Easy2Earn Dollars

If you had the choice between having $10,000 to build a web site from scratch, or to buy an established web site that is generating $500 a month, which would you choose? The market for buying established web sites has always been hot, but it’s always a tough decision as the auction clock counts down… especially if you get into the high five and six figures sales! The million dollar question is, if you took the time and had the resources, could you build something better, vs. buying a web site, or are you just wasting time?After buying  few established sites over the past several months, I’ve had my fair share of stressful moments and going over the numbers time and time again to make sure I was making the right decision. Through my experience, I’ve broken down my decisions to a few major factors.

Here’s a list of my top reasons why I would rather purchase a solid established web site for 20+ times earnings, then build my own from scratch.

TIME IS WORTH MORE THAN MONEY

We all have great ideas. Unfortunately we get side tracked, have problems executing and get overwhelmed… which leaves most of our ideas on the back burner. Hence, time is more valuable then money. If you are already established and making money online, you may already have the resources and money to purchase a web site, which saves you the time from starting from scratch. If you buy an established web site, the design, infrastructure and establishment is already there.

IMMEDIATE BRANDING, AUTHORITY AND DATA

Depending on the size of the web site you purchase, you may be paying for the branding and authority already associated with a site. One of the biggest problems with starting a web site from scratch, is having to get people to your web site and building a solid presence. This can easily fall into the “time issue”, but is actually a whole set of problems/solutions in itself.

The data from picking up an established site is also a huge benefit. These days every site has a mailing list, a twitter account and a social appearance. While these advantages usually don’t have a dollar figure on them, they definitely do contribute to the growth and exposure of your site. The time itself to build up traffic, collect newsletter subscribers and study these numbers is quite a hefty number.

OUTSOURCE YOUR NEW SITE COMPLETELY

How is your business doing financially? If your numbers are doing great, picking up an established site that is already generating a few hundred/thousand a month in revenue is a good idea. Actually, if it’s a site that you can completely outsource and keep profitable, then it’s a great idea! Web sites that may fall under this category are media/video entertainment sites, blogging and web forums. Even if the cost of outsourcing is 75% of the profit made from the site, you are still earning a potential 25% profit while increasing in size month over month, while not having to manage the site.

PUTTING YOUR EXPERTISE TO GOOD USE

The last and most important factor in deciding to buy an established web site, or create your own… is if you can put your expertise to use. Whether you specialize in affiliate marketing, social media, web design or search marketing… it’s tough to find an established web site that is doing their best on all of these, and that is your advance. Find already profitable web sites, what they are lacking, and most importantly what you can improve upon.

PLACING THAT WINNING BID!

In the end, it all comes down to a few deciding factors on whether or not you are going to be the TOP BIDDER when that auction clock counts down. (I hate that 4 hour extension on Flippa!) In realistic terms, it might come down to the size of your wallet, but if that’s not the case… then it’s the following. Do your research and make sure the site is legit. Think really hard if this is a site/niche that you want to dive into. If you’re going to drop a few thousand or more on a site, make sure you are ready to take it to the next level… or you may find yourself putting out a fire, losing money and cost yourself even more time than before you picked this site up.

WHERE TO BUY & SELL WEB SITES?

There is a huge demand for the buying and selling of web sites, but also a big lack of competition. So where is the best place to buy and sell web sites? Right now Flippa.com (formerly SitePoint) is leading the way… and by a mile I may add. Since their launch, Flippa has done over $28 million in web site sales. Where is all of the competition for Flippa? Sure, you have sites like ebay.com, that usually have crap sites. Then you have a bunch of “in the mix” sites, that just don’t compete. Right now Flippa is KING.

