Easy2Earn Dollars

As marketers, we see it all the time… BIG RED LETTERS on landing pages to grab our attention. Different colors make people act differently. RED is usually seen as a “danger” or “warning” color… while BLUE or GREEN is more “soothing” and “trusted“. An excellent example of this was how in Star Wars, Darth Maul is RED and BLACK (representing his evil), and Yoda was GREEN… showing his “stability” and “safety”.In today’s post I wanted to focus on all of the main colors and how they should be represented in your advertising efforts. Believe it or not, the colors you place on your landing pages or web sites can drastically change your overall conversions and the user’s thinking process. Below is a break down from HP, on the main colors we use for marketing and how they are often looked at by others.

Primary Colors:

Red is a very emotionally charged color. It tends to increase the respiration rate and can even raise your blood pressure. It creates excitement and can be associated with danger, war, power, strength passion, desire and love. It can even increase your appetite.

Yellow is the happy color… it is the color of sunshine. It creates a sense of cheerfulness and helps to stimulate mental activity. When yellow is very bright, it can attract attention. It can also provide a very sharp contrast to dark colors. Yellow can have the appearance of being brighter than white if over used and can be disturbing if used too much.

Blue is a trusted color. It can provide a sense of tranquility and security. It tends to symbolize loyalty, wisdom, trust, faith, confidence, and intelligence. While red can help to increase the appetite, blue tends to have the opposite affect and can actually suppress the appetite.

Secondary Colors:

Orange is the combination of the happiness of yellow and the energy and strength of red. It symbolizes creativity, determination, enthusiasm and success. In addition orange indicates affordability. Because of its similarity to red, it is great to promote food.

Green tends to suggest endurance and stability. It represents harmony, growth and freshness. Green indicates safety. Obviously, it is associated with money and wealth. With the interest in “green” products, it is the only color that can promote organic foods and products effectively.

Violet or purple combines the energy and strength of red with the stability of blue. It represents nobility, ambition, power and luxury. It symbolizes extravagance and wealth and is often associated with dignity, independence, wisdom and magic.

Others:

White is purity, goodness, light and innocence. It is considered perfection. White is generally positive and simple. Often it is the color of charitable organizations, low-fat foods and dairy products.

Black is elegant, powerful and formal, but can also be associated with death. In marketing, it is dignified. In certain contexts, black is very negative (blacklist, black humor, etc). It can also denote prestige.

Next time you are working on your landing page or new web site, step back and look at your color scheme and see how your colors are targeting your audience.

A few days ago I released my first post on “How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!“, along with the picture of my $306,373.24 check. Due to the massive exposure and questions generated from the post, I thought I’d bring you the second installment to How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months! This time we will go with a Q&A theme.

What is the web site you made all this money with?
The site I was able to have so much success with is MySpaceNow.com. There is no programming on the site at all, and it’s made up of over 10,000 pages of content, such as images, myspace layouts and social networking applications/flash. Yes… you can imagine how long that took to put together. However, when you are seeing results, you just want to keep making your project bigger and better!

What is the current status of your site?
My myspace resource site is still running and still turning a decent amount of profit each month. The traffic is lower than it used to be, but that’s expected. I was one of the first to get into the “myspace resources” niche, and now it is more saturated than ever.

What is/was your site traffic?
I first started the site from scratch and with no traffic. The first method of advertising, were a few text links on a couple of my other sites. Next was to get the word out on MySpace and other social networks. Once the users started to grab content and link back to my site, it was golden. The high point for site traffic was around 185,000 uniques per day. Currently the site receives around 15,000-20,000 uniques per day. Yes, this is quite a drop… but as mentioned above, I haven’t focused on this site in over a year now.

Having Multiple Dedicated Dell Servers to Manage Traffic was a Must.

When was the last time you updated the site?
I’ve been quite busy with many other projects, so realistically, I haven’t touched or updated the site in nearly a year. Meanwhile the site still receives several thousands of visits per day, while also earning several thousands a month. My only maintenance is monthly servers fees, which are much lower than they were back when I was working on the site full time.

How did you make so much profit over costs?
The myspace site I created was a huge viral success. Once a few sites picked it up, the traffic was tremendous, and search engines were sending me a ton of traffic as well. Since I did not have to worry about marketing costs, I could focus on providing content, managing ad space, and making sure the site was always accessible. The main costs in running a site like this (outside of the hundreds of hours of time spent), are server costs. Over $100,000 was spent on shared hosting, buying new Dell servers and hiring a server management team to make sure everything was always running.

What were your advertising and hosting costs?
As mentioned, the site was pretty much all viral. After running the site for several months with no advertising costs, I decided to give Google Adwords a shot. I was able to target towards some pretty cheap traffic, since my Quality Score was super high, and this was a niche market that wasn’t oversaturated (yet) and click prices weren’t insanely high. Marketing through Google Adwords brought in over an additional MILLION clicks. Even after $27,721.89 in adwords cost, the site still had no problems clearing seven-figures. Hosting costs ranged per month from $300 (when first starting out), to up to $10,000 a month, before buying my own Dell servers and hosting myself.

