Updated Posts, Powerful Ideas
Steve
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Posts by Steve
The Power Of Niche Blogs
Aug 13th
Blogs are a hot topic right now. There are several ways you can use a blog in your business, but in this post I want to talk about one way that’s easy to implement and can be very profitable. And that is using WordPress blogs to create niche sites.
Using a WordPress blog for niche marketing is powerful for a few reasons:
Easy to set up, especially if your hosting has Cpanel with Fantastico so you can install a blog in a couple of clicks.
Hundreds of free themes that you can choose from to make your site stand out
Easy to add posts, pages, articles, adsense and other content to the site
Search engines are likely to index your site in a few days
Then there are the plugins that you can use to optimize your site for your visitors and search engines.
The real power of using WordPress blogs for your niche sites is that is quick to set up. Here’s why getting your niche site up and running quickly is so important.
You’re never going to be sure that any site you put online is going to get traffic and make sales. It could be that the niche you’ve selected is very competitive and you can’t get much traffic. The keywords you’ve targeted may not be effective. The offer or product isn’t as profitable as you had hoped.
If you get into the trap of trying to make everything “perfect” before you launch your site, you’ll waste a lot of time. Sure, you want to make sure that your site is a good quality site. You could spend hours and hours on getting the site ready for launch, only to find that you aren’t making any profit.
The idea is to get your niche blog online as quickly as possible, and move on to the next one. Once one of your sites shows some traffic and sales, you can continue to add content and put your efforts into driving more traffic and backlinks. And you can drop the sites that aren’t doing as well.
Setting up a niche blog is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get a site online. Once you do a few, you can easily get one created in a couple of hours. If you write your own content, it can take longer, but you can still do it in a day.
Put up a couple of sites a week, and in a year you’ll have created over 100 sites. Speed is the key to creating niches sites, and using WordPress blogs is the best way I’ve found to rapidly create niche sites. Don’t over analyze, just get your first site up. You’ll be amazed at how easy it really is…
Discover How To Create A Network Of Cash Generating Niche Blog Sites That Earn You Income On Autopilot. Get All The Details Here…
Here’s What WP Syndicator Can Do For You
Aug 13th
I told you about a new plug-in called WP Syndicator yesterday, and I wanted to give you an example of exactly how it can help you to get a lot more traffic to your site.
Your blog can have a lot of good information on it, and you can continually post new content, but if you don’t get traffic, you won’t get results from the time you invested. So you have to do the basic SEO by using keywords in your title and throughout your content.
One of the best ways to move your site higher in the search engine results pages is by getting backlinks from other sites. One good way to do this is to set up accounts at several Web 2.O sites, and put up content that links back to your site. Sites like: WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Mulitply, Plurk, FriendFeed, Xanga, Identica, You Are, Blellow and Bright Kite. It’s also a good idea to use twitter as well.
So every time you make a new post, you have to go to each Web 2.0 site and post an article that links back to your blog. You could just copy and paste your blog post into each site, but it would be more effective if you rewrote or submitted new content to these sites.
While this is effective, it takes a lot of time. You could hire someone to do it for you, but for most of us, that isn’t an option, at least not yet. So if you wanted links to your blog from these Web 2.0 sites, you had to do it yourself.
WP Syndicator has changed all of that. Here’s the short version of what WP Syndicator will do for you:
The first step is to sign up for an account at each of these sites. WP Syndicator will help you to do that. This should take less than an hour.
The next step is to write your blog post. Once you are done, WP Syndicator can submit an excerpt of your blog article to any or all of the Web 2.0 sites that you have signed up for. The default is 500 characters, which is around 100 words. You can set it to any length you want. At the end of the excerpt is a link back to your blog where they can read the rest of your post.
With WP Syndicator, you can automatically post content and get several links back to your site every time you update your blog. This saves a ton of time, and gets you a lot of backlinks and more free traffic.
WP Syndicator was purchased by over 1,000 people during a fund raiser that Andy Fletcher, the creator of WP Syndicator, ran on the Warrior Forum. It is getting great reviews and results, and now it’s your turn to see what WP Syndicator is all about. Click here now…
Easy Way To Get Quality Backlinks To Your Blog
Aug 12th
How’s your blog doing? Are you getting enough traffic to your blog? If you’re like most of us, you’re always interested in getting more traffic to your blog. The ideal situation would be for your blog to get to the first page of the search results for your targeted key words. In other words free traffic. There’s a brand new WordPress plug-in developed by Andy Fletcher that will help you do just that.
