Making Money online DAY 9

October 18, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 9: The Magic Money Tree…

One of the people doing the challenge has already made their first money online from the website they started as part of the crashed challenge. Now that we have some decent content, and are building traffic it is time that I talk to you about money so that you can turn that traffic into $$$. I was speaking with someone earlier and came up with the following formula…

$50,000/year = $4166.67/month = $138.89/day = $5.79/hour = $0.10/minute

Today’s going be a little long, however I think it is plenty worth it… We are signing up to different services to moneytize our site. And then looking at how we can use Simple Ads Manager to show the banners on our site. Today lacks videos at the moment, however I will add these later as I still have to edit them.

Also I’ve added a competition to win 10 articles for your site, check it out here.

Spam?

I hate to say it, but I hate spam. Now that we are listed in search engines we are going get automated tools leaving comments on our blogs to try and make the spammers sites more popular. Or even more cunning to try and sell you secret methods to increase your traffic or make your blog more popular. Now I am lazy and cannot be bother manually reviewing every comment so lets make it harder for the spammers.

The simpliest solution to stop this is to activate Akismet.

  1. In your Dashboard, click Plugins on the menu.
  2. Find Akismet in the list and click Activate.
  3. You then have to goto http://rfurl.net/akismet to get a license key, click get and akismet API Key. Scroll down and click Personal Site. For a personal site you can select to choose how much you page, and just slide the slider across and select $0 (free).
  4. Goto your email, and find the email from Akismet, open this and copy the API Key into the plugin settings. Click Save.

This will automatically mark suspect comments as spam, and 99.99% of the time is pretty accurate. However if you are worried about missing genuine comments it may be worth reviewing the spam list once a week.

The video is coming soon…

Affiliate CPA Marketing…

We covered what affiliate marketing was in Day 4, where we looked at getting paid a commission for each sale we make. Now however I want to introduce you to CPA (Cost Per Action) marketing, where we get paid a commission each time we get someone to do something. This may range from getting  a user to enter their email address or zip code, to getting them to download and install a software program.

There are affiliate networks dedicated to this, with varying degree’s of exclusiveness. I’ve spoken to a few of my affiliate managers, and they have agreed that if you are doing the crashed challenge you will be approved by them(so long as you havn’t already been banned!).


The first network I want to introduce you to is MaxBounty…

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/mb (If you do not want to use my affiliate link just Google MaxBounty… However in this case their normal approval process will apply)
  2. Click Become a Publisher, fill in the details and enter your website in the Website Url box, say that you are doing the Crashed Challenge in the description and a little bit about what your site is. Select No in the “Is this account for Incentive Traffic” box.
  3. Read and Agree to the terms and conditions, and then click Submit Application.
  4. Email  your assigned affiliate manager saying that you have just signed up, you are doing the Crashed Challenge (or for a quicker response message them on AIM or Skype on their account).
  5.  Once you are approved, login and click Search Campaigns, type in the topic of your site and click search.  Make a list of products you think are related to your Niche for Day 10 tommorow.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you use any affiliate tracking links on social networking sites you must use a short url service such as http://bit.ly - You will get banned if you just use MaxBountys own urls as they are.

Another Affiliate Network

Just like we signed up to Clickbank, there is another Affiliate Network which is similar and having access to more offers is never bad is it?

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/p (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Goto the Affiliates menu and click Register, then Register now.
  3. Fill in the form and click Create My Account.
  4. Confirm your email, login and have a look at the range of products on offer here. Make a list of products you think are related to your Niche for Day 10 tommorow.

Amazon Affiliate Network

The next source of income is the Amazon Affiliate Network. Generally I find that I can find something on Amazon for every single niche possible no matter how weird it is. And the best thing is that Amazon is great for upselling people into buying addition things at the same time.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/amazon (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Click Join now for Free, fill in the form, read and agree terms and conditions and click Sign up.
  3. Confirm email.
  4. Log in and browse for products related to your niche. Make a list of these for Day 10 tommorow.

And we can’t forget the Overrated Google Adsense…

There is yet another type of affiliate marketing known as CPC (Cost Per Click) where you get paid just for people clicking on the advert on your website. The best known and biggest is Google, and applying now you have your website is easy.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/as (Not an affiliate link)
  2. Click Sign Up Now
  3. Fill in your details, read the terms and conditions and click Submit Information. Usually this will be processed within 24 hours.
  4. I will cover how to add the Adsense to Simple Ads Manager in Day 10.

