Author: enetwal

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines V

In our last discussion we talked about keyword density and the need to have your keywords appear on your page, frequently but not too frequently. The need to do so early on your page, and some suggestions on making sure you had enough words overall to appear substantive to the search engines and pointed out a need to have keywords that appear in your meta tags also appear on your page.

These are all important factors visible on your page. Today we will talk about three more elements of on-page importance. Your URL, the originality of your content and finally internal links.

You probably already have your URL or web site address. So this first topic may seem pointless, but let’s dig in anyway. If your business is counseling women going through a divorce on their financial matters, you may be better off trying to get www.DivorceeFinancialAdvice.com as your URL rather than www.JBBrown.com.

Way too many business web sites use meaningless business names as their URL in the hopes of creating some branding value. While some will take issue with me here, a URL that includes your major keyword may do you a lot more good, unless your brand is already deeply ingrained in your marketplace. Similarly, MinneapolisChiropractor.com
may be superior to WellnessClinic.com, although MinneapolisWellnessClinic may be worth a shot.

If you are wedded to www. your name.com you might still want to consider buying domain names of the better combinations of your major keywords and geographical areas and redirecting them to your web page. This serves a defensive purpose of keeping them out of potential competitor’s hands. Once you own these domains you can have them point to your existing web site. It’s not the ideal from an SEO standpoint but will help drive traffic to your site for the relatively minor cost of the domain name.

Originality of content shouldn’t be a problem for most business websites. But if your website is a template and you are using essentially the same text as another website, you may not get your site indexed at all. Google and the other search engines want to see unique new content, and not a duplicate of the same old thing. They will index the first copy they find and ignore the duplicates. You don’t want to have your site ignored. Make sure you are not using a carbon copy of someone else’s web site.

They also like to see new content. You can do that by adding new pages on occasion, or by making changes to existing pages. Is there a portion of your page that can be updated from time to time? If so, make sure you do so. This lets the search engines know that your site is active. That said, if you are going to do it, make sure you do. No one is impressed with a site that is talking about an upcoming holiday from two years ago.

Internal links are the links on your site to your various pages on the site. Most web sites have a home page and links on almost all their pages to “Home.” A better strategy is to use your major keyword, be it “Minneapolis Dentistry Home” or “St. Louis Sewer Repair Home.” By adding your keywords, you let the search engines know that that’s what your pages are about. It reinforces all your other keyword efforts.

This may be a bit tricky in some cases where space is tight, but where you can include links within the text of your pages to other pages, you should be sure to use anchor text links like this. Next week we will discuss off page factors. There we will go into more detail on linking to your site. When you are off page you have very little control on what links others will have to your site. When you have complete control such as on your own page, it behooves you to make maximum use of your ability to use internal links that let the search engines know what your pages are about.

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Don’t forget about my WART Analysis program. For next to nothing I will do a diagnostic of your web page and provide you with my personal advice on steps you could take to make your web page more effective in terms of search engine ranking.

Getting to the top of the Search Engines IV

In our last article, we discussed the hidden or invisible “on-page” factors that can help or hinder your ability to rank high on the Search Engines. Today we will look at some on-page factors that matter as well.  By on page I am talking about the text that people can read on your home page.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, the key factor for any web site is your selection of keywords.  These are important in both the visible and hidden portions of the page.  They should be in your meta tag title tags, keyword list and description.  They must also be on your page.

If the search engines see keywords in the hidden code that aren’t on your page, they will discount them and possibly even penalize your site.

Specifically you want to have your primary keywords appear in the first 50 words of your page text at least once.  In the past some internet marketers tried to game the system. They would stuff their keyword on the page over and over to get a high ranking. Such tactics worked for a short while but Google and the other search engines changed their algorithms to punish keyword stuffing.  The rule of thumb now is that you want your main keyword to appear between 1-4% of the time.  If you have a thousand words on your page that would mean you would use your primary keyword from ten to forty times. For five hundred words of text that would be five to twenty times.  This is called keyword density in the trade.

This is usually not a problem for most sites, but it does require keeping in mind which keyword you want your web page to rank for, and them being sure to use it when you are writing your page.  When working with a home staging client, I noticed one occasion where they used the term “home stager” repeatedly, while the focus may have been better put on the term “home staging.”

By the way, if you have a top three or four keyword variations that people search for, you may want to have one page of your site optimized for one term, and another for the second, etc.

So, my home stager above might have stressed the term Home Staging on her home page, but talked about House Staging or Home Stagers on another page talking about services provided, or a third page on her certifications, Qualifications etc. This takes a bit more time, but helps raise your sites ability to rise to the top not just on your main keyword but on other keywords as well.

The final topic we will discuss today is total word count.  It appears that the magical number of words on a page that the search engines like to see is 425.  In my experience most business web sites don’t have that many on their home pages, while most information sites do.  The search engine bias is toward sites that provide more information, so it’s not hard to understand that they would tend to reward sites that appear to be “meatier.”

For many of the sites I have reviewed in my WART Analysis program I have had to suggest they add a paragraph or two of text to their front page.  And since I am an advocate of using geographical keywords in the meta tags I encourage them to consider adding their geography to their home pages as well.