Earlier in the year I came across a new site called OfferVault, which helped you compare cpa offers across a bunch of affiliate networks. Mark Roth, the owner of the site, recently contacted me and let me know about some of the changes and improvements to the site since then. If you saw the previous site design, you will notice a huge improvement right away. The old design didn’t have much of a color scheme, and I found it a bit confusing on where to signup or access the search area for current members. The new design puts all that confusion to rest and provides much more.What’s new and what’s better?
The original concept for the site was mainly to provide a search database of affiliate offers across networks. Since I last checked out the site, Mark has doubled the size of the networks he lists in his database. The majority of names to choose from, are ones you probably already know Clickbooth, Market Leverage, and Rextopia. I feel the main attraction OfferVault, is there affiliate offer search, but new additions have been added to the site as well.

Live Member Search Tool and Keyword Function
Ever wonder what other people are searching on, or just need some inspiration to get in a niche? A cool feature of OfferVault is the “scrolling search feed” when you are at the “compare offers” page. It doesn’t tell you how others are pushing offer, just what they are searching, but it still may help you find that next niche you were looking for.

Once you come across an offer worth looking at, you can click on the “KW” option next to the offer and it will bring up a listing of relevant keywords. This usually takes around 30 seconds to pull a report together. It’s not just a few keywords, but it shows “keyword groups”, advertiser competition and search volume.

Full Offer Breakdown
Everything is in place on OfferVault for you to find the offer you are looking for. In the past, you could find the offer, but then it was a hassle to see the landing page and you would end up opening new windows, etc. With the platform, once you make a search and find an offer, click it and everything is there for you. A quick offer/network description, payouts and the landing page right on that same page. An excellent looking setup, and big improvement to their site.

The “NEW” OfferVault
As explained, all of the improvements are here to make this a really great resource site, and that’s exactly what it is. The goal of the site is to make it easy for you to find new affiliate offers, at competitive rates, and while offering a bit of resources and training along the web. Over the past few months, OfferVault has also added a weekly webinar series. Once you are a member, they are free to watch and cover everything from PPV traffic, Facebook Advertising and Google Adwords. Some of these videos go well over an hour, and are free to all members.

Here’s the part of the post where I’m supposed to throw out a kicker or trial offer. Fortunately that’s not necessary. OfferVault is FREE! There is no upsell and you gain instant access to their directory. After being a member, and if you decide to join a new network through their site, OfferVault may get a referral commission. With this structure in place, they can offer you a free member.

Once or twice a year the Unique Blog Designs team comes out with a killer new product and revolutionizes how we create ad campaigns. In the beginning, they focuses on blog themes and custom layouts. Then earlier this year they came out with Affiliate Theme, which brought a new concept and method to making campaign landing pages. Now the UBD team is back, and showing us all how to easily create those wonderful squeeze pages everyone loves to hate. They may be very long sometimes, and they may always ask for your emails, but most importantly… they work!I’ll tell you right now, I’m an entrepreneur and marketers at heart. I hate having to deal with any coding or wasting time with source codes on new projects. Whenever I can have UBD work on a project for me, or use one of their new plugins, it always saves me time and pays for itself instantly.

What is a Squeeze Page and why should I care?
If you are reading this blog, I’m sure most of you already know what a “squeeze page” is. For those who don’t, it’s been proven to be one of the most effective ways to generate revenue and build a mailing list. How many people visit your site or ad campaign, then leave? Instead of letting them leave, you offer them something for free and grab their email to follow up with them after you leave your site. This is the basic concept behind squeeze pages. If you’ve never split test your ad campaigns with a squeeze page, you may be missing out on some big money.

Click Here to Test Drive & Buy Squeeze Theme

How to Create Your Own Squeeze Pages for Ad Campaigns
I’m not going to leave you stranded with a quick one page review on Squeeze Theme and never talk about it again. Within the next two weeks, I will have a follow up case study on how to create a squeeze page for your ad campaign and build up a mailing list in the process.

Here is a quick example of an effective Squeeze Theme template.

Squeeze Theme + Squeeze Camp
This time around UBD has offered something new along with their product. You now have the option to purchase Squeeze Theme by itself, of enroll into Squeeze Camp. Squeeze Camp is a 12 week course that walks you through using the wordpress plugin to it’s max potential, how to create the best converting squeeze pages and most importantly, how to make money in the process.

