Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 4
Last time we talked about Link Exchange programs and Blog Proliferation as tools for your workamping business. Before I continue with the next topics, let’s revisit those two briefly with a little expanded information.
I mentioned that cross exchanging links with other sites is not very effective, even when the other site is relevant to yours. You can make it a bit more effective if you can get the other sites to put your link somewhere besides a link directory page. The search engines, and especially Google, don’t seem to put much value in back links coming from a link directory page. Not that they don’t help at all, but they may not be worth the effort. The search engines grade a link on how hard it is to obtain and give you credit accordingly. Link directory pages are easy to get. One way links embedded in a legitimate page is much harder. Are you seeing the pattern now?
That’s why writing quality articles that will get picked up and used by other sites is so important. Whenever another relevant site “borrows” your article and puts it on their site it’s like they wrote about you on a page of their site. Your link is embedded in a page full of high quality content because you wrote it. Even better, it’s one way. You aren’t linking back. Are you seeing the pattern here as well? This, by the way, is one of the things that make blogging such a powerful weapon in your workamping arsenal. Because someone took the time to hand create the content of a blog post, the search engines value it highly.
The Magic Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is all the rage right now. Everyone is throwing that phrase around to describe everything from totally ugly sites to YouTube. Whenever a new innovation comes around, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and labels it Web 2.0, even when it isn’t. What is Web 2.0 anyway and how can it help us as workamping bloggers? We’ll spend another article, or maybe a whole series on Web 2.0 at another time. For now I just want to give you a quick overview of what you should be studying and using it for.
Web 2.0 basically describes the newer innovations in dynamic web sites. Web site technology, like everything else technological has gone through an evolution. Early web sites were little more than online letters consisting almost entirely of simple text on a page. Graphics really helped and are probably responsible for the first explosion of the web phenomenon. Web 2.0 is the term applied to the next big leap in that evolution. It mainly applies to interactive web sites – sites that incorporate interactive media like dynamic graphics, audio or video, customized or adaptive user experiences, etc.
This is important to us because the search engines recognize the popularity of these sites and rank them higher because of it. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc. can be useful in getting your site noticed by the search engines. They don’t do you much good as far as monetization goes, but that’s another article. For the purposes of this article, we like them because they can be used to link back to your site. MySpace, for example is ranked 9/10 by Google. So it is beneficial to get a MySpace page and add a link to your web site to it. The search engines will pick that up and credit you for it. Better yet, get all your friends to do the same. When many people on a social networking site like MySpace or FaceBook have these links to your site, your credit goes up. To that end, make videos and put them on YouTube, Google Video or Amazon as well. Then you can link back to them from your site and let YouTube provide the bandwidth. Also, you can enclose these videos or podcasts into your articles and make them more desirable. Producing these videos and uploading them is an entire article series in itself as well. Keep reading, we’ll cover all of this in more detail as fast as we can.
Get Socially Networked
One of the easiest ways to get your blog onto the social networking sites is to start your own accounts and link to your site from it. While I recommend you do this from several of the more popular sites, having others do it too is even better. You can make it easy for your readers to do this by including social networking quick links at the bottom of your posts. Fortunately, Wordpress makes this easy for us as well.
I use The Sociable plug-in from the Wordpress.org site and I prefer the Sociable Zyblog Edition. The easiest way to locate it is to do a Google search for Sociable Zyblog Edition. The Wordpress.org plug-in page should come up at or near #1 on Google for that key phrase. Download it, install it, activate it and configure it to include your favorite social networking sites. The instructions are good and the plug-in is easy to follow. Once that’s done your readers can easily click their favorite icon and share your site.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 3
One of the most important things you need to make your web site enticing to the major search engines is high quality back links. Back links are links from other web sites to yours. They’re best if they come from high page-ranked sites, contain your targeted keywords in the alt tags and are one way. Reciprocal links, links where they link to you and you reciprocate by linking back to them are okay, but one way links are better.
So, how do you get back links to your web site. There are dozens of methods. There are also dozens of Internet Marketers out there that claim their system or product can do it for you “automatically” or “while you sleep” or whatever. While it is true that some tools are helpful, and even a few are worth paying for, most are just over-hyped reworks of tools that are already available to your free. In the next few articles I’ll try to briefly cover a few of the methods I use and why. We’ll expand on each of these with more detail in upcoming articles.
Link Exchange Services
Link Exchange Services are online services that you join to make exchanging links with other site managers easier. A quick Google search on “Link Exchange” will reveal hundreds of these services, many of them free or at a very small cost. How do you choose? What you want is quality and relevancy above all else. The search engines give you the most credit if the back links to your site are from high quality sites that contain content relevant to your own. If you’re blogging about fishing in the upper Midwest, it won’t do you a lot of good to have back links from gambling sites or sites that sell Chinese pseudo-Viagra. In fact, it may even hurt your ranking. But having back links from sites that have something to do with fishing or other outdoor sports will help tremendously because they’re viewed as relevant by the search engines.
