The old saying “Measure Twice Cut Once” is an important one to remember, especially at this phase of your blog creation. Having a blog that is now 95% ready to go live is often a time that a we start to get impatient and want to focus on the promotions to start earning money. This is a HUGE mistake because we suddenly put more items on our plate and get distracted from finishing off important items that seem insignificant but are critical to your blogs initial success.

There is certainly a good balance here as well as there are also those that are never satisfied with what they have and therefore get stuck in analysis paralysis and just sit on thier blog never moving forward with it, never feeling like it is ready. Your blog does not need to have perfect graphics and the exact correct colors, there are what we refer to as “Deal Breakers” which are the items that are critical and then there are the other tasks that are not critical but “Nice to Haves”.

The remaining items to finish before we start to go heavy with the promotions are to…

• Optimize the optin message and “Thank You” page
• Checking for errors (broken links)
• Create and submitting the Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)
• Turn on ping

Part 1 –> Optimize the Opt-in message and “Thank You” page

How often do you go to a blog and see a message like “Subscribe to our RSS feed”?

Do you really think that is effective?

We can guarantee that the majority of you agree it is not yet the majority of you do that very thing. This is one of the factors of your site that is so important and yet our impatience or even laziness cause us to just skim over it and go on to other things. In the previous COWpetition post we reference creating a call to action that was placed at the end of your posts to entice the reader to take a desired action on your blog. This exact same thing needs to take place with getting readers to opt in to your list.

You need to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and answer the question “what is in it for me”. People do not subscribe to RSS feeds for the sake a seeing the word subscribe, the do not submit an email just to see what happens. Never assume that offering free advice is something people will appreciate but instead give your readers what they want by providing a solution to a problem. Whether your blog is about health, automobiles, racing or make money.. there is a problem your readers have and that is why they are on your blog at that moment. It is your responsibility to understand what it is and provide a solution to them with a high percieved value.

Once you know the problem, you now have to tell them how to solve the problem by opting in to your list or subscribing to your rss feed. With the Video Game Reviews blog that we built, the problem that we focusd on was video gamers not having all the latest gaming consoles so they could play all the coolest games and so we offered them a simple way to have a chance to win one. There were a few different ideas we had for opt in headlines, we thought of mentioning how they could make thier friends jealous by showing off ther new system, they could finally stop being the butt of the jokes and actually have a system like everyone else or we could just tell them they can win one and let thier own reason surface. We opted for the last one and made it very obvious to see when they went to the blog what the benefit of opting in was.

Once we had the opt in message ready we now need to figure out how to best use the thank you landing page. This a an extremely valuable piece of virtual real estate and so often we see a thank you page that simply says “Thanks for opting in”. This is where you want to be sure that you give your reader direct instructions on what you want them to do next and it might be giving them an upsell to a product or like with the GamerzReviewz blog we used this to instruct them how to get more chances to win which were by performing actions that promoted GamerzReviewz. This is the critical need to the blog, to get the word out, and so it is the main focus.

Part 2 –>Checking for errors (broken links)

Before we create our sitemap we want to make sure that all links are working and there are no broken ones. Having broken links can cause errors and the search engines will not only not be able to properly access areas of your site but you will give readers the impression of an unfinished, unprofessional site. This is very easy to check with the free tool http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Part 3 –> Create and submitting the Google site map

Now that all the pages on your blog are ready to go, and all the links are checked and acurate, you want to make sure that the search engines are able to easily access all of them. The most effective way is to accomplish this is to create a search engine (mainly Google) specific sitemap and with WordPress this is extremely easy to do with the help of the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap that all the major search engines can read and is very easy to use.

Step 1: Go to the Plugins area and activate the “Google XML Sitemap” plugin.

Step 2: Open a blank notepad file and select save as and save the blank file as “sitemap.xml” and then repeat this step and save a new one as “sitemap.xml.gz”

Step 3: Upload these two new files to the same directory as your robots.txt file and change the permissions on them to six.six.six which is read & write access.

Step 4: Go to “Settings” –> “XML-Sitemap” and on the top of that page in the “Status” area, click on the link that says to build sitemap manually.

Step 5: You sitemap should now be ready and now scroll down and make sure the option “Build the sitemap in a background process (You don’t have to wait when you save a post)” is checked and if you have any extra pages on your blog, such as an opt in thank you page, then you are going to want to put the id# of that page in the “Exclude the following posts or pages:”.

To get the ID #, go to “Manage” –> “Posts” and then mouse over the title of the post and you will see “&post=#”, the # is the post ID.

Step 6: Now go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and if you do not already have an account with them, create one and then submit your sitemap. This is very important because the information that Google provides after a few days is very powerful and so do NOT just rely on the “ping” feature with this plugin. We promise that in a few days when we show you the data Google provides, you will be thankful you did this.

Part 4 –> Turn on the Ping

Now it is time to turn on the auto pinging feature in your blog but since we are having FeedBurner doing the pinging for us, we only need to ping FeedBurner and let them do the rest. The benefit of this is the back end issues that pinging the services can cause with your blog and by only pining feedburner you eliminate all these issues.

To do this simply go to Settings –> Writing and scroll down to the “Update Services”  area and enter http://ping.feedburner.com and click “Save Changes”.

Congratulations… We Are Ready For PROMOTING!!!!

Hope this post helped… let us now your questions and comments.

