Your WordPress Video Tutorials

I am very excited today because I have just come across something that quite blew me away, it is so fantastic! It is called WordPress Classroom 2.o. I absolutely wanted to see what it is all about, because I love WordPress and building blogs and websites with it, I think it’s the coolest blogging (and website) platform out there. So I signed up and got hooked!

I remember what a hard time I had when I wanted to learn the “How to” of WordPress, and all the associated options with it. There is a lot to learn, and it is just so much easier if you have a good guide that shows you how to do it. And that’s exactly what WordPress Classroom 2.o does. A pretty well known guy (in the Internet Marketing world, anyway named Matthew Wolfe created it, and the best part is it is all VIDEOS!!! – I personally learn a lot better if I can follow a video rather than just writing! His WordPress Classroom 2.o is packed with clever videos doing the “show all” and “tell all” of WordPress. You will really be a pro after going through all his stuff!

Matthew is just such a nice guy, because he created these really cool instructional videos that teach you how to set up your own blogging business and now he is giving them away for free!! There are something like 15 videos that walk you through the whole thing step by step.

I only had to look at 2 of his free videos and already learned something really cool I had no idea about – it’s about hiding affiliate links (if you click on that, you will get to my “old” post about hiding affiliate links; that’s the hard way of doing it). Matthew has shown me something so simple in his tutorials, it’s crazy. No more stuffing around with .php files and FTP! — I won’t tell you what it is, that would somewhat spoil it for you .

If you have followed me for a while, you should know that I never recommend anything if I am not convinced it’s really good. After all, I have been burnt so many times, and I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did.

So, trust me,  if you really are serious about making money with WordPress blogs and websites, then head over to WordPress Classroom 2.0 and grab the free videos before Matthew decides to pull them down!

Now, when I say it is my biggest earner, that doesn’t mean much, really. I have been going along at an extremely slow pace over the past 2 years, if I can spend 1/2 hour a day on my Internet Marketing it’s already a lot (and that includes learning about new stuff!). So my site on Beach Decor still earns me around $150/month and has been doing so for the past year or so. But – earnings haven’t gone up. Unfortunately. Even though I have been doing a little bit of work on the site occasionally. Hm. Why?

Well, the thing is this: Pretty much all the time when I did my link building for the site, I concentrated on building backlinks to my home page. Every directory submission, every link exchange, most comments I left, I had them all pointing to my home page. Which is ok – I have been on page 1 of Google’s SERP’s for quite a while for my main keyword “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and am getting really steady traffic from it.

But at the same time I have forgotten about the other pages on my website, the pages that have also been built around specific keywords to be able to achieve good Google rankings in the SERP’s (what else do we do keyword research for???). So, here I have a website with a few pages centered around keywords that could potentially bring in a lot of traffic, but I have completely neglected building backlinks to those pages.

Because that is what a good Internet Marketer should do who takes care of his niche site: Build backlinks to all of his pages to get the most out of potential traffic.

I want to show you something; it is a few screenshots I have taken from my SEOQuake Toolbar to show you what kind of difference in links built back to my sites pages there is:

Backlinks To Home Page

Backlinks To Page "Tropical Home Decor"

Backlinks To Page "Lighthouse Home Decor"

(All these screen shots have been taken with the software “Jing” which I absolutely love it’s so easy to handle!)

As you can see, my home page has by far the most backlinks and thus ranks the best out of all my pages. Some of my pages have only 2 or 4 backlinks pointing directly to them, one or two might even have none! So it is no wonder that they do not rank for the keywords that I had originally designed them for…

So what I have decided to do now is to try and get the other pages of my site that is already doing ok to rank better by starting to build backlinks to them. Instead of building all the links to my home page, I will concentrate of getting backlinks to my internal pages, if possible with the anchor text being the actual keyword. This should, over time, increase the visibility of those pages in the SERP’s and start to bring in some extra search engine traffic through these keywords.

The reason for the earnings of my site not increasing in revenue is simply because there is only a certain number of people searching for “Beach Decor” or “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and I am getting all the traffic I can already from it. But I am not getting any traffic for my other keywords yet as they are not high up in the SERP’s yet, and that is due to the fact that I have very much neglected link building to those pages.

Building backlinks is a tedious process, especially if you do it yourself. But as boring it is, it is a vital – if not the most important – task if you want your websites to be successful and visible on the Internet. The more backlinks a site (or page ) has, the more value Google will put on it, generally, and the better it will rank.

So, even if it is one of the least exciting processes in the adventure of earning money online, I urge you not to forget your link building, especially also to any internal pages you might have within your website or blog, to reach it’s full potential.

Naturally curious, I had to check out the site, of course! And I am a bit of a sucker for plugins, especially free ones…

After downloading and activating the plugin (you will get video instructions on how to do this, if you should not know), I have to say that I am really impressed with the features! I think Mark Dulisse has done a great job with this plugin. It will make your SEO so much easier. I especially like the list of suggested plugins (for SEO purposes) you get within your wp-admin after installing the plugin (told you, – I’m a plugin-sucker!). I was very surprised that out of a list of 13 suggested plugins for SEO improvement I had only 2 installed!!!

