2.0 property for referral traffic.

A caveat, these numbers were a bit skewed as I did not start using Shoutwire, Sk-rt, Plime and Reddit for the first couple of days of this case study, and believe Shoutwire would have probably matched or eclipsed Propeller in the amount of traffic served if I had started using them from the beginning (in other words, USE Shoutwire!)

In conclusion, you can see that the few social bookmarking / social news (or social voting) sites I did use served about 2500 visitors in three weeks. This is direct referral traffic that you would not have received from the search engines. So, if you have a brand new site or have not used web 2.0 before it is certainly worthwhile considering it gave me 12.5% more traffic for 2 minutes of extra work per post (on a brand new blog).

Will you receive the same amount of traffic? It’s hard to say as it will depend a lot on posting frequency and whether your posts are "buzz worthy". There are software out there that can automate a lot of this process, and make the process very painless.

One that I use frequently when bookmarking Blogger or static sites is Social Bookmarking Demon.

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Adding Google Analytics to Blogger

Whether you’re trend blogging or creating blogs to drive traffic to affiliate pages, you need to know where your traffic is coming from. In this short video tutorial shows you how to add Google Analytics code to your Blogger blog, from setting up your analytics account to adding the code to your Blogger template, this video shows you everything step-by-step.

High-Res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)

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December 23, 2007

Adding AdSense to Blogger - Trend Blogging Part 4

If you are going to be building a blog using Blogger for Trend Blogging, you need to understand how and where to add your AdSense units. So, I created two videos on how you can add AdSense to a Blogger Blog. One on the basics of adding Adsense to Blogger and the second on more advanced tactics (see below).

Obviously, I am assuming that you already have an AdSense account. If not, make sure you sign up for one ASAP as it takes a few days to get your account approved by Google. You can signup for the AdSense program here.

The first video talks about using the built-in facilities of Blogger to add AdSense to your blog (this video is just a tad bit over 9 minutes long)

High-Res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)

There is however a downside to using the built in features… which is the lack of control of ad placements. You really only have three choices using their features: 1. below each blog post; 2. in your left or right navigation; 3. in the footer. This leaves out an obvious placement, which is an ad above your blog post. This area is probably the most important for click through rates of your ads.

So, I’ve created another video that shows you step-by-step how to add the code above each blog post (this video is about 8.5 minutes):

High-Res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)

You will need to parse your AdSense code into standard XML to work properly with your blog. I explain all of this in the video above. But, in short, you need to convert certain symbols from your AdSense code into a language that Blogger can understand. In other words, we need to change:

Adding Adsense To Blogger

This is extremely simple, and can be done with a program such as "Notepad" on your PC. I show you how to do this quickly and efficiently in the video using the "replace" function in Notepad.

Once your code has been converted into a language Blogger understands, you can simply copy and paste it into Blogger. In the video I will show you exactly where you want to enter this code.

Have a look at the second video. If you have any questions, please feel free to post using the comments function below.

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December 17, 2007

Hubpages Case Study Follow Up - Appear On The First Page Of Google

UPDATE - December 25, 2007:

Since I wrote this update on Hubpages Case Study below, the rankings have changed yet again. And since I didn’t actually mention the Scribd rankings from my Scribd Case Study in my initial update, I’ll include these as well. So here are the Google Search Engine results for both Hubpages and Scribd for the various keywords:

Keyword: Project Quick Cash

    Hubpages Ranking: 11 (page 2 of Google)
    Scribd Ranking: 12 (page 2 of Google)

Keyword: Project Quick Cash Review

    Hubpages Ranking: 3 (page 1 of Google)
    Scribd Ranking: 4 (page 1 of Google)

Keyword: Project Quick Cash Reviews

    Hubpages Ranking: 1 (page 1 of Google)
    Scribd Ranking: 2 (page 1 of Google)

Keyword: Review of Project Quick Cash

    Hubpages Rankings: 4 (page 1 of Google)
    Scribd Ranking: 1 (page 1 of Google)

I was actually quite surprised to see such a jump in the rankings… and the Scribd pages all of a sudden appeared from "nowhere". It goes to show you that the maturity of pages is a consideration.

My recommendation: If you are going to promote a new affiliate product (particularly an eBook or other courses on Internet / Affiliate Marketing), be sure to get a jump on the creation of Scribd pages or a Hubs on Hubpages. Preferably 3 - 5 weeks in advance (if at all possible). This will allow for your pages to mature and increases the chances of these to rank well in the search engines (for your chosen keywords).