Many of them have followed this suggestion and added a final paragraph on each of their pages.  A butcher for example might include on the bottom of each page a phrase like the following: “South Minneapolis’ premier source of quality meats serving Minneapolis, Richfield and Bloomington as well as the Highland neighborhood and the rest of St Paul.” This adds some words to the page, and also the geographical keywords to complement those in the meta tags.

One final comment on words on the page. Words that are placed on images or graphical elements such as on your header are usually invisible to the search engines and don’t count as keywords on the page, or in the total page or first 50 word counts.  If you put your cursor on your header and right click and do not see View Source or View Page source in the box that appears, you are probably on an image that cannot be read. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to keep it in mind when designing your page so it can compete in the search engines.

That’s it for today. We will continue with on page visible factors in the next article. After that we will explore off page factors.

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines 3

The hidden essentials to attract the search engine bots are your title tags, your keywords and your meta description.  In addition, your keyword should appear on your page in an <h1> tag. We will discuss each in this article.

First let’s talk about where to find your hidden code.  Go to a place on your website where there is text and not an image. Right click, and a box will appear with a number of options. Look for one that says View  Page or View Page Source, click on it. It should bring up the HTML code that is behind your web page.

Near the very top will be a header tag. It looks like this <head>.

A variety of different types of code can be placed here. For our purposes, the three important items are the title tag, the keywords, and the description.  Sometimes one of more of these will be missing.

This section of code always ends with an end tag that looks like this: </head>

The next section of the code starts with the body tag, <body> and this is where the parts of the page that are visible appear.  But except for the <h1> tag we won’t be dealing with that today.

Title Tags.

Each page of your web site has a title tag. The title tag will show at the very top left of your browser when you are on the page. When you go to some people’s web page you will see the word “Home” in the top left. That’s because they named their home page “Home.”  More frequently you will see the company name, ABC Jones & Company or something similar.

In terms of search engine optimization, you would be better off to include your primary keyword and your primary geography. So if you were ABC Jones, I would consider putting “ABC Jones & Co San Diego Home Staging Experts” or “ABC Jones New Jersey’s Best Wedding Arranger.”

The title goes between the <title> and the </title>

Each page has a different title so you might add a Pipe sign after that and use, About us, Contact us and your other page names on the relevant page.

Keywords:

You should also see a line of code that starts with, <meta name=”keywords” content=” and then a series or word separated by commas.

Most businesses have more than one keyword that people use when they are trying to find you. Hopefully you have identified the primary one or ones. Keyword research is a major topic on its own, and one you should pay attention to. For example, while home staging is the dominant keyword to use in the home staging business, about 10% of people will type in “house staging” when looking for a home stager. You want to include the keyword “house staging” in your keywords.

Note that this two word phrase is still a keyword. Internet marketers have long know that you want to use keyword phrases, because that’s what some people type. Two and three word phrases and sometime longer yet can generate positive results for them. If you are the only person who puts “best specialty cold cuts in Chicago” in your keywords, and also in the body of your site, there’s a pretty good chance you will pop up pretty high if someone actually searches for that term. Now don’t go hog wild, as relatively few people will use the phrase.

The key here is to focus on what people who don’t really know what to ask for are likely to use when they are trying to find you.

Finally, I recommend that you use not only “fresh cut flowers” as a keyword but “Toronto fresh cut flowers” if you are a Toronto florist.  Use the suburbs you sell to as well.  When someone searches for Pizza in the search engines millions of sites appear. When they search for Pizza, 55417 a zip code, they get those closest to home.

Description
Similar to the Keywords, you should see a line of code in the meta tags called description. This should be kept to 160 characters. Some search engine results display this description when your site comes up in their listings. As such you may want to make it a sales pitch. You want to come up with a coherent statement using as many of your best keywords as possible, especially including your primary geographical reference points.

If you say, “Dog Walker in Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, Edina….etc.,” even though you might not come up number one on the listing yet, a person from Edina or St Louis Park will recognize that you are in their bailiwick.  They may check you out before the top guy, just because they see that you are local to them.  This is a side benefit, worth getting, but your primary intention is to rank high when the search for “dog walker Edina,” rather than “dog walker Minneapolis.”

While you want to focus your site on your largest geographical target, consider using the smaller ones as well, but don’t get carried away, you only have 160 characters.  When consulting with others, I try to include at least the top three keywords and then work as much geography as I can all the while trying to make a strong sales pitch. It’s an art form.

<H1> Tags

You may have a header on your web site that may have been designed as an image or may be in HTML code. Many web sites will consider this their headline and launch right into the body of their message on their main page.  This is a mistake.

Start you page with a headline. That headline should include if at all possible your primary keywords including you primary geographical market. This is done by using <h1> tags in the HTML code for the headlines.  Thus while the headline is visible the code isn’t.

So if you are a Hair Salon in South Omaha, you might top you page with </h1><h1> South Omaha’s Premier Hair Salon </h1> in the meta tags. This will automatically make it headline size on your actual page.  More importantly, it will let the little bots searching your page that these are important words and what your page is all about. And that is what you want.

The four steps outlined above are crucial first steps to getting your page optimized for the search engines. We’ve covered a lot of material here. If you have any questions, let me know.

In the next issue we will talk about some of the visible on page factors.  This ran a bit long today, so I may break the next section into two parts.