Free 37 Page Squeeze ebook & Limited Time Discount
Even if you are on the fence about buying another wordpress plugin, you should at least head over to their site and pick up the free 37 page ebook on creating and making money with Squeeze pages. After looking through the ebook, you then have the option to save 34% if you decide to purchase. This 34% discount expires on December 1st, 2009.

As I mentioned, this was a quick review on a great new plugin I have been toying around with for the past week. Next week I will follow up with a few ideas and concepts I have been using to generate some revenue and build up lists.

What has Twitter brought into your life? From a business aspect, it’s opened up worlds and brought us together. However, what is the real value in Twitter for those who aren’t making money online? While I was at BlogWorld in Las Vegas, there was a lot of discussion about raising money through Twitter. This was an excellent concept, just for the fact that you can easily participate and reach millions of people with a single click. Soon, charities may no longer need to waste funds on tv advertising, pamphlets or ad campaigns. If we can get more people to participate and come up with new methods for generating money and helping those in need, the future of raising money just be a “tweet” away.

The “Make a Wish” Foundation has created the Make-a-Wish Tweet-a-Cause and is putting the power of Twitter to work! In a partnership with LeapFish, the Make a Wish foundation is looking to raise $10,000 to send Jacob and his family to Disneyland. Jacob, age 4, has a rare and life-threatening disease that has affected him since birth. Personally, I went to Disneyland once when I was very young, so I don’t remember it that well. What I do remember and know, is that every child, (especially those less fortunate), should have the chance to dream and visit such a place as Disneyland in their lifetime.

So let’s send Jacob to Disneyland!

As mentioned, Make a Wish foundation and LeapFish are combining forces to make this “wish” possible. Every time a user “retweets” the text line below, LeapFish will make a donation of 5 cents to the Make a Wish Foundation until the $10,000 and been raised.

Click HERE or copy / paste the following into your Twitter client:

Just tweeted 2 grant a childs wish! #LeapFish donates to #makeawish foundation for each tweet. http://bit.ly/3KgyQX Please retweet!

The campaign will run from November 16 through November 27, 2009. LeapFish will match each Tweet with 5 cents to a target of $10,000 which will get Jacob and his family to Disneyland.  Click here to view progress chart and donation earnings.

JumpTV (www.JumpTV.com) is the world’s leading broadcaster of television over the Internet. With over 300 channels from 75+ countries, JumpTV delivers its audience news, sports and entertainment content on a real-time basis from all corners of the globe. JumpTV has viewers in over 100 countries who watch channels on JumpTV.com via ordinary Internet connections on their home computers, laptops, Internet-enabled television sets, and 3G mobile phones.

JumpTV allows viewers to remain connected to their homeland by providing an easy way to watch their favorite television networks, sporting events, dramas and movies from anywhere in the world. JumpTV channels are available on a subscription basis and select content is available for free to audiences in the United States. Channels are also available as part of national, regional or lifestyle packages. In addition to offering live streams, JumpTV offers complementary content on a Video on Demand (VoD) and Pay per View (PPV) basis.

It’s usually the last place you visit when you are on a web site or blog, but still… lots of people see your footer. For web site, it’s usually just a few links, contact info and a copyright symbol. For blogs, it’s become a whole new playing field. With fancy custom designs and easy widgets and plugin installs, what you can do with your footer is limitless. SpyreStudios put together a list of “48 Excellent Examples of Blog Post Footer Designs“. Below I will highly a few that I found most impressive.

The UpSell
Once your site visitors are at your footer, there’s a good chance they are going to either click something, or leave your web site / blog…. so why not try and sell them something! Something I’ve seen a lot more of recently, is blogs posting what theme they are using on their blog, then offering others to buy that same theme. Usually, blogs doing this will receive a commission on all referred sign ups. A great example of this can be seen on Chris Brogan and CopyBlogger’s blogs.

Example Footers: Chris Brogan, CopyBlogger

Keep Them Reading Your Site
Another great resource for your blog footer, is to keep the reader interested and let them know about key points or areas of your blog that they may have missed.

