Maximize Results

Optimize Your Blog: Part 2

In continuation of the series on how to opimize your blog, I want to cover a very important rule of thumb that all bloggers must know if they want to make money blogging. While some may not consider this a real “optimization” technique, it directly relates to HOW you should build a website or blog…if you want to make money with it.

For the most part, bloggers are scatterbrained.

This is O.K. if it’s your personal blog covering things relevant to you and your life. But if your goal is to build a website or blog that can generate income, let me provide you with a framework that successful bloggers follow.

Focus On One Thing

Every time I create a new site, I make sure the focus of that site: the content, the videos, the comments, everything is related to one topic. Instead of trying to make your site all things to all people (or worse yet, what you “think” people want to know about) find something that people are interested in (one topic) and build a website around it.

The internet affords people the luxury of finding specific groups of people who share common interests. People like to find specific answers to specific problems, and for this reason, your focus should be on creating tightly themed websites that are centered around one topic.

Example: To employ this “tightly themed” technique, it’s important that you make sure the topic in which your covering is not too broad. For example, don’t create a site centered around the general theme of “weight loss.” Instead, focus on one popular diet: South Beach, for instance. Become the expert for all things related to the South Beach Diet, and you (1) have an easier time writing content (2) attract a very targeted visitor that is first interested in information on the South Beach Diet but is ALSO interested in weight loss in general (the original much broader niche). If you want to create a site about “weight loss” don’t make it about the broad niche, find a specific subset within that niche and build a site (or sites) around that.

Have A Revenue Source Before You Create The Site

Continuing with the South Beach Diet example, before I would ever create a site around this topic, I would make sure I could first earn a commission for getting someone to:

1. Sign up for the diet
2. Do a desired action that generates revenue for me and is directly related to the South Beach Diet.

If you take away one thing from this article, get this: don’t create a site without first having a revenue generating action your future visitors can complete in place before you build the site. This may be earning a commission for selling a product, getting someone to signup for a trial, it could be anything. Just make sure it generates revenue for you, and it’s either selling the product your the “expert” about or is directly related to the topic.

This is the best way to build a website or blog that can make real money. Furthermore, you won’t start with the notion of, ‘I’m going to just start writing about [BLANK] and see where it takes me. Don’t waste your time going down that road.

Find a way to make a commission for selling a product or generating a lead, then build a niche site centered around this ONE thing. Like my economics teacher used to say, “Prior planning prevents poor performance.” Start with the end goal in mind, focus on one topic, then build your site.

Note: In Buying & Selling Websites we cover many other techniques related to what make successful websites, what types of sites are best to buy, and how you can get the most money for a site you want to sell.

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Optimize Your Blog: Part 1

So you’ve got a blog. Now what?

In this series of posts I’ll be covering several strategies to maximize your blogs potential with proper optimization. How can you be both search engine and user friendly at the same time? It’s a tough balancing act at times, but if you really want to make money blogging, you must start with a properly optimized blog.

Display Your Keywords First And Often

Let’s use Blogging Experiment as an example. For almost 2 years now, BE has been a content driven resource teaching people how to make money. The topics include blogging, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, and how to buy and sell websites. While the topics are varied, the general them is consistent: how to make money online.

For this reason, a list of popular keywords that BE wants to rank well for (and subsequently write content for) must be related to these keywords.

Currently, our site ranks well for a number of keywords related to the topics listed above, but as I started browsing through the site, I noticed a couple key areas where further optimization would help even more.

Starting with the navigation bar, I changed “Home” to “Make Money.” For those who don’t know, the anchor text (the phrase used to describe the link - in our example “Make Money”) is very important in search engine rankings. By keeping the word “Home” as the anchor text pointing back to your home page you are inadvertently telling the search engines that your home page is trying to rank for the phrase “Home.”

Because 99.9% of other websites just leave the word “Home” as the anchor text to your home page, you are now competing with virtually every other website online for the keyword “Home.”

Furthermore, in our example, the navigation bar is the first text our site displays. Not all sites have the navigation set up like this, but this makes it even more critical in our situation.

Those top links are the first introductions search engines have to our site after going through the title tag and meta description. For this reason, we want to make sure that they (the search engines) quickly realize what this site is about. By making “Make Money” our anchor text with the link back to our home page, we let the first on-site text be a very keyword rich phrase in which we want to rank.

If you want to use the word “Home,” at least try to fit in one of your targeted keywords somewhere close to the top.

The second part is to display your keywords often.

Remember, often doesn’t mean trying to keyword stuff every article or page with your targeted keywords. Instead, it simply means to be aware of the keywords in which you want to rank and use them strategically throughout your site. Consistency is the key here. Be aware of your targeted phrases and use them wisely.

Don’t Forget The Footer

Just as important as it is to have the search engine see your keyword phrase somewhere close to the top of your site, it’s equally important to include that same phrase, or even a little different variation of that phrase (what I recommend) at the bottom in your footer.