Summary

This is a good list to get started with, I will introduce some new networks next week, however I am trying to avoid causing information overload…

Tommorow I will cover different ways we can use these companies to make money through our sites!
 


Making Money online DAY 8

October 18, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 8: Stats, Questions and answers…

As I had to take yesterday off, Day 8 is being released now, and Day 9 will then be released towards this evening. Because I originally planned to make each day’s task around 1 – 2 hours long I feel it is unfair to add to your workload here. Instead I will take this opportunity to answer some common questions, and go over the basics of statistics.

We’ll look at Statistics and what they really mean, and then I will answer questions after that.

Statistics

What is the use of having install Statspress if you do not understand what it tells you. Here I will give a quick explanation of each section in the menu.

When you click on Statspess V in the menu you are given an overview of your visitors. We are interested in the Visitor and Page view rows, and the Yesterday and Today columns.

A Visitor is a computer that has opened your website, and is tracked by what is known as the IP address.

A Page view is created when a visitor views a page of your website, or moves from one page to another.

In addition to this we have the Last search terms, which tells us what people have typed into a search engine to find us. From these we can also help develop new article titles or keywords to target.


If we look at the menu we have a Visitors option, this will tell us how many people are looking at each page and on which day. We can then work out what people like (or are finding most) and allow us to develop more articles like that.

We then have the Views option which is similar to the visitors option but tells us how many times each page is viewed (useful for if people keep going back to the same page)…

The next menu option to pay attention to is Referrers. This tells us where our visitors were before they found our site… And is useful for telling if your twitter, facebook, youtube marketing is paying off or not. It also is useful to find people that linked to our site as well.

Questions

Q) I was thinking about how we put a link to our advertise here page in the footer of the blog and I thought that is not a very visible place for the link if we want people to see it. Can you explain your logic for putting the link in the footer and why not someplace where people will notice it easier? I mean if we are trying to monetize our blog with this method why hide it in the footer? I am sure you have your reasons though so I was hoping to understand it better.

A) It is just one income stream, and one of the lower converting ones. However we do add 2 banner adverts which show on every page advertising this page if there are no other adverts in the system.

Also by linking to this on every page we show search engines that it is an important page on our site. Try typing “advertise best football goals” (without quotes) into google and see what you find…

——————-

Q) I have a question about setting up the facebook page. This has to be attached to a personal account – doesn’t it?
Do you make the personal account one you use just for this, that is for your websites? Or would you attach it to one you use for your family and friends?

A) No it doesn’t. The way I showed it you can create a facebook page without having to create a facebook account. Because of this you can create a facebook page for your site without breaking Facebook Terms of Use which prohibits you from having more than one account. To create a page without creating a facebook account goto http://rfurl.net/fbpages and click Create Page.

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Q) I’m approaching the part where I’ll have to write 25 articles and I had a question : Are you repeating yourself from time to time between articles? I don’t mean an exact copy, but the same kind of ideas / tips

Also, if I would go about delegating this work, having someone to write stuff for me, do you care he that person write something too similar to what’s already on your site?

A) There will always be some overlap if your site is targeted at a specific topic/niche. However each article has a unique point. If you want to delegate the work ensure that the writter is providing unique content and give them article titles to write for.

——————-

Q) quick question, how many people should we follow per day and for how many days?

A) I would personally say to follow between 30 – 50 people a day (which is around 3-4 minutes of running Tweet Attacks. And this is something that is done long term so keep doing it for as long as you keep the site running!

——————-

Q)  Not sure i understand. In Tweetattack you can find people to follow based on categories? But don´t they need to follow you to be able to read your messages? Or you men they do if the page looks interesting?

A) You can people to follow based on your topic. If your twitter looks interesting and they are interested they will follow you back. Generally 10% of the people you follow will follow you back.

——————

Q) I cannot use clickbank as I do not have 3 credit cards

A) There is a rumour that you need 3 credit cards to signup to clickbank. This is wrong.

To stop people from making a clickbank account to buy stuff for themselves with a discount ClickBank has a rule where 5 different people need to buy using your affiliate link and using at least 3 different credit cards (so like 1 credit card for each person that buys something). Until this happens clickbank will not make any payments to you, however selling 5 things isn’t that difficult as you will see next week!