I was able to generate over 1 MILLION clicks using Google Adwords!

What other ad networks did you use on the site?
In my last post, I focused on some of the big earners from the site, which were Yahoo Publisher Network, NeverBlueAds, CasaleMedia and ValueClick Media. Other earners on the site were InterClick (which is another cpm banner network), Miva (which provides screensaver/wallpaper downloads), Google Adsense (generated nearly six-figures in revenue), AuctionAds (I posted multiple times on my earnings with them), WidgetBucks (another new program, which I also posted earnings on)… along with a few other networks. All of these advertisers combined generated over seven-figures in revenue for the site… which clearly covered the hosting costs, making this a seven figure profitable site.

You made a lot with Yahoo, but what about Google Adsense?
Originally I had no expectations for the success of this site. I was providing a service and it exploded quickly. Once the traffic was flowing through the site, it was time to test different ad placements and to see what worked. Luckily, the Yahoo Publisher Program had come out (and accepted my site), just a few weeks after my site went live. I was originally running Google Adsense, then started running Yahoo Publisher Network instead. After comparing numbers, Yahoo was providing much better numbers. I would continually rotate advertisers on the site and see which performed best. While Yahoo earned nearly seven figures alone on the site, Google Adsense accounted for nearly six-figures in revenue as well.

Google Adsense in itself generated almost $100,000 in Extra Revenue.

Would you have sold your site if you had the chance?
The opportunity to sell this cash cow of a web site did come into play around the 7th or 8th month of it’s existence. I wrote a post about this a while ago, which was called “To Sell or Not to Sell“. While I was offered nearly a seven figure package deal for the site (more/less depending on performance), I’m still glad I never accepted their offer. The parent company that was interested, was purchasing up a bunch of Social Networking Resource & Entertainment sites… which they then all turned into crap sites. I also heard that this company screwed many of their “partners” on payments owed from their buyouts.

Why did you wait until now to post your check?
I’ve never been one to look for attention, or brag. The intention of posting my check was not to impress anyone, but to stress to everyone the possibilities before you. Yes, the check was received back in 2006. However, keep in mind… this blog is still less than a year old. I have literally spent the last year debating on whether or not I wanted to be put in the spotlight, if I was to post this check. But I decided to take the risk… my intention is the same as always, I want you to succeed, make money online and live the dream that us affiliates and ppc marketers are living.

Why didn’t you post your resource site in your original post?
The main reason why I didn’t like my resource site in my original post is because this is a blog, and it’s purpose is to keep people coming back and giving them more. A lot of people were leaving comments, asking what my site was. You were not being ignored… you were part of the process. Not only have I released my site information, but also how I promoted the site, my advertisers and actual earnings numbers.

Is this your only big and successful web site?
I’ve been making money online for over 11 years now, since I was 15… and have never had any other job. A one-hit-wonder I am not. Over the years I have adjusted to every market change there has been. I’ve done freebie sites, permission based email marketing, ran my own ad network along with my own network of entertainment sites. Was this site one of my biggest and fastest money makers? Yes! I saw an opportunity here and made the most of it. I am now focusing on several other different niche areas and projects.

Aren’t you worried people will copy your site idea now?
They say being copied is one of the highest forms of flattery… well, when you own a web site, and you’ve been copied… IT SUCKS… but, I’ve been copied plenty of times before. There is still plenty of money to be made in this market, but it’s also plenty saturated! You want to make a resource type site? I say “Go for it!”.

As mentioned before, I’ve been making money online for over a decade now, (since I was 15!) and have some close friends that advise me on what I should post and what I should not post on my blog. There are risks associated with everything. Some have warned me about giving away too much information. However, if I didn’t meet up with these people in the past, that took their time to help me along the way, I wouldn’t be where I am today… I only wish to do the same for you and all of my blog readers. Yes, it may be risky providing the amount of information that I do, taking risks and trying different things is how I got to where I am today. I’m willing to take that risk to benefit my blog readers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Introduction to Ranking Factors

This article contains a large list of the factors that can influence a web document’s rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase. Although it is impossible to say for certain which of these items affects which search engine or how important the factors are individually, I’ve created an estimated ranking importance scale as indicated by the following symbols:

	Exceptional Importance These factors have primary influence in ranking search results at the major search engines.
	High Importance These factors have a high impact on modifying rankings of web documents in the SERPs.
	Moderate Importance These factors have a measurable level of affect on the rankings in the SERPs, but are not major contributors.
	Slight Importance These factors carry some impact on rankings and could be important when in a highly competitive area.
	Inconsequential Importance These factors are of low consequence in changing the ranking positions of a web document. They may have some effect in certain queries or documents.

For each factor, the 13 individuals (myself and 12 others in the field) voted on each factor’s perceived importance. I then averaged these votes to come up with the scores you see listed next to the factors. In addition, the standard deviance (which measures how much fluctuation existed between votes) is also listed and a scale has been created to show if there was wide disagreement or general consensus on a factor’s importance.

