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.
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.
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
Make Money Online - Making Your Blog Site Look Better
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.
You’ve got your blog online. You’re posting articles to it regularly. You’ve signed up for Adsense and some affiliate programs. Now What? This is where the real fun begins! Now you’ve got some decisions to make.
Are you going to do this the inexpensive way and do most or all of the work yourself, or are you going to invest a little money into your online business and get it up and running faster?
The answers to these questions really depends on you, your budget, and your tolerance for risk vs. reward. Wordpress has everything you need and you can get most of it for little to no cost. The downside to this approach is the extra time it takes, not to mention the lost income due to trial and error. I’m going to give you many of these tips at no cost. Unfortunately, the information I’ll give you for nothing will require a lot of work on your part, and a lot of time to accomplish.
The first thing you need to do is make your blog look a little better, and more importantly – more authoritative. This doesn’t require fancy graphics only a professional artist could love, but it does require a little work. There are plenty of free Wordpress themes and plugins available. If you can find one of these that fits your blog well, great! But remember, your primary purpose here is not just a hobby – IT’S A BUSINESS! To that end, you might consider investing a small amount in your business to take it to that next level of professionalism.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to professionalize your blog site, and make it more authoritative looking, is to use one of the many commercial themes that are designed specifically for this purpose. The one I like is WP Remix by Premium Themes. WP Remix is a professional looking blogging theme that is one of the easiest to use I’ve tried. Most of its functionality is drag and drop. It works great and is ready for you to start adding your affiliate links and Adsense ads into right out of the box. I recommend you give it a look and see if it isn’t worth the small investment to save you hours of manual setup and configuration.
If you are the do-it-yourself type, or you’re just on a really tight budget, you can do all of this yourself with free to near-free resources. In the next few articles I’ll show you how to add your Google Adsense ads and affiliate links into your Wordpress theme.
In the meantime, here are a couple of videos that will show you how you can upload a new theme to your site using Filezilla, a free FTP program. You can download Filezilla at http://www.filezilla-project.org.
View the demonstration on installing a theme in Wordpress here.
View the Filezilla upload demonstration here.