——————-

Q) I am struggling to find good keywords…

A) Keywords are useful, but I think they are very over-rated… Just think if you work on your keywords and get them to #1 in google. Google then just changes its ranking, all your work is gone…

Now if you look at social, once a user likes your site, the site stays with that user and Google can’t take that away from you. For now concentrate on the challenge, I have not done any keyword research as it is not important at this stage…
 


Making Money online DAY 7

October 16, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 7: Drunken Rambles and Twitter Traffic…

First of all I would like to apologise for any typos in this post. I am fresh home for the clubs and have probably had to0 much to drink (I love Fireball Whisky – its a whisky with a cinnamon twist!)…

Today I will be talking you through several things, hopefully I do not get in trouble for giving too much in this post but meh, I blame the drink! I have also started using a short url service for my links as I would like to track how many people are clicking, on what and from where to help me improve the future posts in the challenge. If it is an affiliate link I will state that it is.

My Fair Affiliate Link Policy

When you click on an affiliate link I may earn a commission, this does not affect the amount you pay, or your need to pay. 99% of the services I am using in this challenge are free, some may offer a paid upgrade however that is completely at your discresion and not required for the challenge (unless specified). Occasionally it may be that I have arranged a special deal with the owner/provider of that service; in this case the only way you may get the deal is to use my affiliate link or referral code. I will always try to state if that is the case.

I am not here to make money from the challenge, I am here to get you making money from the challenge. I do spend around 6-8 hours (or more) working on every single post in the challenge, and would appreciate you using my affiliate links as this also helps me calculate how many people are actively following the challenge. And hopefully once you have started earning you may see the value in upgrading on some of the services.

The Mindset…

Tonight I’ve spent out with some good friends, however I decided that I should share with you some basics behind my mindset.

1. Believe that you deserve every $ that you earn, unless you believe you deserve it you will never earn to your full potential. You are not getting money for nothing, you are getting and deserve money because you are taking action to get it. If other people do not want to take action, they do not deserve it…

2. Respect yourself, I know how easy it is to spend money, how easy it is to just sit there working to earn that money. With money comes a good life, but if you forget your life then money will get you nothing. I came home alone tonight; this is partly because I intended to write this post, and partly because the thrill is in the chase.

3. Dedication. Even though I have stumbled home, I have done my 50 situps, and 50 pressups before I have got into bed (yes I am writting this in bed)… I know that sometimes it seems like a lot of work, but you rarely get anything for nothing… If you do not want something enough you will never get it!

Now with that out of the way… Today we are going look at how we can leverage the power of twitter.

How we can use Twitter…

Twitter is easily the second (if not the most) influential social network around, and we have out account all the way from Day 1. Now that we have our site with some decent content it is time to look at building up our traffic…

Personally though all of this can be done manually, that takes time and dedication, and I like things done for me. That is the reason I am going to introduce you to two new tools, that both are free (though a professional upgrade is avaliable).


Tool 1: Get More Followers…

There’s no point using twitter, if no one is going see our tweets. Our first step today is to learn how to get more followers. To help with this I have found some free software that will help us do this.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/tweetattacks
  2. Click to close the page, it will show a box offering you a special offer. Click Cancel to stop it closing and accept this offer. This is the free software that we want to use.
  3. Click Open as we want to install this software once it is downloaded. When it finishes downloading we want to copy the files out of the zip to our desktop.
  4. Open Setup and go through the process just clicking Next at each stage.
  5. Find the Tweet Attacks icon on your Desktop and click it to open it.
  6. You need to register, enter your name and email address and click activate. Wait for the email to arrive to confirm your activation (usually takes minutes…). Click the confirmation link…
  7. Open Tweet Attacks again, it will say an update is avaliable. Click Update Now and let it do it’s stuff…
  8. Goto the Manage menu, and select Twitter Accounts. Enter your twitter username, and password. Click Save and Close.
  9. Goto the Switch Module menu and select Account Statistics. In the left menu click Reload Accounts, and then Update Statistics.
  10. Goto the Switch Module menu, and click Follow/Unfollow. Select your username in the Account list, then in the Task menu select Follow from search result. In the Parameter enter a keyword related to your niche (I used football). Click Start Tasks to start following people related to your keyword, let it run a couple of minutes and then click Stop.
  11. This is something you need to do over the next few days…

The video is here…

Note If you know how to limit how many people are followed at one time in the free version feel free to let me know and I’ll update the post!

How to Automate Tweets…

I like being able to set a site up, and leave it to run itself whilst I do more important things. One of the best free tools you will find online for twitter allows you to schedule you tweets in advance. When you combine this with the ability to schedule posts in wordpress you have an all round winner. I don’t think any more explaination is needed here.