Example Footers: UX Booth, Mashable, Search Engine Land

Having Fun with Your Blog Footer
Not all footers need to be an upsell, or a source for driving visitors to different areas of your site. It’s always nice to see blogs get creative and come up with their own designs and layouts for rss, bookmark buttons and subscription forms. I took a liking to the blog designs below.

Example Footers: Spoon Graphics, CSS-Tricks

These are just a few samples, but I know I’ve seen some other great blog footer designs in the past, and just can’t remember the site names. Be sure to take a look at the full list, and leave any other cool blog footer designs in the comments section.

Our credit monitoring service includes a free 3-in-1 Credit Report with information from all 3 national credit bureaus - TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. The report includes your complete, unabridged credit information plus all 3 credit scores.

We call it a merged report because the 3-bureau information is printed side-by-side in an easy to read format that makes it simple to compare reports and spot any errors or inconsistencies.

Since credit bureaus do not share their data with each other, it is important to check your credit and scores at all 3 bureaus to get an accurate picture of your credit records. Most lenders review all 3 credit reports before deciding whether to extend you credit, and they use the average of your scores as a guide.

The 3-in-1 Credit Report is valuable because it lets you see exactly what your lender does. You can use this information to negotiate better rates on credit cards and loans to save money. If your credit is damaged, you’ll like the free credit score analysis which provides excellent tips on how to raise your score.

Once you login and receive your credit report online, you should print a copy and review it carefully, circling any unfamiliar information. Signs of fraud and identity theft include strange addresses and accounts you do not recognize. Follow up on these and any other items by contacting the creditor directly at the telephone number or address listed on the report.

Your 3-in-1 Merged Credit Report includes:

• Personal Information: An overview of your current and previous addresses, current and past employers and spouse’s name.
• Account Summary: Detailed information about your open and closed credit accounts including mortgages, car loans, credit cards, store charges and other loans. This section lists a 7-year payment history, current balance, limits, historic high balances, and date the account was opened. It also includes whether the account is up to date, and current status such as paid, settled or sent to collections. This section is typically the longest.
• Public Records - Lists foreclosures, bankruptcies, liens, divorce settlements and legal judgments against you. In general the less information that is listed here, the better, as these items tend to be viewed negatively by lenders.
• Inquiries - Lists names of all institutions and/or individuals who have requested your credit report in the last two years. You may see places where you have applied for credit, prospective employers or landlords, and current creditors who regularly check your report to make sure nothing has changed and you can still meet your obligations.

In addition to your free 3-in-1 Credit Report, you will also receive:

• 3 Credit Scores - These scores are very important as they determine whether or not you will receive the credit you seek. Many lenders do not scour your credit report; they simply look at your credit score to decide.
• Personalized Score Analysis - Along with your 3-in-1 report you will receive personal tips based on your scores to help you understand and improve your score.
• Credit Monitoring Service - Around the clock monitoring of your credit ensures that all changes to your reports will be reported to you within 24-hours, giving you real-time warnings of any fraud or derogatory notations to your file.

Dear Fellow Musician,

What if you could lock yourself in a room and get 4.5 hours of
ministry-focused instruction from the man behind many of your
favorite gospel albums?

Would that excite you?

Well, you’re definitely in luck! Because I’ve found a resource
that’ll uncover tons of contemporary gospel secrets from one of
the baddest gospel musicians in the industry today, Mr. Jason
White!

You’ll get the opportunity to learn flavorful approaches,
chords, movements, patterns, “licks & tricks,” and real songs
from Jason White, but not only that…

You’ll learn the music ministry side of things too. This isn’t
just for someone who wants to steal a bunch of chords and sound
good, although you’ll get dozens upon dozens of chords and will
certainly sound 10 times better after devouring this course.
This is deeper than that though.

This is for the musician who truly wants to be used by God to
usher in His presence through music. The musician who no longer
wants to be a distraction or hindrance to the service but
actually be an integral part of the worship experience.

