Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Being an online marketer, you are going to need some tools.
I have compiled a list of some of the best tools you can get without spending an extra dime. Check out all of these tools and feel free to make a comment with your recommendations.

Comment Kahuna – This is probably the coolest free tool that I have found. Basically you type in a keyword like “internet marketing”, select that you are looking for a WordPress blog, and click go. This will find a ton of blogs that are talking about the keyword you specified. It will also tell you if the blog is Follow or NoFollow and it will give you the blog’s pagerank (how relevant Google thinks it is). You can then go around finding high Page Rank blogs that allow Following and comment on them. This will allow readers of that blog to find your site and it will also make Google think your site is more popular. This is probably the most used traffic generation tool in my arsenal.

Google Analytics – Probably one of the most important tools you can have as a website owner. This will allow you to track everything about your site. You can see how many visitors you have had, how long they stayed, what site they came from, what site they left on, and so much more. An absolutely essential tool!

Cam Studio – Free software that lets you record a video of what you are doing on your screen. Remember that video that I made yesterday? I used this program to create it and I didn’t spend a dime to make it. I highly recommend it!.

Open Office – This is like Microsoft Office but free, and in my opinion, better. You basically have programs similar to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and more. It is great when it’s time to make an ebook because the program similar to Word allows you to save your document as a PDF file (With all of your hyperlinks intact).

Keyword Difficulty Check Tool – When you are trying to figure out which niche to blog about, you can use this tool to check how stiff the competition will be in that niche.

The Link Popularity Checker – This will allow you to see how many other sites are linking to your site. You can also compare your site alongside two other similar sites if you’d like. It’s a great way to check what is necessary to climb the ranks of Google.

Weebly – You can use this site to quickly and easily create a free webpage on any topic that you’d like. The web address will end up looking like yournich.weebly.com. It’s actually a really great, free, web site creation and hosting tool.

Blinkweb – Very similar to Weebly. You can quickly create a website and they will keep it hosted for you.

Picnik – This site allows you to quickly and easily resize images so that they fit better on your webpage.

Tweetlater – This site allows you to set up Twitter so that you can autofollow anyone who follows you. It also allows you to schedule tweets. If you are about to promote a new product, you can preschedule a series of tweets about your product and it will post them throughout the day.

BrowserShots – This site lets you see what your website will look like in pretty much any other browser out there. This is an important tool to make sure that your site looks as good to everyone else as it does to you.

FileZilla – The best ftp program out there. This will allow you access to your server’s FTP so that you can manually upload and download files from your server.

Survey Monkey – Create surveys and polls to gather information about users and site visitors. A great tool if you are trying to figure out what your audience really wants.

MindMeister – This is a recently discovered tool for me. You can create mindmaps for any ideas that you might have. Over the last three days, I have created mind maps for every one of my blog posts and I have laid out an entire 18 month business plan. Once you get goin, the mind starts flowin… (I just made that up. Cheesy right?)

Online Stopwatch – It is exactly what it sounds like. I use this a productivity tool. It has a count down timer as well. I set the countdown for 60 minutes of work. When times up, I take a 15 minute break before getting back to it. It’s been amazing for my productivity.

A few more that you might have heard of already

Twitter – One of the best marketing tools out there! Build up a following, tweet things that interest people, and watch them check out your blog because they like what you Tweet!

Skype – Get in contact with other like-minded people. I can’t use Skype enough. I have had conversations with some of the most successful people that are more than willing to share ideas just by contacting them on Skype! You can chat with Voice over internet protocol with them too! How cool is that? Free long distance…

YouTube – Make videos and post them there. Mention your website and people come… Easy enough right?

That’s the best I can do for now… I may make a part two in the future. There are so many great tools available!

I need to give some credit to others for this list as well. Thanks goes out to:
Rob Willis, Shirley Cheung, Adam Spiel and Joe Fier.

There are several ways to monetize your blog.
The main three are affiliate marketing, pay-per-click advertisements, and e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is actually an extension of affiliate marketing but it is so powerful that it warrants a little bit of separate attention.

To begin with, we are going to focus on affiliate marketing. I was going to really go in depth about PPC advertising with adsense but decided that affiliate marketing is probably a better way to start. I don’t think that posting Google Adsense ads on sites about internet marketing is the best strategy. The main reason being that people who visit internet marketing sites tend be a little more web savvy. They tend to be more blind to adsense type ads. Promotion in the internet marketing niche is much better and much more profitable when you affiliate your self with products and companies that you like to promote.