Whats even better is you can add as many twitter accounts with the same account on this website making it a one stop twitter manager.

  1. Goto http://rfurl.net/autotweet (or if you don’t want to use my affiliate link google SocialOomph).
  2. Click Register, fill in your details, do the captcha and click Register.
  3. Goto your email and find the confirmation email, open the confirmation link to confirm your account.
  4. Sign up their email list if you want to get sales emails… Or click Login and enter your username and password, and click Login.
  5. Goto Social Accounts on the menu, Add New Accounts, and then click Add Twitter. Login to twitter or click Authorize when asked. Click Authorize App.
  6. Click Save when you arrive back at the SocialOomph website to save your account.
  7. Goto Scheduled Updates on the menu and then click Schedule New Update.
  8. Enter the update you want to post, it must be shorter than 140 characters. Once you have done this you specify when you want the tweet to be posted; either by x amount of time after the last tweet, or by putting in a date and time.
  9. You need to schedule at least one tweet for every post you have schedule in wordpress… In addition also add some other tweets at appropiate times such as “It’s great to be home, work today was crazy!” to be posted in the evening etc…

The video showing you how to do this is here…

I have only touched on the power of SocialOomph here, if you have spare time have a look at some of the other features that you can use!!!

 


Making Money online DAY 6

October 13, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 6 & 7: Content Creation

This weekend write and schedule one post a day for the next 25 days. If you need to remind yourself how to schedule a post please see Day 2 here.


 


Making Money online DAY 5

October 12, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 5: Easy but Often forgotten money… (Includes Day 4: Part 2)



Now that we have the profile of our user, and a list of problems that the user may have it is time to start to think about how we can put the solutions in front of the user. Personally I use really advanced software for this which controls all my websites in a single place, however for our small site I’ve found something a lot simpler.

I am not an expert in this new plugin so if you know more than me, feel free to add your comments however I have spent the past week using it to try it out. Part 2 of Day 4 covers how to set this up, and how we can add our first Income Stream to our website.

Today involves installing our Ad Management software, joining our first affiliate network, creating our first sales page, and configuring our Ad Management software for this… Sounds like a lot so lets get started!

Install the Simple Ads Manager

The software is a plugin called Simple Ads Manager, when talking about ad’s the place the ad is shown is normally called a zone. Whilst the ad itself is called a creative and belongs to an ad campaign.

In Simple Ads Manager the place the ad is shown is called a Place, and the Ads are called Zones (don’t ask my why)… What we will do now is install Simple Ad’s Manager, add a page on our site offering to sell advertising, and then set up a default ad to advertise this page if no other ads are avaliable. I am also going to give you a few default ad’s to use.

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard
  2. Click Plugins, then click Add New.
  3. Enter “Simple Ads Manager” and click Search
  4. Click Details and make sure that the Author is “minimus” as there is another plugin by nearly the same name. If it is click Install Now.
  5. Click Activate Plugin.
  6. A new option will appear on the left menu called “Ads”


Joining our first affiliate network: Clickbank…

Now this is where everyone else goes sign up here, copy this code here, and you are done… I’m special because I am different and I am going to try and explain it so you understand exactly what we are doing.

An affiliate is someone (or a company) that makes their money through getting paid commission for selling someone else’s product or service. Generally the more affiliates that promote or market that persons product, the more money the person makes.

Finding these affiliates willing to promote their product was a big problem, however the solution was simple. A “middleman” was developed called an affiliate network which is like a meeting place for affiliates and product/service providers. This allows affiliates to sign up to view and promote a list of products/services that are listed on the network by their creators.

Clickbank is Instant Automatic Approval so you can start promoting offers immediately without having to be approved! You do not have to do this for every site you create, and should only do this if you do not already have a ClickBank account!

To get started…

  1. Watch the video for an explanation of how Affiliate Networks Work…
  2. Goto http://www.clickbank.com
  3. Click on Sign Up
  4. Fill in the details, pick a unique username for yourself. Read and Accept the Terms and click create account.
  5. Goto your email and find the confirmation email from ClickBank, open the link.
  6. Go back to your email and copy your confirmation code from the ClickBank email. Go back to the clickbank you opened, paste this code in the confirmation code box, type in the confirmation code and click Confirm.
  7. Important - ClickBank will automatically generate a password for you and show it to you now, write it down in a safe place or memorise it. If you lose your username you will lose anything you have earned in that account! I have also changed the password from the one shown in the video…


FULL DISCLOSURE DISCLAIMER
 Clickbank does not run a refferal program for new affiliates, I will not earn a single penny from your signing up to this affiliate network.