It’s called WP Syndicator. This new plug-in will enable you to automatically post an excerpt of your blog post to 15 different Web 2.0 sites including WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Mulitply, Plurk, FriendFeed, Xanga, Identica, Blellow and Bright Kite. It will also send a tweet about your latest blog post at the same time.
The content syndicated will be an excerpt from your post, the length that you specify, and will have a link back to your blog to read the rest. You have a choice of leaving that to the default “Read more…” or changing it to a keyword specific anchor text. Either will get you more traffic but the keyword anchor text may give you a more valuable backlink and boost in the SERPs.
The WP Syndicator plug-in installs just as easily as any other WordPress plug-in. It does take a while to set it up the first time because you have to set up all the details for the various Web 2.0 accounts but once that’s finished, it’s pretty much set it and forget it. Once it’s installed, every time you go in to edit post, you’ll see a link in the top right hand corner that says “click here to syndicate”. Click and you’re done. It’s that easy.
In his latest update, creator Andy Fletcher, added a few features that early testers requested so WP Syndicator now will also syndicate pages and has auto-syndication capability. This feature is disabled by default but if you want to enable it, you can and there is a handy rate limiting feature also added so that you don’t get banned from all the Web 2.0 sites for posting too many, too fast. Personally, I recommend that you leave it disabled and just syndicate your best posts but you can choose whatever works best for you.
This is truly one of the best new plug-ins to come along that will give your blog a traffic boost. What will more traffic mean to you? More subscribers to your list? More sales? WP Syndicator could easily be the boost you need to take your blog to the next level. Click here for more links and traffic…
The Web Graphic Solution
Aug 7th
One thing every web site needs is graphics and images. Headers, Buttons, Ebook Covers, And CD Covers. They make a site more visually appealing and can make a web site look professional in the eyes of your visitors. You have 3 choices when it comes to getting graphics for your site.
You can search for free graphics. You WILL find free graphics online, but in a lot of cases they are either poor quality or you won’t be able to find graphics that fit your site.
You can pay for graphics. There are sites where you can get some nice graphics, but you’re limited to what they have to offer and again you may not find what you’re looking for. To overcome this obstacle, you can pay someone to design graphics for you.
You can learn how to do it yourself. You’ll need some type of graphics software to do this, and one that gets the most attention is also the one that is VERY expensive – hundreds of dollars – PhotoShop.
The best way to get the graphics you need for your site without having to pay each time is to learn how to do it yourself. And while you can spend a lot of money on software to create your graphics, there is a free alternative.
It’s called The Gimp. The Gimp is often called the free alternative to PhotoShop. It’s free, open-source software that can help you to create stunning graphics.
While The Gimp IS free, you still have to learn how to use it so you can create your professional looking headers, buttons, and ebook covers. There are a lot of tutorials at the gimp web site that will teach you how to use it.
There is another way to learn The Gimp, and that is by watching video that will show you how to use the features that The Gimp has to offer. You’ll have to 27 videos covering around 3 hours of instruction on how to get the most out the Gimp so you can start creating the graphics for your site.
It’s called Design Graphics With Gimp – Start designing amazing graphics in 180 minutes of less. Even if you’ve never created a graphic before, and you don’t know where to start, this video series will show you how it’s done. You also get a bonus of 20 headers, mini site graphics pack with private label rights, and 30 themed site templates with plr. Click here to learn more.
Whether you use the free tutorials or invest in Design Graphics With Gimp video series, The Gimp is free software that will allow you to create the graphics you need to make your site stand out and look professional.
Summer Is The Time To Prepare Your Sites For Christmas
Aug 6th
Have you ever noticed how offline stores stock their shelves? As we near the end of summer, while the weather is still warm, stores are starting to sell winter clothing. In the spring of the year, you can find all sorts of warm weather products – fans, grills, patio furniture, lawn products – before summer arrives.
The takeaway here is that YOU should do the same thing in your business. This is especially true if you want to cash in on the Christmas season.
One thing you can count on is that people are going to buy Christmas presents this year. A lot of money is going to be spent, and you can position yourself to get some of these profits.
The reality is that it takes time to do market research and keyword research to find out what products are going to be hot this year. Then you have to create and upload your site and start promoting it.
If you wait until November to get started, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. The marketers who take the time to create their marketing campaigns before you already have traffic and listings on the search results pages.
Now is the time to create a lot of small niche sites that offer the products that a lot of people are going to be searching for as we near Christmas. You’ll have an advantage because you will have done all of the work needed to get traffic flowing to your site.
