Welcome Page 4. Market Discovery Page 5

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2 Contents... Welcome Page 4 Market Discovery Page 5 Customer Factors Page 6 Product Factors Page 13 Finding The Keywords Your Niche Uses Page 21 Getting To Know Your Customers Page 23 Matching Up Products With Problems Page 28 Staying Current Page 29 The Competition Page 30 Choosing A Product Page 32 Keywords (Finding Your Main Keyword) Page 33 Adding Variables Page 34 LSI Keywords Page 36 Blog Set Up Basics Page 39 Domain Name Page 39 Hosting Page 40 Installing Wordpress Page 43 Layout Page 46 Selecting A Theme Page 47 Editing Settings & Themes Page 51 Integrating A Free Offer/Building Your Niche List Page 54 Adding Content Page 66 Out Sourcing Page 68 How To SEO Your Blog Page 73 Title Tags Page 74 Heading Tags Page 76 Alt Tags Page 77 What Are Google Panda & Google Penguin Page 81 How To Get Your Blog Indexed Page 85 Blog Directories Page 86 Social Media Page 87 2

3 How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog Page 89 Backlinks Page 89 Yahoo Answers Page 93 Squidoo Page 98 YouTube Page 102 Banner Advertising Page 104 AdSwaps Page 107 Monitor Your Traffic Page 108 Making The Money How To Monetize your Blog Page 111 List Page 111 Affiliate Programs Page 113 Text Links Page 114 Paid Reviews Page 116 Selling Physical Products Page 117 Final Words Page 119 3

4 Welcome... Welcome to Strategic Profit Secrets. This blueprint contains all the information you will need to establish an online presence that will create multiple income streams and be the go to place for information in your niche. Getting started. We recommend that you read this entire blueprint before doing anything. The blueprint is then laid out in an easy to follow, step by step manner. By reading the whole blueprint first you will have knowledge of what your goals will be and you will know about the methods and sites we refer to later on in the guide. Will this work for you? This guide will work for anyone. The key is to TAKE ACTION. A lot of people who get this guide will do nothing, or look at it and think it is too hard. By taking action and following the step by step instruction anyone can start to make money online. This is NOT a get rich quick scheme and anyone who thinks they can start earning thousands of dollars in just 2-3 days is mistaken. This guide is aimed at making your first $100+ in the first days. The blueprint then expands on this to show you how to make over $1,000 per month and up. While the initial set up may seem quite intensive over the first 7-14 days you will then start to realise that you can reduce the time you spend working to simply 1 hour per day. To Your Success The Strategic Profit Secrets Team 4

5 Market Discovery... Market Choice... The first big question you need to ask yourself is what market or niche you would like to enter, your first thoughts are very important. The first markets you think of will be ones that you have knowledge about already or ones that interest you. Choosing a niche you are interested in or already know about will mean that the research that is necessary is either interesting for you (and more enjoyable) or some of it might already be done. Choosing to enter a niche based purely on thoughts of larger scale profits is no good as you are going to hate doing the research for one reason it will not be done properly. On the flip side don t think that any interest you have will make the cut, we still need to crunch the numbers. What we are aiming to do here is to find a balance between a subject or niche you are interested in and make sure there are enough possibilities in that niche for you to operate a profitable site around that topic. The next steps will take you through: What you need to do to find out what niches make the cut and which ones you will need to either widen the scope of or which ones you will need to consider scrapping altogether. How you ll find out if a niche has a large enough target audience and make sure that they spend money in that niche. How to avoid the corporate niches one s that large companies spend large marketing budgets on. After following these steps you will have selected a good niche to work with. I will then show you how to: Find out about your audience and potential customers. How to stay up to date within your selected niche. 5

6 Find out who your competitors are. Spy on what your competitors are doing. Look at selecting what products to promote. And looking at how you can maximise your income from your given niche. Finding a Niche that makes the cut There are a few key factors that a niche market must have. Simply put these can be broken down into the two categories of: Customers factors Product factors One without the other will not work so let s have a look at how you can find out whether your niche will make the cut. Customer Factors... These are the factors you should address first, finding a product is easier when you know that you have a customer base and you know a little about these customers. To find out if your chosen niche has a customer base you will first off need to do the following. Head down to the local newsagents, book store, library or your local Barns & Noble (or equivelant). What we are looking for here is proof that there are money hungry customers in your niche. Any niche that has lots of books about it is a great niche to go for. It is even better if you find magazines on your niche as people are buying enough copies of them for new issues to get published monthly. Keep in mind that a lot of the magazine publishers income will be from advertisers so this enforces that there is money spent in this niche. An alternative to the physical trip to the book store etc. Can be carried out by looking on a few sites. 6

7 Amazon.com being a great one for books Simply select Books from the search drop down and enter your niche. I m going to select the Dog Training niche. Here s an example of my results: As you can just make out there are over 10,000 book results for Dog Training meaning there is definitely enough interest in the niche. Not too much, as some searches return over 100,000 results. Searches that return over 2,000 results are good indications that there is a good active market for your chosen niche. You can also check out MagsDirect.com as an internet based alternative to making a trip out to the newsagents. The screenshot below shows MagsDirect.com, the site is easy to use and you can either search for your niche or use the browse function on the left hand side. This is also a very handy feature to help you select a niche if you are unsure of where to start. As you can see I widened my search by just using the word Dog rather than dog training. I could also have used the word Pets etc. Any magazines that are relevant to your niche show that people are constantly interested in this niche. The more relevant the magazines the better. 7

8 Now we know that the niche has a customer base and one that is likely to spend money, we now need to make sure that the niche has a presence online. You will find that some niche s appeal more to the offline prospects out there, that said more and more niche s are making the jump online so this shouldn t be too much of an issue. To find out that your niche has a good internet presence you should: Find out who is blogging about the niche, how often they blog about it and what parts in particular. To find out who is blogging about any particular niche you can use these sites. 8

9 Technorati - Just enter your niche or a term related to your niche in the search box at the top of the page. In my example I searched the term Dog Training and here are the results. 864 Blogs Found! These are the actual people who blog about Dog Training. To see what these people are blogging about just click on URL of the blog under the name and you will be able to see what topics they have posted about. From this I can see that there is a pretty decent community of bloggers who are talking about my niche. 9

10 Blog Catalog - A site similar is Blog Catalog. Here we are going to use the search feature located in the top right. Again you will see the results displayed, showing you how many blogs people have regarding your search term. The next step after you have made sure that the niche you have selected has a pretty good online presence in the Blogosphere is to see what Google thinks. All you have to do here is head on over to Google.com and type in the name of your niche. 10

11 Here are the results for a search for Dog Training There are a few pieces of information that you will want to look at here, these are: 1) How Many Results - In the bar under the search box is the number of results that have been returned for phrase you entered. In this case 214 million for Dog Training. 2) The Search Results -The search results on the left (under the red line) show you the top 10 sites, take a look at the top 10 to see what aspects they are talking about in your niche. These will be your competitors for free search engine traffic so we will be using these results again later in the system. 3) The Sponsored Ads - The sponsored ads appear down the right hand side and at the top of the search results. You can use these results to see what kind of items or services they are selling. Now from the search volume I have seen from both Google and the 2 blog sites put together with the amount of books and magazines available I can see that Dog Training is a great market to target. 11

12 What I may also want to do is target a smaller niche, one where I can guarantee great search engine position and a lot of exposure. What I have picked up from looking at these results is that dog training can be broke down into smaller sections, I have seen terms like toilet training for dogs, obedience training etc. All while carrying out this evaluation of the niche. Now why would I want to go for a smaller niche? Well the competition in a big markets is fierce, here you will find yourself competing for a first page result on Google and other search engines with large companies with million dollar SEO budgets. So we leave them to that and target a smaller niche within the Pet market. In the example above Dog Training, would be as big as we would want to aim in the pet market, we could look at other specific pets as well as certain aspects within dog training. This gives us a great advantage when it comes to conversions too. Imagine from what you have just seen from my example and possibly your own. If I target Dog Training and sell a toy or treat that helps dogs learn to sit I am losing out straight away - I lose the people who are looking to train their dog to roll over, for people wanting to train their dog to pee outside etc. So by selecting a smaller niche I am making sure my visitors are more targeted and making sure that they are looking to buy at some point. I am finding something they need specifically and giving them the answer they want. At what point is my niche too big? This is a hard question to answer as each niche and the market it belongs in is different. But here are some stats to think about when you are selecting your niche. Amazon.com/MagsDirect If the results throw up over 10,000 results on Amazon, have a look to see if there are lots of books within the results on the same subject. Run the search again based on that new niche term you have found. My example again, Dog Training returned over 10,000 book results and a brief look through the first few pages there were plenty of books on obedience training, so this gives me more possible smaller niches to look into. 12

13 A refined search for Dog Obedience Training had over 800 results. Online presence When you are looking for an online presence for your niche you need to make sure that people are talking about it. Aim to have results in Technorati of over 100/200 and over 100 pages of results in BlogCatalog. My Dog Training search in Blog Catalog returned 651 pages. Google I had a massive return here for Dog Training with over 214 million results, refined searches for Dog Obedience Training was 1.7 million. Still a great show of interest and is also more targeted so the traffic we generate is not wasted. There we have it, a simple formula to check out if you have a niche with the sort of presence and customer potential we are looking for. Product Factors So we have found a niche that has a presence online and it also has a customer base, now before we go any further we need to make sure that there are a range of products available in our niche. We will look into selecting the right product a little bit later, so for the time being we just need to make sure that there are products available that we can sell as an affiliate. We have already done the first part of this by using Amazon.com Amazon offer an affiliate program known as Amazon Associates, you can sign up for the program here: 13

14 The Amazon Associates program is ideal if you are running a blog as you can refer any item sold by Amazon and you take a cut of up to 15%. That said the typical rate is about 4% so we want to find alternative programs that will provide us with a higher percentage of each sale. Where to look for affiliate products? These are the hot spots when it comes to seeing if there are enough products in your chosen niche: 14

15 PepperJamNETWORK - PepperjamNETWORK offers a huge range of affiliate products and is great to find products to promote. 15

16 E-Junkie - E-Junkie is a service that helps product creators to sell their products and services online. To carry out a search for affiliate products/services change the drop down that states Documentation as standard to Affiliate Programs then enter your niche and off we go. The results that you will see will all be products or services that you can promote as an affiliate and then earn a commission per sale. By clicking on one of the results, you are given a write up of the product, the price of the product and the % you will make per sale. 16

17 Clickbank - Clickbank is a retail outlet for digital products and is a great place for affiliates due to its high affiliate commissions. To find out what products are available in your niche, click the marketplace link at the top of the page and enter your search term. By entering the term Dog Training there are over 35 pages worth of products I could choose to promote. In the example below there are products on the first page offering up to 75% of each sale. 17

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19 Google Search As you can see, some of the above offer a lot in my chosen niche and others only a few, this will change form niche to niche. Also remember that these are not the only sites. That said they are however all I have needed to use. If you are getting stuck or want to explore further simple enter the following string into Google niche affiliate program (swapping niche for your topic) So I entered... Dog Training Affiliate Program Here are the results: 19

20 Over 2.5 million results and from the top 5 selection I have a variety of products I can promote or see alternatives to sites we have just looked at. If after checking all of the sites you are either not finding any products or just a handful then your niche will not be one that will sell well online. Ideally you will be looking for niches with over 50 products or services you can promote. The reason that there are so many products in some niches is that they work. The existing products sell and sell well so new products are created to compete in that market. We will take a look later at how to select the best products for you to promote but now you should have found a niche with a online presence and that has a variety of products you can sell as an affiliate. The next step is to see what keywords and phrases your potential customers are searching for to try and find what they need. 20

21 Finding the Keywords your niche uses... What is a Keyword? A keyword is a word that is used to find a particular product. It is the word or phrase that is entered into the likes of Google by the user to try and find what they are looking for. As you can imagine there will be a huge range of terms and variations used by people all around the world all trying to get the same information. Let s take my dog training example again, if I was looking for a dog training guide I would use the term Dog Training Guide now without changing the meaning at all I can easily come up with a few alternatives, how about: Dog Training Course Step By Step Dog Training How To Train My Dog All of these mean the same thing but are all different in the eyes of the search engines. Also which one do people search for the most? Well that s what we re going to find out now. Head on over to the Free Keyword Tool at Wordtracker 21