I am not going into what this plugin will do for you – you can read all about it on the SEO Power website -, but I will attach a few screenshots from within my blog so  you can see what it will look like.

My suggestion is for you to get the plugin – you will not regret it. I can’t tell you any results yet – I had it only installed for a day so far, I need to give it a little bit of time – but I have no doubt that it will work.

This is just a little gem I couldn’t let pass you by! BTW – if you click on the screenshots, you will be able to have a better look at them.

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Keywords

Let's work out a plan of action!

Hey everybody, I am back online! Have been for about 3 or so weeks, to be honest. I just had to play “catch up” with my real life, after 5 weeks offline and a business to run it took (and still takes) a lot of time to re-organize and get up to date with everything. So my Internet Marketing has – again – taken a bit of a back seat.

If you have been reading my blog you have seen that, after lots of trials and errors, I have finally come to realize that the one way for me to earn a living of the Internet is “Building Niche Websites” and earning money through those sites with Google Adsense and Revenue from Affiliate Programs like Amazon.com or Ebay Partnernetwork.

Building Niche Websites is not the only way to earn money on the Internet, for example you can build email lists, too, but I have come to realize that it is not for me as I do not want to have to constantly write emails to my list to make money from it. It’s just not me. Admitted, if you do it right you can probably earn a hell of a lot of money from it, but you need to be prepared to put the expertise and hours into it.

When you build niche websites and monetize them, if you do it right you will have a fair bit of work to do at the beginning, but once you have got yourself established it will become a lot easier to maintain.

No matter what you decide to do – it is absolutely vitally important that you get yourself organized and have a plan. I just read through a post I made about getting organized back in July last year, and I am sad to say that I am back at exactly the same spot as last year. Stuffing around on the net but not achieving anything.

Have a good look at yourself – are you doing the same? Are most of us wasting heaps of time on the Internet trying to make more money but doing it without a proper plan of action, thus failing miserably and asking ourselves WHY?

For me, I also will have to sit down and think about my approach to establishing my niche websites and driving traffic to them. To date it is all over the place with no real direction, and that’s why nothing much has happened to my earnings over the past year. They have pretty much stayed the same, and that’s a pity as it could have been quite different if I was organized and focused.

So, make a plan, and work with it and on it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you can always make it better over time. You just need to start.

If you also work with niche websites, one plan of approach could be to set aside a day a week per site (depending how many you have) and just work on that site on that day. Even if it’s only 1/2 hour. Work out what’s important and when and how to do what you have to do.

Please, we have to make sure we do not end up as the next Internet Marketing Casualty – we all need more self discipline and less distraction.

A very good online tool to getting organized and creating “mind maps” to keep you on track is “MindMeister“. It is definitely worth having a look at.

I apologize to you all in case I sound like rambling on, it’s just something I find really, really important and have big trouble doing myself. I am very upset about it, and I want to just remind you all of how precious our time is and how we waste it so often by being unfocused, and therefore not getting any further to achieving our goals.

The question when joining any affiliate program is always, will it be worth it to do so? Or will I be wasting my time? Well, I will tell you my story and let you decide!

My first Amazon check

First I want to tell you what brought on this post: I received my first check from Amazon in the mail yesterday!!! It was a great feeling, mixed with a bit of a let down, because to bank the check here in Australia it will cost me around $15 AUD, and that hurts, especially because the check is “only” $212.09 USD (The US Dollar and the Australian Dollar are very close in value at the moment).

So, after my excitement had died down a little, I had a look at the facts of how I had been going with the Amazon Affiliate Program, and then I thought I would let you know about it. So if you are thinking about Amazon, you have a little bit more to go on.

Here are some facts about the Amazon Affiliate Program:

• The regular referral fee for products from Amazon is 4%. This goes up to 6% after 7 referral sales in a month, and up to 6.5% after 31 sold products. Then to 7% when you have sold 111 products and so on….
• you can advertise via links & banners, widgets and even a so-called “a-store” which is a complete store you can develop to sell products. Have a look at the store I built for my Beach Decor website: Beach Decor Amazon Store You can either integrate the store into your website or you have a stand alone store. Their widgets are great, you can choose between many different ones to suit your site. I personally like the Carousel Widget very much (again, some samples on another site of mine: Mens Casio Watches)
• There are a few programs within Amazon where you can earn higher referral fees than 4%, like up to 15%  with Endless.com (Shoes and Accessories), or 10% for Kindle, I think.
• The Amazon Affiliate Program pays its affiliates in several ways (and you can choose):
  • get paid via Amazon gift card/certificate
  • get paid via direct deposit (only if your bank account is in the United States)
  • get paid by check

I started out with my Beach Website in February 2008. The site is built around an Amazon Store. The major goal of any website, and especially an affiliate site, is always to get traffic, because the more traffic the more sales, right? So it took quite a few months to get my site up and getting a few customers every day. Which means my earnings weren’t great at all at the beginning. I had months were I earned nothing at all, and others where I made $3, or $6. This started increasing over time, but it fluctuated greatly.