Our First sales page…

Now we have our Clickbank account I will show you just how simple it is to add multiple streams of income to your website in one go. Many people do not bother to do this, it takes 10 minutes and you only have to get one person to buy from either method to be in profit. Easy but often forgotten money…

  1. Open your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Click Pages, Add New.
  3. Enter the title “Advertise Here” – (I use this so people looking for sites to advertise on in google can find us)
  4. Untick the “Show this page in Menus” tick box
  5. Start writing your page content  – (I have included my example below for you, please write your own version of it)
  6. Goto http://ClickBank.com, and click Marketplace on the top right. Enter “banner” into the search box and click search.
  7. You can decide which product you want to promote, or if you want to promote a design service instead. Personally I am promoting Easy Banner Creator.
  8. Click promote next to the product/service. It will open a new window. In the Account Nickname box type your username, for Tracking ID type “ap” (for Advertising Page) and click create. Copy the domain it gives you in the top box.
  9. Go back to your Advertise Here page, and add a comment saying something along the lines of “If you do not have any banners to advertise with already, I recommend you use Easy Banner Creator here to make professional looking banners“. Select the text “Easy Banner Creator” and click the Hyperlink (Insert/Edit Link) button on the editor toolbar (looks like a paperclip). Paste the link from Clickbank into the URL box, tick open in a new window, and click Add Link.
  10. Finish writing your advertise page telling them to email you (include your email address) if they are interested in advertising. Click Publish to add the page to the site.
  11. Now we want to add a link to the advertising page in the footer of everypage the same way we did for the Privacy Policy. Click Appearance, then click Editor. Select the footer in the file list that appears on the right.
  12. Now you want to look for  where you added the Privacy Policy code and insert the following code between the </a> and the <br />. After you have done this check your site to make sure the Advertise link is on every page.

 - <a href=”/advertise-here”>Advertise</a>

The sample text I use is avaliable here http://www.bestfootballgoals.info/advertise-here, PLEASE use this only as a reference and rewrite it yourself for the best benefit!

How to configure WordPress Simple Ads Manager…

Now we want to get it ready to use, and add our first (often forgotten) method of monetizing our site, this is simply to add the ability for people to advertise on your site… I was going create some lush banners but cannot find my photoshop cd, I will add these as a resource at a later date…

We start by adding a new page detailing our offer:

  1. Save these two images (right click on the following addresses and click Save Target as…) http://crashedchallenge.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/468×60.jpg and http://crashedchallenge.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/300×250.jpg
  2. Login to your WordPress Dashboard
  3. Click Ads on the menu
  4. Click Add New Place.
  5. Enter the name (at the top of the page) “Top Banner Spot”, make sure the size is 468 x 60. Click upload and select the image you just downloaded called 468×60.jpg. In the target box enter “http://www.yourwebsite.com/advertise-here”.
  6. Scroll down the page, and where it says Codes in the Code before box enter “<center><p>” and the code after box enter “</p></center>”. Scroll up and click the Save button on the right.
  7. Click on New Place in the Ads menu on the left. Enter the name “Bottom Banner Spot”, make sure the size is 300×250. Click upload and select the image you just downloaded called 300×250.jpg. In the target box enter “http://www.yoursite.com/advertise-here”.
  8. Scroll down the page and where it says Codes in the code before box enter “<center>” and the code after box enter “</center>”. Scroll up and click the Save button on the right.
  9. In the Ads menu click on Settings.
  10. In the Ads Place before content select “Top Banner Spot”, tick both the boxes after this Allow ads place… and Allow using predefined…
  11. In the Ads Place after content select “Bottom Banner Spot”, tick both the boxes after this Allow ads place… and Allow usng predefined…
  12. Scroll down and click Save Changes…

The video for this is here…

If you have better graphics skills feel free to upload your own images instead of the ones I have supplied.

Summary

Today we have just started moneytizing our site and I have shared a money method that 99% of Internet Marketers do not do. Back many years ago it used to be very common, now though people get so distracted by advanced stuff they forget tried and tested basics.
 


Making Money online DAY 3

October 10, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 3: Loose Ends…

We are coming along, just 2 days ago we had nothing, now we have our blog, with 2 pages of unique content. Social Networking accounts ready to use… It’s nearly time to start thinking about money however there are a few loose ends to tie up first.