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OK, we are at the start of week 3 and so it is time for the 2nd COWcast and time to open up the Q&A

The feedback on the first COWCast was great (if you attended and want to leave some feedback about it, that would be fantastic… you have to be opted in via email to our list to access it) but before we schedule our second one this week, we want to open it up to any questions and or clarifications in regards to the last  weeks posts.

Here are the links to the posts as a refresher for you

• Initial On Page Optimization with a Dash of FeedBurner and Aweber
• Navigation Do Not Forget the Navigation
• Get Your Blog Up
• Keyword Research Start Up the Diamond Digger
  
• Content Creation Madness

Please post your questions and clarifications down below

We have our content ready, the internal linking set up and our robots.txt file set up. There are just a few more things to take care of and then we can start up the initial promotion engine. These are…

• 1. SEO Your Index and Link Bait
• 2. Set up the optin form with FeedBurner and Aweber

Note –> During this time we have actually initiated some of the work in the promotional side of things, but for the sake of keeping things organized in these posts we are laying it out in this order. In the next post we start getting into the promotional side of things.

Part 1 –> SEO Your Index and Link Bait

We are almost ready to go live with our blog but first we need to make sure that it is properly optimized for the search engines. To do this we will use the WordPress plugin called “All In One SEO”.

Step 1: Activate the plugin if not already activated.

Step 2: Go to “Settings” and then “All in One SEO”

Step 3: Enter in a…

• Home Title
• Home Description
• Home Keywords.

These may change after you look at the Affiliate Elite results but you still want something in there for now.

IMPORTANT –> The title of the page is like the headline of a classified ad, this is what Google uses in the main title of the listing and if your title is not formatted properly and compelling then your click through rate is going to be terrible. We have seen many people with great rankings and not great traffic due to this reason. Make a more compelling “ad” then everyone else… you want to get the attention of the person looking at the results in Google.

Google often uses the meta description as the description in the listing as well so explain the title, so if you say you are the best at something then explain why in the description.

For the keywords just put four keyword phrases about your blog, do NOT worry about this too much as Google basically ignores them and they do very little in the other search engines as well.

For the title do not use more the 10 words, for the description keep it under 20 and the keywords just put four or five phrases.

Step 4: Do NOT check the “Use categories for META Keywords” but DO check…

• Use noindex for Categories:
• Use noindex for Archives:
• Use noindex for Tag Archives:

Checking these for exclusion is very useful for avoiding duplicate content.

Also check the “Autogenerate Descriptions” this will autogenerate the description if there’s no excerpt for the post.

Step 5: Go to your Link Bait post and scroll down to the “All in One SEO Pack” form area.

You want to now create a custom…

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

…for this page.

Step 6: Now you want to go to your post text and click on the HTML tab

Step 7: Where ever you have an image in the content look for the alt=”" and you will want to enter text into the alt tag. I recommend you put the main keyword phrase in one of them (ONLY ONE) and then in any other images, simply put what the image is a picture of. This is important from a professional standpoint and is just one of the “MANY” things Google looks at.

Step 8: Last of all go through the post and bold the main keyword phrase once and then Click “SAVE”

Part 2 –> Use FeedBurner and Aweber

We are going to be brutally honest here and tell you exactly how it is. We do not organize contests, spend hours writing content and work our tails off on this blog because we are such nice people. The fact is this is part of a business and our strategy is that by providing excellent value to you and working with you to help you succeed, we will gain your trust so you will opt in to our mailing list which in turn increases our readership and advertising value and hopefully you will also eventually purchase something with us or through us. You NEED to keep this in mind for you business, you have mouths to feed, bills to pay and you need to generate revenue to pay for those things.

Why do we tell you this?

Because we see so many bloggers out there that have no clue and they are going in circles, barely making a penny and they can not figure out why. Not only do they have no idea why they are doing this (we talked about this a while ago) but they also have done absolutely nothing to actually build a business and assets.

Let me ask you this…. What would happen to your current business if Google decided to de-index your blog?

If you have not taken the time to build an asset for your business then the answer you probably have is a pretty colorful one that we will not bother repeating.

So what is an asset? An asset is basically something that you own and has a value and one of the best assets an online business can have (in our opinion) is a subscriber base. With a solid base of subscribers, even if Google totally de-indexed your blog, you would not be lost at sea, you would still have a revenue stream and your business could still grow.

Of course there is more to having a list of subscribers then that but hopefully you are getting the picture here.

With a blog one of the easiest ways to gain subscribers is through the blogs RSS feed. This is very effective for staying in touch with your readers however it has its limitations but using a service like FeedBurner.com is an excellent way to overcome those limitations. They allow you to optimize and advertise and even offer a mail option where subscribers can subscribe via email. The problem with the FeedBurner option by itself however is you do not really own the asset, instead you are left at the mercy of FeedBurner.

The Solution –> The solution to this issue is using the mailing list service Aweber with FeedBurner.

We do not want to NOT offer a RSS subscription option for those that prefer to use a RSS reader and we of course want to be able to publicize our RSS readership size for monetization purposes but at the same time we want to grow an asset that we own and can have total control over. This is where Aweber is very powerful because it works beautifully with FeedBurner to get the best of both worlds! You can also mail your list personalized messages, gifts to increase trust and the occasional offer (which is what this is all about). A word of caution however, if you are mailing a promotion… make darn sure you truly believe it is something your readers would be interested in and is something you believe is worth while for them. Do NOT send them crap or you will lose their trust!