Personally, I’ve used a couple of the pay services in the past. They’ve helped and did boost my rankings, but I’m not sure it was helpful enough over the free sites to make much of a difference. I’m experimenting this time with WorkFromYourRV.com. I’m not using any of the paid services. Instead I’m using all free link exchanges and relying on blog proliferation to get it done for me. In that respect, we’re on this journey together and we’ll see how it works.
Bottom line … link exchanges are a small part that can be beneficial to your overall effort to rank high with the search engines. However, it is only a small part.
Blog Proliferation
The entire point of a blog is to attract readers. Duh! That is also an excellent way to get back links to your site. Many of you are probably reading this article from somewhere other than WorkFromYourRV.com. That’s because I make my blog articles available to the public at large in a variety of ways. I have an RSS feed that syndicates my articles, not only to many of my readers, but to other services that attach my blog entries to other peoples sites. In addition, I upload my blog articles to article services where they’re made available for search and download.
There is another complete segment of the “make money online” market out there that will teach you to set up blog sites in which you don’t have to write a single article. Instead, you scrape relevant, on-topic articles from other sources and include them in your blog. That’s a perfectly legitimate business niche and someday I’ll run a series of articles on how to do this as well. I don’t feel it’s as effective as writing your own material, but then again, it’s easy and you can maintain many more sites using this method.
Those types of sites have to get their material from somewhere and that’s where you come in. Publish your articles through RSS and to the article directories. Make them available for free use and they’ll get picked up and spread over the internet in no time – especially if you write substantive articles.
The reason this benefits you is because all these article services allow you to put a byline at the bottom where you put links back to your site. These links become quality one-way links to your site from other sites. The best kind!
I’ve had my best luck with EzineArticles.com. They are the most restrictive, but seem to get the most attention because of it. Every article you submit to them must follow strict guidelines and is reviewed by a human being. That makes them more difficult to use, but highly respected. About 75% of my articles that I receive back links from come from EzineArticles.com. If you’re only going to bother with 1 article submission site, go with them.
A couple more sites just in case you want more. I also use ArticleAlley.com and GoArticles.com. GoArticles.com will even let you put links directly in the body, so if you embedded an affiliate link, as I sometimes do if it’s relevant, they’ll even let that pass. EzineArticles.com won’t. There are many more, but these are the ones I use most. You can experiment with some of the others, but just watch your traffic sources to see how they’re helping, if at all. We’ll cover how to tell where your traffic is coming from in another article series.
That’s enough to keep you busy for now. We’ll continue with this subject next time.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we have our blog monetized, we need to make it palatable to the search engines. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a huge subject. There are people that make a very good living specializing in being a search engine expert. So obviously, this blog isn’t going to even scratch the surface. But I can get you started and point you at some great products and materials that have helped my tremendously.
Here is a checklist you can use to cover the main points you’ll need to cover in your blog. These aren’t all-inclusive of course, but they’re a great start.
Optimize Your Web Site for the Search Engines.
This is a complete study all in it’s own. This is a great place to start however because you usually only need to do it once. Here you can get a lot of information on the Wordpress website and in the documentation to the various SEO modules available for Wordpress. These have a lot of great tips on making sure your title tags, descriptions, keywords, etc. are all set up correctly. Of course, if you’re willing to spend a little money and don’t want to go through it all yourself, there are a few commercial themes and blogging systems that I’ve tried in the past and have had great luck with. One is Blogging to the Bank 3.0 by Rob Benwell. He has some free themes and a great ebook that is a lot of help. I learned a lot from his product and system and it was a relatively cheap education. You can read a review on my Pure411.com site here.
Another great product is Carl Ocab’s Ultimate Blogging Theme. I recently bought his product and liked it so much I’ve switched this site over to it. I haven’t even had time to write a review yet, but I will be. Carl got started at 13 years old and now makes a great living purely as a blogger. Part of it is his theme. His site consistently ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword he’s targeted.
Regardless of whether you choose to do it yourself and set up a free theme to be SEO friendly, or if you purchase a proven theme, you need to make sure you make all the correct changed to it. This takes education. The best place I’ve found so far for that is Gideon Shalwick and Yaro Starak’s new site. This is probably the best place I know of to learn exactly how to get it done right so you can maximize your income from your blog. I personally rely on it and have purchased a lifetime premium membership. They have a wealth of professionally produced videos, audios and articles that are concise and easy to understand. If you can only afford 1 training product, get this one.
Focus, Focus, Focus.