Today is going be the last day we spend any time doing any major onsite stuff for the next week, and I will introduce a few nifty tricks which I like.

  • How to check Google Indexing
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Site Statistics
  • Youtube video plugin
  • Scheduling Posts

How to check your Google Indexing

One of the most basic things you can do online is to check if your website is included in Google. Generally the more pages you have included in google the more chance there is of gaining traffic.

  1. Goto http://www.google.com
  2. Enter “site:www.yourwebsitedomain.com” into the search box and click search
  3. It’ll tell you how many pages are included on google, or give you nothing found if Google hasn’t found you yet.

This is how it looks for bestfootballgoals.info. I’ve not submitted the site or anything, however I do have a link to the site both from this blog and BHW which may have affected the speed with which it has been indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google has a set of tools which will tell you more about how Google see’s your website, and what Google thinks it is about. Even though you can add multiple websites you own into one Google account I personally will create a new Webmaster tools account for each website. This prevents Google from seeing that a lot of websites are owned by a single person and automatically thinking that they can’t be quality because of this. When you add your website you have to confirm that you own it, and I cover how to do this below.

  1. Goto http://www.google.com/webmaster
  2. Click signup, since we already created a google account when we signed up to youtube we can sign in with this account.
  3. Click Add Site, enter your website address and click Continue.
  4. We need to verify we own the website, google gives us a file to upload however I prefer to cheat (I recommend watching the video here)… Copy the name of the file google gives us.
  5. Goto your cPanel Control Panel and click File Manager, when it loads click Create File, and paste the name google has given you in.
  6. Select the new file in the list and click Code Editor, accept defaults and click Edit.
  7. Go back to the google webmaster tools, click on the download link, click open and copy the contents of the file. Goto the Code Editor and paste the file contents, click Save File. Then click close File Editor.
  8. Go back to google webmaster tools, click the confirm link (number 3 in the list). If it works, go back in the browser and click Verify.
  9. It’ll take a few days for Webmaster Tools to become useful to us, however we can goto the Site Configuration menu, and click Settings. Then we can choose to use the www.sitename.com option in the prefered address format.
  10. The search queries, keywords, crawl stats will all help us in a couple of weeks… For now we are done with Keyword Tools.

Whilst this will be empty to start, Google will start building data on your site over the next few days and it will eventually become awsome for finding new keywords. The video is here:

Site Statistics

It’s always nice to know when you are visited, till now we’ve not had no content so there has been no need. Now we are starting to develop our content it is important that we can track what people like and where they are coming from. The easiest way is the StatPress Visitor plugin which we install now…

  1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins.
  2. Click Add New, enter “StatPress” and click Search.
  3. Find “StatPress Visitor” in the list and click Install Now, and Ok.
  4. Click Activate Plugin.
  5. This adds a new option to our menu called StatPress V, click this.
  6. At the moment you will see it is blank (or 0). From now on each time someone visits your site StatPress will track which pages they look at, where they come from, and what country they are in.

The video is here:
Site Statistics

It’s always nice to know when you are visited, till now we’ve not had no content so there has been no need. Now we are starting to develop our content it is important that we can track what people like and where they are coming from. The easiest way is the StatPress Visitor plugin which we install now…

Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins.
Click Add New, enter “StatPress” and click Search.
Find “StatPress Visitor” in the list and click Install Now, and Ok.
Click Activate Plugin.
This adds a new option to our menu called StatPress V, click this.
At the moment you will see it is blank (or 0). From now on each time someone visits your site StatPress will track which pages they look at, where they come from, and what country they are in.

The video is here:

YouTube Embed Plugin

I like things being simple, and trying to use the embed code that youtube gives us on WordPress is just agony… It hurts badly so I have my favourite alternative, the youtube Embed Plugin which is so simple even a baby could do it!

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard
  2. Click Plugins, Add New.
  3. Enter “Youtube Embed” and click search. Find Youtube Embed in the list and click Install Now, click Ok.
  4. Click Activate Plugin, goto the Settings menu and click on the YouTube Embed option to configure some of the settings.
  5. In the Style information box enter “text-align:center;” to center the video in the post. Set Show Fullscreen Button to Yes, Show Search Box to No, set Show Annotations to No, and then click Save Changes.
  6. Scroll down to preview how the video will look.
  7. Click Posts, Add New and enter a title and select the appropiate categories.
  8. Search YouTube for a video related to your post title, to include the video in your post you just need to write the Video ID in the code shown in the video below.
  9. Click Publish, and then preview the post to make sure that the video is working.