Note –> We know of no other mailing list service that works with FeedBurner like Aweber does for being able to get the full benefits of FeedBurner tracking.

Step 1: Go to http://www.feedburner.com/ and create a free account

Step 2: Submit your RSS feed and then click the “Activate Feed” button.

Step 3: Click the “Next” button and then on the next page check the…

“I want more! Have FeedBurner Stats PRO also track:” (This is now free)

NOTE –> There is an option here to optimize the links fro tracking purposes versus search engine optimizing… personally we like to leave it at default to get the most accurate tracking but the choice is up to you.

Step 4: Click the “Optimize” tab and then click on “SmartFeed” in the side bar and activate this.

Step 5: Click the “Ping Shot” in the side bar and click all the available service and then add 5 more from the drop down box and then click “Activate”

Step 6: This step is only for those who do NOT have an Aweber account. Click on the “Email Subscriptions” in the side bar and click “Activate”. You will then take the supplied html code and enter it into a “Text” widget for your sidebar of your blog. Make sure to have it as close to the top of the sidebar as possible.

Step 7: If you have an Aweber account, you will not want to complete step 6 but instead log into your Aweber account and click on “Create and Manage Lists”

Step 8: Click the green “Create List” button and fill in the following but make sure to click the save button in each section that you fill:

• List Name
• Uncheck “Multiple Unsubscribe”
• Company Name (use name of blog)
• Website URL
• Email Address (this is what your subscribers will see)
• Name
• Check the From/Reply

Step 11: Click the “Messages” tab and “Blog Broadcast” sub menu and then the green “Create Blog Broadcast” button.

Step 12: Enter the following information…

• RSS Feed URL: Put your FeedBurner RSS feed URL in here
• Send Preferences: Send immediately and check Send Automatically
• Click the green “Load Templates” (Just use the basic template)
• In the “Plain Text Message” delete the lines…{!rss_channel_title}
  {!rss_channel_description}
  {!rss_channel_link}

  …and replace them with something like…

  Hey {!firstname_fix},
  Here is the latest update from Website Name Here…

  (Obviously use something in your own voice)

  It should look like this…

  

  Repeat the same step for the HTML message and so it looks like…

  

  Click the green save button.

Step 13: Go to “List Settings”, then the sub menu “Web Form” and click the green “Create Web form” button.

Step 14: Fill in the following information…

• Form Name
• Check “In line”
• Create a “Thank You” page on your blog and put the URL to the Thank You page in the field (DO not use the Aweber default).
• Put that same URL in the “Already Subscribed Page” field. (This is what we do initially but later on we change this but we will talk about that later)
• Click Next and add the “Name” option to the form and then mouse over the Name field in the preview box and click on the blue box with a pencil in it. In the drop down now select “Yes” for required.
• Click Save.

Step 15: Click on the Get HTML link and copy the HTML not the JavaScript.

Step 16: Log into your blog admin area and go to the “Design” and then “Widgets”. Click the “Add” beside the “Text” option to add a text widget and then click “edit” on the new added widget. Enter the HTML for the optin and click “change” and then “Save Changes”

Step 17: Drag the widget to the top of the widgets and again click “Save Changes”

Step 18: Go to your blog index page and view the optin box to make sure it is properly formatted to work with your blog. We will talk about formatting the optin message and thank you page in the next post.

Step 19: Go the Plugins page and activate the plugin “FeedBurner Feedsmith” and then go to “Settings” and then “FeedBurner”

Step 20: In the #2 box, enter your FeedBurner RSS feed URL, leave the #3 empty and then click save. Your RSS feed will now auto redirect to the FeedBurner one.

In the next post we are going to talk about…

• Optimizing your optin message and “Thank You” page
• Creating and submitting your Google site map (why you want to submit and not just ping)
• Checking for errors

Hope you found this a helpful post! Do not forget to register for our HUGE contest if you have not done so already (Click Here to do that now) and as always give us some feedback, questions and comments about this post

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If you are in the market for a professional template for your site, but don’t want to spend an outrageous amount of money, a great resource that offers the ability to get an incredibly affordable, customized to your needs template is YesTemplates.com. They offer a variety of templates for customers, and with the cost of the templates starting at a paltry $75 for an entire site, there’s a ton of value available.

The YesTemplates.com page is easy to navigate, right from the top page down. You can choose from a large variety of already designed templates in a bunch of categories. No matter what specific purpose your site may have, there’s likely a template on this site that you can use. From sites for churches and other religious organizations, to construction, dating, and even personal blogs, there are options for your site’s purpose.

Each page also has a preview image that can be brought up demonstrating each page’s capabilities. Each template is priced for your ownership, not just for the rights to use them. Yes, each template at YesTemplates is available for one buyer, and once sold, the buyer retains all rights to that page… with a few restrictions tough. For just $75, that price is ridiculously inexpensive for a complete design.

Upon purchase, you receive a zipped folder containing the site in an image program file, all of the fonts used, and all of building blocks of the site, including the hard coding involved in getting the page to show on various browsers. This way, the site can be manipulated in any way you may need for your own uses, as well as ensuring that your site can be made compatible with future technologies.

It is important to note that the site’s designs are all created in-house, meaning that what you find on YesTemplates is unique and won’t be found anywhere else on the Internet. The site employs experts in all aspects of the creation of websites including logo design, layout and graphic designs, JavaScript, XHTML, and CSS coding experts, experts in dealing with Flash animations, and even high end technologies like PHP, MySQL, and AJAX, ensuring that whatever purpose that you need for your website design can be developed by YesTemplates.