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If you would like to have me take a close and personal look at your web site, I am offering a special deal on my new diagnostic service.  The price is incredibly low, and the service a great value. I will look and see what if you need to make any changes to your site and actually call you and discuss them with you. For more info go to www.askearlabout.com/WART/index.html

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines 2

There are two main areas of attention when discussing how to move your website to the top of the search engines. The first are the on-page factors and the second are the off-page factors.

The on-page factors are the easiest and quickest to deal with and are where we will start to focus our attention. They are critical but not the most important. The off-page factors will in the long run carry more weight. But that said, if your on-page factors aren’t set up properly you can and will lose much of the benefit your off-page efforts could supply.

We will talk about 10 on page factors. Of these four are invisible, and of the six that are visible, one may already be cast in stone for better or worse.

The invisible elements are the Meta Tags. The meta tags are in the hidden code that the search engines can see, but your visitors normally don’t see. You will learn how to see them, and anyone else’s when we discuss them in detail in our next section.

The meta tags include your title tags, your description and your keywords. The fourth of the invisible items is called an H1 tag. The results of it are visible, but since it’s also HTML code (of the simplest kind) I am listing it as one of the invisible factors. Almost all of you will be able to make improvement to these elements on your web page. For some of you this alone will make a significant difference in your page ranking. So stay tuned.

I’ve been surprised at how few websites I’ve reviewed have had adequate meta tags. Even those done by expensive web designers are often poorly done or in some cases missing altogether.

The visible elements include your first 50 words specifically, and the total number of words altogether. The total keyword count within your text and the percentage of the whole they comprise. We call this keyword density. The visible elements also include the internal links you have on your site and the way you link them, as well as the originality of your content.

The one item that may already be locked in stone is your domain name itself. As we will discuss, you will do better with the search engines if your web site includes you main keywords in it. If your site is already up and established you may not want to change it. That’s understandable. But if you are just now starting up and or are considering a complete makeover of your web presence, give serious thought to including your keywords and geography if appropriate in your new domains.

In our next article we will focus in detail on the hidden items. That will be followed by a look at the visible elements. Once we have covered those we will move on to discuss the off-page strategies.

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P.S. I have just launched a new service I call the WART Analysis and Consultation

I have been testing it over the past week or so with home stagers and it has been very well received.  I’ve got the service rock bottom priced for a short while, but will be raising it soon, so check it out now and take advantage while the price is so low.

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines

What’s a top listing on Google worth?

Whether you are a home stager in Philadelphia or a shoe store in Omaha, or a Dentist in Los Angeles, getting your business to the top of local search engine results can make a significant difference to your profitability.

How much more traffic does the top listing get, compared to the number two listing? I don’t know. It varies. But I have seen estimates that claim the top listing can expect from 1.5 to 3 times as many visitors compared to the number 2 listing. These same estimates suggest that the number three listing gets roughly the same drop off compared to the number two listing.

What’s that mean in numbers?

Say on a given day or week, 100 people search for “Chiropractors in Minneapolis,” the odds are that 95 of them will look at the top listing. (Count on 5% doing something else)

If the ratio of drop offs is one and a half – on the low end of the above estimate, that means about 63 people would see the second listing and just 42 the third listing.

What’s that mean to your business?

Fewer eyes on your website results in fewer eventual conversions, which is marketing talk for sales. No matter how effective your web site is, it can’t create customers out of people that don’t see it.

Now some web sites convert better than others. And just getting a lot of traffic isn’t a substitute for having a web site that produces, but that is another topic. The first objective is to get eyes on the page. Then we will worry about getting those eyes to do something.

If that first website is a dog, the second one will see more traffic as a result. If it’s great, the second site may see even less traffic, as it scoops up all the business right then and there. This and many other factors may affect the actual drop off in your market, for your specific keywords.

The bottom line is that there is a drop off, and it matters to you and your business whether you are on top or not.

Now, what if you are no where near the top? Your web site can still be useful if your drive traffic to it by other advertising efforts. So don’t give up on your site. But there may be ways to climb from page 3 or 23 to the top in many markets, once you learn a few of the tricks to search engine optimization.

For many locally based businesses, getting on the first page of the search engine listings is very doable. The reason I say that is because the majority of your competitors don’t understand search engine optimization either. If you follow me and this series, and apply what I will be sharing with you, most of you will be able to make some significant progress.

Just for the sport of it, pick one keyword you would like to rank for in your market. In the example above I used, Chiropractor in Minneapolis. Find one appropriate to your business and market. Now go to Google or MSN or which ever search engine you use and figure out where you web site is. Write it down.

At the end of this series, I’d love to hear from those of you who made the greatest progress. If you’re already number one, don’t get too comfortable, one of your competitors may be reading this and planning on overtaking you.

Chinese Herbal Medicine site is up – Also new product to share

I have put up my new site on Chinese Herbal Medicine site using the Niche Profits Classroom theme again just like I did to the Aromatherapy site.  I used the PLR package I bought from Doug Champigny, and rewrote key elements of several chapters to serve as my sites main articles.

I used the ten articles provided with the package as the guts of my 10 part mini course, and the eBook as my major download.  I’ve added a resource page to the back of the eBook and have tacked a few referrals on some but not all the mini course.  I have a link in both to my Aromatherapy site and will modify that site to include a link to this one.  I will be writing articles for the article directories for both to drive traffic as well.

