Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 2
In the last part I promised to explain what Real Simple Syndication, or RSS is and why it’s important. Let’s do that now before we go further.
RSS is an Internet protocol used to publish frequently updated content. Actually, it a family of competing protocols, but more on that later. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to, or “syndicate” content on the internet such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video, etc. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you use an RSS reader to get that content automatically whenever new items are published. In some ways, it’s like being on an emailing list. RSS documents (which are called a “feeds”, “web feeds”, or “channels”) includes full or summarized text, plus information such as publish dates and authors.
RSS feeds are great for bloggers because they allow us to syndicate and deliver our content automatically. They benefit our readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from our websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software usually referred to as an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”. These readers can be web-based or desktop-based. By using an RSS reader, it isn’t necessary to actually visit the web site to read it’s latest content. I personally use Google’s RSS Reader because I can make it a widget in my iGoogle page.
How to Put RSS to Work For You
You can use RSS for many things, but the 2 most important for a blogger are building a reader base and providing additional dynamic content on your web site.
First, building a reader base. Notice the subscribe box at the top right corner of my web page? That’s my invitation to syndicate my content and read it in either your favorite RSS reader or in your email. When visitors click that link they can subscribe to my feed and get all my blog entries as soon as they are published. Building a strong reader base is important. I personally use FeedBurner for all my RSS feeds. It’s a great service and it’s free. Remember I mentioned there really wasn’t a single RSS standard? That’s one of FeedBurner’s strong points. It can syndicate your feed in such a way that almost anyone can read it regardless of the RSS reader they use or its protocol. I don’t have to worry about it, FeedBurner handles it. I highly recommend you get a FeedBurner account, play with it, learn how to use it and syndicate with it. Once you’ve done that, add a subscribe block to your site similar to what I have and start building that reader base. FeedBurner has tools to help and there are several free Wordpress modules and widgets that can help you build that block.
Second, you can use RSS to add additional dynamic content to your site. This not only makes the search engines like you more, but it can be a beneficial service to your readers. A great example of this is the CONTRIBUTORS CORNER section of my web site at CoolRVToyz.com. If you go there and look you’ll see blog articles that relate to RV’s and the RV lifestyle. These are written by a variety of other bloggers that syndicate their blogs via RSS. I use a module to subscribe to their blogs and display them on my site. My members get a great service by being able to read a variety of RV-related articles, the bloggers benefit because I’m providing them additional exposure on my site and I benefit by having additional, constantly changing content on my website. Win-Win-Win.
One of your goals should be to get other bloggers to pick up your feed and put your blog articles on their site. This gets you that additional exposure and also gets you additional backlinks from their site to yours. Back links are another very important part of SEO, but that’s a subject for another article.
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.
How I Make a Living From My RV Working Over The Internet
For some time now I’ve been answering what seems to be the same email over and over. It goes basically like this:
“Phil, how’s it going with CoolRVToyz? I read on the site you’re a full-time RV’er and I have a question if you don’t mind. I’m wanting to go full time as well, but can’t really afford to retire yet. Can you share a few of your secrets about how you make your living over the Internet? You don’t have to get specific, but any information you’d be willing to share would be gratefully received. Thanks.”
Truth is, I’ve received so many of this kind of email from my camping and RV friends that I actually started copying and pasting my answer from the previous one and changing it around a little just to keep from typing so much.
To that end, I decided to open yet another web site - WorkFromYourRV.com. In reality I own over 100 Internet domains that I use for various reasons in my Internet business; so what’s one more. Most of them deal with camping, campgrounds, RV parks or GPS related information. None of them dealt with the subject of internet marketing. I wanted to avoid including this type of subject matter on CoolRVToyz because, well, it just wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of that site. CoolRVToyz is all about cool stuff for your RV lifestyle; in particular the Ultimate RV Parks & Campgrounds Directory - our flagship product. I didn’t want to start cluttering up the camping theme of that site with Internet Marketing “junk”.
Being a full-time RV’er presents specific challenges when you’re trying to run any kind of a Home-Based business. You obviously can’t carry much in the way of inventory in the back of your RV. Inbound shipping is problematic at best, especially if you move a lot like I do. Communications are also problematic since you don’t have many of the normal business tools like land-line phones, fax machines, etc. Those challenges can be overcome however, and it is completely possible to run a business from your RV while still maintaining the type of camping lifestyle we all love and enjoy. That’s why I opened this web site.
The purpose of WorkFromYourRV.com is to pass along what I use to make a living over the Internet while working from my RV. But, before I give away any “secrets”, I must provide a bit of a disclaimer of sorts.
Please read this next paragraph carefully:
In my Internet business, just like any other business, I work hard. If you came to this site looking for a way to get rich quick, you’re on the wrong site. Yes, there are a few opportunities out there that can make you a great deal of money if you catch them at the right time and do everything just right. However, the vast majority of the schemes over the internet are outright scams! Even the good ones don’t always work for everybody. I have failed at some of the things I’ve tried, even though I’m still convinced to this day they would make a profit if I had just worked on them a little harder, or differently. Some of the things I’ve tried made a little money and some made a lot. But, just because one particular idea made a lot of money for me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will for you. Each of us is different and will approach each challenge differently. I have a reputation to uphold, which is one of the primary reasons I’ve avoided this subject in “public” for as long as I have. I will do my best to only bring you ideas that have a reasonable chance of making a profit on your investment, but I can’t, and won’t offer any guaranties. In the end, much of your success will be based on your willingness to pull a few weeds in your garden, and never lose site of the big picture. Working over the Internet is a bit like trading stocks. You have to look at the entire portfolio and not get too hung up on how much you made on one stock versus how much you lost on another. As long as the overall portfolio continues to make you money, you spend your time refining it.
The Internet is a quickly changing landscape. What works today will not necessarily work tomorrow. My efforts on this site will be to keep you up-to-date with what I am finding out there and provide you with pre-screened ideas that I am either using myself or think are good ones to try. I can’t try them all, even the ones I think are pretty cool. After all, it’s just me and my RV. I’ll always let you know however which ones I’m using myself and which ones I just think are worthy of consideration. Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you new information as I run across it.
Happy RV’ing …
Phil King