If you have a template of your own already and want it changed, need some alterations to a design that YesTemplates has, or want a new corporate identity or a custom site from scratch, YesTemplates does this work as well. With the ability to custom design to your organization’s specifications, or create what you want from scratch, YesTemplates can ensure that no matter what vision you may have for your business’s web appearance, they can create what you’re looking for. They provide mockups of your site in progress, and can turn around a site in as little as four business days that is ready to be put up on the Web and shown to the world. Plus, they also create designs that are part of the new Web 2.0, at the cutting edge of multimedia and Internet appearance and utilizing the leading technologies in website development.

With the amount of templates available to purchasers from just $75 for full ownership, the myriad (how about that fancy word) of technologies and experts in house available in creating templates not only for general purchase but custom design, and the ability to have your company’s unique vision placed into a design ready for the world as you need it, YesTemplates offers what looks to be one of the best services available to build your organization’s or your own website quickly, easily, and beautifully.

Check them out now at YesTemplates.com

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OK Every One… You May Need to Sit Down for This.

A few weeks ago when we started this little COWpetition and we started to have a few people contacting us about becoming a sponsor… well the prizes kept building up and building up and you are not going to believe this but as of right now we have over $27 000 in Prizes!

You read that right…

This is a blog focused on teaching people how to effectively Make MOOney Online and let us tell you this… these prizes will help in a HUGE WAY!!!

Check this out… You can WIN…

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These are not cheap, resell right pieces of cow patty… these are the top and we do mean top products on the market right now for helping people to make money online.

If you want in on this action all you need to do is CLICK HERE and follow the very simple instructions!

We still ant believe… over $27000!!!

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There are two main areas of focus that every blog needs to pay attention to…

• People –> Human visitors need to know exactly where to go and how to get there
• Bots –> The search engines bots need to no where to go and not go

The easiest way to do this… in our opinion, is to first create the site navigation, then once it is all done you go back and move it around to sort what goes where. To do this, you need to clearly understand what pages are important to get them ranked in the search engines and what pages are important for people but not for the search engines. For example…

• Non Money Pages (privacy, disclaimer and contact us): These types of pages are very important to have for legal reasons and also to help provide assurance to the readers but they do not need to rank in the search engines, they are simply on your site for anyone needing that info but having them rank in the search engines is pointless.
• Money Pages (sales pages and other monetized pages): These are the pages that you want people to visit, you want people to find in the search engines and are what you make your money from.

Because of the difference between money and non money pages, you want to ensure that all the “link love” that your site has, is focused as much as possible on the pages you make money on. This does not mean, removing links but instead just moving them and using the infamous rel=”nofollow”.

What this allows you to do is keep links visible to the human readers but for the most part ignored by the search engines (mainly Google) and vice versa.

Step 1 –> The first thing you want to do is to put the links to the disclaimer, terms of use, privacy and contact down to the bottom of the page, out of the way and remove any of these from the top and or side of the page. These are not pages that make you money, so you do not need them front and center but you do want them to be visible to someone looking for them. By moving these to the bottom of the page and adding nofollow to them, you are able to keep everyone happy

Step 2 –> Put a “Home” link in the top nav or sidebar with a “nofollow” tag. You are going to have to modify the actual template html to do this. This is important because you want a “Home” link for people to be able to clearly see how to get to the home page but you do NOT want the search engines using the word home as the keyword anchor text for your home page… unless of course you are Home Depot

To do this what we recommend is you “view source” of the blogs index page and then copy the html that is being used for your sites navigation. Then go into the template source code and modify the php scripting. So for example, the source code for a blogs navigation in the header.php by default will look something like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

and when the source code is viewed from the live blog, it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

So what we do is delete the source code html in the header.php (if the nav is in the header) and replace it will the html but add the nofollow where we want it to be, so it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Hopefully we did not lose you there

Step 3 –> Put a static link to your “link bait” page (do not use the nofollow for this link) beside your “Home” link in your navigation. So with the above example, the code in the header.php would now look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/ rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/linkbaitpage”>Link Bait Keyword Text Here</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Part 2 - Call to Action

There are two things you need to do for your readers… the first is provide useful content… the second is direction.

This is really where the rubber hits the road in terms of a quality blog (in our opinion) and a “MFA” (made for AdSense) site. What we mean by that is, if you have a garbage site, that has no link bait, uses cheap writers or only unedited PLR, then chances are you’re not going to earn any loyal followers. People want quality… they want answers and they want help. If you can provide that, then you will gain trust, they will want to come back and you will be able to earn revenue.

To do this most effectively, you want to keep those loyal people updated by opting in to your auto-responder / RSS feed PLUS you want to make sure you are directing them to the most important area of your site at that time… that would be the link bait for the initial site. To do this there are two things you can do…

• Use the plugin Subscribe Remind (http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/):
  By using this plugin you give a pre defined message but the message is easy to see and is made to appear with every post.
• Create a custom message at the end of each post: Creating a custom call to action in or at the end of every post gets the readers attention when they are already interested in what you are saying. This is the perfect time to mention to them that they can learn even more or get even better results by signing up or visit your link bait page. Have the message directly relate to the content… if one post is about “fat burning products” on a blog more specifically about exercise, then having a generic “Learn more about exercise” is not good… but having something like…
  Click Here to learn about not only the latest Fat Burning Products but also discover fun and easy exercises, healthy eating tips and more by now

Personally, we recommend using both, this is the most effective because it covers all areas.