As you can see, instead of using the phrase “Make Money” like we used in the navigation bar, this time we used another target keyword: “make money online.”

We want the search engines to see that our site, more specifically our home page since that’s where the links point, are directly related to each other. The next step is to make sure that your content actually reflects information related to those key phrases. Meaning: don’t just pick your best two keywords, put them in your header and footer then talk about completely unrelated topics on your site.

That’s not what this is about.

Optimization by it’s definition is to modify a system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. Taking the time to do these little “detail” things are what separate the mediocre sites from the ones who actually make money. Granted, optimization will not necessarily put money in your pockets directly, but a better optimized site means more traffic which ultimately means more money.

These tips work great with optimizing wordpress, other blog platforms, or any website in general.

Get More Done By Working Less

I think the 40 hour workweek is a waste…

Nobody has the attention span to work on ANYTHING for 8 hours straight in a day. I read a stat somewhere that on an average work day, most people only actually do 2 hours of “real work”.

The rest of the time is spent browsing the web, checking emails, chatting on instant messenger, talking with co-workers, spent “in meetings” and other non productive work just to fill up an 8 hour shift.

I wonder who came up with this schedule for employees?

Even though I haven’t worked a 9-5 job in many years due to my internet business success, I still carry on the same values I’ve always held about how much work time is optimal.

Personally, I can get more work done in 3 hours than almost anyone who works an 8 hour shift. So, that’s what I try to do with my internet businesses as well.

Here’s how I do it…

Think about what goal you need to achieve for any given day. Make a quick bullet point listing of each task you must get done.

Next, turn off your cell phone, your instant messenger system, close your door and do not allow any distractions whatsoever.

Then, you just dive right in.

When you are 100% fully focused on a particular task, you can get it done so much faster than if you have distractions around you.

This technique is what I call my 3 hour work block and it works amazingly well.

In many cases, by blocking out a certain amount of time like this, I’m able to get ALL of my work done for the day in just three hours. And I still get more done than I would in a typical 8 hour workday without this extreme focus.

I don’t care if you work a job or if you have a full time internet business, try this and see what happens.

It’s very refreshing when you start at 9am, plow through all of your tasks and by noon, you are basically DONE working for the day.

I don’t recommend working this hard for more than 3 hours at a time because you will get burned out. If I’m a little behind or want to accomplish more and get ahead, I simply work a 3 hour block, take 3 or 4 hours off to relax and then do another 3 hour block.

Still only working a total of 6 hours, but the amount of work I get done is incredible.

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Link Building Success

Every web owner wants to get one way natural links but oftentimes this is easier said than done. If you’re not a link baiting enthusiast then you’ll need to get links the old fashioned way: ask for them. First though, you need to ask yourself, “Do I really want to get this link?” don’t just link for the sake of it, make sure that it is relevant to your site.

Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks

One of the best tried-and-tested recommendations is to analyze your competitor’s backlinks. You can make this the starting point of your link building campaign. Remember though that you need to keep track of all information you get in excel or word file; this will not only make you organized, you will also discover the link map of the whole industry as you progress along. Soon, you will have an impressive list of link prospects.

When you visit the sites that your competitors are linked from, look for the “recommend as site” and “add URL” links. There are times when it would be easy to just fill out the form and submit your link but there will also be times when you need to dig a little before you find the “add URL” link or even find their contact info.

Stay Organized

Once you have a healthy list, stay focused and organized by grouping your prospects into different sections including authority links, blog links, directory links, social media links, newsgroup links, and forum links among others. And depending on your industry, you can further categorize your list. For example, if you have a “make money online” site, you can categorize your links into:

• Sites about Blogging
• E-commerce Sites
• Auction Sites
• Search Engine Optimization Sites
• Web Development
• Business Information Websites

Having an organized list will also help you determine the anchor text you should use. Once you’re organized, you’re ready to start your successful link building campaign.

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Making Big Money In Weird Niche Markets

Typically when I talk about making money online, I tell people to focus on the big, proven money making website ideas like health, wealth and relationships. Those markets are always in demand so it’s easier to make money in those markets.

BUT, every once in a while I come across a story of an entrepreneur who takes an unlikely idea and turns it into a huge money maker.

Here’s one of these examples I just came across…

As you know, gas prices are out of control right now. It’s a super hot topic that is on the news pretty much everyday. Most people sit around and complain about it because they think there is nothing they can do.

Here is one guy who is not complaining one bit!

Basically this guy found a way to run a car using WATER. It sounds crazy to me, but after watching the video on the middle of this page, it’s pretty impressive.

He says in the video that his car was about to drive about 100 miles or so on 4 OUNCES of water.

I’m not trying to start an argument over whether or not you can run your can on water or not. I don’t know anything about cars or how they work and I don’t see myself converting my car into a water burning machine anytime soon.

But it’s a great lesson of taking a huge problem in the world and coming up with a possible solution to the problem.