Once again this took a bit of work. The most time consuming was rewriting. For each article, I made sure to focus on one or more keywords I had identified using the money word matrix as being at least someone actively searched for but with relatively few resulting pages.  The keyword part wasn’t that difficult, but it just takes time as does the writing in general.

I’ve learned a fair amount about both herbs and aromatherapy in the process. For both projects, I found myself doing additional research online to add material, particularly to the articles.  I am sure I will continue to do that as I write for the article directories.

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I also wanted to mention today that I bought a script from Dave Guindon that you may want to check out. It’s only $47 but will be going up after his introductory week so I figured Ishould mention it now, even though I haven’t installed it yet.

Dave is something of  An under-the-radar software developer/marketer.  He has been secretly creating
a script that systematically siphons leads + sales from all his websites!

Exit Splash

BUT, the real impressive aspect of this concept is… Dave figured out a way to increase leads + sales without sending more traffic to his sites!  What a concept! And … a Scary one!

Think about it, right now you are LOSING money from every website you own!  It’s well known that you lose over 95% of your web traffic! But don’t worry, Dave figured out a way to tap into that lost traffic using a very powerful small script anyone can easily implement.  And FINALLY … he decided to reveal his new technology to the world.  Check it out for yourself:

Exit Splash

Dave has been secretly handing out this new script called Exit Splash to fellow online marketers ..and the results have been very impressive to say the least.  One guy increased his lead capture efforts by 325% resulting in ($)4,329 of EXTRA sales!  The crazy part is … he generated those leads and sales from people attempting to LEAVE his website!

You can watch several short customer review videos here:

Exit Splash

PS: Dave Guindon is currently running a special discount and plans to increase the price by at least 40% … so I highly recommend taking a few minutes to see this now:

Twitter Effect Videos Showed Me How to Monetize Twitter

Step-By-Step How-To for Marketing on Twitter? Must Be The Twitter Effect Videos!

“Big-Dog Twitter Secrets Revealed!

Learn To Use Twitter For

Marketing & Make Friends,

Get More Traffic & Skyrocket Your

Online Sales Almost Overnight!”

Use These Powerful Twitter Effect

2.0 Videos & Skip The Steep Learning Curve

As You Learn How To Use Twitter For

Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing and Niche Marketing!

I copied this headline, because I wanted to get your attention.  Twitter is exploding online, you’d have to be living under a rock to not have noticed.  At first I was skeptical, but then its potential finally dawned on me. How about you?  Well at last check, I had over 1500 followers up a couple hundred from the last time I checked a couple of days ago.  Not too shabby. Maybe you have more?? Maybe you don’t care, and I can understand that as well.  Keeping your Twitter family to just very close friends may a good idea.

But if you are interested in using the power of Twitter as a marketing tool I have to recommend you invest in the Twitter Effect Videos! For $17 you can learn the tricks the “Big Dogs”  are using to monetize Twitter.  For a dime more you will be able to get the master resale rights and make your money back in no time.

Grab A Great Niche And Build Your Own Niche Blog or Site

In recent posts, I’ve discussed how I took a limited edition Private Label Rights package I bought from Doug Champigny on how to use essential oils in aromatherapy and turned it into a blog site using the Niche Profits Classroom technique. I have been adding an article a day to the article directories in support of that site and have begun to get a trickle of traffic. It will probably take a few weeks and another dozen and a half articles to really get the traffic rolling full bore, which is just fine. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

The key to my article marketing has been the keywords I’ve selected using the Money Word Matrix software that’s included in the Niche Profits Classroom membership. There are natural keywords that most web sites dealing with Aromatherpy naturally use, such as “aromatherapy.” The problem with such keywords is that while a lot of people will click on them, there are 10 gazillion web sites competing for the word. The odds of my fighting the way to the top are pretty slim. On the other hand there are many long tail keywords like, “healthy products biomagnetic aromatherapy oils” for which only a handful of sites appear, but next to no one searches for. While some people swear by long tail keywords, a lot of them are at best, long shots.

The Money Word Matrix, quickly sorts through the maze and identifies keywords where I have a fighting chance to rank over time. These are the keywords I slip into my rewrites of the PLR material I buy and put on my site.  I then use these same keywords as titles or main headings in the articles I write and put up on the article directories. By linking back to an article on my site with the same keywords, I get good Google juice for a keyword in moderate demand and for which relatively few people are fighting.

Today, for example I wrote an article on making essential oils.  Making Essential oils is an excellent keyword because well over 1000 people search for that term every month and less than 5000 sites show up in a Yahoo search for the term.  Now 5000 is still 5000 and it will take me a while to get to the top of that list, but there were 13 other keywords that dealt with distilling aroma therapy essential oils. And while I didn’t stuff them all into today’s article, I will use them over the next week. All pointing back to this one article on my site on the distillation of essential oils.  Since it’s an internal page, Google will be all the happier to consider my site to be worthwhile.

As I work my way through the 3 and half pages of keywords, I identified using the Money Word Matrix tool I will write other articles that will point to other pages on my site. Eventually, this consistent action will compound and I will begin to rank on many different words. As this happens, I will begin to go after some the the high traffic words and when I do, I will have a lot more success, as Google will already be seeing my site as a high ranker on so many related terms.