When ever linking to the Link Bait or RSS feed, especially when using a call to action with a term like “Click Here”, you should add the nofollow tag to the link. We do not recommend using a keyword as the link, a call to action phrase is much more powerful and effective.

Part 3 - Create a robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/robots.txt

Hope this post helps, hope you opted in to get more great tips and a chance to win some cool prizes and we hope you leave a comment about this post

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Now that our blog is installed with the proper theme and plug ins, we need to start putting everything in order.

With a new blog, a huge mistake that a lot of marketers make is they focus all their initial energy entirely on the index page, this is where they target the majority of their links and optimization. This is not an effective viral launch strategy and we can prove that by pointing you to sites like digg.com and stumbleupon… how many diggs or stumbles are actually linking to the index page of a blog… VERY FEW!

Part 1: Link Bait

With a brand new blog, your focus, in our opinion, should be on creating what is referred to as a “Link Bait” page. When we first create our blog, it is our usual strategy to have it completely non monetized and focusing all its attention initially on the “Link Bait” page for the first 30 days. We usually do not monetize the blog initially as we have proven to our selves that it increases link building effectiveness (people are more willing to link to a new site that offers just good info rather then to one that is hammered with ads). Another reason we use this strategy is a blog is usually not starting to earn revenue for the first few weeks because the traffic is not really at a point to where it is worth while and in our opinion it is better to sacrifice a few dollars in potential ad revenue to get more back links.

The other reason for not monetizing is we want to finish analyzing the keywords with Affiliate Elite to understand what our focus keywords for making money need to be and then we want to start creating the content focused on monetization (affiliate stuff).

With GamerzReviewz we did not follow this strategy of not monetizing the blog due to the fact that we only have 30 days and we do not have time to come in later and start testing different things (you will notice the ad placements have already changed a few times as we are testing them) but it is highly recommended that you do not monetize your site during the initial launch phase.

So with the Link Bait page, the focus is to provide something that is very attractive to others and entices them to not only link to that page but also share it with others. So many times we have seen people submit a generic article or the homepage to sites like digg and then they cry that the system does not work. Well no kidding it does not work when you are submitting useless information that is not exciting to the readers. Who would ever digg a PLR (private label right) article or something some outsourced help in India wrote that cant speak a word of English but qualifies as a Elance.com writer.

You need to understand that with the evolving internet and Web 2.0 (actually some are even saying Web 3.0 now ) the real power is in using solid Link Bait content with the social sites. The best way we can describe this is it is like pulling the string on a kite to try to get it into the air, when you pull hard on the string the kite jumps up into the air… but then what?

This is when the wind MUST take over and lift the kite into the clouds or else it crashes back down to the ground.

When you submit content to social outlets, if the content is garbage, then the initial boast you give it will be all that it has, and once the initial promotion stops, the content will drop like rock. On the other hand however, if your content is worthwhile, then others will grab onto it and your link growth will explode.

How to Make a Link Bait Page:

A Link Bait page can really be anything you want. It can be…

• an article
• a song
• an image
• a video
• a contest
• software
• or anything else you can think of.

The idea however is it must be something worth while so people will want to link to it and share it with others.

A great article that gives some good detail on creating a “Link Bait” page, is at…

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linkbait-beginners-guide/

For our site we needed something that we knew would cause a lot of buzz and offer a lot of value to the potential buyer of this blog in the long run. Back links of course are very valuable but have a mailing list is much more valuable and so we needed something that could accomplish both goals and therefore we decided on a contest that would require contestants to provide us with both emails and links. We wanted to ensure that we targeted people that were in the gaming market and offered something we know that the majority of them would love to win and so we offered a new gaming system. The problem is when you have a contest, often people do not want to share about it because they want to win and the more they share the less chances they have to win. To counter this we made it so there was a worth while incentive to not only opt in to the mailing list but also share about the contest with others.

You can check out our “Link Bait” contest page at…

http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/contests/win-a-ps3-xbox360-or-wii-with-gamerzreviewz/

One last point on “Link Bait”… make the page easy to read and come alive. Put some images in it if you can, make sure to bold certain points and even blockquote a really important point or two. It is also important that you keep the paragraphs to no more then 3 sentences each… this makes the content easier to read.

Part 2: Start Posting Your Content

Now it is time to start adding some of your content. The purpose of this content is to just give some food to the search engines while your site is getting started. We are not going to promote the site yet, we are just wanting to add the content.. we still have to fix up the navigation. Also if you just had one page (your link bait), it is not much for the search engines to bother with and also your readers will be pretty turned off, because you will not appear much of an authority on the topic. You want to appear as some what of an established site

In the previous post we talked about creating content and so we are not going to go into any more details on it here.

Once you have your initial content (at the bare minimum start with at least 15 unique posts), you will add them as individual posts to your blog. Make sure to organize the posts into categories and rename the default category to something that relates to your site.

Part 3 - Update Your Blog Theme

This is very important because it helps to make your blog recognizable for the niche you are pursuing. Often people just use a WordPress free theme and leave the images that are included and so you may have a city scene for the top banner on a blog about “Back Pain”.. not really a good idea.

The first step (if your blog has a header image) is to update this header image… which is very easy to do.