What is affiliate marketing?
Basically, when you are doing affiliate marketing, you are promoting someone else’s product. When the product sells, you get a cut of the profits. I believe CDNow was really the first company to start affiliate marketing on a grand scale on the internet. Nowadays, Amazon.com and eBay use affiliate marketing heavily. Each company that you sign up for has their own process of bringing on affiliates. I can’t really go in to the process of how to sign up for each of them on this blog.

How can I make money with affiliate marketing?
First let me give you an example of affiliate marketing in action. My blog has a recommended reading section. You’ll notice that in this section, I am talking about all of my favorite books. If you click on one of the books and decide to purchase it, Amazon will give me something like 4% of the sale. As you can see, it’s not huge money. 4% of a $15.00 book is $0.60. I need to sell a lot of books to make real good money. Another example of an affiliate is PowWeb. My blog is hosted over there and I am a huge fan of their services. Every time someone clicks on their link and signs up for an account, they pay me $77! It only costs someone $45 per year to sign up! They are counting on the fact that people are going to sign up and hang around and continue to renew. As you can see, I do not need to get a whole heck of a lot of people to sign up over there to make a good income. This is the power of affiliate marketing! There’s some good and some bad but if people trust you enough and value your opinion, it can all really add up quickly.

Another great place to find affliates is called Commission Junction. They have a whole bunch of different companies that you can promote with all different types of offers. This is where you can find any product from any niche to promote. If promoting eBooks is more up your alley, I recommend Clickbank. Here you can find all sorts of eBooks that offer up to 75% commission.

Here’s what you should do.
Signup for the affiliate programs at Amazon.com, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Find some products between those three companies that you think you can promote and that your readers would enjoy. The companies will give you a special link with a unique tracking code. Use that link every time you talk about the product. People will click through the links and, hopefully, buy the products that you recommend.

Tomorrow I am going to teach you how to cloak the links. This will make the URL that people see in the status bar look different from the actual link you are sending them to. Psychologically, people may respond better when they don’t think they are being sent to an affiliate link. I don’t do much cloaking on this site (It’s called Full Disclosure Internet Marketing for a reason) but I do want you guys to understand how to do it. It will definitely come in handy.

Until next time, you should now have the tools to get a blog set up and start making some dough.

If you have any questions, comments, or better suggestions about affiliate marketing, please leave them in the comments! I will thank you for it and so will the other readers that would greatly appreciate more advice!

Let’s change our theme.
You’ve got your blog in place, you’ve got some content written on it, and you’ve got all the good plugins that bring people to the site and keep them coming back. It’s time to tweak the look of your blog. Changing your theme can be extremely simple or it can be an insane pain in the butt if you are a perfectionist like me. I want every little detail to be exactly as I envisioned it. Because of this, I actually purchased expensive software to edit my blogs so I can get the layout and colors exactly how I want them. If you just want a blog that looks nice but you are not extremely picky about getting the exact color and the exact layout that you want, you are in for a real easy ride. If you are more of a perfectionist, the steps to create your own theme are beyond the scope of this article. Maybe another day. If you ask nicely, I may be willing to throw something together for you in my theme editor. But I’ll talk more about that at the end of all this.
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Let’s Get Some Action On Our Blogs!
Yesterday I taught you how to set up a WordPress blog. Hopefully you did that and wrote a post or two. Now we are going to get that blog ready for action. Plugins are little add-ons that you can use with WordPress that help your blog accomplish beneficial things. All of the Plugins that I am going to list below can be installed from directly within your WordPress administration area. I have a total of 11 plugins that I constantly run on my blogs.

How to install plugins on your blog.
Well your first step is to log in to your admin area at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. Enter your username and password to get to your dashboard. Now you are going to click on the plugins menu on the left side of your dashboard screen. A drop-down will appear and you can click on “Add new”. Now I am going to give you the names of the plugins that I use. So all you have to do is enter the name of the plugin in to the search box, click the “install” link to the right of the plugin and then just follow the directions to install it. Once it is installed. Click the link that says “activate plugin”. Your plugin should be good to go.

My favorite plugins and what they do…

Akismet – This is the best spam blocker for your blog that there is. After your blog is online for a little bit, people will start commenting on your blogs with nonsense text or ads to irrelevant sites. This will prevent that and help moderate the comments that people post on your blog.

CommentLuv – This will promote commenting on your blog. When you have CommentLuv installed, people that comment will get a link back to their latest blog post. Other bloggers love backlinks and this is an incentive to comment.