Jason is ready to show you what he’s picked up over the years as
he’s had the privilege to walk closely with prominent pastors like
Bishop Charles Blake.

This is a holistic course focusing both on the creative music
side and the ministry side. You will not go wrong with it.

To learn more, click the link below:
==> http://www.hearandplay.com/450572/gkministry.html

The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO

Research

Before you do any SEO you need to research the part of the web you will be trying to change. Many people believe this is the most important step in the SEO process. No skipping!

Complete the The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO - Completing all the tasks on this list will give you all the skills necessary to complete this checklist.

Write down your goal - Why are you doing this? Why do you want people to find your client’s site? Is simply viewing your client’s site not enough? My goal was “I want local parents to find my client’s website and be persuaded to register their children.”

Brainstorm and write down search queries - What words might people type into the search engines to look for your client’s company? For my example, I came up with “Issaquah Preschool,” “Issaquah Daycare,” “Sammamish Preschool,” (a neighboring suburb) “Preschool Summer Camp,” and “Creative Preschool.” Your list should be longer.

Research your chosen keywords - Sign up for Google Adwords and learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” and “ad text ideas” generator. Learn how to use Wordtracker (paid) and/or the Keyword Difficulty tool (free).

Using what you learned from keyword research, record what you believe to be the best keywords - For my project, I used “Issaquah Preschool,” “Issaquah Early Childhood,” “Preschool Summer Camp,” and about five others.

Analyze the current Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your keywords - Who is ranking? What are they doing effectively and ineffectively? Investigate and get to know your competition.

Create a list of your competition - Use the information from the previous step to create a list of competitors. You will use this to figure out how other sites were able to get into your targeted SERPs.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find the sources of your competitor’s links - Record the sources of links your competitors have and save them for later.

Search for your client’s site - Use the site command on Google, Live and Yahoo to see if your client’s site is indexed. Ex. “site:www.gigglywigglypreschool.com.” If your client’s site is not indexed, you need to figure out what is preventing the search engines from crawling it. Be sure to also search the title tags of your client’s most important pages to see where/if they rank. Record your results.

Onsite

Sign up and verify with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Live Search Webmaster Center - This is an important step that will become necessary later.

Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO - This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site.

Evaluate the visual design of your client’s site - If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client’s niche.

Check compatibility between browsers - Visit your client’s site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client’s website renders correctly and won’t drive away users.

Create a new e-mail address specific to the site you are working on - Use this address for all e-mails pertaining to your project. This is especially important for link building.

Look at your HTML code and optimize all of the SEO related tags - If you are unsure what these are, reread the
Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• • • Primary objective should be accomplished from the homepage
    • Keyword in title (unique for each page, include keywords)
    • Keyword in h1 on each page
    • Keyword in text
    • Optimize URL architecture (www.website.com/birds/eagle instead of www.website.com/allanimals/?type=bird&species=eagle). Use 301 redirects if you rename pages
    • Information architecture - as few clicks as possible
    • On relevant images include keywords in alt tags in filenames
    • No-follow appropriate links

Decide if you need a meta description - Modern search engines are great at scanning the text of websites  displacing applicable snippets based on user queries. You need to decide if you want to rely on the algorithm or create your own description. I suggest making your own meta description for your homepage and letting the engines figure out the rest. Remember the purpose of making your description is to convince potential customers to click on your link in the SERPs. Make it convincing and use your keywords.

Add company address and phone number - Be sure to do this on every page. The search engines are smart enough to detect address and phone number formats. This data is essential to local search. I recommend adding the the following formatted data (example is for an American company) to the footer of all of your client’s pages:

Company Name
1111 11th Pl NE
City, State Zip
(555) 555-5555

Add a robots.txt - This is important for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to specify exactly what pages major search engines can crawl. Second, including a robots.txt makes tracking search engines easier because they always download the file before navigating your client’s site. This characteristic differentiates the SEs from normal human visitors.