22 Enter your niche or a relevant term into the search box and hit enter. Here are the results for Dog Training Here you can see the top terms for your search along with the daily search number. There are well over 10 pages to go through and not only does it give you an idea about keywords but as you can see from the example above, it also gives you specific products and courses (or types of products and courses) that people are currently looking for. Any term with above 40 searches for a broad marketing like dog training makes the cut. For more specific searches like training your dog to sit, we are looking for above 10 searches. The key is to select one main term and jot down lots of related smaller terms. We will then later on in the blueprint show you how you can target different pages of your site for different keywords. Now, not every attempt will work out. So give the niche a chance but don t try to force things too much. There are some goldmines out there and all you have to do is hit one of them. But by following along the steps in this course you will have a better chance of hitting one of these each and every time. 22

23 We will be covering keywords in more depth later, so if you are still a little unsure about your main keyword and what other keywords you will want to target don t worry. We can add to the list later on. The aim here it to make sure people are searching online for your market. If you entered a keyword term that only displayed 1 or 2 related keywords then it maybe that your market hasn t got a great online presence or that you are not targeting the right keyword. If this is the case we will address this later in the blueprint. Getting to know your customers... Knowing about your target customers makes it much easier to do two things. 1) Get them to your site. 2) Sell them something. But before we get to look at how we do either of those things we need to find out about out potential customers and to do this we are going to use a website called... Quantcast

24 The first step is to find a domain that is the leader in your niche, an authoritative site. The easiest way to do this is to put your keyword into Google and look at the results. When you get the results you should disregard any sites that are not solely about your topic, i.e. amazon results, Wikipedia etc. Out of the remaining ones I take a look at each one and then pick the ones I feel are the most authoritative. If you are struggling to pick out the most authoritative site you can use Google Page Rank and Alexa rankings. The higher the page rank the more Google ranks the site and the lower the Alexa ranking the more traffic it gets. You can check alexa rankings at Alexa.com, just enter the domain name you want to query. Page Rank can be found out by searching google for a page rank checker, there are plenty to choose from. Alternatively if you use firefox you can use a plugin called Search Status, you can download it here: Once installed you will see a few icons in the bottom right of the screen, these give the PageRank and Alexa ratings, all you have to do is hover over them when you are on the page you want to find the details for. So now I have a domain, I go over to Quantcast and enter the domain in the search bar at the top of the page, here are the results: 24

25 Depending on the site you entered you may not get a full set of results but we are looking for the Demographic data above. As you can see you are given a whole range of data and stats. Just take a few minutes to browse through the information you have been given. Now I m going to take you through a few different sections and point out the information you should be taking note of. Gender Age Income So for me I have a slight female market who are most of the time over the age of 35 and they mainly earn upto $100k. Knowing the gender, age range, income levels gives me a lot of power as a marketer. I know that I can t create a male only orientated site, quite the opposite. I know that I do have to worry about the price of the items I am promoting. Our target is to make money from this market, but don t limit yourself to one market alone. That is where a lot of marketers fall down. Now there are some simple do s and don ts here, so here they are. Don t fill a niche website, let s say a dog training site, with loads of adverts for irrelevant products advertisements. Do gather your visitors name and so you pitch them alternative products and sites they might like. We ll look at how we do this shortly. But for now back to the information we gathered. 25

26 We know about our customers now, so this can help us select not only a product but a type of site. There is no use in me having too much flashy new technology going off on my site as the older generation will not really find a use for it. If my market were more year olds we could maybe incorporate a flash game to the site but that is not the case here. What we have are a group of people who want information. This doesn t mean we cannot have a graphically pleasing site with video content. It just means that if there is no use for it, don t include it. Back to the customers Now we know what the focus of your site is let s ask ourselves two questions: What are our customer s problems? What do they want and what do they need? Problems? This could be a huge range of things in the dog training market, from having a new puppy or wanting to teach your old dog new tricks. There are other problems too, maybe I need some toys or treats to help with the process? Maybe I want to train my dog for competitions or in a certain aspect. When you put your mind to it the list can get pretty endless. To help us out here we re going to break it down into two parts. The first of these is Finding The Problem. To do this we are going to go back online and find the real problems real people are having. A great start is to head back over to Technorati and MyBlogLog and scan a few of the blogs in the niche. Look for trends that occur, the way I like to do this is grab a piece of scrap paper and write down the problems as I come across them, if I come across the same problem again, keep a tally. 26

27 Get Dog To Sit - //// Teach My Dog To Shake Hands - // Etc. Don t give up before you have come across 10 problems that people want help with. You will also start to see a problem but we need to make sure this isn t just limited to people who have dogs and blog. For this next step we are going to find out where our potential customers go online, where does the average person look online and ask for advice and help? Online Communities & Forums Online communities such as forums are places where people go and hang out online, share their tips, go to find out information and ask for help. To find these forums simple head over to Google and enter the term niche forum replacing the word niche with your niche. 27

28 Here are the results for Dog Training Forum Open the forums one at a time and look for more issues and problems people are having. Looking at what people are writing on these forums on a day to day basis will give you a great understanding for what your customers want in your market and also expand into what else they like and what else you can sell them down the line. Make sure you check out a few forums and a few blogs to create a list of issues/problems that your potential customers are having. Now we have this list we can look at the second point, What do they want, and what do they need? This again is split into two parts. What do dog trainers need? Well a need is something they have to have, they have to have a dog, they have to have treats, that s pretty much it for the general stuff but for training other types of dogs certain things there will be additional equipment. Looking at what dog trainers want? These are items that are like luxuries, they are not essential. They may include toys, and additional equipment to help the process, or simply the fact that they want to train their dog fast! This category will also include improvement materials and coaching, they want to train their dog, they don t need to. Matching Up Products with Problems So to recap, we have a list of possible products (or services) in our niche, we also have a list of wants or needs. Now we need to focus each product/service to its more specific niche, for example the group of dog trainers who want to get their dog to sit, they want that simple 3 step guide to help them out. 28

29 So there we have matched up a products with a mini niche (a niche within a niche). It is important to find at least a few products that you can sell to the same crowd. There are a number of reasons for doing this: Some products get discontinued or taken off the shelf (so to speak) you will need a replacement if this ever happens. Some products convert better than others, it is always wise to test and monitor multiple products to start with to decide on which one will give you a better return on investment. Why stop at promoting one product our aim is to sell each person who lands on our website something and to do this we will need to create a niche list. Staying Current Once you have your site and campaign set up the best way to make sure it keeps earning you a good income is to make sure that you know what is going off in your market. This is another reason to enjoy or understand the market you enter. Is the product you are currently promoting going to be affected by any new developments? The technology market is notorious for this with software being sold one day and then it being useless a week later because of a new operating system release or a new firmware update. Make sure you keep on top of things. The way I do this is to find a handful of blogs in my niche that are authoritative, have plenty of updates (1-2 per week minimum) and I add them to an RSS reader. A tool like Google Reader is freely available if you want to do this This saves me the time visiting all the sites and I can scan over the posts to see if any are relevant or may affect my campaign. 29

30 I also find the most active and relevant forum in my niche and pay that a visit once per week or once every two weeks checking out the popular posts in the specific sub forums. Using these methods you can usually pick out any major issues that will mean making amendments to your campaign but it is even better to pick out the latest happenings in your niche so that you can target the latest products to your niche list, or even set up an additional campaign. You can also stick a few bits of information together from what you find and it out to your niche list as a newsletter. This will give you credibility with your list in that you care enough to let them have the latest information you come across and give it to them for free. Keeping your list in your favour is a major part of marketing and can improve conversions like crazy. The Competition Before taking a look at choosing the best product or service to promote we have one very important thing to do and that is check out what he competition are up to. We re going to start out by doing a simple Google search for our keyword phrase, I have decided to narrow my niche to Puppy Training and will search for the term puppy training, the results are shown below. Remember the Sponsored Ads are shown at the top and to the right of the natural search results. You want to focus only on the Sponsored Ads this time and make a few notes, these should include: What product they are promoting. What words (keywords) they are using in their advert. Their domain name. 30

31 Then click on each ad and take a look at the site, you will get a feel for the type of content you will need to place on your site. Don t worry about the site set up we have that covered in a later blueprint, all you have to do is add in the content where I tell you. Now you have a list of domains and products they are promoting, try searching for similar keywords in your niche, the keyword tool we mentioned and used earlier will give you an idea of what these might be. Keep a track of campaigns that are repeated for multiple keyword phrases or appear in similar markets. You will also want to keep doing this every few days to see which ads are moving up and down, staying in the same place or have been removed. If you 31

32 see ads that are staying week after week then you can tell that these are profitable campaigns. Why would someone leave something thing up that was losing them money? It s a short answer they wouldn t. These will be the products that are selling and converting well, there is no point trying to reinvent the wheel, if the product sells then jump on board. Choosing the Product I will now show you how you can pick the best product for your market by looking at a few key stats: Refund rate Yep. Even before the commission cut you get this is more important. Look at the current refund rate, if this is not published ask. It is no good making 1000 sales a day if 999 of them get a refund. Certain places will have higher refund rates in general because of how they operate. Clickbank seems to be on a current trend at the minute of attracting a lot of refunds. Commission rate The percentage that you get per sale. Remember when looking at these that the higher % is not always the way to go. A lot of people buying a cheaper product can easily out rank the odd sale of an expensive product. Once you have weighed up the commission rates you should also check out products that have recurring commissions, these will usually be subscription based products where as long as the customer stays you get monthly commissions. These are great as they turn into a residual income for doing no extra work. In summary we have looked at how to select a niche market, making sure that there are possibilities to make money and how to select a range of products to promote. 32

33 Keywords... Finding Your Main Keywords We briefly mentioned this earlier in the guide but here we re going to look at it in much more detail. Think about it, will one keyword phrase be enough? Sure you can make one keyword phrase profitable and there will always be ones that outperform the others. But imaging having 4 or 5 different keyword phrases that all pointed to the same site and were driving free targeted traffic. Here we will find a number of keyword phrases that you can target for your site and then use them to drive free traffic. So, how do you find your keyword phrases? The best way to start is to head over to the free keyword tool at Wordtracker - Just enter your niche into the Keyword field and click Search If you have narrowed down your product or market to a smaller niche within the main one then enter that term, if not go with the wide search term. A wide keyword term would be Dogs or dog a narrower term would be dog training and even further would be dog obedience training. What I suggest you do is grab a piece of paper and make a list of the words and phrases you come across with decent search traffic. You can also add this information into a spreadsheet as it is easier to sort and manipulate this way. The wordtracker site shows the daily search totals, so remember to multiply by 30 to get a rough estimate of the monthly search volume. When you are generating your keyword list don t just go for the main terms, this tool is only so good and only finds words that are relevant and have the word you entered in. 33

34 Other ways to generate alternate keyword phrases If you are either stuck with a short list of keywords in your niche or are in a niche you don t fully know about, try out these methods to generate your keyword list. - Head over to the blogs we listed earlier. Check out what people are posting about frequently on their blogs and check the search volumes in the keyword tool. - Likewise do the same on the forms we found and listed. - Do a broad Google search for your niche e.g. Dogs and look at what the first 2 pages of Google (top 20 results) have as their title text. This is displayed on in the search results. - Finally head over to the major sites in your niche and see what their latest eadlines are. - If you fancy some offline research, pick up the latest magazine in your relevant niche and take a look through for ideas. Remember to check the search volume of each term. Note Check for any ads that are placed in the magazine, each ad will usually have a few good keyword phrases as in a main title to grab your attention and a more detailed tag line. These can make very good keyword phrases. Adding Variables Another great keyword tactic is to add in variables to attract a different crowd. Using words like cheap and discount can create you a new phrase that might not have been targeted in your niche. This will lead to attracting a lot more traffic. Remember when using variable words like cheap and discount that you are dealing with people whose budgets are tighter than the norm, or someone hunting for a bargain. This means matching the items you are promoting with the correct keywords. Here is a list of other keyword variables you could use in your market, remember some of these work in some niches and not others and some will only work depending on the type of product or service you are promoting: 34