 


 

Perhaps some of you read my case study on how you can appear on the first page of google using Hubpages I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

I initially saw a boost in my rankings for my Project Quick Cash Review Hub… however after a brief "honeymoon" period of a few days, my hubs were nowhere to be seen.

A couple of days later it then reappeared and it has "stuck" on the first page of Google since. There are no external links pointing to this site and it still managed to rank…

Here are some screenshots of the results as of today, December 17th, 2007.

Results for my primary search term "Project Quick Cash Reviews" (First Page, Ranked #7):

Project Quick Cash Reviews

Results for search term "Project Quick Cash Review" (First Page, Ranked #8):

Project Quick Cash Review

Results for search term "Review of Project Quick Cash" (First Page, Ranked #10):

Review of Project Quick Cash

And finally, the results for search term "Project Quick Cash" (2nd Page, Ranked #14):

Project Quick Cash

As you can see, I have been able to get decent results from about 15 minutes of work (setting up the hub). I am certain that if I had taken the time to link to the Hub using the appropriate anchor text from a half a dozen to a dozen decent pages, I’d be able to increase the ranking to appear within the top 5 for the above search phrases (with perhaps the exception of "Project Quick Cash").

I would deem this method (of using hubpages) as a good free method (augmentation to bum marketing) to get sales or traffic to an affiliate product / sales page.

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December 14, 2007

Trend Blogging Part 3 - Creating A Custom Blogger Header Image

One of the things I recommend people do when creating a blog for Blogger, whether it’s for Trend Blogging or a general blog, is to create a custom header graphic for your Blogger blog.

In other words, instead of a blog with a boring header like this:

Blogger Old Header Image

You want to invest a little bit of time and upgrade the header to look a bit "spiffier". I recommend you create something like this:

New Improved Header Image For Blogger

So, to help you figure out how you can do this quickly and efficiently, I created this new video below. In this video I’ll share with you how I create a header from scratch and how you place the header on your blog in about 10 minutes.

High-Res version of this video is available here (opens in a new window)

Here is a "blow by blow" recap of the video (It’s not as detailed as the video, but at least you can get the "picture"):

1. My Blogger Template of Choice:

I use the "Mr. Moto" template, as it is one of the easier templates to modify in Blogger. If you haven’t done so already, go to the "Pick New Template" page and choose the "Mr. Moto" template (Template -> Pick New Template). Be sure to click on the "Save" icon once you’ve selected the template.

2.How to quickly find the proper dimensions for your header

Go to the "Edit HTML" page (Template -> Edit HTML). Go to the "Edit Template" section of this page. Scroll down until you find this area:

#outer-wrapper {
  margin: 0 auto;
  border: 0;
  width: 692px;

What you’re looking for is the number in red. This will be the width of your header image. Write it down.

As you can see there is no number for the height… so you’re pretty much free to choose whatever you want. I recommend you use a header height of 160px.

3. Where to find suitable images for your blog

I use a royalty free photo site at SXC.hu. The images here are free, however be sure you read the "fine print" to see what restrictions apply to the photographs.

4. How to create the header with an image editor

As you can see in the video, I use a program called GFX Writer (not an affiliate link) by Incansoft (BigMike’s company, for those familiar with the Warrior Forum). I often use Photoshop as well, but I’ve found this program to be a lot faster to use for creating these types of headers. It’s only about $25, and is a powerful tool for any internet marketer who’s on a limited budget. Be sure to check out the video to see how simple it really is…

By the way, here’s a reminer: the header size is 692px wide and 160px high.

5. Placing the Header

Once you’ve created the header, go to the "Page Elements" page in Blogger (Template -> Page Elements). Click on the "Edit" link in the "Header" section of this page (this will open a new window). In this new window, click the radio button for "From Your Computer". Then browse for your file on your computer. Once you’ve selected your new header it will show you a preview of the header. Go to the "Placement" section of this page and choose the radio button for "Instead of Title and Description". Then click "Save Changes" (this will close this window).

6. View your blog

Just click on "View Your Blog" and you will see your brand new header displayed promptly at the top of your page… actually just below the Blogger nav bar.

That’s it folks!

In the next video I’ll show you how you can get rid of the Blogger Nav Bar, and how you add Google Analytics to your Blogger blog. Both of these things are important as you start growing your Blogger blog(s).

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