Offsite

Add your client’s business and website to the major search engine’s local listings - This is paramount as local search is likely to drive the majority of your traffic. These are the most important places to submit:

• • • Yahoo Local
    • Google Local
    • Live Local
    • Ask City - UNVERIFIED. I think the best way to do this is send an e-mail to askcitybusiness@help.ask.com with the subject line “Ask City Feedback - Business” and include the business name, full address, full phone number, URL, business category, name, and e-mail address. (Can anyone confirm this?)
    • CitySearch (data on this site feeds Ask.com and Live)
    • Yelp (data on this site feeds Live and Yahoo)

Add your client’s website to industry specific directories - To find the prevalent directories, use the list of link sources you created earlier. Also, you can try searching for “(your client’s local city name) business directory” and “(your client’s industry) directory.” For example, I would search “Issaquah business directory” and “preschool directory.” Be sure to record which directories you add your client’s site to and the usernames and passwords you use. You should use the e-mail address you created earlier for directory registrations. You should also make sure to use different passwords for different logins. You should always be thinking about maintaining your client’s security.

Try to get the links your competition already has gotten - Use the list of link sources you generated from Yahoo Site Explorer and try to acquire links from those sources. This may be as simple as submitting a form or as cumbersome as e-mailing webmasters to find out their link addition policies. Always try to get your keywords in your link anchor text.

Get more links - Scour the internet and find other sites that might want to link to your client’s site (site:website.com “submit a link”). Remember the importance of the source of your links and the anchor text used. 100,000 links from spammy sites with bad anchor text will help you less than a single link with excellent keyword anchor text from a super authoritative site. A good place to start is to use the Juicy Link Finder. You should also consider your local chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links pointing at locally targeted websites.

Decide if utilizing social media sites is advantageous - Is your client in an industry that could actively participate in social media? If so, be sure not to be spammy and to only contribute quality and appropriate content. It is much more expensive to fix a ruined online reputation for a business than it is for a standard user. You may also want to consider adding your client’s business to professional networks such as Linkedin.

Create and submit sitemaps - Create a sitemap. Then login into Google Webmaster Central and Live Search Webmaster Tools and submit it.

Optimize your client’s site from Google’s side - Login to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the tools menu. You will want to set the correct geographical target and preferred domain.  In addition, you must also decide if you want to enable image search. It may drive you traffic but the traffic will unlikely be useful.

Track and Improve

Track progress - I recommend taking a monthly screenshot of all of the following SERPs. A screenshot is an easy way to gather a lot of information. The image files contain data on when they were taken so they are easy to organize. I recommend you do this for the following:

• • • Ask Local SERP
    • Ask Main SERP
    • Google Local SERP
    • Google Main SERP
    • Google Webmaster Tools
    • Live Maps SERP
    • Live Local SERP
    • Live Search Webmaster Central
    • Yahoo Local SERP
    • Yahoo Main SERP
    • Yahoo Site Explorer

Create and maintain a spreadsheet of your rankings - This gives you a resource to prove to your client that your work is necessary. Be sure to keep it updated monthly so that you are always aware of how you rank.

Continue to make changes, build links, and record your results - This step will never be completed. You should strive to become number one on all your SERPs and get so far ahead that none of your competitors will be able to compete.

The Beginner’s Checklist to Learning SEO

Learn how to build a basic website

Before diving into SEO techniques it is important to know the basics of web development. The following tasks will develop the necessary web development skills needed to become a successful SEO:

Learn how to code a basic website without using a WYSIWYG editor – Don’t fear the word code, writing HTML is much easier than you think. If you can make a sandwich with two pieces of bread and put something in the middle, you can write HTML. For help, check out this excellent tutorial. Remember, don’t worry about SEO techniques at this point. Focus on learning how to build a website first.

