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…
- Goto http://twitter.com
- Enter your site name, email and a password you want to use and click Sign up
- 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
- Enter the confirmation captcha code and confirm
- 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
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- Now click the design button of the settings page. Click on a design you like and then click save.
- 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).
- 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…
- Goto http://www.youtube.com
- Click on create account in the top right.
- Enter your email, and play with the username until you get one that matches your website. Enter the post code, DOB and click Accept.
- Now make up a password, untick the Web History box, and then enter the Captcha.
- Now go to your email account and find the email from YouTube, open this and click on the confirmation link inside.
- On the confirmation page click the account preferences link, when this page loads click the Profile Setup link on the Left.
- 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.
- 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…
- Goto http://www.facebook.com/pages
- Click Create Page
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- If you have a photo related to your topic/subject, click upload image to add your photo to the page.
- Click Edit Page, then click Basic Information on the left menu on the next page.
- Enter a sentence into the about box, a quick description and then your website address in the websites box… Click Save Changes.
- Click View Page, then on the page menu click Info to see the changes you’ve just made.
- 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…
- Goto https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Enter your site name and a couple of variations. Do the Captcha and click Search.
- Scroll down and set it to show 100 rows.
- Click the download button, select the CSV for Excel format and click download. Save the file and when it is downloaded open it.
- 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.
- Login to your wordpress and click Posts
- Click Add New
- Select the categories you want your post to belong to.
- Enter a Title, and then write your post below.
- You can click Save Draft which lets you come back to it later, or click Publish to make it visible on your blog.
- 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 9
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.
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…
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?
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.
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.
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!