35 Variable Keyword List: discount cheap sale new special wholesaler expert distributor firm professional best premium elegant custom bespoke delivered consultant instant 35

36 As you can see the list could go on, and can get even bigger when you look at certain markets. Imagine the food market, delivered could be added to with frozen, fresh, organic etc etc. LSI Keywords When it comes to keywords this is the part that a lot of people either don t know about, don t understand or just get completely wrong. The thing is it s not that difficult and it will make Google love your pages. Before we get into what it is and what we need to do to implement, our goal is simple, we want to get a good rating from Google for our website within the search results. Google rates sites based on their relevance to the content on the site and the amount of links they have containing those and related terms. Later in the blueprint we will tell you how to get Google to like your site. So what are LSI keywords? Say my keyword is Dog Training, you will see related keywords like Dog Treats, Dog Obedience Training or both containing the initial keyword. These can be found in most keyword tools, LSI comes in when keywords are related but do not contain the main keyword. Here s a few examples: Main Keyword Related Keyword LSI Keyword Fish Fish Tank Aquariums Printer Laser Printer Inkjet Zoo Zoo Animals Seaworld 36

37 How to find LSI keywords As you can imagine you can come up with as many LSI keywords as you can related ones. So knowing which ones Google considers most relevant is key to our success and this is how you do it. First off head over to Google s keyword tool: You will see the screen below: We re going to use the top option, although if you want to generate more keyword ideas especially from competitors websites then selecting the website content option and entering your competitors URL will show you what their page is optimized for. This is also a great way to test your own page, if it comes up with words you are not trying to target then alterations are required. But like I said we re going to use the Descriptive words or phrases option, then all we do is enter your keyword or niche, enter the captcha code and click Search. 37

38 Here are the results for Dog Training The first thing you should notice is that this list can be sorted in a variety of ways, if you choose sort by relevance, this is telling you what Google class as the most relevant related term you entered. The column under that shows the competition for each keyword and the two next to it show the previous months and average search volume. To get the full list and access to all the LSI keyword you may have to log into your Google Adwords account, don t worry if you don t have one, its free to sign up and is worth doing so to get the full use of this tool. 38

39 Blog Setup Basics... Why a blog? There are many reasons why we use blogs instead of different types of websites. The main ones are: 1. It is easy to set up and can be done in just a few clicks of a mouse. 2. We don t need to spend money on design, design is really important with the new Google updates (we ll talk about them later), there are lots of designs out there for blogs for free or a minimal fee. This means there is no need to hire coders, designers and graphics people. 3. Google loves blogs a simple page website just doesn t rank as well as a multi page site. Blogs give us this straight after the installation. To start with we re going to install wordpress and make the necessary amendments we need to that as soon as Google see s our site they will love it and start ranking it. We will then tell you how to add content, drive traffic and monetize your site. Like we said at the beginning of the blueprint, read it all first and then go back to the beginning and use it as your go to guide as you are going through each section. Domain Name The first step to setting up your site is buying a domain name, this will be the site address or URL that people can enter to go direct to your site. An example of a domain name is I would recommend getting either a.com or a.co (.co s are a new extension) but carry the same top level credentials as the.com If you think that you maybe better going for a country domain extension e.g..co.uk in the United Kingdom then make sure the demographics of your chosen niche also back up this decision. Where to get your domain? There are plenty of places where you can buy domain names, I would suggest using one of these 2 options: 39

40 Hostgator Hostgator offer hosting, or file space on the internet for you to put your website files. While you are buying hosting you can buy a domain name as well. This makes everything very simple and straight forward, if you planning on only having one blog during the next 6 months and/or are totally new to the process of owning and setting up a blog, then this is the option for you. The second option is to buy your domain names at Godaddy.com. Godaddy allows you to manage your domain names and host them wherever you like. This gives you more flexibility but will include a couple of extra steps in the set up process. This is ideal if you are planning on having multiple blogs with many different domain names. Choosing your domain name... To choose your domain name again you have two choices: 1) You aim for a keyword rich one, meaning it has part or all of your main keyword in the domain name. The domain does not just have to contain these words, but be sure to keep it as short as possible. 2) You forget about the keywords and go for a brand-able name. Look for something short and catch, if this options for you, go get creative ;-) Hosting Your hosting or web site space needs to do one thing, store your files on the internet so people can see your site. When setting up a blog you can make things really simple by selecting a web host that offers Cpanel web hosting that also uses the Fantastico installer. My choice of host is Hostgator: Once you have your hosting you need to link your domain to your hosting. This is of course only essential if you have purchased your domain name and hosting from different sites or at different times. 40

41 If you signed up for a domain and hosting at the same time then you are ready to move onto the next section. If not this is how you link your domain (purchased in Godaddy) to your web hosting. Firstly you need to login to your Godaddy.com account, once you have done this on the main page, hover over the Domains tab and in the far right column under My Account, choose the Domain Management option. You will see a screen like this: After clicking on Domain Management you will be given a list of your domain names. Click on the one you want to edit. You will then see the page below: 41

42 Now click on the option that says Set Nameservers. A pop up box will appear and you will have to select the option to enter your own nameservers. You will then have to enter 2 nameservers. These are supplied by your hosting company, usually in the welcome . They will follow the format of: NS1.HOSTINGCOMPANY.COM and NS2.HOSTINGCOMPANY.COM Once you have done, you may have to wait an hour or so for the domains to point to the new host. Then you re ready to install Wordpress. 42

43 Installing Wordpress... For this installation of wordpress we re going to be using cpanel hosting with the Fantastico Installer. To get started log in to your Cpanel account (e.g. ww.yourdomain.com/cpanel) using your username and password you received from your hosting provider. When you log into cpanel you will see this screen: Then on that opening screen scroll down to the bottom and click on the Fantastico icon under Software/Services: (If you do not see this you should get in touch with your web host and ask them to add it to your account) 43

44 This will bring up a full list of software options you can install. First Select WordPress and then select New Installation Then you ll see the screen below where you need to enter the details of your blog and create a username and password etc. (Blogs are best set up on the homepage of your domain so leave the directory blank) 44

45 After you have entered your details click Install WordPress and then follow the last few on screen steps to install your blog. Now your basic blog is installed. It s as simple as that and should only take 4-5 minutes at the very most. To check out your new installation type your domain name into the browser address bar. 45

46 Layout... It s now time to look at layout. This is essential as over the last year we have tested different blog layouts and the results have been eye-opening. We looked at various items including: Initial layout Where to place your ads Where generates the most sign ups Search engine rankings Traffic flow The list goes on... this is what we found. The layout of the blog should have the content on the left, with 1 right side bar. Just like the example below: We also tested blogs with 2 right sidebars, 1 left sidebar, 2 left sidebars and 1 left and 1 right sidebar. 46

47 The results were quite conclusive. After a year of testing the blog with a single right sidebar had more sign ups, more traffic and a higher income than any of the others. All blogs contained the same banners and graphics, same offers, same content and were all using the same traffic methods. So now you know that you should be looking for a theme with a right sidebar. We also tested... Where to place your ads - we will cover this in the money making section at the end of the blueprint. Where generates the most sign ups we will cover this in the integrating a free offer section. Selecting a theme... You know what sort of theme you are now looking for. So its time to make up your mind... Do you want to have a unique theme created for you and specific to your chose niche? If so check out the Outsourcing Section. Do you want to get a free theme? If so check out these websites: How to change your theme... Once you download the files for a new theme you may need to unzip/extract them. This can be done by right clicking on the folder and selecting unzip or extract all Then after you ve done this you ll need to upload this folder into your theme folder. To upload files to your website you ll need an ftp client. I recommend as its reliable, virus free and doesn t cost you a penny. 47

48 So if you download Core Ftp and open it up. Then you need to put your account details into the program like below: All the information will be available in your hosting and it is the same username and password that you entered to access cpanel. Your hostname will be ftp.yourdomain.com (remember to change yourdomain.com for the domain name you purchased). Then click connect Connect You now need to locate the theme folder on your site by expanding the directories: Public_html > wp-content > themes 48

49 Drag the folder into this directory. Now you need to log-in to your WordPress admin panel to activate the blog theme by going to: (using the log in details you set up in Fantastico) Once you have logged in you will see the screen below: 49

50 You need to click on the Appearance link on the left hand side and then click on the name of the blog theme you ve just uploaded which will activate the theme. You can activate any of the themes you have uploaded from this page. 50

51 If you then return to the main domain name in your browser you will see that the new theme has been placed on your blog. If you have someone create your theme for you, you can ask them to upload it and activate it for you. This does mean giving out your username and password but you can change your password afterwards. Editing Your Blog Settings & Editing The Theme... There are a few blogs settings that you will want to change regardless of your theme. These are: Add RSS... To allow you to keep connected with your visitors you need to add the RSS Reader icons so that users can subscribe to your blog in their RSS Reader. This is very important and easy to do so here s a quick guide to do this First you need to download the plugin: There are simple instructions on that website on how to get it working. Once you have the plug-in activated you get to select the icons you want displayed. I personally like to add most of them in the sidebar but make sure you at least add the main ones like yahoo, msn, Google, technorati etc. Make sure you choose the setting that means people have to click read more to read the full blog post. This means that you will get more traffic from people who have subscribed via RSS and want to watch or read what you have started talking about in each post. Optimize for the Search Engines... Firstly we need to make sure your Blog s title and tagline sections are filled in correctly. To do this go to options section in your control panel and in general options you ll see right at the top your Blog title and Tagline. You need to make sure your main keyphrases are in these as the search engines will pick this content up. 51

52 The next thing you need to check is your Permalinks structure. Select Settings, then Permalinks from the side menu. This needs to be set to custom and the custom structure needs to be: /%postname%/ This is because the search engines give more weight to folders closer to your root directory and when you have the link structure set as: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ You ll see that an extra 3 folders have been created meaning the post is deeper and as the search engines see it, not as important. 52

53 It also means that each blog post title with keywords in can be picked up by the search engine robots and help people find the information they are looking for on your site. Tidy Up The Theme... If you have had a theme designed for you, you will not need to do this section. If you are using a free template we need to tidy up the site, especially the side bar as depending on the theme you have chosen you will have a number of unwanted items placed there. To remove them just open up the widgets menu and remove them, if there is nothing in the widgets menu adding a blank text field will normally re-set the sidebar blank. As you can see, first select Appearance and then Widgets. The right of the secreen shows you which widgets you have in which section. Common widgets are placed in the middle and you can simply drag and drop them into the section on the right and then change the settings. 53

54 To add any HTML code you can use the Text Widget and then enter the HTML code into the widget. If this fails it will mean opening up the sidebar.php file in either the Wordpress admin panel theme editor or in an HTML editor. Again if you need help with editing HTML code the easiest way is to check out the Outsourcing section. There are plenty of people that can help you out for as little as $5 so you can get your site looking just how you want it. Integrating A Free Offer... Building Your Niche List Have you ever heard the term: If not, let me explain. The Money s In The List Most people online make money from their list. This is a list of contacts, names and addresses of people who have subscribed for something free, for purchasing a product or signed up for a course. Even the guru s who launch product after product will make more money from their list that they will selling their products online. If you have an online presence it is essential that you build a list no matter what niche you are in. Creating a list is very important for us as bloggers for many reasons. 1) First and foremost it lets us connect directly with people who have visited our blog. You will read all about the methods you can use to drive traffic to your site later in the blueprint but imagine having a large percentage of people who have already been to your site on a list. You can simply them when you have new content on your blog and they can click the link and check it out directly. Returning traffic on demand! 2) Not only can you use your list to send traffic to your site but you can also send them to other sites. Have you seen a product that you think is great, tell your list about it. Remember they are interested in the topic of your site so don t be telling Dog owners about the latest Twitter software and vice versa. Oh, and remember to include your affiliate link. (We will cover more on marketing in the Make Money section). 54