This doesn’t have to be a hard thing to do. The first step is to get your sites created. Create them quickly and don’t worry too much about making them perfect. Don’t get hung up on the little details. Just create a few pages, make sure your affiliate links work, and get them online. Then move on to the next one.
To recap, find products that are going to be in huge demand this Christmas. Create mini-sites for each of these products. Get as many of them created as you can, and do it quickly. Start promoting and driving traffic to your site.
If you do the work now, while the weather is still warm and thoughts of Christmas seem far away, you’ll be in a great position to cash in on the Christmas season. What are you waiting for?
Don’t Let The Competition Scare You
Aug 5th
The best type of keyword to rank for is one that has a lot of daily searches and doesn’t have a lot of competition. Unfortunately for most of us, these keywords are rare and hard to find. So we are left with the option of entering markets that have more competition than we would like.
The question is:
How much competition is too much?
Some say that you should only enter markets with less than 100,000 competing web sites. Others say the competition should be less than 50,000. While these guidelines are useful, I want to show you something about competition numbers that may surprise you.
The reality is that the competition numbers you see in the search results aren’t the only information you need before you decide to enter a market.
I’m going to show you how the competition numbers you see are not the number of sites you’re really competing with.
Let’s look at the digital camera market. It’s a big market with a lot of competition. I decided to take a look at “waterproof digital camera” to see if I could enter the market as an affiliate for Amazon.com.
I started with Google, and when I entered waterproof digital camera without the quotes Google showed me that there were 2,500,000 competing web sites. Not good news!
Next I entered waterproof digital camera with quotes, and found that there were 361,000 competing sites. While better, that’s still a lot of competition.
Then I went to Bing.com, entered waterproof digital camera, and found there were 12,500,000 competing sites.
In each of these searches, if I had stopped there, I would have given up hope and moved on to another market. But wait…
I went back to the Google search results page and kept clicking forward in the search results. At the bottom of the page, you can opt to go to the next page, or skip ahead 9 pages deeper. What I found was really cool…
For the search phrase waterproof digital camera without the quotes, with 2,500,00 competing web sites, Google only listed 639 pages. Only 639 out of the 2,500,000 pages made it to the search results pages.
For the search phrase waterproof digital camera with the quotes, with 361,000 competing web sites, there were only 620 pages listed.
Using Bing, with 12,500,000 competing sites, only 819 pages were listed.
Using Yahoo, I couldn’t see a number of competing web sites, but there were only 1,000 pages listed.
The lesson here is that you shouldn’t be deterred by the competition numbers you see. In a lot of cases, you’ll find that there are a lot fewer competitors than you thought there were. With less than 1,000 competing pages in Yahoo, and even less in Google and Bing, this is a keyword that’s worth looking into.
A final tip:
On the Google search site, click on setting in the top left corner, and select “Search Settings”. On that page, you can select the option to show 100 results on each page. This makes it a lot quicker to get to number of pages that are listed on the Google search page.
4 Free Tools You Should Have
Jul 30th
Some people have the idea that the more you spend for something, the better it is. You know the phrase “You Get What You Pay For”, but when it comes to the software that you need to create professional sites and run your online business, that’s not the case. In fact, there are 4 software tools that do most of the things you need to do to get your site up and running, including creating products.
What follows are my list of 4 tools I use all of the time. The first two will allow you to easily create a stunning web site or web pages. The other two make it easy to upload your files to your hosting account and to create PDF ebooks and small reports. And the best thing is that all of these tools are FREE! Let’s get started.
1. Xheader.
Header graphics are almost a must-have element on any web page. In the past, you had to know how to do it yourself, pay someone to do it for you, or purchase and learn how to use software so you could make them yourself. Not anymore. With Xheader, you get software that comes with 500 templates in several categories that you can choose from. Select a template, add text and any graphics you want, add text effects, and you have a professional header. This is not some kind of “Lite” software that has the option to get the “Pro” version. There is only one version, and that’s Xheader. You can learn more by clicking here.
2. Kompozer.
Now that you have a header graphic, it’s time to create the web pages that you’re going to use it on. You can pay a lot of money for some web design software – sometimes several hundreds of dollars. There’s no reason to do that because you can create really nice web site with Kompozer. This is free, open source software that you can use to create web sites quickly. It’s a WYSIWYG web page editor – What You See Is What You Get – so if you can use a word processor, you can easily learn how to use it. There are help files that will answer a lot of questions, and there is a forum that you can access when you go to the Kompozer page. There is no advertising, and never any option to upgrade to a paid version. Free and powerful. Get it here.