I’m sure this guy will make millions if not BILLIONS of dollars if this thing actually works.

Anytime it feels like everything is going wrong, the economy is crashing and the sky is falling, a few smart people always find a way to capitalize on the situation and become wealthy…

I wonder what other kinds of solutions we can come up with like this guy just did?

Not Getting Enough Traffic Love from Google?

Search engines are probably the single most effective way to generate traffic to your web page. Because of this, web owners will inevitably complete with each other in order to get a higher ranking. But how would then do this? Well, a lot of e-books, blogs, websites, podcasts, and other kinds of content are dedicated to this topic. But there will always be web masters who complain that they are not getting visitors from search engines. This can be due to different factors but some of the most common reasons I know of include:

1. New Website – when your site is new, you should expect that it will not perform that well with search engines. Take note that there are over 30 billion pages on the internet and a lot of these can be categorized as “spam”. Before search engines start to give your site a good ranking, they need to achieve a certain level of trust with you and this will grow over time as you build your content, traffic, and one way links.
2. Black Hat SEO Techniques – very few people want to be called a black hat marketer; or in layman’s term, a spammer. But no one can deny that being a black hat marketer does have its own appeal because of its immediate results. If you decide to take this route, you should realize that you can be hit by a penalty or in some cases, banned altogether.
3. Useless Content – even if you invest a lot in creating your website, it would not matter if you don’t have good content. Searchers are exactly that, they search for information that is relevant to their needs over the internet. In addition, good content will generate a lot of links which are “votes” for your website.
4. Duplicate Content – some people debate on the impact of using duplicate content on their websites. But as far as I’m concerned, search engines love fresh content and it will reward websites and blogs that frequently posts new and original articles.

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What The F#% Should I Sell?

I got a pretty funny email a few minutes ago that I thought I’d share with you…

The subject line of the email was “What The Fu## Should I Sell?” Use your imagination to fill in the blanks…

Typically I get emails from people who ask for advice, and most of time they are really nice about it. They tell me how they tried this or that and they just don’t know what they are doing wrong.

This guy’s email was no different. He just wanted me to tell him what he should sell online.

If you took my buying and selling websites training class, you know that one way to greatly increase your sites value & income from a website is to convert your site to a different revenue model.

For example, changing your site from a content site that makes money from adsense to an e-commerce site will typically double or triple your income (sometimes more). It doesn’t matter what your topic is, you can sell a physical product in that market pretty easily. It’s usually EASIER to sell a physical product online than an information product because there is a higher perceived value there.

The key to doing this is to make sure you don’t turn your site into a “super mall” where you sell 5,000 different products. Focus on just a handful of highly targeted products and promote them within the content of your site.

So, where do you buy these products to sell on your site? (Hint - right here…)

Some people like to use affiliate programs from places like cj.com to find products to promote. I’m not a huge fan of that method because you typically only earn about 5-10% commissions on sales, plus sales are not tracked very accurately so you only get credit for a portion of the sales you actually generate.

A much better option is to buy the products wholesale and ship them out yourself. (Or you can use a dropshipping company to fulfill orders for you).

We used this model for the website we sold for $575,000 and it worked very well. The problem is, it’s HARD TO FIND wholesale suppliers or companies willing to dropship products for you!

I did a lot of research when I owned that last website trying to find suppliers. There are two ways to find suppliers. You can search for hours online and “hope” to come up with what you are looking for, or you can pay a small fee to access a directory of suppliers already researched for you.

I like the choose the easy option, so I signed up for a wholesale directory (this one to be exact).

I bought a couple of “wholesale lists” which were a complete waste of time so don’t waste your money. There are a bunch of things I like about the wholesale directory though. Actually, I think I’ll just go ahead and show you what it looks like rather than try to explain it.

(I’m not sure I’m allowed to show you the members area or not, so if I get in trouble I’ll take down the video).

As you can see in the video, you literally have access to hundreds of suppliers, you can read reviews about other members who have used them in the past and there are all kinds of training & advice for members.

For the $67 bucks they charge, you get a bunch of valuable information. Especially since when you add one of those physical products to your site, you will be making 3-10 times more money from your website than you are making with adsense.

Don’t even get me started on selling your site!

If your site is making $100 per month from adsense, your site is worth about $1,500.

If your site is making $500 per month from physical products, your site is worth about $12,000.

Is it worth the $67 investment in the wholesale membership thing? Yup…

A few other cool things about that wholesale directory is you can find stuff to sell on ebay, so if you don’t want to manage a website, you can sell on ebay instead. I don’t recommend selling on ebay because you get VERY LOW profit margins. I love to buy on ebay, but selling is a joke.

Or, you can just buy stuff for yourself at wholesale prices as well. Why pay $289 for a pair of Gucci sunglasses when you can buy them wholesale for $141.85? That alone would cover the cost of the membership!

So, there’s my answer Steve (if you are reading this).

I’ve just given you the motherload of ideas for WTF You Should Sell

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