Step 1 - Mouse over the image and right click your mouse. The image more then likely will be a background image, so select “View Background Image”

Step 2 - Now right click on the image and save to your computer. You will also want to note where the image is located because you are going to upload to that same location on your server. An example of the location is…

http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/images/header.jpg

Step 3 - Edit the header image, keeping the original size and include some images that relate to your topic.

Step 4 - Upload the image to over write the original.

Now it is time to start setting your blog up to get ready to go live.

Part 4 - Updating Your “About Us” Page

The “About Us” page is an often ignored and under used page that really is something that helps build a lot of credibility with your site. This is especially true when it comes to trying to sell to people because you need to ensure you create a sense of trust with the readers by either explaining your qualifications or by relating to them.

There are two ways we go about creating an “About Us” page…

• Talk about the Person: If you are interested in building yourself as an authoritative person in this field then this is a perfect place to create a resume of sorts. Explain why you created this blog, what the blog is for, why you are an authoritative source for information in this niche and maybe a little bit of personal info like where you are from and also add a picture of yourself.
• Talk about the Site: If you are not interested in personally being known as the author of the blog (branding your name) then instead of talking about the person behind it you can focus on the blog directly. We still recommend you include an image on the page. For this type of page you will want to stick to the facts of the blog only, what it is created for, where they should go on it, what they can expect from it and why it is a resource they should use.

How to Create the “About Us” Page…

Step 1 –> Click on “Manage” and then “Pages”

You do not need to create a new page here since WordPress automatically created the about page right off the start.

Step 2 –> Click on the page titled “About Us”

Editing a page is no different than a post, the only thing is you do not assign a category.

Step 3 –> Once you have created the page, you will want to shut the comments “OFF”. Simply scroll down to the “Comments & Pings” and un-check the boxes and then select “Save” button.

Part 5 - Creating a Privacy, Terms of Use and Disclaimer Page

We think that often people look at the Internet as a “personal” item and that our blogs are our own private things that we can safely share with others. The sad thing however is this is 100% not true and there are thousands of rouge lawyers out there just waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce of some poor unsuspecting victim.

The best way to protect yourself from this is first and foremost, seek legal counsel on anything you are not sure of. Next you will want to make sure you use content that you have legal rights to use, meaning you created it and have the permission to use it… this includes images, videos and articles.

You also want to ensure you have the proper legal documents on your blog such as a “Privacy Policy”, “Terms of Use” and “Disclaimer”. These are extremely important because they clearly lay out the who, what, when, why and how that surrounds your site so you can be protected.

There are a lot of sources you can use to create these pages that are both free and paid. Do not just copy and paste something from another site, make sure to get a custom one for your business and we personally recommend the “Internet Lay Compliance System” which does cost money but it covers you from A to Z.

To create these pages, you will simply create pages in your blog.

Step 1 –> Go to “Write” and then “Page”

Step 2 –> Create the individual page and then make sure (like the about us page) you shut off the comments and pings.

step 3 –> Click “Publish”

OK, we think this is enough for this post… we actually have loads more but we will break this into another post in which we talk about navigation, call to action and the robots.txt

Hope you found this post useful and as always please give us your feedback, comments or questions

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We always hear about how we need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to dominate the search engines but for the last couple years the term VEO has surfaced which says to focus on the visitor and not the search engines.

Which one is right?

In our opinion, they both are and we made reference to this is an early post in this cowpetition.

You see with the new evolving dynamics of the web, things have changed. No longer are you just focused on trying to get traffic from Google but now you have hundreds and sites to also take advantage of that can send you equal and often times more traffic then Google. Because of this if you end up on focusing on just one aspect of your site optimization then you are missing out on the entire potential.

Our recommendation is you first set up your site for the human visitor and then once that is done, optimize it for the search engines. This is no different then focusing on your content, you want the reader to be satisfied and then you can tweak it to make the search engine bots happy too. In our experience trying to first optimize for the search engines and then for the human visitor is a more difficult task.

The process that we go through for this and the one that we followed for the GamerzReviewz blog is…

1. Install your blog, theme, and plugins
2. Create a “Link Bait” page and Opt In with site navigation emphasis on the “Opt In” and “Link Bait” for both the search engines and the visitors and update the graphics and color of blog to match theme
3. Manually test all links and ensure all navigation is pointing exactly where we want it to, install a robots.txt file and then submit your sitemap to Google webmaser tools to verify the blog is clear of errors
4. Start contacting JV partners and start your initial promotions

The great thing is while the keywords from the previous lesson are running in Affiliate Elite, we can get all this other important work done and when they are ready we can already be getting loads of traffic thanks to our Link bait page and viral incentives.

In todays post we are going to focus on point 1 and then in the next post it will focus on 2 & 3 and then after that 4 (or so that is the plan right now).

The following may seem basic to you but we are sharing it anyway and so pay attention

Part 1 –> Installing WordPress:

There are two “main” ways to install a Wordpress blog. The first is to manually download the files from…

http://wordpress.org/download/

The second is to use a free installation script, called Fantastico,that is standard with many hosting accounts. If your hosting account does not come with “Fantastico” or something similar, then the manual install is relatively easy to perform and WordPress provides a detailed guide at…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

…to help you through the installation.

Yes we realize there are more ways to do this and there are new tools for this popping up all the time, but for the sake of simplicity these are the two we are referring to.

For this post we are going to walk you through the steps to install WordPress using the “Fantastico” service, which is what we did.

Step 1: Log into your hosting account control panel and locate the “fantastic”icon.