Google Analyticator – You are going to want to keep track of the traffic going to your blog. To do this you can sign up with Google Analytics. They will track where people came to your site from, how long they stayed, what links they clicked on and more. With this plugin installed, you don’t need to get in to the HTML of your website to install Google’s tracking codes.

Google XML Sitemaps – This will help Google find your site. When you install this plugin, it will send Google a sitemap every time you update your blog. It basically tells Google, “hey, check it out, I updated my site”.

Platinum SEO Pack – This is another one that will help you with the search engines. You install this and you can edit how the search engines see each individual post. You can plug in keywords that you want Google to associate with your site and with each individual post. This is probably one of the most important plugins you can install because this will get the search engines to notice you fast.

Popular Posts – This puts a sidebar widget on your blog that lists your most popular posts. This is good for the search engines because the search engines like to see you linking around your site. It is also good to keep users on your site because they can see what most people are interested in and dig deeper in to your content.

Post-Plugin Library – This plugin does nothing on its own. It is required to be installed if you want the Popular Posts Plugin and the Related Posts plugins to work.

Sociable – This is a really cool tool that I just recently discovered. If you look at the bottom of my blog posts, you’ll see a bunch of little icons for things like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc. This plugin puts those links there so that people can promote your site on their favorite Web 2.0 site. If someone really likes your post and they are on Twitter, they can click the Twitter link and send out the post to their followers. This is great to get your name out there.

Top Commentators Widget – This is another plugin to promote people to comment on your blog. This puts a widget in your sidebar that ranks who comments the most. People like to see theirt name ranked high as a top commentor. I like to turn on the option to post people’s links when they comment as well. That gives them another incentive because it is publicity for their blog.

WP To Twitter -This links your blog to Twitter. Everytime you make a new post on your blog, this program will send out a Tweet telling everyone that you just made a post and it will give them the link. This helps get a nice little surge of traffic everytime a new post goes online.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – This is another plugin that has multiple benefits. It puts a list of related posts at the bottom of each individual post. Google likes to see your site linking deeper in to itself but it also encourages viewers to dig around deeper in to your blog.

So then what?
Ok. So now you have all of these plugins installed. Just by doing that, you are well on your way to having a blog that the search engines love and that people want to comment on. The next step is going to be getting your WordPress blog looking prettier. I will get to that step in my next blog post. Just by installing the plugins above, you may start see traffic starting to roll in. If you have some content on your blog, Google and the other search engines will start to find your blog.

Are there any plugins that I left out? Please comment if you feel that there is something that is absolutely essential that I forgot in my list.

Full Disclosure
Before I begin this post on how to create a blog with WordPress, I want to fully disclose something. I do have affiliate links in this article. Some of the sites that I suggest you visit and some of the services that I suggest you use, I am an affiliate of. However, I do not promote any products that I do not use myself. If I suggest a server host or a domain name company, it is because it is the one I use and I have had good experiences with them. If you want to use one of the services that I am suggesting but you don’t want me to get the credit for it, go ahead and search the company on Google and sign up that way. I just want to be upfront and honest from the start.

Why Use A WordPress Blog?
The majority of the money that I have made online to date has been because I have set up several WordPress blogs. It is very quick and cheap to set up a WordPress blog and once you manage to get traffic to the blog, there are many ways to monetize the blog. The first WordPress blog that I ever set up was over at HowIWillBeRich.com. I probably made my initial investment back on that site within the first month of the site going online. Now I rarely update the site and it still brings in probably $30 every single month.

WordPress is very simple once it’s set up. Once you’ve got it installed and running on your server, it’s incredibilly easy to keep your blog updated. No advanced html or programming language knowledge necessary. Just log in, type up your blog post, hit publish, and you are updated. It’s so simple.

First you need a domain name and a host.
I am a big fan of a hosting company called PowWeb. With these guys you only pay $3.88 per month and you’ll get both your hosting and your domain name all in one place. By doing this, you will eliminate several steps of getting your domain and your host linked together. I recommend paying for a whole year in advance. You will pay $46.56 and you won’t have to think about it again for a year. You will get a domain name, unlimited webspace, and unlimited bandwidth (the amount of files that can be transferred from you to your viewers). On top of that, they give you $50 free in adwords. That’s $50 in free advertising. Sorry if it sounds like I’m really pitching their product. I really am just a big fan of their service. They’ve been great to me so far. So that’s your first step to creating a WordPress blog. Get your domain and server lined up over at PowWeb. (I had to cut this here because there are images and I want to keep a good load time. Just click below to keep reading)
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