55 3) You ve got a blog, you ve got traffic (and a list of people), imagine you create your own product to sell. What better way to get it reviewed or sell it that to sent it to your own list of people who already know about your site. As you can see a list has loads of benefits. Whether we are aiming to sell them something from our site directly, get them to buy a product we are advertising or reviewing or want to promote a product down the line, the best time to start building a list is now! As I ve just mentioned our aim is to convert every single person who hits our page into a sale of some kind. Now this will not all happen straight off the bat but with a few additions to our arsenal we can convert a lot higher percentage of visitors into buyers. Step 1 Collect Information We re not taking anything major here all we need is a name (just the first name will do) and an address. To do this we are going to use a few different tools and the first one is an Auto Responder. The one I use is called Aweber and you can sign up for it here: Aweber offers a whole heap of tools and advantages but basically it enables you to build an list. It even gives you the boxes to put on your website so you don t have to mess around with any code. It then allows you to the people on your list from a white listed account meaning you will not get sent into the spam folder or be blocked. You can create multiple campaigns so you will only ever need 1 account here and to be honest it s priceless to any marketer. Why collect addresses? When you collect addresses from your site you will end up with a targeted list. Everyone who comes to your site had searched for and is looking to solve the same problem. This makes this list priceless to you. You are going to promote a service or product to these people and if they buy it then great. But what happens if they don t buy it and they leave your site? You have no way of getting that lead back. 55

56 That is why we ask for their name and . Now people have become protective over their addresses due to the amount of fraud, spam etc that is going around so even though your site is legit they will not always want to part with it easily. What we want to do is give them a compelling offer, give them something for free in exchange for their contact information. Whether this is something that is widely available for free or it may be some tips you have had created, maybe it s just some advice or the chance to be entered into a prize draw or competition. The list is endless. So we have got them to part with their address, this is where the auto responder earns its keep. We can schedule s or send out broadcasts so there is no need to sit there ing individuals or even making sure you send out at certain times as it can all be set up so it runs itself. The idea is that if they don t buy the product the first time you can them promoting it a second/third time, converting a few more percent of prospects into buyers each time. There will be people who are never going to buy this product or service and that s ok, because we can sell them something else. We still know their problem and from our research we know of other products that also meet their wants and needs, so we can promote these products to them also. Positioning & Video... There are two main points we have to make about increasing the amount of sign ups you will get. Through our testing we noticed an increase of 178% when placing our free offer in the top right of our blog, this is either at the top of the right side bar or integrated into the header (again on the right hand side). We saw a massive increase when we also used video (245% more sign ups). The same offer with a text banner did not even compare to when we used a simple video to get people to part with their name and address. You do not need a video from the start for your sign up offer, but the sooner you can add one the better conversions you will see. 56

57 Use the video to tell them what you are offering them, I like to use a free report, relevant to the topic of the blog and answering one of the many concerns we discovered in the market research phase. By pointing out 2 or 3 things that will be uncovered or explained in the report you will get more and more people parting with their name and address. How to use Aweber... To sign up to Aweber user the link below: Once you have signed up with your marketing service you'll need to create a campaign. We'll walk you through how to do this with some screenshots (working with Aweber). Your campaign is basically the name and description of your list and also includes the address and name that the will appear from when you send out your s through this service. When signed in to your account, click on where it says create and manage lists: This will then take you to the following screen where you need to click on create "create a new list": 57

58 Fill in the information needed on the next page such as what you want your list to be called and what name you want the s to appear from and then scroll down and click save settings: And...you're done. That's it, you've created your new list. 58

59 The next thing you need to do is to create your web form (sign up box) for your website. This is the little box on your website where people will opt in to your s and enter their name and address. Go to the web forms option and click on "create a new web form": This will then allow you to start making your form. As you can see in the following screenshot, you can pick a template that you like and it will show you what your web form will look like. You can edit pretty much anything on there, such as the footer, header, what the privacy policy states or when you hover over the section you can choose the option to remove it altogether: 59

60 As you can see we had a little play, changed the colour, edited the header and removed the privacy policy and powered by Aweber sections. Once you're happy you then need to click "go to step2": 60

61 In step 2 you then need to enter the form name (this can be anything and is a good tool for tracking as if you create several different forms with different names and text, placed them on different pages on your site, you can see which ones to do better). 61

62 The next thing you need to enter is the "thank you page". This is the page that your subscribers will see once they have filled out your web form. The basic version will look like this: If you are going to be sending your new subscribers a follow up after subscribing, you can leave the "thank you page" as the basic one shown. Or if you want to send your subscribers straight to another page or to another website (for example through an affiliate link) then you will need to use the custom option as shown below: 62

63 When you click on the "custom page" option this will then prompt you for the URL where you want your subscribers to be sent to. Once you've filled out the information you need to, click on "go to step 3". You will be prompted with the following screen. Click on "save web form": 63

64 Once you have saved your web form it will then ask about publishing. You need to click the option "I will install my form". This will then bring up the code that you need for your site. All you need to do is copy and paste this code onto your website code where you want the form to appear. 64

65 Done. You've now created your list and web form and pasted your code onto your site ready to get those all important sign ups! *PLEASE NOTE - Generally, the less information you require to opt in, the more signups you'll receive. It's the web forms that just ask for name and address that tend to have the highest opt-in rates. Don't let this put you off asking for other details though as other details can help you customize the s you send out to your list. For example, if you run a business selling products for pet owners you could ask for details on what pet they have or what breed of dog etc. If you can personalise your s it makes the customer feel more appreciated * Now that we've created our lists and web forms, the next thing we need to cover is the difference between follow up s and broadcast. If you're using Aweber, in the "Messages" section the drop down menu will give you the following options: Follow Up, Broadcast and Blog broadcast. Follow up messages go out automatically after someone subscribes. When you create a new follow up message you need to specify an interval (number of days that the system waits before sending the follow up). So for example, let's say you want your follow up to be sent out on a interval of 4, your subscribers will get that message 4 days after the first follow up. This is great if you are wanting to send out a follow up every month for 12 months, all you have to do is set up the interval and the messages will be sent out automatically. Follow ups are the ideal way to welcome subscribers to your list, as well as deliver regular content that will be valuable to your subscribers no matter when they sign up for your list. Broadcast messages go out at specific dates and times, chosen by you when you create the message. Instead of setting an interval like you do with follow ups, you simply choose the send time of the broadcast, and it will go out to your whole list at that time. Broadcasts can also be sent to segments of your list, allowing you to target subscribers who are most interested in what you are going to be offering. Broadcasts are ideal for time sensitive announcements such as events, holiday s, special offers and new product announcements. Just as you can with follow ups, broadcasts are also a good way to send weekly or monthly newsletters. A blog broadcast isn't really another kind of message, but rather a way to automatically create broadcast messages when you make a new post on your blog. When you make a new blog post, you can send a blog broadcast to announce the new blog content encouraging people to come back to your blog. 65

66 Instead of using one or the other, you need to make use of both kinds of messages as this will get you the best response. Adding Your Web Form To Your Blog The best way to do this is to go to the widgets section and add two text boxes, remember the top one will be for the video or graphic telling your visitors what they are signing up for, the second one will be for this code. With the video/graphic going above, I recommend that you remove the headline rom any webform and use the video to show them where to enter their details in case it isn t obvious. A red arrow pointing below usually does the trick ;-) There you have it, a campaign with web form on your blog collecting addresses and generating you a niche marketing list in your chosen market. Adding Content... Adding content to your blog is essential to keep it up to date and relevant so people keep coming back. Later on we ll look at getting people to your blog but if there is nothing of interest there when they get there, they re not going to stick around. What we have found out from testing is that we get a lot lower bounce rate (the people who check out more that one page on our site before leaving) when we have a mix of text, images and importantly video content. You should post a video at least 1 in 5 posts. Making sure there is always one on the front page of your site. Video s mean that people who have a short attention span and people who cannot be bothered to read paragraph after paragraph will still find use for your content and find themselves watching. Now you may not know how to create video content and thats OK. You can simply use videos from other sites like YouTube, then talk about the video and what you thought was great about it in the post below. Another alternative is to Out Source the video creation. We ll cover that in more detail next. 66

67 How to add content to your blog... First off head over to log into your blog at Once here you can either choose the option on the top (the + icon), and select post, or the option Posts from the left menu followed by Add New. If you choose the left option, you will have to choose create new from the next menu. You will then see this page: This is the main screen where we will enter our new posts, I have highlighted 3 very useful options. 1) Media this quickly allows you to upload video or images to your blog posts. 2) Visual/HTML this option allows you to view your post in either code or visual mode. Remember if you are copying HTML code you will need to paste it into HTML view and then chance the view back to Visual. 3) Publish this allows you to choose when the post will go live. This is called scheduling content. 67

68 Scheduling content... To schedule content I normally put an hour or so to one side once I have the content ready. I will then use 1 of two methods. 1. By using the timestamp feature in Wordpress which allows you to schedule posts to go live in the future. 2. By saving articles as drafts so I could log in from anywhere (even on my mobile) and choose which article to post. Implementing this method saved me a lot of time and stress and I suggest you do the same. What content should you post... Your blog content needs to be informative and fun to ready, it needs to capture peoples imagination and get them to come back time and time again. Through our testing we have discovered that the best scenario is to include as much video content as possible. The easiest way to create Video content is to outsource it, check out the outsourcing section to find out how easy it is to do this. Outsourcing You have a simple choice to make first off. Do you want to do all the work yourself (this is the cheapest but most time consuming option) or do you want to pay people to carry out the different jobs? If you are anything like me then you will have chosen the latter option and I suggest you go sign up for an account at Elance.com 68

69 All you have to do is choose the option to Hire and you can post your jobs and aim it at the experts, whether this be creating you a custom wordpress theme or creating you content to go on your blog. The possibilities are endless to the point where you can even have people blogging for you, this method allows you to manage multiple blogs very easily and have multiple income streams in different niches. So here are some of the great advantages of Outsourcing... Advantages of Outsourcing Time Saving Outsourcing the parts of work that you cannot do or simply would take you a long time to do will save you time. Expertise By hiring an expert in that area you are ensuring that you get a higher quality of work. Free Time As a marketer, outsourcing not only saves you time but it also frees up your time to start on the next section or next project. 69

70 The only real disadvantage of Outsourcing is that it will cost you. Now if you look around you don t have to be paying over the odds. Here are a few sites you can hire people from: Elance We have already mentioned this one Elance allows you to post a job for any piece of online work from video creation, graphic design, wordpress coding or amendments or even hiring writers to write your content for you. Two very similar sites to Elance are: 70

71 If you are specifically looking for graphic design work I would urge you to check out: 71

72 Another site you will want to check out that offers a whole load of people willing to work for you is: As you can just make out from the screenshot, the Services section has separate forums for Content Creation, Design, and Programming etc. You will usually find the prices here are cheaper than hiring people on elance, odesk or vworker but you will want to check out the workers feedback and don t be afraid to shop around. 72

73 How to SEO your Blog Setting up a blog is that easy that anyone can do it, so much so that it can be hard to make your blog stand out from the countless others that will be vying for the same traffic that you are. So how do you get that all important traffic that will make your blog successful? The simple answer is content and SEO. When you search for information or content online, a lot of the time you'll find that the #1 ranked site in Google for that search is a blog. Why? Because blogs are great for Search Engine Optimization because they have multiple pages and categories that you can add your tags into to get the targeted traffic you need. Doing search engine optimization for a blog is slightly different than SEO for most other websites, mainly because of the social elements that are ingrained in the blogging world. Some examples of this are: RSS and feed readers make it easy for readers to subscribe to every post you write, and be notified the moment you publish it so that they don't miss out on anything new that you post. Many people who read blogs also write them, and many of them have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. If a few reputable bloggers syndicate your story it can have a cascading effect where many of their readers share your story. Popular blogs that ask for reader feedback may have dozens or hundreds of comments on each post, adding unique content which the page can rank for. Creating blog content is mainly focused on giving people something to talk about, creating something worthy of attention and something that is shareable. This should always be your first concern when it comes to writing your content. Make sure it's interesting and it's something that your visitors will want to read. Once you've written your basic content this is when you will need to read back through it and focus on the SEO side. You need to make sure your content has your targeted keywords in there, Title tags, Headlines and Alt tags. These are what will help you bring in the traffic from search engines. So let's cover what they are and why you need to have them in your blog posts. 73