I love this plugin as it makes YouTube so easy to use, to find out how to include a video in your blog watch the end of the video below for the code to use.

How to Schedule WordPress Posts

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you can just add a years worth of content to your site, and have wordpress publish it automatically throughout the year? Well you can, and we are going write and schedule the next 5 days posts to be published automatically.

  1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard
  2. Click Posts, Add Post.
  3. Enter the title, write your post as you normally would, and select the category.
  4. In the Publish box next to where it says Publish immediately click the Edit link.
  5. Select tommorow’s date, and a time during the day.
  6. Click Ok, and then click Schedule which will publish the post automatically on the date and time specified.
  7. Do this for 4 more posts so that we have a new post each day until the weekend…

A video demonstration is here…

Summary…

We should now have our blog loaded with 5 articles to be published over the next 5 days. Personally I normally pay an article writer to write these for me (saves me time), however if you are just getting started they are easy enough to write. Today is the last day we will be doing these basic but necessary tasks, tommorow we will be starting to Monetize. We will look at the different options we have for earning money online and how we can tie them into our blog.
 


Making Money online DAY 2 (b.)

October 8, 2011, by No comments yet

Day 2: Getting Social…

Today is a little more interesting, there are several things we need to do including working out a bit more about what our website is about. We are still in the housekeeping phase, however what we do today will set us up well for traffic later…

By the end of todays task you will have:

  • An understanding of why I think Social Networking is important
  • Twitter set up and configured
  • Youtube set up and configured
  • Facebook page set up and configured
  • A list a keywords related to your site
  • Add the first post to your blog

Why I believe Social is important

Over the last few years the use of social networking has changed rapidly, and now everyone and their pet seems to have at least account somewhere on the social net. Major brands now find Facebook so appealing that they even base multi-million dollar TV Advertising Campaigns around people ”Liking” their page on the social network.

However what I consider key (and often overlooked) is that Social is based around human intelligence and interaction. For many years Google and other search engines have tried countless mathematical algorithms to determine the best results to a search query. The number of websites which have links to your website, the types of website that has links to your website, how many blogs meantion your website… All of which could be artifically manipulated.

Now if you picked someone of the street and asked them how they cooked a curry they’d tell ya, no mathematics involved and without being influenced. Its the same on Social networks, I’ll ask what films are good to watch, which is the best garage to use… And my friends will answer me. It fixes the problem of artifical manipulation.

Now all Google needs to do is work out just how to link the two together, in the meantime we can be prepared, and also get shed loads of free traffic. Generally a social network will allow us to link to our website from a page on an authority site and also make other users aware of that page or account.

Twitter Setup and Configuration

Google has already done great things for Twitter, and linked it directly into Google search. If something suddenly gets a lot of attention (Tweets), and someone search for it in google they will be shown the Tweets related to it in the search results!

To get set up to use twitter…

  1. Goto http://twitter.com
  2. Enter your site name, email and a password you want to use and click Sign up
  3. Now play with your username until you get one with good keywords, less than 15 characters long and is avaliable… Your address will be twitter.com/username – Click create my account
  4. Enter the confirmation captcha code and confirm
  5. Now enter your subject/topic into the Search box and click search… Look through the people that are found a click Follow on any people you think are perfect for your niche/topic
  6. Goto the email you used to sign up and open the email from Twitter. Click the link in the email to confirm you own the email address…
  7. Now if you click the down arrow in the top right corner and then click settings we can edit our profile. First thing to change is the Timezone.
  8. Click the profile button of the settings page. Enter a Location (somewhere important to your niche is always good), your website address and a quick description about your site. I usually put “owner of http://website.com” in the end for an extra link as people are curious and will check your website out. Click Save.
  9. Now click the design button of the settings page. Click on a design you like and then click save.
  10. Click the twitter logo on the top left, enter a tweet in the the What’s Happening box and click Tweet to post it to your profile. (The number next to the Tweet button is how many characters you have left for your message).
  11. Now click Profile on the top menu to have a look at how other people will see your profile.