Now as I previously explained in an earlier post, it took me almost a week to build my first site, and it’s now time to start another one.

Just my luck, Doug Champigny has released another PLR package and it is right up my alley. This one is on Chinese Herbal Medicine.  So I grabbed it, and will be doing the same thing all over again.  (If you hurry, you might still be able to get one yourself, but as of this writing less than 50 remain.)

Now the Niche Profits Classroom approach is not the only way to do this. I think it’s the best game in town, but if you want to, you can do a similar blog or web site on your own. The nioche profit classroom is under $50 a month though, so if you can afford it, I would encourage you to do so.  The Chinese Herbal Medicine package is one time investment of just $27 and includes a well written 40 page ebook and two sets of graphics and ten articles. In addition to the articles, there are 10 audio files, one for each article that you can add to your site as podcasts. This little pod cast trick is another great way to get Google’s attention, by the way.

Once I get both sites up and producing traffic, I bet I will be able to cross sell products from one site to the other. Building an online business, isn’t about getting rich overnight. It’s about building sites that serve people interests. That takes time and effort. While my Armotherapy site was built on the PLR package I bought, I have since done some additional research, and bought a few additional suppemental PLR articles, (no where as well written, but cheap and with some different angles.) As time goes on, I will learn more and add more to the site. The advanatge of a PLR Product like the ones Doug puts together is that you have the specific gravity to put up a credible intial site and have a product to sell.

As time goes on you can build upon it and develop it into a significant site. That will be a lot easier to do, when you have traffic already flowing to it.

If you have any questions about what I am doing with these sites, how I am using the PLR or the Niche Profits Classroom, let me know.

The lessons I am learning here apply to mainstreet business. So if you are one of my brick and mortar clients or home staging friends, pay attention. The name of the game is marketing. And in today’s world while the product and circumstances may vary, many of the tools and strategies are the same or at least similar.

Discover how to use your C-panel

Too many small businesses and even beginning internet marketers rely on someone else to handle all aspects of their web pages. While it’s good to delegate, for many micro-businesses it is also good to understand how the basics of your web site work. Then you can make quick changes when necessary and have a better understanding of what is and isn’t involved in making changes. That way when you do decide to outsource, you will know what can be done, what’s involved and how much (little) you should be willing to pay.

For new internet marketers, learning how to control your own page is all but required if you are bootstrapping your new online enterprise. There are two reasons for that. First much of the process is much simpler than  most people would believe, and second by knowing what is involved and possible, you can delegate with more confidence and at lesser prices.

Learning how to access your C-panel and taking charge is roughly akin to the difference between being a passenger in your daddy’s car and learning to drive.  Once you know how to drive, you have a lot more freedom about where and when you go places.

I got my initial education on C-Panel from Bob the Teacher and Chris Morris, and I highly recommend them to everyone.  Their video series will unlock the potential of your web site for you.  You will learn how to set up you own emails, create your own web pages, set up data bases, and much much more.

I found the course to be my personal emancipation proclamation.  It allowed me to escape the tyranny of being locked in web hosting agreements and the need to play a waiting game to make changes to my own site.

It was a breakthrough. It may well be the same for you. Remember the feeling of freedom you had when your first had your own car and then the ability to travel where you choose. Discover C-panel will be like getting the keys for the first time. And while you may need some time to learn and master your new skills, it will set you on the path where you can soon be traveling cross county in no time.

Bob and Chris offer a free initial video lesson, which will give you a good idea of their teaching method and the topic. From there you can decide whether or not to proceed with the full course. I did, I encourage you to do so as well.

Click on the Image above to learn more and get access to your first free video.

Create A Website, Follow-up with a Squidoo Lens

I am trying to practice what I preach. And so now that I have my Aroma Therapy Scents blog site up, I am writing an article a day pointing to a different page each day and using the keywords featured on that page. That is actually not to time consuming. I know the topic, I already have material to work with and a clear sense of the keywords I want to use. The article directories have been eating them up, with several already apporved.

The next step was to create a Squidoo Lens. Frankly, I largely cut and pasted articles from the web site into Squidoo, and then hyper linked the key words in each article back to the pages.  I added a lot of Amazon and eBay modules to the Lens, which should generate at least some sales. Time will tell. At the bottom of each text module I added a link to my sales page and to the home page, encouraging people to buy my Aroma Therapy Scents eBook and or sign up for my 10 day ecourse.

My main goal is to get backlinks to the web site. But Squidoo should also send some traffic my way and generate a few sales here and there.

Now I should probably go back and rework some of the text as they may be duplicate content as I just cut and pasted the articles. That will take a bit more time, but otherwise I have less than an hour into the Squidoo Lens, which is a real time bargain.  see: Aromatherapy Scents Squidoo Lens http://www.squidoo.com/AromatherapyScents

I recommend that everyone with a web site, set up a Squidoo page. It may generate some revenues, but more importantly it provides backlinks and traffic.

A niche blog launched with Niche Profits Classroom

I’ve finished creating my first Niche Profits Classroom Blog Site. It’s called Aromatherapy Scents.