Know your keywords and focus on a singe keyword with each article you write or upload. Writing scattered articles doesn’t get you noticed by the search engines. Pick the top 5 or so keywords that you want people to locate you by and focus all your blog articles on one of them at a time.
Post, Post, Post.
This is advice I haven’t been to good at taking myself sometimes. The search engines like dynamic sites. A dynamic site is one that changes regularly. You don’t want to post multiple times per day necessarily, but you should post at least a couple of times per week. There are tricks to help make your site more dynamic, like using RSS feeds. We’ll cover those in a later article.
Don’t be Mediocre.
Write good articles. Don’t just throw something on line to keep the site dynamic. Your readers will appreciate getting REAL and accurate information. After all, your free information is your service to your readers. If they don’t take time to stay on your site and read your articles, they won’t come back, and they certainly won’t visit your affiliate links. Remember: Quality, not just quality.
In the next few posts we’ll continue this theme and present even more ways to get your blog noticed by the search engines and everyone else. For now, this should keep you busy.
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
Adding Affiliate Ads Into Your Blog
I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles that I’ve always had my best results from affiliate ads. Since that’s the subject of this article, let me clarify that a bit. The last thing I want to do is leave you with a false impression that PPC ads aren’t valuable. Quite the opposite.
PPC ads have one distinct advantage over most other forms of online advertising – they start making money immediately. That’s important whenever you start a new web site in an attempt to add to your online income. We’re all prone to discouragement. If we put in a lot of work and get our blog going, then nothing happens, our first reaction is to abandon the effort and write it off as a failure.
The truth is, making money online usually isn’t as “instant” as most would have you believe. While many people do make large amounts of online income, and many of them rather quickly; most make it more slowly. PPC ads give us that instant encouragement that something really is happening and we really are making money online – even if it’s just a small trickle at first.
Affiliate ads will make larger amounts of money in the long run – at least they do for me. I have friends in the internet marketing business that make an impressive living off nothing but PPC web sites, but I have more friends who, like me, take a more balanced approach. I look at like I look at my investment portfolio – diversify!
If you’ve been following this entire series, then you’ve already set up one or more affiliate relationships, either directly with the vendors you plan to use, or with affiliate clearing sites like ShareASale or Commission Junction. Placing the ads into your blog is the next step.
I use a 2-stage approach. First, I have a sidebar panel that I put a group of ads in that are related to my blog. Second, I place appropriate affiliate ads in some of my blog entries. If you’re reading this entry on WorkFromYourRV.com, you can see the ad panel to the right. These are all affiliate ads that have relevance to my blog’s subject and, when clicked, take you to the vendor’s website where you might possibly purchase their product. If you do, I get a small commission. Same with the ads in the blog entries. These are usually more focused and are relevant to the specific blog entry in which they appear. This type of sales is as old as sales itself. My Father-in-law spent most of his early career as a shoe salesman in the days when his entire income was commission from each pair of shoes he sold. This is no different, just adapted to the Internet.
One note of caution here. If you’re in this for the long term, choose your affiliations wisely. Nothing will kill a blog, or even an entire online business faster than recommending disreputable companies. Your readers are YOUR customers – always remember that. They took your advice when deciding to purchase a product, and will likely blame you if the experience goes bad. Personally, I BUY EVERYTHING I RECOMMEND. I realize that can get expensive, and may be out of your budget, but it is the only way I know of to insure the product is legitimate and has value. All of my friends in this business that are successful have the same attitude. You can’t please everybody, but you certainly can make your best effort to get close.
To put affiliate ads in the sidebar of your blog, look for plugins or widgets on Wordpress.org and follow their instructions. Most are reasonably simple and will present your ads in a clear way on your site. For example, if you signed up as an affiliate for Amazon, you can take a look at the AmazonSimpleAdmin widget. It allows you to embed Amazon ads almost anywhere in your blog. If it’s appropriate to display related eBay ads in your blog, then you may want to check out the WP Tag Ads widget or the eBay Sales Lister widget. These scan your blog tags or content and select appropriate eBay ads to display. If you are interested in a Zazzle store, there’s even a widget (Zazzle Store Gallery) that will display products from your Zazzle store.
To embed other affiliate ads into your post you can simply ad an image to your post, or you can use a plugin. I personally like to just insert the images using the Wordpress post editor while I’m writing the post. That way I get full control over where in the text the affiliate ad appears. Just insert the image, then replace the image code generated by Wordpress with the code given to you by your affiliate. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble, try a plugin like the WP-Affiliate plugin and see if that matches your needs better.
In the next few articles we’ll cover more about the layout of your blog and how to start driving traffic to your blog. After all, if you don’t have readers, you can’t have customers. Watch for new videos as well.