74 Title Tags Title tags define the title of a document and are required for all HTML/XHTML documents. It is the text that describes it. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind content of course). Here's a quick example of title tag code: <head> <title>example Title</title> </head> Title tags appear in three key places: in the browser, in the search results and in links from other websites. So, let's use strategicprofitsecrets.com as an example to show you how the title tags shows up in these 3 places. Strategic Profit Secrets tag line is "Expert internet marketing tips for your online business". The screenshot below shows where your tag line will appear in the browser. The screenshot below shows how your tagline will appear in search engines. Using keywords in title tags means that search engines will "bold" (or highlight) those terms in the search results when someone searched for those terms. This helps create a greater visibility and a higher click-through rate. 74

75 This screenshot shows how you tagline will appear if someone links back to your website (particularly from social media sites such as Facebook). The title tag of a web page needs to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content and is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. A keyword-laden title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. Because title tags are such an important part of SEO, there are a few "best practice" rules you need to keep in mind. These are: Length - Keep them short, snappy and to the point as 70 characters is the maximum amount of characters that will display in the search results. Keyword placement - The closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results. Branding - If you're trying to build up a brand name, try using your brand name at the end of a title tag can be a good approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If it is a well known brand, and it can make a difference in click-through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If this is not the case, the keyword should be first. Readability - A compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results. Don't think solely of keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor's first interaction with your brand when they find it in a search result and should convey the most positive impression possible and make them want to visit your site. 75

76 Heading Tags Heading tags are the second most important on-page SEO factor that you need to make good use of. The heading tags break down into the following : H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. The header tags (H1, H2, H3 and so on) represent the beginning of a new section or area of a pages content. These tags are what alert search engine spiders to the relevancy of the content that follows the heading tag. H1 is the most important tag and carries the most weight in the eyes of the search engine and then goes down in importance as you get down to H6. A quick simple way of looking at it would be: <H1>Earth</H1> <H2>Europe</H2> <H3>UK</H3> <H4>England</H4> <H5>Cornwall</H5> <H6>Newquay</H6> What this basically means is that the most important heading will probably be the 'Article Title' and will go between the H1 Tags, the second most important heading should goes between H2 Tags and so no. There isn't a restriction on how many times you can use a certain tag within a page (with the exception of the H1 tag which you can only have 1) but in order to make the most of these tags you need to use at least the H1 and H2 tags. The ideal way to use your tags would be: Header Tags Uses on WordPress H1 Post Title/ Article Title 1 H2 H3 H4 #1 Headings within Posts #2 Headings/ Sub Headings within Posts Comment Box Title/ Sidebar Widgets Title Number of Times As Many Times You Want (2-5 best) As Many times You Want (up to 6 best) Unlimited H5 Sidebar Titles Unlimited H6 Footer Widgets Title Unlimited 76

77 Here are some quick simple tips you should follow when it comes to your heading tags: Always use heading tags where it make sense, make sure they flow with the content and break it up into sizable chunks Using too many heading tags on a single page can make it hard for your readers to determine where one topic ends and another begins They need to grab the reader's attention and show them what to expect from the content after it so keep them relevant Keep them short and simple Use your target keyword in heading tags. This will make the page look focused on a single keyword and gain importance in the Search Engine s eyes. Although we want you to use keywords in your tags, AVOID KEYWORD STUFFING! Try to use target keywords in H2 and H3 tags instead of in H1 tags. For example, let's assume your keyword is "Header Tags". Use "Header tags" in H1, "Header tags Secrets" in H2 and "Header tags Secrets Unveiled" in H3. Alt Tags The Alt attribute in HTML is one of the most improperly used code elements. People either completely neglect to use it or use it in a way in which it was not intended. But by using it properly, you can take advantage of the SEO benefits you'll get. ALT text is used when images cannot be displayed or loaded. For example, this may be used if someone has opted to use a text-only browser, are on a slow internet connection, or if the web server is unable to serve images. The alt text will also be displayed when you hover over the image. When and how to use alt images: When an Image contains meaningful text. When your image contains text, you should put that text in the ALT attribute. Similarly, if you use an image as a link, the ALT attribute should contain the text in the image, or the link text that you would have used had you not chosen an image. If an Image contains meaningful non-textual information. This might be the case if it is a photograph or a graph, or some other type of informational image. In this case, the appropriate ALT text would be a brief description of the image. For a graph displaying temperature data in the UK, for example, you might write alt="the UK has seen steady temperature increases during the past decade." If, however, you want to supply a simple description, you could use square brackets and use the alt attribute like this, alt="[graph of Mean Temperature in the UK over last 10 years]". 77

78 Every time you add an image to your blog remember to always add your alt tags to every image. The text tag will make the search engines understand what the images on your website are about, and also help your images to show up in Search engine image results for relevant keywords. For many blogs, showing up in image searches has shown to be a good source of traffic as an enticing and interesting picture will make people want to see the content that goes with it and see what else you have to offer. Alt tags have great search engine optimization benefits because images cannot be read and interpreted by search engines. But alt text can. Just remember these 2 key factors when writing your alt tags: Keep it under 50 characters. Any more than this is unnecessary and it won't all be shown. Avoid using specialized symbols. If you need to include a symbol, consider a textual alternative. SEO Pressor One of the great advantages of having a blog is that there are countless plug ins you can install that will make your blogging life that little bit easier. One of the plug ins that is a must for any Wordpress blog is SEO Pressor. Optimising each web page you write is an important focus point for anyone wanting to increase their blog s traffic. It forms a massive part of your success in SEO and we've already looked at how to write your content, how you need to make the most of keywords and how to best use tags in your posts. This plug in will help you with a lot of the SEO heavy lifting and let you know how well you've optimized your post. SEO Pressor is an on-page SEO system which calculates keyword density in your post, formats keywords and provides you with rolling feedback for SEO. It analyses title tags, proper placement of keywords, images and links on the page. By analysing these features of a blog, SEO Pressor can recommend changes that need to be made to enhance the potential traffic for the blog. SEO Pressor improves search rankings bringing them to the number 1 position which is essential to attracting lots of targeted traffic. This is all based on the assumption that you do your keyword research properly so although it won't do all the work for you, it makes your blogging experience a lot easier. This plug in is a good learning tool if you are new to SEO because it gives you suggestions and tutorials on how to optimize your website. It also has an option to 78

79 allow site-wide keyword decorations. You can enter keywords that you want optimized and SEO Pressor automatically bold, italicizes, or underlines those keywords throughout your site. Wherever keywords should be placed like in your page titles, image ALT tags, or H1 tags, this plug-in makes sure that they are there or adds them in for you if they are not there. It even gives you other suggestions that optimize your site even more. Because of this, it is like having a SEO consultant right next to you telling you what to do to make your site more optimized. The above images give you an idea of how the SEO Pressor works. You insert a keyword which you would like to target for SEO so that you can rank better on search engine results, and what SEO Pressor does is to give you the score of the keyword that you have chosen to use and also the density of that keyword. The higher percentage you have for the score and the density, the more optimized your article 79

80 will be. Ideally what you should be aiming for with the percentage is anything around the 90% mark. With SEO Pressor there are only a couple of requirements to be able to use it. You need to have a Wordpress blog, it needs to be self hosted (not hosted by Wordpress) and you need to have version 3.0 or up. SEO Pressor is a simple and easy to install WordPress plug-in that you only need to install once and you're good to go. So if you're wanting to save yourself some time on your blogs SEO you can get more information on SEO Pressor and grab yourself a copy from here: 80

81 What are Google Panda and Google Penguin? Google Panda Panda is a change in Google's search results ranking algorithm which determines where your site will show up in search results based on if your site provides a "good user experience". What this does is lower the rank of "low-quality sites" and move "higher-quality sites" near the top of the search results. This update classes lowquality sites as those with low-value for users, those that have copied content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren t necessarily spam but aren t great quality. This update is meant to improve the user experience for those using their search engine as they want to show sites that will appeal to the reader, look good and deliver good content. If your site has dozens of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offer little to no real value for the reader, your site is going to be penalized. Panda is a site wide penalty, which means that if enough (no specific number) pages of your site were flagged for having thin or bad content, your entire site could be penalized. Panda was also intended to stop scrappers (sites that would republish other company s content) from outranking the original author s content. So what does Panda class as low quality content? Duplicate articles on the same/similar topics with slightly different keyword variations. Mass-produced or outsourced content that is spread across a large network of sites. Short, unsubstantial articles that aren't informative and lack helpful specifics. 81

82 Dull looking pages that don't show attention to details and are not well thought out. Content with spelling, stylistic, grammatical or factual errors. When it comes to identical low quality content it is important to note that this is particularly endemic across e-commerce websites. For example, why should a pair of audio cables be described differently in each website and in each page on your website? Theoretically to meet the "unique" content guideline every product should be given an unique description and listing to avoid being marked as low-quality content by Panda. The update is mainly aimed at bringing judgment to the content farms and those sites which steal and duplicate content. That means in order to prevent Panda from blacklisting you, you MUST NOT steal other peoples articles, and really focus on creating unique content that will be of use to your target audience. When you're writing your content for your blog try to think of: What topic will my readers will be interested in? What do I offer to my readers that is unique? What is it about my content that will differentiate myself from other sites that are based on the same subject? How can I make my content more personal and make my readers feel like they are getting to know me? Another factor that Panda takes into consideration is how trustworthy your site is. This not only applies to your content, it may extend to your links, your tweets and your resources related with the site. How trustworthy a site is can be hard to determine but trust could be measured by the links awarded to the article and site, and the more authoritative the link, the more trustworthy the article and the site. When you're looking at how to make sure your site and content is trustworthy, ask yourself the following: Would you trust the information presented in the article? Is this article written by expert/enthusiast who knows the topic well? Is the site a recognized authority on its topic? Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? Is this the sort of page you d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? If you're building up links from sites that answer yes to most of those questions then your site will be good for both Google Panda and your fellow readers. 82

83 Advertisements are the next thing that the Panda update affects. Everyone wants to be able have paid for ads on their site to bring in revenue. But with regards to the Panda update, you need to make sure that any ads on your site are good ads. For example 3 good ads that bring you in $10K are better than 20 ads at $500. Don't cover your blog with ads. It looks bad, will put your readers off and may affect your ranking thanks to the Panda update. Ads aren't pad and won't get you banned, but if your blog is crammed with unrelated ads just for the sake of making you a bit of extra cash you will be penalized as your reader experience won't be great and neither will your blogs load time. Panda updates are usually every month or so but Google doesn t re-index every site each time, so if you get your site banned or moved down in the rankings you may be forced to deal with low traffic for several months until Google gets around to recrawling your website and taking note of any positive changes. This is why it's important to keep up to date with any Panda updates, make changes to your blog and content so that you don't experience any downside to Panda updates. Although this update seems like it takes a lot of work to overcome being penalized and that you can be penalized for just about anything, this update is actually great for blogs that regularly publish good content that isn't stuffed with keywords just for the sake of it. If you focus your efforts on creating fresh, good quality content you won't be penalized by Google Panda updates and you'll more than likely find your blog moving up in the search rankings. Google Penguin Penguin is a code name for a Google algorithm that is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google s Webmaster Guidelines by using 83

84 now black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content. You can't really argue with an update that penalizes spam sites and this update is good for bloggers and the web in general. So what does the penguin update target? Well ideally you should get to grips with Google's full Webmaster Guidelines which you can find here: we'll break it down into the main ones that you should be aware of: Don't use hidden text or hidden links Don t use cloaking or sneaky redirects Don t send automated queries to Google Don t load pages with keywords just to try and cram as many in there as you can Don't load pages with keywords that are irrelevant to your content. Don t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with duplicate content Don t create pages that try and utilize phishing, installing viruses, trojans etc Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines, or other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. In addition to these basic guidelines you also need to take the following in to consideration: Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, this is what is referred to as cloaking. Don t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site s ranking or PageRank. Avoid links to web spammers on the web as your own ranking will more than likely be affected adversely by those kinds of links. It's hard to argue with an update that tries to get rid of spam sites and make the search results a lot more user friendly. By taking all the above points into consideration when writing your content and building up your links, you'll avoid being penalized by the Penguin update. 84