It took me about four days to complete, which is a lot longer than the Adam and Alen say it should, but I am an expert and finding every possible way to screw things up, and I did.

That said, I was very happy with the step by step videos that are part of the Niche Profit Press segment of their membership site. Virtually every step of the way is spelled out in detail. And even though I was able to mess up, I was also able to figure out what I did wrong by playing back the individual videos.

One of the things I like about their approach is that they have a lot of very short videos to cover each step. These are sometimes a minute or less sometimes as long as 5 or 6 minutes. That means you don’t have to sit through a 30 minute video to see the detail you missed at minute 25.

The other thing to say about the Niche Profit Press setup is that there are a lot of steps involved. You could do this yourself if you have a lot of experience with WordPress. But for those of use with from little to moderate skill with wordpress, the step by step process is the way to go.

Now some of my problems were due to dumb mistakes on my part. For example, I misspelled my url and then couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t showing up when I set the DNS to the new web hosting service I am using. And a couple of times, I sped ahead thinking I knew what I was doing only to be disproven in short order.

The other end of it is that Adam and Alen teach a way to outsource all your research and writing. I’m still at the do it myself stages. And that is the second half of what I want to share with you today.

Some of you are aware that I was promoting a PLR package last week for aromatherapy. And yes, I bought it myself. The package contained an 11 chapter, 50 page ebook and 10 additional articles. It was by and large pretty well written and contained a lot of worthwhile information. From my perspective it was like buying a research paper on the topic, only I also had the additional rights to use it as my own.

But I didn’t use it out of the box. First I rewrote the various articles that came with the package. Initially this was to be sure it wouldn’t be seen as duplicate content by Google.

But what was more interesting was rewriting it a second time to fit into each of the articles keywords that I discovered using the Niche Profits Classroom’s Money Word Matrix.

The Money Word Matrix is what first got me interested in the Niche Profit Classroom. Rather than just finding highly searched for keywords, the money word matrix seeks keywords that are actively searched for but for which relatively few resulting sites exist. In other words, keywords that I could have a real shot at getting top rankings on relatively soon.

Access to the software is part of the Niche profits membership and is well worth it on its own. It still took some time to figure out the best such keywords to use for each of the ten articles. But once I found them, I went back to the article text and worked them into the articles.

Now in addition to the articles and the eBook, I needed to come up with a 10 lesson e-Course. To do that I went to the eBook, and in essence pulled a summary lesson from each chapter, being careful to not give everything away in the course. So once again the PLR was more of a research document from which I wrote my own articles. I mention this again, because I sense that some people new to the concept of PLR see it as plagiarism. In fact, private label rights are a well established and inherently ethical approach to publishing information.

And now that I have my site up, I have been writing articles, one a day focusing again on each of the articles one by one on the blog. Again each of the articles I write will be focused on the keywords used in each of the articles on the blog and will be directed not to the home page alone but to the interior pages of the site. Since I first acquired the PLR rights and worked on the article, my wife brought forth an alternative health tome she picked up at a garage sale and I am now supplementing the PLR material with information from another source.

I have no doubt that this concept and approach will eventually raise my new post on Aromatherapy to a top ranking on Google in the next few months. I am confident my e-course will generate a list of people interested in aromatherapy whether they buy my eBook or not. And I am also confident that many will buy the ebook, and some will also buy aromatherapy candles, lamps, dispensers and other paraphernalia over time.

I’ve written in length about this today, to demonstrate one way of effectively using PLR material and to encourage you to give serious thought to joining Niche Profits Classroom. For under $50 a month, it is well worth the investment.

I intend to resurrect some past PLR purchases of mine and run them through the Niche Profit Classroom process and I will be watching for other niche PLR products I can use in the future. This won’t keep me from pursuing my other Micro Business Specialist consulting efforts, but hey once once of these little blogs are set up and fully launched, they will generate income for a long time. I think I could soon pop one of these out in less than a day. Since its April already, I can imaging having 25-35 of these by the end of the year. That could make my year.

http://askearlabout.com/NicheProfitClassroom.php

The internet has changed, Davids of the world its your turn!

While we were sleeping, the internet changed.

Well, actually we knew it would. We saw it do so. In fact we have all been fully involved in the new wave that has now for years been called web 2.0.

But have we stopped to pay attention to the power it has given us?  Not me. At least not until I got my copy of Mike Paetzold’s new releaste, Authority 2.0.

You see, I have been content to be a little guy. And while I wouldn’t typically admit it, a bit intimidated by the Goliaths of the internet world. The huge mega sites, that draw in hundreds of thousands, even millions of visitors on a daily basis.

I’ve been shopping for the tiny niches, the crumbs no one else would bother to care about. How about you?

In my post yesterday, I talked about hitting singles. And frankly, I like hitting singles.  But wouldn’t it be nice to get that occasional home run?

Well home run hitting requires a bit of training, and this new ebook by Mike Paetzold is just the ticket.

It spells out what it takes to plan and execute the creation of a genuine authority site. The top dog within your chosen niche. Where you are not just one of the players but the recognized industry leader.

And the surprising secret, is that the tools that have evolved over the past few years, the web 2.0 we have all been immersed in; have made the process simple enough that even us little Davids and Diannes can create a powerful authority site.  One that once took a wallet and a sizable staff.