	Highly Disputed These factors have a wide variance of opinion on importance.
	Somewhat Disputed These factors have some dispute as to their importance.
	Average Agreement These factors have an average level of dispute/consensus.
	Some Consensus These factors have some consensus on importance levels.
	High Consensus These factors have a high level of consensus.

The factors listed herein provide a near-comprehensive list of factors which can positively or negatively influence the rank of a web document. If you have questions or would like to contribute additional ideas, please e-mail me.

List of Contributors

The following individuals made this project possible by submitting their opinions on each ranking factor, and adding comments where they felt it important. I have taken note of many of these comments in my description of the ranking factors and each score is representative of the group’s overall opinions. Many thanks to:

Most Important Factors

The following are the top 10 ranked factors across the 5 categories:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

In-Document (on-page) Factors Affecting Ranking:

The following factors are on-page items that affect the ranking directly by virtue of being a part of the indexed and retrieved document. Many of these factors will not apply universally to all documents, while others are standard.

Create Killer Landing Pages - Free Template June 13th, 2008 admin Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Make Money No Comments » I get questions all the time about landing pages and what are the best ways to create them. Instead of writing a post on what you should focus on, I will simply take an existing ad campaign from MarketLeverage, and made a real landing page out of. I also made the base template design for the landing page, so you can save it and use it for any future campaigns you want to test. The campaign that this landing page is going to focus on, is for NiteTrim, which is currently paying $25 per lead through MarketLeverage, and you get paid on the user paying for shipping and handling.First, let look at the default template and what we are going to do with it (below). What I did was create a default landing page that can be used for almost any offer you want to promote. All you need to do is rewrite the text to make it apply to the actual offer. Now that we have a base design, all we need to do is modify the design to match the NiteTrim offer and make it appeal to the visitor. After adding a new “targeted” picture and content, you will see the custom landing page template now looks like a full dedicated offer landing page for NiteTrim. Play around with colors and wording for the best visual effects. Golden Tips for Testing Landing Pages - Rotate & Test Images: Right now I have an image of a girl measuring her waist on the landing page. After I would go live with this ad campaign, it would be smart to build several other landing pages with a different picture of images. Possibilities include, actual product, other weight loss pictures, different girls and more. - Add Testimonials or Legitimacy to Your Campaigns: On the landing page created for NiteTrim, you will also see that I created an image to show the product was features on several well known tv shows and new sources. To stress the product even further, I added a full testimonial and before/after pictures. - Call to Action: Probably the most important feature of your landing page, is the “Call to Action“. What text are you going to use to convince your users to click further and hopefully convert them into a sale. “Lose Up to 10lbs. in Just 7 Days” is an excellent header right in their face. Then the “Claim 1 Month FREE Supply Now!” and the “Try It Free Today” are stressing the point even further. FREE LANDING PAGE TEMPLATE I already showed you how to make an awesome landing page out of a template design, now it’s your turn. Click here and download/save my custom default template and create your own landing page. Also included in the download is my NiteTrim landing page. I’m also going to extend this landing page post, by allowing you to use the “NiteTrim” landing page that I created, to promote the campaign yourself. If you aren’t already an affiliate with MarketLeverage, join now, then grab the “NiteTrim” offer (Pays $25 per free trial) and start promoting the program using the landing page I created, or change it up and test what different image and text changes can improve your campaign performance. Article Links: - Download my Custom Landing Pages ZIP File   INC vs. LLC - Whats Best For Your Business? March 13th, 2008 admin Posted in Marketing, General No Comments » You are finally making a decent amount of money online and are looking to make the change from your personal name to an established business. You have a couple choices here. Will you start an LLC, or an INC business? While this may seem like a very simple question, it can get quick confusing, and your decision will be based upon what type of business you run. Each of these business entities will cater to your business differently. I have compiled a great list of sites for you to read through to help on your decision.- Choosing the Best Ownership Structure for Your Business Nolo has created a great 4 page article, which covers some of the key areas to help you decide between an LLC or an INC. These covered areas include “the potential risks and liabilities of your business”, “the formalities and expenses involved in establishing and maintaining the various business structures”, “your income tax situation”, and “your investment needs”. - Inc. vs. LLC: Which legal structure suits your business? BankRate was probably the best article write up I came across. It gives a run down of the advantages and disadvantages of running your business as an LLC or INC. - US Business Law & Taxes About.com has also compiled a list of great resources which cover Starting Your Business, Financing Your Startup, Business Taxes, Business Accounting Records and Finding a Business Location. The end result of most of these articles are to sit down and talk with your attorney or accountant to make the best decision. That is what I did… My goal is to specialize in making money, not to have to go to school again and read hundreds of pages on LLC vs. INC. It’s most likely your attorney or accountant already have an idea of how you are making money, and if not, explain it out to them. Once you go over everything, they should be able to tell you which business entity is right for you. You specialize in your job and your attorney and accountant specialize in theirs, before racking your brains on all this information, get their opinion as well. « Previous Entries © 2007 Easy2Earn Dollars | Powered by WordPress | Theme by Bob