85 How to get Your Blog Indexed Getting your blog indexed by search engines is one of the most important factors towards building up your traffic. Your blog will eventually get indexed but this can take some time as search engines crawl the web every few weeks looking for websites to index. Here's how it works: Search engines start at one website with a large number of outbound links (usually a directory) They follow every link they come across, indexing each page they arrive at Once a page has been indexed they follow all the links from that page And so on until there are no more links to follow So if you have no links currently, how do you get your blog indexed quicker? Search Engines First off, you need to submit your site to search engines. You can submit your site to Google here: ogle.com%2fwebmasters%2ftools%2fsubmiturl&followup=https%3a%2f%2fwww.google.com%2fwebmasters%2ftools%2fsubm it-url&service=sitemaps You can submit your site to Bing here: The next thing you need to do is to use the webmaster tools provided by search engines to submit your sitemap. The webmaster tools allow you to submit you sitemap to search engines so that your post page gets indexed in search engines. It also allows other parameters to watch like crawl rate and site links. 85

86 Blog Directories After you've submitted your URL and sitemap to the search engines, the next thing you need to do is to make the most of the blogging community and add your blog to blog directories. There are so many blog directories out there now but it's worth getting your blog submitted to as many as you can. Here is a list of the best blog directories that you can submit your blog to: Technorati - This is one of the more well-respected and popular blog directories and spans more than 30 categories. Blog Catalog - Vast number of categories, from academic to writing, while offering the ability to search by country, language or user. Simple blog registration. On Top List - Manually-edited directory that reads the RSS feed of your blog. You can also use the site s social features, article directory, and other great tools to build your blog. Blogged - A mix of a directory and a Google News type site that is fed by the blogs listed with Blogged. Spill Bean - Well-designed directory with categories such as health, society, Internet, and personal. Blogging Fusion - Over 60 categories, including family-focused blogs. Blogging Fusion has an good number of listings, and it also has visitor stats. Blog Listing

87 Fun, colourful and catch the attention of the reader. Bloglisting displays the pageranking blogs, which is a helpful tool when determining with whom you want to exchange links. Blogorama - Strong base of blogs and a solid text-ad system for its front page. Blog Hints - Features over 100 categories. The site is very picky about which blogs are included, and those that are listed are presented via a visual interface that shows the site s design and page rank. This makes Blog Hints the perfect site for finding link-swapping partners. Once you get your blog on these communities Google will have no other choice but to index your blog. So register with at least 2 or three for an account and get your blog listed. When you're listing your blog just remember to pay special attention to your blog s description, keywords & tags (add related keywords and tags to your listing, this will be used by other members to find your blog), branding (put your logo, avatars, screenshots etc. have a consistent branding everywhere), and list your blog in the correct category. Social Media Registering an account on Social Sites with the same username as your blog s URL is another great way to get your blog indexed by Search Engines. You want to register with all the big social sites such as: Twitter - Facebook - Stumble Upon - Delicious - Linked In - When you are signing up with these sites remember to sign up with your brand/keyword. For example, if your blog s name is Timsdesigntips, it s good practice to register the same username at twitter and to create a page in Facebook etc. Having a consistent keyword- 87

88 username on all major Social Sites will help get your blog indexed faster, and will also help build a brand for your blog. Social media sites generally use no follow tags on links which means the links don t really help with SEO. But it s still worth getting pages for your keywords/brand as these pages can rank in and of themselves in Google and can help you to have control over numerous search results for the same keyword. By following these simple steps you'll get your blog indexed by Google a lot quicker. Backlinks are also an important factor for getting indexed and we'll cover this now in our next section. 88

89 How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Sadly it's not enough to get your blog up and running and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in. You need to put in a bit of time and effort in order to make your blog a success and the first thing you need to start with is building up backlinks to your blog. Backlinks So what are backlinks? Backlinks are like a thumbs up or vote for your website. The more backlinks your site receives the higher it will rank. Without links pointing at your website it will likely never get a high keyword ranking. Search engines rank websites according to how many quality backlinks they find for your blog. Quality is determined by how relevant the other site is to your site and where the link is placed on their page (within the content is best) and how many other links are on the page (less is better). A large number of low quality links pointing at your site isn't a good thing. In order to rise up to the coveted first page of search results you need high quality links. The best way to encourage people to link to your content is to give them something worthy of linking to. If you're throwing your content together with no thought for how useful or interesting it will be for your readers, then you're never going to get someone wanting to link back to you. Offer something of value of something that piques their interest and they'll want to link back to you. Google recently changed its algorithm so that if you have tons of traded links, purchased links, are involved in triangular linking schemes, or buy large quantities of 89

90 links, it raises a red flag and Google may apply a filter to your site to prevent it from ranking high or in a worst case scenario your site gets banned. What do search engines class as high quality backlinks? Your link on a site with high PR (page rank) Your link on a page with few other links Your link within the content of the page (not the footer or sidebars) A link from a relevant site (one within the same niche as you) Now, although we want high quality backlinks only, we should point out that the occasional and relevant link trade is ok, as is buying a link in Yahoo directory or another directory (that is human reviewed where you have to pay for the review and not the submission). But again, doing this to excess can cause you problems with your ranking so keep in mind that moderation is key. Anything you do to try and unfairly manipulate your rank in Google WILL draw a red flag and your site could be banned, penalized or have your keyword rank filtered out, i.e., you won't be able to rank for anything no matter what you do. What are dofollow and nofollow links? A lot of blogs and forums (where you want to get backlinks from) will receive lots of junk comments. The purpose of these comments is to get backlinks to someone s website. To stop people from taking advantage of this some blog and website owners will put a nofollow attribute in any links posted in comments. An example of this: <a href=" rel="nofollow"> 90

91 The "nofollow" at the end, that s the part that tells search engines not to follow this link. When Google sees this it won t follow this link so it won't really help with your rankings in search engines. Here's a quotes straight from Google: Nofollow provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines Don t follow links on this page or Don t follow this specific link." In general, we don t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Dofollow links are links that Google and other search engines will follow and these are the links that help with your ranking. Although the nofollow links don't help with your rankings, you should still be trying to get nofollow backlinks as this is/and looks a lot more natural to search engines. If you're unsure of whether a site uses the nofollow attribute on comments, the Firefox plug-in "searchstatus" will highlight any nofollow links on the page. How do I get good quality backlinks? When you're just getting your blog up and running the best places to start are: Find friends, businesses associates, individuals, or organizations who are willing to link to your website as soon as it's online. Some of them may require a link trade but try to get mostly one-way links. Relevant Links. Look for websites focused on what your market but those that have a slightly different focus e.g. submit to a gardening site if you sell gardening tools. Competitors Links. Check to see where your competitors are getting their links and try and submit your website there also. Find Directories in Your Own Niche. If you sell or offer information about vitamins then look for directories focused on health products. However Google puts less relevance on directory links so don't put a lot of focus on these. Comment on other peoples blogs. Look for other bloggers in your market. See what sort of posts they have and find those with good content. These are the types of sites you want to comment on. Blogging is very social so you need to 91

92 be social. Participate and comment on peoples blogs regularly and they'll want to comment on yours and will be far more likely to link back to you. Guest posting. This is another great way to leverage other people s traffic and send some that traffic to you. Find a blog that is related to your blog and write a guest blog post for them. They will pay you back with a link to your website. If people like the post you ve written then they will likely visit your website. Participate in Forums. Find popular forums in your niche market. You can get backlinks from online forums by placing a link to your site in your forum signature that appears at the bottom of every forum post you make. Make sure the forum allows signatures and allows links in signatures. Also make sure that the link to your site in the signature is a dofollow link. By participating in these you'll build up your backlinks and will get traffic from those reading your posts and wanting to find out more of what you have to offer. Article Marketing. Write a 500 or so word article related to your market (with SEO and the keywords you want to target in mind) and submit it to an article networks such as: ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, articlecity.com, associatedcontent.com, articledashboard.com, articlesbase.com, and searchwarp.com. Be sure to place a link to your URL in the articles (e.g. you can add a "to find out more visit" at the bottom of your article) and your bio along with a line or two about what they can find on your site. Article marketing can also get you direct traffic from articles as we'll direct traffic from websites who digitally reprint your articles as well as the one-way incoming links from both the article directories and the sites that republish your articles. Copying content. Now, we don't mean this as a "go out and copy others content, but as a what to do if people copy yours. As your site becomes more popular you may find that people begin copying your content and republishing it on their websites. You can spend a ton of time and effort trying to get these sites to remove your content or you can use it as a way to build backlinks to your site. In every post that you publish you should embed 3 links to other posts you have published. This means that when someone copies your content they will be giving you 3 backlinks! Encourage people to share your content. So you've just written and posted some great content on your blog and you want people to spread the word. By having plugins on your blog that allow people to like, tweet and share your 92

93 blog post on social sites, you'll get backlinks and traffic without having to lift a finger yourself. Wordpress has tons of plugins for you to chose from that will give you the social sharing buttons on your blog. Getting quality backlinks is extremely important when it comes to SEO, and because of their importance, it needs to be high on your priority list when you're trying to build up your blog traffic. Although building up backlinks can take time and effort, it's something that you can't avoid if you want to be successful online. If you're wanting to rank high for your chosen keywords and more importantly, rank higher than your competition, then you need to put in the work as you can guarantee your competitors will be even if you aren't. Make link building part of your regular routine and you'll keep one step ahead of your competition and keep your traffic coming. Yahoo Answers As well as building up backlinks to your site through all the "usual" methods, another one that you need to utilize is Yahoo Answers. At some point or another we've all searched the web for an answer to a specific question we have and the top answers have been Yahoo answers. By using Yahoo Answers for your niche sites and you can boost the traffic you get to them. All you need to do is spend a little bit of time writing answers to people questions and providing your website URL in the source box. 93

94 Here's the link you need for Yahoo Answers - When you're looking to answer questions you need to click on the "Browse Open Questions" as you can see on the image above. This will then open a page of questions that need answers and a section where you can choose which category the question is in. So let's have a look at the steps you should take to make Yahoo answers work for your blog. Create a Yahoo sign in. You'll want your sign up if you haven't already with your "normal" not your "business blog" details as you'll be referencing your blogs URL in the source section of the answers. Here is the link you need to sign up - Find the right category. Yahoo Answer are categorized, so you need to look for the category that is most relevant to your blog s subject/market. Each category also has subcategories that are related to the main category. What you should look to do is to answer questions in both the main category and the sub-categories which are more focused. You can see from the screenshot below the general list of categories. 94

95 So let's look at a quick example. If your market is in the computers and internet category choosing this will then give you the following categories as shown in the screenshot below: It will show you all the open questions in the general category or you can choose one of the subcategories to view the open questions. Now all you need to do is find a question that you can answer. What you should ideally be looking for are questions that you have the answer to in one of your blog posts. Again keeping with the computers and internet example, we found the following question: 95

96 To answer the question simply click on the!answer question" button. If you're not already signed in to Yahoo, you'll need to do it at this point. You'll then see this next screen where you can answer the question and enter your source URL. When you are answering questions here are a few pointers that you should follow: Since you are blogging in a particular theme or subject, you must be having a fair idea about the subject even if you are not specialized. Answer with a link. In the answer section, don't just give a link, answer it in brief but convince the reader that by clicking the link he would get more detailed answer. Also giving just a link would look more like a spam and the reader would not trust it. But don t forget to give the link to your site in the source section. When you give the link, make sure it is to a related post and not to the main page of your blog. If the reader gets the answer they want they'll want to probe around on your site to find out what else you have to offer. When you're answering questions, try and be the first one to answer. If other people have already answered the question, your answer will be added to the bottom of what has already been written. Try and give the best answer possible. This is the whole point of you doing this. Every question has a certain amount of time to be answered and after the time allotted for each question has ended, all the answers the question has received are voted on. If your answer is selected as being the best, then your content will make it to the top of all the answers. This will get you a 96