Step 2: Once inside the “fantastico” control panel, you will see on the left hand side, a list of different php scripts that you can install on your server. Click on the “WordPress” link.

Step 3: On the right side of the screen you will now see a summary of current WordPress installations on your server. If you have not installed WordPress already, under “Current Installations:” it will simply say “None”. Click on the link that says “New Installation”

Step 4: Now you will have the WordPress set up form on the right hand side of the screen. If you have installed your domain as a subdomain or addon domain, then make sure you select the correct domain location in the drop down box. If you are installing the blog in the root directory of your domain, you will leave the “Install in Directory” blank. Enter an administrator user name and password and your email account password.

The email account password can be anything you want as you will not use it anyway and the rest of the fields will all be updated later on. Now click on “Install WordPress” and then on the next screen click the “Finish Installation” button. On the final installation page, you can also enter your email address to have all the installation information (user name, password, and more) sent to your email address.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress!

Part 2 –> Getting themes and what to look for and what to customize

When you first install WordPress on your domain, it will have the default template. Personally I recommend you do not use the default template, as it is in my opinion, very boring, and there are loads of nicer free templates available.

We used out own custom theme that you can learn more about at http://www.johncow.us/milkit/

If however you want to use one of the free templates available from WordPress then…

Step 1: Log into your WordPress admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: Click on the “Design Tab

Step 3: This is your “Template” management area and WordPress makes it extremely easy to update your templates with just a few clicks of the mouse. To find some great templates, you are going to want to scroll down on the “Design” page and click on the link called “WordPress Theme Directory”. Make sure to right click and open in a new window so you do not leave your admin area.

Step 4: You will now find a directory of thousands of free WordPress”Themes” (templates) that you can use on your blog. We recommend that your first choice in the sorting options, on the left side of the page, the “Widget Ready” option, as this will make modifying your blog a lot easier later on. Now select a theme that you like and do not worry if you are not sure, you can easily change the theme later if you wish.

The sorting options are not guaranteed and so a word of warning is to install the theme and check that tit is widget compatible before you do any image changes or anything like that.

Note: Widgets are a feature in WordPress that allows you to easily drag and drop different features into your blogs sidebar.

Step 5: Once you have the theme that you like, click on the “Download” link and save it to your desktop. You will want to unzip the file and save the folder to your computer.

Step 6: Now open your favorite FTP software to upload your theme to the correct folder. If you do not own a FTP software, download the free open source solution called FileZill, which can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/

Step 7: Locate the folder on your server called “themes”. To find it, go to your root folder where your index page would be and click on “wp-content” –> “themes”

Now upload the entire contents (folder and all) to the themes folder.

Step 8: Go back to your WordPress admin area now and if you are still in the “Design” area, refresh your page. You will now see the downloaded template included. To install the template, simply click on the template picture and it will automatically get installed.

You can now right click on the “View Site” button and open in a new window, to see how the new template looks on your blog.

Part 3 –> Plugins… what they are and which ones to use

Plugins are basically scripts that can be easily added on to your WordPress installation to add extra functionality and since WordPress is an open source project (all the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use with a few restrictions) there are literally thousands of programmers constantly creating improvements and new plugins for WordPress.

The problem with plugins however, is WordPress is always evolving and with new improvements, often some plugins stop working with the latest version of WordPress. Thankfully however, there are always new plugins being created and 95% of them are all free.

The majority of plugins are more for fun functionality, meaning they are more just “cool to have” type of features. There are a few plugins however that in our opinion are very important to use and help from both an end user and an optimization point of view. These plugins are not the only plugins to use and if there are others you like then feel free to use them. We also make no guarantees that the next time WordPress updates, that any of these will continue to work.

To find plugins, click on the “Plugins” tab…

…and then scroll down to the bottom the page and right click on “WordPress Plugin Directory” and open in a new window. This site has thousands of plugins to choose from and provides some important information. The most important thing to look at when looking at plugins, is the compatibility, you want to ensure that the plugins work with the version of WordPress you are using. To check this, simply click on the plugin title in the directory, then on the Plugin Details page, check the “Requires WordPress Version:”

To find out the version of WordPress you are using, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page in the your WordPress admin area and it will mention it.

If the plugin is compatible, then click the download button and save the file to your computer. You will then want to unzip the contents of the zip file. Now open your FTP software and navigate to “wp-content” –> “plugins”

Simply upload the the unzipped plugins file to the plugins folder. Now go the plugins page in your admin area and you will see the list of uploaded plugins. Plugins that are NOT activated will be white and once activated will turn green. To activate a plugin, simply click the “Activate” link.

Akismet–>
(http://akismet.com/) This comes standard with WordPress and is in my opinion the most stable of all “Spam Filter” plugins. The only draw back to this plugin is you need to have a WordPress API but these are very easy to get. Simply register at http://www.wordpress.com and then you will receive an email with your API key in it. Then you activate the plugin and click on “Akismet Configuration” and then enter the API key in the provided field.

All In One SEO Pack –>
(http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress out of the box is not optimized well from a search engine perspective. This plugin helps with improving how each post and page is optimized and also helps to prevent your blog from showing duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps –>
(http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) Google site maps are fantastic ways to help improve the complete indexing of your blog. This ensures that all posts and pages are properly linked to for Google (and the other search engines) to find. You can also block certain pages from being found, ping the search engines when your sitemap is updated and best of all the sitemap will automatically update every time the blog updates.