3. Open Office.
Creating small reports, articles, and ebooks is a big part of online business. So you need a tool that will make it easier. So you need a tool that will make it easy to write and format your content, including adding graphics, as well as the ability to turn your content into a PDF file. And a tool that would make it easy to create PowerPoint slides would be good as well. If the tool would open Microsoft Office documents as well, it would be great.
The software that does the above and more is called Open Office. It is free software that can take the place of Microsoft Office. It can create PDF files, slide shows, spread sheets, and a lot more. As a marketer, you can create as many PDF files as you need, all with Open Office. It’s a big download, but it’s something that I wouldn’t want to be without. Get Open Office here.
4. FileZilla.
Once you’ve created your header graphics, and have your web pages looking good, it’s time to get them to your hosting account. FTP software makes it easy to upload your files up to the Internet. But which one should you choose? For me, the choice is easy – the free open source software called FileZilla. FileZilla will upload all of your web pages, graphics, PDF files, video files, and anything else you can think of. No ads, no cost, easy to use. It doesn’t get any better than that. Get it here.
There you have my 4 must have software tools. They are all I need to create professional web pages and sites, header graphics, PDF ebooks and reports, and upload them to my hosting account. These tools are powerful and free, so go check them out and see for yourself.
Discover How To Point And Click Your Way To Creating Amazing Web Pages. A step by step method that takes you from start to finish in creating your site, setting up your hosting account and getting your site online, and start making sales. More information here…
How To Discover The Markets You Can Compete In
Jul 29th
Finding the keywords that you need to target for your marketing is vital. It’s also important to know when trying to compete in a market is extremely difficult. Here are a few things you should consider before you spend the time and/or money trying to get on the first page of the search engine results pages.
Let’s say you did target “weight loss” and you DID get a first page listing. While that is not something that will likely happen, there are a few drawbacks to getting there. While there are thousands upon thousands of searches for that key phrase, you really don’t know what they’re searching for. They could be looking for:
- Weight loss tips
- Weight loss menus
- Weight loss ebooks
- Free weight loss information
- Weight loss programs ( think Nutri-System)
- Weight loss workout routines
- Vegetarian weight loss
- Weight loss supplements
- Fast weight loss
If someone were to land on your site for the term “weight loss”, do you offer what they are REALLY looking for? And how would you know. The problem is that the term “weight loss” is a very broad keyword, and it covers a lot of potential possibilities.
If someone is looking for weight loss supplements and you’re offering a weight loss ebook…
If someone is looking for fast weight loss, and you’re offering an exercise program…
If someone is looking for free tips, and you’re selling something…
You’re out of luck…
You have successfully generated the dreaded “untargeted traffic”. People who get to your site who have absolutely no interest in what you’re offering.
Mega-market keywords look really good because of the number of searches that they get every day. But unless you have a site that covers just about everything that someone would want, you’re not going to make a lot of sales.
Another thing to consider is that where you rank is going to affect your traffic. If you’re not on the first page of the search engine results, you’re going to have a hard time getting any traffic. Let’s say you get your site in the top 100 sites for your keyword. Most people look at the first page of results, and if they don’t find what they want, they enter another search term. A few of them may go to the second page of search results. Very few of them are going to go through 10 pages of results to find your page.
That’s why it’s in your best interest to drill down in these mega-markets and target the related keywords. It’s a lot easier to attract the kind of visitor to your site that is looking for what you’re offering. And that results in you making sales. I don’t want you to waste your time targeting keywords that you’ll have a hard time profiting from. The sole purpose of writing this is so you can avoid the mistakes that I have already made. Hope this helps.
Finding Profitable Keywords In A Competitive Market
Jul 29th
When it comes to keyword research, most people will enter their main keyword into a keyword tool and see how many searches there are. If there are a lot of searches, they start thinking of all the traffic they’ll get and they create their pages and write the articles. And then they wonder why they aren’t getting any traffic and why it’s so hard to get a first page ranking for their web pages.
Let’s go through an example that will show you why it’s not always a good idea to target a keyword based ONLY on how many searches it gets. This is especially true in the mega-markets such as golf, dogs, and digital cameras. For this example, I’m going to use the weight loss market. Weight loss is a huge market, because there are always going to be people who are interested in losing weight.
I enter the keyword phrase “weight loss” in Market Samurai and find out that there are 818,630 searches per day!