97 continued amount of traffic from that question. When someone has a question, more than likely they'll they search to see if it has already been asked. If it has they are far more likely to read the best answer than any of the other answers. Be a top contributor. Yahoo Answers also gives points for your answers. 2 points for an answer, 10 points for the best answer and 1 point for voting an answer. As your points grow you become the top contributor. When you answer a particular question, you will be shown as a top contributor near your avatar. By getting to be a top contributor people may trust your words more than others and they are more likely to click your avatar and see what other questions you have answered. This means more traffic to your site. Use Yahoo answers as inspiration for your blog posts. If you hit a wall and can't think of any good posts to write about for your blog, use questions as inspiration. While you're browsing questions to answer, more than likely you'll come across some questions that will pique your interest and you'll want to write a post about it for your blog. Answer the question in your site and give the link to that post as answer in Yahoo. These are questions asked by a genuine person and there are many people with the similar question, so when you post it in your site there are chances you will receive hits for that post from search engine as well. Now, this may look like it takes lot of time and effort on your part but you have to ask yourself if the time and effort you put in is worth it. The simple answer is yes. You'll be building up links to your site and giving something back to potential readers. You'll be building yourself up as a specialist in your market, someone that people will trust and will look to for more answers. All this will bring a steady continuous traffic to your blog as when people search for answers to questions, they may come across your answer, even if you answered it a long time ago and visit your blog as a result of work you did ages ago. As well as Yahoo answers there are other question sites that you can answer questions. The other main 2 that may be worth your time are: AnswerBag - AskVille - But if you only want to focus on one answer site to get traffic, make sure that it is Yahoo answers as this is by far the most popular answer site. 97

98 Squidoo If you haven't already heard of it, Squidoo is a free online tool that allows you to to create a web page or Lens on any topic. According to Seth Godin the creator of Squidoo, everyone is an expert in something. Want you need to do is to create a Squidoo lens on your blogs subject. You can create as many Lenses as want and when you publish it to the web you get to pick the URL. For example: Squidoo.com/Your-Lens-Name. Your lens name should be your blogs name ideally. By creating a Squidoo lens, you're building up your "brand" and getting traffic to your blog from the lenses you create. The benefits of having a Squidoo lens, besides the extra traffic are: You don t need to know how to build a website, but you can still build yourself a Squidoo Lens. SEO tools are built-in and easy to use, which allows you to rank higher on search engines for your topic Building a Lens doesn t take a lot of time. You can have a quality Squidoo Lens up in a few hours So first off, you'll need to create a Squidoo account. Here's the link you need: Once you're signed up and logged in you'll see this first screen: 98

99 To get started with creating your lens, click the "create a lens" button and you're ready to get started. You'll then see this page where you need to describe what your page is about. Obviously this needs to be related to your blog subject and something that will interest your market. Let's say that your blog is all about how to create handmade bags. Your lens could be about how to make a leather satchel bag : Once you've entered what your lens will be about you'll see this next screen where you can set your lens URL, topic and subtopic, and who the lens is appropriate for. 99

100 You'll then need to enter your tags in the next screen. This is one of the most important aspects of your lens. You need to make sure you're using your target keywords so that the right audience finds your lens. You'll then need to decide how you want to get paid. Yep, you'll get paid if you make any royalties through the ads that will be shown on your lens. 100

101 Once you've gone through the basic set up you'll be taken to your dash board where you can edit all the appropriate information for your lens such as the text, images, your profile etc. In the top right of your dashboard you'll also see your lens progress, which bits are missing and what you need to do before you publish your lens. 101

102 Now that we've briefly walked you through how to create a lens, here are a few final tips that will help you create a great lens for your blog: Have a plan. Think through what you re trying to accomplish with this Lens before you start building it. What are your goals for the Lens? Add links to your website to as many modules as possible. Lenses can act as landing pages for your website. Because of the built in SEO, Lenses will oftentimes outrank your website and even your biggest competitors website. Use this to your advantage by turning your Lens into a lead generation tool. Linking your website to your Lens will move traffic from search engines to your Lens and then ultimately to your website. Add as many relevant tags as possible so that your Lens ranks for all possible search terms related to your Lens topic. Pick a topic that is relevant, that people want to learn about. Share your Lens on all of your social media accounts. Visit other Lenses geared towards the same topic. Leave comments on those Lenses with links back to your Lens. By following these tips you ll be able to create a Squidoo Lens that will generate your blog tons of new traffic. Another site similar to Squidoo is Hubpages which again can help with building traffic to your blog. Here's the link to Hubpages if you want to create an account there: But again, if you only have time to focus on one, Squidoo is the one to go for. YouTube Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard of and used YouTube. YouTube is another great way to get traffic back to your blog. Video marketing is one of the best ways to promote your blog and your brand. Create a video that s educational, funny and entertaining and you'll have just made a new fan who not only wants to subscribe to your YouTube channel and share your video on social networks but they'll also want to visit your blog and see what else you have to offer. The simplest way to get your YouTube video viewers to hop over to your blog and check it out is by asking. Even though people may go searching for your blog using a search engine it's so much easier for you to tell them exactly where to go at some point during your video. 102

103 So when you're creating a video for YouTube, what should you be doing? Use keywords in your YouTube titles You should ALWAYS use a keyword rich title for your video. You should already done keyword research to for your market so make sure you use these in your titles to reach your target market. Google often adds in videos now for search results so you'll get double bang for your buck using those keywords. Put a hyperlink to your blog in the description section in YouTube. YouTube lets you add a description to your videos but it will also create clickable links when you enter in full URLs so you need to make sure you are using this feature. YouTube cuts off its descriptions at 140 characters so you should add the link to your website or post at the beginning of this video description so that you don't miss out on getting it in there. Having a link in the beginning of the description ensures that your links will be seen and hopefully clicked though. Use your Keywords in your YouTube video tags. Tags within YouTube are great for SEO and they help YouTube determine what other related videos will show up when your video is finished playing (and vice-versa). They also help YouTube index your video. So for example, let's say that someone searches for a keyword you're targeting. Your YouTube video will appears in the search results if you've used your keywords in the tags. The viewer watches your video, then they click your link in the videos description and you've just received a new visitor and a and potential subscriber. As with any video give your viewer a clear call to action. Tell them to visit your website by clicking link below, tell them to subscribe to your newsletter, be there to guide them and tell them what else they can expect or look forward to from you to keep them coming back. Video marketing is growing in popularity because a video explanation of something is usually more engaging than a text or image post. How-to-tutorials are a great example of this and are one of the main reasons why people love them so much. It makes the video a little bit more personal, allows them to follow the tips at their own pace and skip back to sections that they want to re-watch. No matter what market you are in, more than likely you can come up with a quick and entertaining how-to tutorial to promote your blog. If you're struggling to come up with ideas for videos or 103

104 can't think of a how-to, have a think about doing a product review video or a video of what's new to the market. By creating some simple videos and uploading them you can greatly increase your blog traffic and brand awareness. Banner Advertising NOTE: As this is a paid traffic method you may want to use the free ones first. This method is great to grow your blog once you have started getting free traffic. Also note that you do not just want to send people to your main blog page, you will want to send them directly to a page with an offer and optin box so you are gathering leads whilst paying for this traffic. Banner advertising is another great way to get traffic to your site. A banner advert is an image that appears next to the main content on a relevant website - where potential customers of yours can see it. When a reader clicks on it, they're brought to your site to find out more about what you offer. You pay for a set amount of space on a website for a set amount of time. So what are the benefits of banner advertising? It's usually relatively inexpensive and you know exactly what you are paying upfront. This means that for just a few dollars every month you can have your banner out on hundreds of sites or may only pay a few pennies for every visitor that clicks on your banner. Get targeted audiences for your banner ads. There is a lesser chance that you can filter the audience if you use link exchange or article submission on websites. But with banner ads, you can choose the sites on which they'll appear. Being able to place your ad on similar sites or those in your market means your reaching your ideal target market and those who will be interested in what you have to offer. They can be monitored meaning you can easily keep track of how many people see your adverts, how many click through to your site and how many convert to a sale. If you're looking at running a banner ad to boost your traffic, you need to think about budget, what you want your ad to look like and what text you want in it. If you're unsure of what exactly you want to go for, have a look at your competitors banner ads to get an idea of what works. 104

105 The next thing you need to think about is where you want to place your banner ads. One of the best marketplaces for banner ads is BuySellAds - BuySellAds.com is an online advertising network that brings online publishers (such as bloggers) and online advertisers together, making it easier for those advertisers to find Web sites and blogs best suited for their ads and budgets. There are different niche markets, and depending on the niche you are in, the pricing of your ads will vary. How do you choose the right sites for your ad campaign? Well first off your ad must be professional-looking and engaging so the visitors will want to click on it. Make sure that it will speak to your target market. When you are browsing the directory in BuySellAds, you'll see the number of monthly page impressions on the website s listing page along with other details about the site. This is a calculation of the estimated impressions your ad can receive on that website in a 30-day period. 105

106 Make sure that you have a look at the website and that you actually like the overall look and operation of the site. You will want to find sites that you'd be happy for your ad to be on. Some ads rotate and some don t. If an ad rotates, it means you will share that space with other ads, and the impression count reduces to show you the impressions that your particular ad will get in that rotated space. If you do not want to share ad rotations with other ads, make sure that you purchase an ad spot that doesn't rotate. You'll also want to look at where the ad is located on the site and how the ad zones are presented. Ads closer to the top of a site are usually priced higher as these are generally more visible and could get more clicks. Although you can find some good deals on ads that are lower on a site it may not be worth it if you think your ad isn't going to get noticed. The location and presentation of an ad is something you will want to consider and if you're in any doubt about an ad placing, try the spot you are considering for a month to see how it does. If it doesn't do as well as you'd hoped you can always cancel and advertise somewhere else or on a different placement. You will want to weigh the ad spot s selling points against the to make sure that you're not over-paying for the space. Just because an ad is at the top of a site doesn t mean that you should pay double or triple the price of an ad that appears in the middle of a site. It all depends on the website s traffic, the location of the ad, how many ads are already on the site, and the professionalism and organization of the site itself. In general, a good price to keep in mind is $1 for every 2,000 impressions. This is an average price to go by, and depending on the site, the size of the ad, the 106

107 site s niche market, and the owner of the website, these ad prices can vary greatly. If you are happy with the results it gets during its first cycle, you can just keep things as they are and your ad will automatically renew for the next cycle. If you find that the ad isn't doing well at, cancel the ad and it won't renew for the next cycle. When you purchase an ad through BuySellAds.com you can login to your account to see the results of your ad campaigns - how many impressions your ad received, how many clicks it received, etc. This is one of the key elements of running any ad. If you're paying for ad space you need to monitor how well it's doing to see if you're getting value for money and if that specific website is getting you the targeted traffic you want. Ad Swaps As well as looking at buying banner ads you could also consider doing an Ad Swap. If you can t afford it or don t want to pay for banner advertising ad swaps are the perfect way to get your ads out there. An ad swap is simply an arrangement where you agree to put up someone else s ad on your site or newsletter in exchange for them doing the same. The goal of an ad swap is mainly to get exposure for a specific purpose, such as selling products/services or improving awareness of your brand/site. This is different from a link exchange because you are not seeking to advertise to improve your search ranking. The link value doesn t matter at all. What matters is getting visitors into your web site. So what should you look for when doing an ad swap? Equal traffic and exposure: Both sites should receive a steady amount of visitors every day, or an list with a decent amount of subscribers. Ad swaps are best when both parties have an equivalent audience reach/traffic count as neither of you will feel like you are getting the raw end of the deal. Good Ad placement: Traffic flows more easily to you when your ad is displayed in a spot which is easily viewable. Both parties should look to exchange ads that are displayed in a similar position. If you're going to display their ad front and centre, you should expect the same in return. Relevancy: Ideally you should ad swap with sites in the same niche, as both parties would benefit from a trade in visitors with an already established interest on the same topic. No Conflicting Purpose. If you re selling a product you should not do ad swaps with competitors (other merchants/firms in the same niche). However ad swaps can be 107