In this 159 page document, Mikes lays out a clear path to niche dominance using the social networking tools that surround us. The pathway he draws is clear and surprisingly doable.

A blueprint to success this well assembled should cost an arm and a leg, but that’s not Mike’s style. In fact, he even included master resale rights to this game changer of a document. But you must be one of the first 100 to grab the book, if you want them.

If you are able to dream big, if you like to aim for the wall, grab your bat, and grab a copy of Authority 2.0.

Now one last comment. Not everyone is a Babe Ruth or Harmon Killebrew.  Some of us would give our eye teeth to be a Tony Oliva, (Age and georgraphy hint) The beauty of this ebook is that even if you decide not to go for the home run and set up an authority site, much of what you will learn here will apply to your other sites. They may give you just that extra kick to stretch some of your singles into doubles, and that’s not a bad outcome at all. Authority 2.0.

Niche Blogs and Web Sites are Ideal for Home Gamers

Much of what I write about here is oriented to the “Bricks and Mortar” business person, but the Micro Business Specialist is a “Big Tent.” concept and particularly includes one person shops staking out a claim via the internet.

For a few home run hitters, the internet is a place to dominate a field. To be the top guru in pay per click, or Adsense or Article writing etc. And then to make millions selling how to books to all of us wanna bees.

A better strategy for most, is to strive to become good a just getting hits. Singles will do nicely if you can string enough of them together. And one of the best ways to get hits consistently is with niche marketing.

I have two suggestions today. One for those of you already aware of the power of niches, and a second for those who may still be getting their feet on the ground here in the less than solid cyber fields.

First the immediate and urgent. It’s one thing to identify a niche, its another to fill that niche with useful material.

One of the best shortcuts is to find and use quality private label material. Private label material is like the store brand of green beans at your local grocery store. It may have the stores label on it, but it was grown and packaged by someone else.

This is done everyday in many fields including article research and writing. You have all heard of ghost writers. Private Label Rights is the term used to describe articles and even books that have been ghost written, and are available for you to use.

Some are PLR material is better than others and some niches are better than others. I will return to this topic again. But I want to share with you my most recent niche and the source of material I will be using. Because if you hurry, you too can grab on of the few remaining rights packages.

The niche is aroma therapy. Aroma therapy is a sweet smelling niche. It’s been around for thousands of years and will likely be around for the foreseeable future. It’s also a niche that isn’t over saturated. That’s why the recent release of a quality PLR package on the subject is worth more than passing attention.

There are a lot of ways to build a successful online enterprise. But one of the surest is to focus on niche markets, and create internet properties that serve those niches. When you can find a quality PLR product that fills a niche you have a tremendous head start.

Doug Champigny, who is a PLR master if ever there was one, has just released an Aroma Therapy package. It includes a 50 page ebook that you can sell as your own, a set of ten articles and ten podcasts of those articles. It also includes a set of graphics you can use and a blank set that you can edit to rename the eBook to your own title.

You could have these added to a web site or blog in short order and add adsense ads, click bank products and a wide number of related products from elsewhere.

Now word to the wise, you will have much more success with this if you rework the content to make it your own. I spent a chunk of my yesterday doing just that. I reworked each of the articles into my own words. It wasn’t difficult as the material was well written. In the process I learned a lot about the topic, which is a plus.

I bought a new domain name, www.aromatherapyscents.com which I will launch as a wordpress blog site in the very near future. I will offer the eBook for sale and provide useful information in the form of the 10 articles on Aroma Therapy that were included in the package.

I will probably add Adsense ads on the site and offer a set of additional products from a select few of the hundreds of aroma therapy and related companies that offer affiliate programs. I will also set up a Google Alert for the term Aroma Therapy and monitor what comes my way. That should allow me to add relevant material to the blog format as time goes on.

I’m slow, and I have many diverse tasks on my daily schedule, so this may take me a few days to get set up to the point I like. But once done, I will have an internet property that will attract visitors and sales for years to come. That is what I call a single. Now if it gets really hot, and I discover that I am getting a lot of traffic I may try to stretch it into a double, but I will take a look at that once I round first.

Now heads up, Doug Champigny the author of the PLR Package on Aroma Thearpy is no fool, and he restricts his PLR material to just 100 copies. That way the internet doesn’t get over saturated with the stuff. This works to my advantage, and yours if you decide to jump on this bandwagon.

But you need to grab your copy today. This one is already largely gone. There’s a growing group of folk who grab Doug’s stuff as soon as it’s issued and run with it. I’m one of them and I think you should be too.

Go to http://askearlabout.com/champignyAromaTherapy.php

Now if this is all new to you, let me suggest that their are dozens of people who teach bits and pieces of this approach. I’ve spent tons of money over the years on eBooks and courses that covered various parts of the whole. Sometimes the parts meshed together with one another, and other times  they didn’t. They almost always had a hole, sometimes a big hole when it came to implementation of the theory being taught.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve become such a fan of the Niche Profits Classroom. If you are still struggling to find your way online, they have an extremely comprehensive training program and some cutting edge tactics that will get you up and running in the right direction fast.