Related Posts –>
(http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries) This plugin helps to provide better related internal linking on your blog. Once activated, this plugin will find which posts are similar to each other and interlink them. This is good for both the search engines and human visitors.

Sociable –>
(http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/) This plugin will automatically add links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so that your posts can be easily added to them.

Brian’s Threaded Comments –>
(http://meidell.dk/archives/2004/09/04/nested-comments/) This plugin will automatically organize your page commentsin a more structured pattern so replies can be made directly to specific comments.

Enforce www. Preference –>
(http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/) This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.

Homepage Excerpts –>
(http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) This plugin gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Subscribe Remind –>
(http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WWSGD –>
(http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) Treat new visitors different then new visitors

Feed Footer –>
(http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This plugin allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed.

OIO Publisher Plugin –>
(http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher) This plugin is very affordable at just $37 and is by far the best we have come across for easily managing displaying paid advertising on your blog.

Do not be concerned with modifying the settings for these plugins yet. You will do this later on once we add content.

Part 4 –> Shut off Notifications

Once you have installed your plugins, you are now going to turn off the default notification function. This is a powerful feature with Wordpress that notifies different blog directories when a new update has occurred at your blog. The problem is you do not want to be notifying anyone about your blog until you have some content.

To shut this feature off, click on…

“Settings” –> “Writing”

…and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called “Update Services”. Delete the url that is in the form field and click “save changes”

Now go to…

“Settings” –> “XML Sitemap”

…and un-check all the “Update notifications”

• Notify Google about updates of your Blog
• Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your Blog
• Notify Ask.com about updates of your Blog
• Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog

Part 5 –> Set your Permalinks

One of the other draw backs of WordPress is that it comes default with very non user friendly file names. On the good side however, they make it very easy to customize this and make it very user friendly. So instead of having a url that looks like this…

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

…you can have something like…

http://www.yourblog.com/categoryname/keyword-phrase-here

To set this click on…

“Settings” –> “Permalinks”

…and click on the “Custom Structure” radio button. Now in the field provided you can set how you want the file system to display. There are dozens of combinations that you can create and the available tokens can be found by clicking the link called “number of tags are available”

Once you have the permalinks set, click the “Save Changes”. Wordpress should update this automatically but it may require you to modify your .htaccess file. Wordpress will provide you with the exact steps you need to do this.

Congratulations, your blog is set up!

In the next post we focus on getting our “Link Bait” set up and optimizing the blog around it from a visitor and search engine perspective.

We hope this was helpful and we will talk to you all tomorrow

Please provide your feedback!

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In the previous post called “Content Creation Madness” we took our focus off of the keyword research for a little while to focus on getting the initial content for the blog started. Now that the content is in the process of getting created, it is time to go back and start up the “Diamond Digger” to find us the keywords that we are going to want to focus on for making lots of MOOney!

The tool of choice for us is Brad Callen’s Affiliate Elite, it is a very cool little tool that has lots of great features but our hoofs down favorite is the AdWords Campaign spy tool. The reason this is so powerful is it will track for you which keywords are being advertised on consistently by the same people and the power in that is if the same advertiser is spending money on the same term for 2 weeks straight, there are only two things going on. Either they are making a profit or they are an idiot… and in our experience 90% of the time, when the advertisers has an ad showing for 14 days, the ad is profitable.

Disclaimer –> This strategy does not work for 100% of the markets out there. Occassionally you may come across a market that does not have a lot of words being advertised on with PPC. This does not mean the market can not be profitable, but you will want to make sure and snoop around at the competition and see how they are monetizing their sites. When there are a lot of PPC ads, that is usually a good sign that there are an abundance of affiliate opportunities available.

Lets Get Started…

Reminder that Affiliate Elite is not a free software but we are not going to lie to you and say that we do this with free tools just to please a few readers. This is the tool we use for this job, this is the tool we used for this cowpetition and this is the tool we recommend you use if you can afford it.

Step 1 –> Open Affiliate Elite and select the project type “Analyze Adwords Competition”

Step 2 –> Click on “Add Campaign”

Step 3 –> Enter a campaign title, leave Google selected and leave the “number of times to run each keyword” at 1 and then click OK

Step 4 –> Click on “Add Keywords” and paste in your list of keywords and click OK.

Step 5 –> Now click on the “Scheduler”

Select “Daily” and then “Next”

Select to “Run the Check” Daily and click next and then select when you want to run it and then click “Finish”

Step 6 –> Now click on “Options” and then change the “Use SE Courtesy” to “15 to 20″. This is important so that you do not get your IP blocked from Google. This process will run in the background and you want to have it have it run slow and steady to ensure you get all the results.

Click Here to Enlarge This Image

Step 7 –> Now click on “Run Now” and run the initial process.

Step 8 –> Now click on the close X in the top right corner

and since you have the scheduler running, Affiliate Elite will stay active in your task bar.

To reopen Affiliate Elite, just double click on the icon in the bottom corner of your screen.

Step 9 –> Now you are going to let Affiliate Elite run for 14 days straight and at the end of the 14 days you will know exactly what words are “Diamonds”

Remember the reason we use this strategy is because we want to try and eliminate as much of the guess work out of the market research as possible. By finding out what the competition is using and making money with in PPC, we can then take those results and transfer them to SEO. Next week we will walk you through what to do with the words from Affiliate Elite.

In the next post we are going to talk about setting up the blog and how we need to focus on both the human visitors and the search engines.

As always, we look forward to your questions and feedback about this post

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