Code a website that contains the following:

• • All styles with CSS. No Tables!
  • Homepage has 3 unique paragraphs about you
  • 3 pages total; homepage, contact and portfolio

I have created a sample for you using my information, Danny Dover. Feel free to use it as a guide but don’t copy and paste my code or you won’t learn anything. You will likely have to scour the internet to learn how to fill some of these requirements. This is useful because it improves your searching skills. (Note: I have purposefully not SEOed my example website. You will see why in a little bit)

Pick You Keywords - Pick keywords that are uncompetitive. This is very important as the words you choose will become the center of your SEO efforts. I recommend using your name. Go to Google and search for yourself. If a small amount of low quality websites show up, use your name as your keywords. If your name is competitive to rank for, find a variation of your name that is easier. Ex. Danny Ben Dover.

Register a domain name and find hosting - This is not nearly as difficult as it sounds. I recommend SuperbHosting or SiteGround as good options. However, there are literally thousands of choices. Use your best judgment, but remember you shouldn’t be paying more than $7.00 USD a month and the domain name should be included for free. Your only requirement is that your host can’t have immovable ads. These could be crawled by the search engines and ruin your rankings. For your domain name, use your keywords from above. Ex. dannydover.com or dannybendover.com. If your keywords are not available as a domain name, choose different keywords. (Note: In this exercise, the keywords you are optimizing for and your domain name should be the same. Although this is not always the case in the real world, having similar keywords to your domain name makes SEO much easier.)

Upload your website files to your new hosting account -  The easiest method is to use FTP to drag and drop your files. See your hosting provider for details.

Sign up for Google Analytics and verify your website – This free tool will allow you to track visitors to your website. Installation instructions are included by Google.

Wait a week and search for your keywords in the big four search engines – It is alright if your website doesn’t show up. That is what SEO is for. If you do find your website ranking (even if it is not on the first page), record how it ranks in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask) in a spreadsheet.

Wait two weeks to allow search engines to find your site and for Google Analytics to gather data.

Learn about SEO and apply it to your website

Now for the fun part. Learn basic SEO techniques and apply them to your glorious website. This will allow you to see how SEO can help your website rank.

Read the entire Beginner’s Guide to SEO – This is essential to building a strong SEO foundation. I also recommend reading the completed parts of the new Beginner’s Guide and Aaron Wall’s SEO Overview.

Read all of the Google Search Engine Ranking Factors – These will reinforce what you already know and give a perspective on variation. These factors are based off of the experience of some of the SEO industry’s most successful people.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, verify and read everything – This phenomenal resource will show you how Googlebot sees your website and point out any SEO problems you have on your site. Be sure to familiarize yourself with it. The information it provides is formulated toward Google but applies to all the search engines.

Run your website through the SEOmoz tools – Specifically, I recommend the Term Target Tool and Page Strength Tool. These tools will point out areas where you can improve your website.

Add a robots.txt file and a sitemap  - Although these are not really necessary for such a small site, familiarizing yourself with these files will be indispensable.

Apply your knowledge – Optimize your Title Tags, Anchor Text, HTML structure (H1, H2), and keyword usage. This is the bread and butter of onsite search engine optimization.

Link build – Add a link to your website on all of your favorite social media/networking sites. Feel free to try your luck with linkbait, although for a site with no competition this isn’t really necessary.

Track your site on Yahoo! Site Explorer – Wait a week or two for Yahoo to find your links and then check to see what links are being counted. Be sure to select “inlinks except from this domain to entire site.” The links should be displayed roughly in order of importance.

Check Google Analytics – By this time you should see more interesting data from your analytics tool. Use this data to learn the basics of analytics and use it as a reference point while link building.

Update your spreadsheet – Search for your website in the big four search engines again and look to see where it ranks. Record these in your spreadsheet. Tracking your data lets you see what techniques are working what techniques are not worth your time.

Test your own SEO theories and record the results - This is not really a task you can ever complete. 90% of all SEO information is already freely available if you can find it. Testing your own theories and getting good results will help you uncover the remaining 10% necessary to out perform your competition.

I sincerely believe that if you complete all the tasks on this list you will be well on your way to becoming a successful SEO. I recommend printing this post out and pasting it somewhere visible near your computer. That way you can complete all of the tasks in your spare time and develop your skills. Best of luck to all of the new SEOs.