I don’t know if it’s the best such training resource out there or not. It may be. It is certainly the best I have encountered, and rather than charging $1,000’s you can access it for a small monthly fee, take what you need and leave. They have a huge array of videos that walk you through the steps to almost everything you need to know. And they share some top end secrets that will make your head spin.

So in this relatively long post I have shared an immediate opportunity to grab great material for a lucrative niche, and my best recommendation on how to move forward online if you aren’t fully up to speed yet.

I hope you will take action on both.

Squidoo – Rank on Top Twice!

Squidoo – Rank on Top Twice! PodcastSquidoo – Rank on Top Twice!

Getting your web site to be top ranked on Google and the other search engines is a complicated task. Particularly, if you are one of many within a given market area.

A little known tool for many main street businesses is an internet portal called Squidoo.

It’s similar in many ways to sites like Facebook, and Myspace in that it allows people to create a web presence easily, but unlike the aforementioned, it unabashedly permits commercialization.  That means you can put up sites that advertise your business.

The easiest way to do so is to reuse much of the content you have on your web page now.  Just rephrase and reorient it to fit the new medium.

Squidoo calls it’s pages, lens.  There are a group of modules that you can create and edit in minutes once you get the hang of their system.  There are a lot of interesting things you can do with the various modules. The main thing you want to do is use your Squidoo lens as additional advertising tool for your services and as a funnel to send traffic to your main web site.

The most critical point when setting up your first lens is what you call it.

If you are a butcher in Minneapolis, you want to do some keyword research as to the best term to use for your market. It may be “butcher”, it may be “quality meats”, it may be any number of things.  What ever it is, you want your first lens to use the best of the picks and then add the words, “in Minneapolis” or what ever the top geographical term is in your market. Then after you set up a lens,  “Quality Meats in Minneapolis” set up another for “Best Brats in Minneapolis.”   Since Squidoo is free, there is no reason for you to not set up multiple Lens on your best keyword phrases.

If you do, you will often find that your Squidoo len(s) will get higher ranking than your own web page, even if you have optimized your web sites meta tags geographically, as I do for my clients.

That’s because Squidoo itself has a high PR or page rank in the eyes of Google.

Now what you want to do is include links in your Squidoo Lens to your web site’s home page.  This helps raise your web sites ranking in Google’s eyes as well.

It sees Squidoo as an “authority” site and gives more credence to links coming from it.

There is a lot more to internet marketing than just having a web site.  That’s what keeps internet marketing consultants like me in business.

While Squidoo is easy to use, like everything, there is a learning curve.  Once you master the basic mechanics you also need to learn the strategies to make it work for your particular needs.  There are a number of eBooks about Squidoo out there.  I publish one called Squidoo Basics. It is a general introduction to Squidoo.

There are other formats beyond Squidoo, like Hub Pages, but Squidoo is probably the best place to start building a broader internet presence.  To get started all you need do is open an account at www.Squidoo.com

In due course, you will not only get your web site on the top of the Google Rankings in your home town, you will also have a Squidoo page there as well.  When prospects see you listed not once, but twice, in the top of the local listings, they will begin to understand that you are the person to go to locally for home staging services.

And that’s where I intend my clients to be.  On top of their local markets.

Blogging PlugIns- Which Ones to Use.

While I have been blogging for a while now, I am far from an expert.  Luckily, I have run into Mike Paetzold who is as good a blogger as any I have encountered so far online. I have learned a lot from him and monitor a couple of his blogs on a regular basis.

In a new posting today, on his Word Press Made Easy Blog, he offers a list of the plug ins he uses.  This is an important topic and I wanted to share it with you.  Plug ins are powerful and can seem mysterious as well to those just getting started in blogging.

I will be going through his list of plug ins and comparing it to the ones I am currently using.  You may want to do so as well.

However, you need not follow his list blindly. I will be not be changing one for sure.  I prefer the audio manager plugin for pod casts to the one he uses.  That’s not to take anything away from his list though. Different plugins work differently on different themes. That ads to the Joy/frustration of Plug ins, but it is the real world.  So you will need to experiment.

You can find his list at: http://wptutorial.com/blog/information/plugins-i-am-using-right-now While you are there you may want to do yourself a favor and sign up to his list. He will reward you with a good ebook, called Blog Tracker thats worht $37. More importantly, you will find that Mike is a valuable resource if you are blogging on a regular basis. And you should be.

Internet Video Advertising is Hot!

Internet Video Advertising is Hot!

Sites like YouTube and Google Video get millions of visitors every day and many of them are looking for information on local businesses in their area. They want to find out about the pizza place down the road, a contractor, or a new hair salon. They could be looking for anything, the point is, they are looking for local businesses.

Nothing attracts massive amounts of traffic and prospective clients to your website the way that an Internet video can. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend big bucks to get a Great Promotional Video for your business! For only $149 we will produce an attractive and informative 30-45 second Video Ad promoting your business and the fine products or services you offer.

Your video ad will be produced and uploaded to all of the Top Video and Social Media Sites and will be seen by hundreds or thousands of people in your area that are looking for a business like yours.

Your Video Ad is going to give your business more exposure and will appeal to your target audience better than any other form of marketing. Your video advertisement will get people to take action and visit your website, walk in your doors or call you for more information.

Take A Look At Everything That Is Included for Only $149 and You Will See There Is No Better Way for You To Bring In New Customers!

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