Day 12: First online income…
Well I checked the Adsense earnings for the bestfootballgoals site and so far I have earnt a easy £3+ which isn’t bad considering the domain only cost 99cents. Today we will start to look at how to increase the amount of traffic going to the site.
There are many theories about different traffic methods/types, just today I have read at least 10 different views on Google and what the Panda update has meant. There are several traffic methods that we can use, personally I am a great fan of social traffic. Nothing better than letting other people do the work for me! Without me going on too much, lets get started!
Keyword/Article Generation
Many people spend hours working on keywords, I personally believe that it is better to allow google to tell you which keywords you should be using…
Once you start to get visitors from Google it becomes a lot easier to decide on the titles for new articles. In Statpress have a look at the Last Search Terms, and try and write another article with each one in the title. For example these are some of the last search terms bestfootballgoals is ranking for, please remember I have not done any SEO stuff at all.
- football penalty drills – #7 in Google
- football penalty kick drills – #2 in Google
I will be writing an article for the site called Football Penalty Kick Drills now… Thats what google thinks my site is about, so I will add it.
Images and Copyright – Staying Legal…
Something that I do not believe is ever covered properly is the use of images on your site. Not paying attention to this can cause you big legal problems, in some cases this can run into thousands of dollars (yeah I don’t agree with it but thats life).
Basically the golden rule of images is if you do not know who owns it, do not use it. With this restriction it may feel like you are stuck, however there are easy solutions…
- Take a photo with your own camera, or create a graphic yourself in photoshop, you then own the copyright.
- There are free stock photo sites that allow you to use images Royalty free, my favourite is Stock Exchange here http://rfurl.net/sxc and another is here http://rfurl.net/pdi
- If my first options fail, I head on over to the Public Domain image sites page on wikipedia here which has close to 100 sources of images to use: http://rfurl.net/wpd
Remember to check the specific terms of each site, generally the US Government cannot own copyright to anything however in the UK there is Crown copyright for government images. Hopefully with these resources you have a good library of images to use across
Note: Before you are tempted to just use images check out this blog post by a company that was sued: http://blog.webcopyplus.com/2011/02/14/legal-lesson-learned-copywriter-pays-4000-for-10-photo/
Youtube…
Well we created our youtube account days ago, now it is time to put this to use, it’s so easy to create a video now that it is untrue. It is so easy that even youtube has got in on the act providing loads of awsome tools free for you! I will demonstrate one of the tools here, however I would recommend that you spend time to try out all the different tools avaliable.
- First of all we need to find some images to use in our video, to prevent future copyright issues I recommend that you look on free stock photo websites like http://sxc.hu/
- Goto the Youtube Create sction at http://rfurl.net/yc
- Pick a tool, for this demonstration I will use Stupeflix – the only restriction in this tool is that the video has to be under 1 minute long.
- Click the upload button to add the images you found into the tool.
- Click the sound button to add a sound track to the video
- Click the More button to add title slides (text slides between images)
- Click the more button to add transition effects between the slides.
- When you are done click the Publish to youtube button.
- Select YouTube (FREE) in the list and click Export.
- Allow Stupeflix access to your YouTube account… Wait for the video to be made.
- Goto your youtube account menu (click down arrow next to your username at the top of the page) and goto your videos.
- Find the new video in the list and click Edit, edit the title and description and put your website link at the end of the description.
- Pick some Tags and change the video category. Click Save Changes.
- You now have your first youtube video… Check it out!
The video is here…
The video for Best Football Goals is here, it took me under 5 minutes to make…
Note: Personally although this method is good, when i use videos I like to go even further. If you have $47 to spare I would recommend you have a look at these pre-made ready to use animated video backgrounds (http://rfurl.net/vidbg) which you can use with something like windows movie maker. They also come with sound loops which you can also use in your videos. I will cover this in a post for you guys later!
WordPress Security
Well I just got email offering to sell me a WordPress Security Guide for only $40, it had some pretty nice copy playing on peoples fear of loosing their work. However it assumed that the person reading it was pretty naive…
We have already covered how to backup your wordpress install which I would recommend everyone does on a regular basis. In addition there are some basic steps you can take to ensure that your website stays secure.
- Make sure you are using a secure cPanel username and password, and try and access this from only a computer you own.
- Make sure your email that you use with wordpress is secure so that people can’t reset your password.
- Make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed.
- Set your display name to be different from your Username (Goto Users->Your Profile on the menu).
- Make sure you use a password that has both lower and upper case letters, numbers and is not in any dictionary.
- Make sure you google the name of any plugins you use to see what people are saying about them, and keep the number of plugins you use to a minimum. Where possible try to use plugins from the official wordpress directory and not from random places online.
- If something requires that you add html or change the code of your website make sure you understand what and why.
- If you are using free theme’s from outside the wordpress official search function (such as http://wptmp.com) make sure you check the code for any eval statements or encrypted code.
Summary
Today’s post has been cut down a bit, I am planning to introduce a new tool to you guys, however I still have to do some final modifications to it before I feel it is fit to release. This is coming, and will be worth the wait. In the meantime I will not delay the Challenge because of it.
Let’s get back on track, Day 13 will follow in the next 24 hours…