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
Adding Google Adsense Into Your Blog
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now it’s time to start adding Google Adsense and other ads for affiliate sales into your blog. This is known as “monetizing” your web site – getting it to make money online for you. Google Adsense is a great place to start. Personally, I’ve made more money from affiliate sales than from Adsense ads, but I don’t dismiss Adsense. It has made me plenty of money online as well.
Adding Adsense into your blog can take one or more of three forms. You can put ads into your header, put ads onto your side bar, or put ads into your blog posts themselves. Personally, I steer clear of the last one, but that’s really only a personal preference. I prefer to only include appropriate affiliate ads in my blog posts, when I advertise in them at all. Many times I don’t even put ads in the posts themselves. If you decide to place Adsense ads into your blog post there are several freely available Wordpress plugins that will do it for you automatically. My favorite is the All-In-One Adsense And YPN plugin. Search the plugins available on Wordpress.org for other Adsense plugins if you’d like different options.
Putting Adsense ads into your header can be a little more problematic. It usually requires editing the style sheet (style.css) and the header.php file for your selected theme. Since each theme is potentially different, it’s difficult to explain exactly how to do that in a blog article. Some theme make that easier than others. If you not a PHP programmer, and want Adsense ads in your header, look for a theme that has that capability built in.
Adding Adsense ads to your sidebar is easier than adding them to your header. There are several plugins and widgets available on Workpress.org that will do this for you. Widgets are a bit like plugins, but with more capabilities. One good plugin that allows Adsense ads to be added to your sidebar is WP Simple Adsense Insertion. It can be used along with, or even in place of All-In-One Adsense And YPN mentioned above.
My first choice for places to put Adsense ads is in the header. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had much better results with affiliate ads than I have with PPC ads, but I still recommend using PPC. Usually, putting them in the header is enough, although I do sometimes add them to the sidebar – usually below everything else.
In the next few articles we’ll talk about using affiliate ads and talk more about how to incluse Adsense and affiliate ads in your blog.
Getting Ready For Online Income
This is just one article in a series on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we’ve started our blog, we need to get working on the main reason we’ve been doing all this in the first place – making money online. This subject is huge. There are as many ways to make money on the Internet as there are Internet sites it seems. Before we can make any money however, we must have something to sell to our blog’s visitors. That’s not quite as difficult as it may seem.
We’re going to focus our online money making efforts in only 2 areas for now. This will simplify our task for now and give us a great starting point on our way to online financial independence. We’re going to focus on Pay-Per-Click advertising and Affiliate Sales.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a marketing model where you place ads on your site that are related to your site’s content. If one of your visitors clicks on that ad, you make a small commission for that click. That can be as little as a few cents, or as much as several dollars, depending on the PPC ad. One of the best known places to get PPC ads for your site is Google AdSense. Google Adsense is easy to sign up for and will automatically scan your blog and supply content-appropriate ads for it.
Signing up for Google Adsense is easy. Just go to https://www.google.com/adsense and click the sign up now button. Go through the help and tutorials to learn how to generate the ad code and then just plug the ad code into your blog pages for instant PPC income. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than I just made it sound, but you get the idea. In the next several articles we’ll be exploring different ways to get this done easily and effectively. All you really need to do now is get your Google Adsense account started.
Affiliate sales is another great way to get started making money online. Internet marketing is growing every day as more of the world’s population comes online and discovers the convenience of online shopping. Affiliate sales is the single most profitable method I use in my online business. I make the majority of my income in Affiliate marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is similar to PPC advertising. You put ads and links on your blog that are related to your content. When your visitors click those links, they are taken to the advertisers site to purchase a product. If they purchase, you make a commission. Commission sales are as old as sales themselves. They’ve been around since the beginning of marketing. They’re an easy way to make money, especially if you want to live the RV lifestyle as I do. You don’t carry inventory or worry about shipping products. You simply refer people to the advertiser and they do the rest.
To get started with affiliate sales you need to sign up to become an affiliate for products that are related to your blog web site. That’s easier than it seems. Even Wal-Mart has an affiliate program! Go to web sites that sell products related to your subject and look for links for affiliates. Search their sites for these links, or even email their marketing headquarters and ask.
Another thing you can do is join several of the affiliate clearing house sites. Sites like Commission Junction, ShareASale and ClickBank all have lists of hundreds of sites with affiliate links. Join these sites and then just sign up for the programs that match your blog’s content.
Again, affiliate sales can seem more complicated that I’ve made them seem here, but they’re really not once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of ways to make it easier and we’ll be discussing them in later articles. All you need to worry about for now is to get signed up to be an affiliate for companies related to your blog’s subject. Take some time to go through the affiliate sites’ help and tutorials. In later articles I’ll show you plenty of ways to get these ads into your blog and start making money online.