Watch the video demonstration here:

Youtube setup and configuration

Youtube gets so much traffic that even 0.00001% of it would be amazing for us to capture. Also we get our site name and link onto another authority site so it’s all good. Many people are put off by the thought of video, however I will show you later in the series that video is simply for anyone…

Lets get started…

  1. Goto http://www.youtube.com
  2. Click on create account in the top right.
  3. Enter your email, and play with the username until you get one that matches your website. Enter the post code, DOB and click Accept.
  4. Now make up a password, untick the Web History box, and then enter the Captcha.
  5. Now go to your email account and find the email from YouTube, open this and click on the confirmation link inside.
  6. On the confirmation page click the account preferences link, when this page loads click the Profile Setup link on the Left.
  7. Enter a description about your website, and then your website address. Enter a city + hometown important to your niche. Scroll down and enter keywords related to your website in the Intrests box.
  8. Click Save Changes

Watch the video demonstration here…

Facebook Page set up and configured

Probably the monster in the world of social networks, even my friends goldfish has it’s own facebook account! However we are going go for what facebook calls a business registration which means it is seperate from our personal account.


Lets get started…

  1. Goto http://www.facebook.com/pages
  2. Click Create Page
  3. I usually limit myself to the last two options here as they seem to be the least regulated… Pick a category then enter a Page Title, accept the terms and conditions and click Get Started. Enter the Captcha…
  4. Enter in your email address, a password, your DOB and the captcha code. Tick to accept the Terms and Conditions and click Sign up now.
  5. Now goto your email to find the confirmation email from facebook, open this and click the confirmation link. This will take you straight to your new page.
  6. If you have a photo related to your topic/subject, click upload image to add your photo to the page.
  7. Click Edit Page, then click Basic Information on the left menu on the next page.
  8. Enter a sentence into the about box, a quick description and then your website address in the websites box… Click Save Changes.
  9. Click View Page, then on the page menu click Info to see the changes you’ve just made.
  10. Click Wall on the page menu, and write a quick status saying how you are launching a new website and how exciting it is!

Watch the video demonstration here…

Find some keyword ideas related to your site

I’ve never been big on keyword research, I always believe that with quality content traffic will follow. To get started I look at what google expects to find on the website based on the title…

  1. Goto https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  2. Enter your site name and a couple of variations. Do the Captcha and click Search.
  3. Scroll down and set it to show 100 rows.
  4. Click the download button, select the CSV for Excel format and click download. Save the file and when it is downloaded open it.
  5. Google gives us the competition for each keyword on a scale of 0 – 1. If you know how to sort it by this in excel do this and save it for later to make it easy to find the lowest competition keywords.

This will then be used to add posts to the site over the next few days. Watch the video here…

Add your first post to the blog

There’s no point having a site if it has nothing useful on it, the first thing that I will add to a blog is a general post on the subject/niche. And now I have some rough keyword ideas I will be able to write a quick 400-500 word post to get the blog started.

  1. Login to your wordpress and click Posts
  2. Click Add New
  3. Select the categories you want your post to belong to.
  4. Enter a Title, and then write your post below.
  5. You can click Save Draft which lets you come back to it later, or click Publish to make it visible on your blog.
  6. This will automatically ping most of the search engines to tell them that new content has been added… This is good as it encourages them to come find you, instead of you having to go find them.

Video demonstrating this is here…

Summary

Today we have also spent some time laying the groundwork to grow, not only do we have 3 very strong links into our website. We also have a way to engage with an audience, and more important for them to engage with us. I honestly believe that Social Networking is going become crucial to search engine algorithms as it provides easy access to human reviews of websites or ideas. I will cover how we can use these mediums to generate traffic later in the challenge, however now we have the basics done we will start thinking about how we can monetize and profit from our work.
 


Making Money online DAY 2 (a.)

October 8, 2011, by No comments yet

Day -2: Assumptions…

Saying that I will teach you how to make money is fine, and I will. However I have also made some assumptions…

  • I assume you have access to the Internet Every Day so that you can follow each daily task as it happens (somethings may take a while to take effect etc)
  • I assume you are comfortable using a computer and the Internet (I will also be doing video’s to demonstrate some stuff which will help)
  • I assume you want to earn money, you have the patience to follow each task, and that you believe you will earn money.

For this challenge I have used a .info domain name. Many people argue that google does not consider them as important as .com/.net/.org TLD‘s however I believe that it is the content that counts rather than the TLD.

If you already have a domain and hosting you are welcome to use that. If you already have a website there following the techniques here will help you increase your traffic and your income.


If you do not have a domain or hosting I have just brought 100 .info domains with various names and have set up hosting for them. I will give you a domain & hosting absolutely free if you cannot afford your own. I will give instructions on how to get your free domain & hosting first thing tommorow morning.

Other assumptions are simply that you have not been banned from any companies, websites etc.