108 done for joint promotion of a specific event or shared project. You also should not do an ad swap with a site that contradicts your brand s ethos or image (e.g. PETA doing an ad swap with KFC). Your goal is to get the best quality visitors from your ad so try to only trade with websites that have a quality audience. Don t do ad swaps just because someone asked you to, it could end up being a waste of time and ad space. You probably know how to find quality ad partners already, as you should be familiar with your niche. If not, find them by doing a Google search for your site s keywords. If you can t set up a good ad exchange because your site doesn t get enough traffic, try again after you ve developed a greater audience. All ad swaps can be measured with tracking links and analytics so both parties can compare how many hits they received with the clicks they sent out. If you re doing an ad swap with a friend or prefer a looser agreement, you can forgo click data and stats altogether. The choice is up to you. Here are some ad swap formats you can use. On-site Banners and Text Links. This includes banners of all sizes and text links on a site-wide basis or on specific web pages. Includes blog post promos. Newsletters. Involves inserting a mention of your ad partner s website or product/offer. This can be accompanied by a personal endorsement. RSS Feed Ads. These are either text links or image banners placed within an RSS feed. Even though ad swaps are free, they do work as long as you do an ad swap with someone in the same niche and a decent amount of regular visitors. If you ve got ad space you can t sell or can't afford to pay for an ad just yet, ad swaps can be a godsend and bring in the extra traffic you want. Monitor your Traffic One of the most important things you, as a blog owner, should do is to monitor your web traffic. You have to know where they are coming from and where they are going on your website. You can significantly increase your revenue if you understand these user habits. This is especially important if you are running any kind of ad as you need to know if your ad is working or not as this can either save you money or cost you it. Where are your visitors coming from? 108

109 This is SO important. As you build traffic, write articles and get more links out there on the web you need to know what is working and what isn't. If you have some kind of a tracking program you can see what works and improve it. You can also see what doesn't work and change it or drop it. Don't waste your time on stuff that doesn't work. How long do your visitors stay and what pages do they view? As your blog grows you will have hundreds, even thousands of pages. What pages do they visit and where do they come from on your site? Do you have a page that you think would be valuable to your visitors but yet it never gets visited? A statistics tracking program is invaluable to your growth on the web as it can help you improve your traffic, understand what your web visitor is looking for and it can help you make more money from your blog. If you haven't already signed up with a tracking program you absolutely need to! Here's the link you need to sign up with Google Analytics which will become one of your most valuable tools. Why should you be using Analytics? Google Analytics is Free. It doesn't cost you a penny to run it. With GA you get sent monthly reports that include graphs of how your natural campaigns are going (natural such as link building, traffic through search engines etc). The great thing about Analytics is that you can set different profiles to focus on specific aspects of your business. Want to just see blog traffic? You can do that. Want to see just traffic from Canada? Sure. Only traffic that signed up for the newsletter? Yep. You can get a great insight as to exactly is visiting your site, what they are interested in and then cater more to that. The possibilities are endless. This is a great tool for analyzing traffic on your site and it gives you a lot of information. In order to set it up all you need to do is to sign up with Analytics and you'll get a piece of code. You paste this piece of code into your webpages or templates and you're done. If you are working with adsense or adwords you really should sign up as it has some nice tie-ins with adsense/adwords so that you can track every aspect of those too. It doesn't matter what you're doing to generate traffic if you aren't monitoring it. If you don't know where your traffic is coming from and what they do on your site you might as well just be throwing your articles and links out the window. You need to 109

110 know which sites and links are bringing you the traffic, which ads are bringing people in and which areas you can improve on. As soon as you have this information you know exactly what you need to do next in order to build up your traffic and keep your readers coming back. General Tips Now that we've covered all the major factors for getting traffic to your blog, let's go over a few simple tips that will get you well on your way to becoming a successful blogger. Blog consistently and on a regular basis. You're not going to get return visitors if you aren't offering them something to come back for. Don't write wall-o-text posts if you can avoid it. Keep your posts short, to the point but entertaining. You need to be able to keep your visitors attention so waffling on will bore your reader and they'll leave before they've finished your post. Be a resource to people. Know what you are talking about and allow people to interact with you, especially in the comments section of your blog. If people need extra clarification, would like you to cover another subject, then oblige them. It will keep people coming back. Write attention grabbing headlines. If you don't nail the headlines you've already lost your readers. Pique their interest with the headline so that they absolutely have to read your post to find out more. If your post needs to be a long one to get all the necessary information in there, organize your posts with lists and subheadings. This will break up your posts into more manageable chunks which people are more likely to read. Be funny, clever and memorable. Put your personality into your posts and you'll have people coming back for more and people wanting to pass on your great content. People want to link back to good content and want to share it so make sure you write quality content. Leave thought out comments on other peoples blogs and they'll do the same for you which will build up your backlinks. Make it social. Tweet about your new posts. Share them on Facebook. This let's more people see your content and again, helps with backlinks. The most important thing to remember when trying to drive traffic to your blog is that content is king. You can have tons of backlinks, have ads running to generate traffic but none of it will matter if your blog is full of terrible content. Your visitors won't want to stay and read your posts, they won't want to buy anything through 110

111 your blog and they certainly won't return. So above all else, make your content great and people will spread the word about your blog. Making The Money How To Monetize Your Blog When to Monetize This is probably the most crucial decision you will make when running a blog, you will obviously want to start making money as soon as possible but there are a few things that you need to make sure of first: 1. Make sure you are getting traffic. 2. Make sure you have plenty of content. 3. Make sure people are commenting on your content. 4. Share your content on social media sites. You will want to make sure you are getting at least 100 unique visitors a week. Having more content on your blog and following the steps to SEO your blog will help you attain this as well as following the traffic methods we have talked about. Make sure people are commenting on your blog by asking questions or for other peoples experiences at the end of blog posts. This will keep people coming back to your blog. There is nothing more off putting on a blog for readers than too much advertising so following the steps below will make sure you have the right balance. Aim to have at least 10 blog posts before monetizing your site. List The first monetization method you will have will be your list. You already have your opt-in form but you need to make sure your blog drives attention and readers to it. Like I said earlier, it s not good enough to just have a keep updated pitch for your opt-in it needs to be more like: Get The Latest Dog Training Updates Direct From Me And If Your One Of The Next 17 People To Subscribe For Free You ll Receive The Secrets To Your Dog s Behavior Video Totally Free Of Charge. Just Enter Your First Name And Below For More The Download Link 111

112 You really need to make sure you sell your free offer and you can even make a post or two now and again about your free offer and how they get a secret gift for joining. As people sign up to your list you can then send them s for other products via an affiliate link, this way you can make affiliate commissions without placing any further advertising on your blog. Read the methods below and you will see where you can pick good products to send to your list. Solo Ads Once you have over 200 people on your list you can start selling solo ads. This is where a product or site owner wants to generate more traffic to their site or product and will pay you to send out an to your list. This is a great method as you will get paid whether you make sales or not. You can use these places to advertise your list for solo ads As your list grows you will be able to charge more and more for these ads. They key is to keep your list happy. If you start sending an every day for a different product they will soon stop clicking on your s and mark them as SPAM. Here is what we suggest. List under 200 subscribers: Limit 1 affiliate promotion or solo ad per month. Try to send out 1-2 s per week. These can be useful content or just telling them that you have a new blog post live subscribers: 112

113 Limit 3 affiliate promotions or solo ads per month. Again try to send 2 s per week with updated information regarding the blog as well as extra information subscribers: You can now start to send 1-2 promotion s per week. Also add in at least 1 a week that is telling them about the blog. Cross Promotions A cross promotion differs from a solo ad in simple that you find someone else who has a list in your niche. You agree an for them to send and they will send you an to send to your list. This will increase your traffic as well as the size of your list. Make sure you are sending the traffic you get directly to a page with your optin form on. You can create a little squeeze page on a new blog page or post and add your sign up box again. Adding Monetization To Your Blog Your blog should have multiple income streams, this not only increases the revenue but also prevents the income drying up if one method becomes stale or certain sites close down. Affiliate Programs We ve already looked at networks like ClickBank, CJ.com, ejunkie.com and even private affiliate programs like the Amazon one give you a great opportunity to monetize your blog from the start before you can approach and get approached by private advertisers. My favourite Affiliate network is Clickbank.com as if offers products to promote across all kinds of markets and they usually pay at least 50% and even up to 75% which is much better than the 5% some other programs pay on different networks. 113

114 Just go join up for a Clickbank account and start searching the Marketplace for products to promote. Once you have found a product you want to promote you can add banners to your blog to promote your chosen offer or as we mentioned before your subscribers direct with the offer. Text Link Sales One of the easiest ways I ve found to get a blog earning more money is selling text links on it. As soon as your blog has visitors, PageRank or/and a good Alexa rank then you ll find people willing to pay money for a link on your Blogroll or at the footer of your blog. I like to sell my links on forums. The best one is: (in the buy/sell links forum) I also sell links on other forums and also use the service by text-link-ads.com which automates the process of adding links using their plug-in, this also enables a recurring monthly income. Private Sponsors & Banner Ads I m sure you ve noticed the move over the last year or 2 towards those little 125 x 125 ads you see on most blogs. These are sometimes referred to as a Blog s sponsors or Recommendations. They are one form of banner advertising on your blog you can sell along with skyscraper ads, leaderboards and even the 250x250 square inserted into a blog posts You can sell any type of banner ad as long as it fits in your blog theme. Banner advertising on blogs is becoming big business and popular blogs are charging up to $10k per month for a little 125x125 ad And you can have 6 to 8 of these on your blog s sidebar. You can sell them in forums and marketplaces along with selling then direct from your blog i.e. having the advertise here graphic on your blog. TIP: Add in the first 2 spots as soon as you set up your blog with the remaining ones being left as either advertise here or blank. 114

115 These can be banners for affiliate offers and not only will they generate some revenue for you but will also lead potential advertisers into thinking they might miss out if the spots fill up without them jumping on board quickly. Keep adding a new one every few days until you are left with 1 advertise here spot that you leave open for people to click to purchase advertising. Even if the spots are full you at least want to strike up a conversation with a potential buyer so you can get in touch when a spot becomes available or let them know about spaces available on your other blogs. Once your blog starts getting traffic you can use: Here your site will be indexed and as lots of people looking for banners ads search the site daily it will save you finding advertisers on your own. Another great tool for Banner Advertising is to use the following plugin: 115

116 OIO Publisher is a plugin for wordpress. It allows you to manage the ad placements on your blog through its control panel and also allows buyers to purchase advertising on your blog automatically which will save you time. The money for each ad will go directly into your paypal account and will stop showing automatically when the time period purchased has expired. Paid Reviews Here s 4 great sites to sign up at to get paid to review products and services:

117 There are also plenty more. The key to making this work is having some back up posts in your blog saved as drafts. These can be simple PLR articles that you can place between sponsored posts so you can take more than 1 the same day. Make sure not to take too many sponsored posts in a short period of time. The key to this method is to feed them in without your readers realising you are being paid for your opinion so they keep coming back and listen to your expert opinion. The better you perform for an advertiser the more likely they will come directly back to you and approach you with a long term link deal. Google Adsense You may already have an Adsense account and I m sure if so you ve seen how easy it is to run totally hand free but earnings aren t as good as the other monetization strategies. However If you have a very high traffic blog in a niche that has high paying keywords then it s always worth testing a few ads spots on your blog for extra income. Selling Physical Products As well as selling physical products from Amazon you can also sell other physical product directly through your blog. Check out the site below: 117

118 Here you can choose products that are relevant to your market and you get to choose the price knowing what you will be charged for the product. The best advantage this has is that you don t need to outlay any money for stock or worry about shipping and packaging. You simply get the order from your visitor, then place the order with them with the customers details and you make the difference in price. Not only will this add another income stream to your blog but it will make your blog that much more appealing to your members. You will also be able to get listed in Google s shopping results and give customers who have bought items from you another reason to tell their friends about where they bought the product from. 118