That’s a lot of searches, and if you could get a first page listing on the search engine results page, you’d get a lot of traffic.
Let’s look at how much competition there is for “weight loss” – 65,200,000 sites. Over 65 million sites!
The main lesson here is to ALWAYS look at the competition you’re up against before you decide to use a keyword. Even though “weight loss” is very competitive, you can still enter the weight loss market. When I entered “weight loss” in Market Samurai, I got a list of 200 keywords and the competition for each one.
Looking through the list of keywords, I decided to look for the keywords that had less then 100,000 competing sites that still had a lot of searches each day. Here’s what I found:
- weight loss menus – 325 searches per day – competition of 14,400 sites
- weight loss meal plan – 595 searches per day – competition of 23,400 sites
- weight loss software – 266 searches per day – competition of 26,900 sites
- safe diet pills – 398 searches per day – competition of 45,800 sites
- fastest weight loss – 730 searches per day – competition of 62,300 sites
- rapid weight loss diet – 595 searches per day – competition of 80,600 sites
- weight loss patches – 398 searches per day – competition of 98,600 sites
These are just a few of the keyword phrases that came up, and they show that while there aren’t as many daily searches for these phrases, there is a LOT less competition. And a much better chance for you to use one or more of these key phrases to get traffic to your site.
Weight loss IS a competitive market, but it is also a market where people are spending a lot of money. You can still enter the market using related keywords that don’t have as much competition and will give you a much better chance of getting your web pages ranked well and driving traffic to your site.
Spend your time working with the keywords that you have a chance at ranking well for instead of trying to rank for the keywords that have the most searches. That way, you can still enter any market you’re interested in and start getting the free traffic you’re after.
The tool you use to do your keyword research is important as well. As you’ve already noticed, I use Market Samurai for my keyword research as well as all of the other features such as rank tracker, finding content, publishing content and much more. What you need to know is that the keyword module is ALWAYS free. Once the trial period is over, you can still use the keyword research part of Market Samurai forever. It’s a great tool to make keyword and competition research quick and easy. Get your copy by clicking here.
3 Powerful Ways To Add Subscribers To Your List
Jul 22nd
Have you been to a site recently that did NOT have an offer to join an email list? They are very rare, and for good reason. A list can be the most profitable part of your business. The problem for you is that with so many lists to subscribe to, how can you entice visitors to your opt-in page to subscribe to your list? Free subscriptions aren’t enough anymore, so you have to get creative.
What I want to focus on is getting new subscribers onto your list. The standard advice is to offer a bribe or freebie in exchange for someone entering their name and email address. It can be a report that you created, some plr report, a video, or software. Here are 3 ideas that you can use to get visitors to subscribe to YOUR list.
I’ve recently come across some other ways to get new subscribers, and in some cases making sure that your subscribers don’t leave.
1.Offer free stuff every day.
One smart marketer is taking advantage of the fact that PLR articles are in high demand. What he does is offer 20 PLR articles EVERY DAY in different niches, just for signing up for his list. So every day you get an email with a link to download the articles. The link sends you to a web site where you are presented with a pop-up ad for a product, as well as offers on the download page. You don’t have to buy anything, just download the articles.
He gets to continually put offers in front of his subscribers as long as they are willing to get the new articles. In addition, he also sends out seperate messages with offers in them. So you get 20 free articles every day, and he gets an opportunity to make offers to his subscribers. Looking at ads is a small price to pay to get free articles.
2. Offer header graphics for free.
Another marketer is offering something else that is very popular - free header graphics. With so many marketers searching for header graphics for their web pages, offering something that is in high demand that others pay good money for is sure to lure visitors to sign up for your list. Sign up for his list, and you’ll get a collection of header graphics you can use on your site.
3. Have a password protected subscriber area where you offer free downloads each month.
A list that I have been subscribed to for a long time has a subscriber only download area. Every month he load the subscriber area up with free download of software and free reports. Some of these come with resale rights. A lot of them are demo versions of a paid product. In every case, the free stuff is valuable on its own. To access the content, you get a new password each month in his weekly newsletter.
In addition to the product recommendations he includes in his newsletter, there are offers in the subscriber area as well, so he can profit while at the same time offering real value to his subscribers.
These marketers are good examples of how to offer a good incentive to get subscribers and how to keep them subsribed to your list. Do something a little different and you could see your list see some really good growth. To your success…
Get people onto your list and make sales – guaranteed – easier, faster, and cheaper than you ever imagined. Get More Details Here…