I had to elect to be paid via check – well, I didn’t have another option, as I am an Australian associate and have my bank account here. So I have to cop the steep bank fee here to deposit a foreign check.  That’s why I set my minimum payment threshold at $200 USD, so it wouldn’t hurt so much.

Well – it has taken 2 years (2 YEARS!!!) for me to get paid my first check from Amazon. Quite unbelievable, isn’t it? My Beach website is on page 1 on Google for several of my keywords, so I get a fair amount of traffic, and it still took 2 years. That is an incredible amount of time.

I will keep going with my sites and the stores there, because they are now making me a little bit of money every month without having to do much any more, but when I think about the time that went into building these stores and updating them etc,… I have to question whether this is really worth it.

So here are a few things I want to point out and put up for comments:

• They are one of the biggest affiliate programs available. Shouldn’t it be possible for them to offer their affiliates to be paid via PayPal, or even offer international associates (and there are bound to be many of them!) to be paid via direct bank deposit? I am with other affiliate programs where this has never been a problem, why isn’t it available here?
• The referral fee is, in my opinion, extremely low. Sure, if you are selling bigger ticket items you might actually make some more money, but if you are selling just “normal” stuff like I do, then you are not going to make a lot of money even if you sell 30, or 100 products! And let me tell you, it takes a lot of visitors to make some sales.
• They do offer some of the best advertising tools around, and make it extremely easy to incorporate them into any website.
• Your best bet with this program seems to be to have a website that gets many, many visitors and sells products that are highly priced, like cameras for example. You could possibly be earning quite a few dollars a month. But it will be hard work to get there, be assured!
• Selling lower priced items won’t make you rich, it might not even buy you a coffee sometimes. This will turn out to be more of a hobby than a business.

So, there you have it. That’s my take on the Amazon Affiliate Program. I like the tools they offer their associates, and I like the fact that they are well established and known. I don’t like that we only get the smallest of percentages, and that they are so backwards with their payment structure.

I would love to hear of your successes or failures with Amazon, and what you think about their affiliate program. Leave a comment!

Over and out – have to go and deposit my check!

P.S. This post has been optimized for the 3 word keyword phrase xxx – I hope you can guess it! It came up with flying colors when I checked it in Micro Niche Finder so hopefully whenever somebody searches for xxx this post might eventually come up on Page 1 or thereabouts… just to let you know that I always try to optimize my posts for a keyword, and so should you!

If you have a blog and are trying to maintain it, you will most likely be struggling with creating fresh content on a regular basis. That is at least my big downfall, I just lack the time to research and put together new and interesting posts in the field of Internet Marketing regularly. But we are all being told how important it is to continuously update our blogs or sites and add fresh and unique content, as this is what can push us up in Google rankings. And that’s the ultimate goal, right? To reach one of the front pages of Google.

So we do our best and try to come up with interesting or new stuff, but to be honest, I think anything we can possibly write about has already been told many times over by others, and will rarely be a real revelation. And we do want to provide good content, don’t we!?

Anyway, so at the beginning of this blog I tried to post every few days, and that turned into once a week or so, and now I am nearly down to once a month…. BUT – the funny thing is that my PR has gone up from a 2 to a 3, and I am still getting as many, if not more, visitors to my blog every day as before. What’s been happening?

It’s actually quite simple, and also quite brilliant, and I honestly have only just realized it. My blog has been updating itself.

How? – Through my commentators leaving new comments, that is! See, not just post you make count as fresh content, but also the comments you get on your posts. Any posts. SO, the more comments you get, the more often your blog receives fresh content. I can’t believe I did not realize that before…. Hooray! The pressure to generate new posts has been released.

Now, there is still nothing better to get good Google rankings and to become a well known and liked blog than updating it often – with your own posts. I am just saying that you don’t have to feel so bad if you don’t get around to it all the time, as long as you get some comments you have a bit longer to make your next post.

Just one more word: to utilize your commentators input properly, you should have the following plugins installed on your blog, simply to give something back to your fellow bloggers who are helping you out on the content side:

DoFollow | CommentLuv | KeywordLuv | Top Commentator

You can read up on CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and DoFollow here.

If you are running a WordPress blog, you can find and install all these plugins in your Plugins section by searching for them, except KeywordLuv. KeywordLuv you will have to go to their site and install it manually. I believe that all these plugins are some of the most important plugins you should have installed as a blogger from a SEO and Internet Marketing point of view.

So, let your readers update your blog with fresh content!

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

Here is what he passed on to his loyal subscribers, and I enjoyed watching this so much that I had to pass it on to you, too. It is a short 9 minute video, but it is so jam packed with great life lessons that it leaves you feeling like everything is possible.

We, as Internet Marketers especially, get often so much negative feedback from our loved ones around us (especially when we haven’t quite gotten to earning a real living online yet), and we often suffer so many set backs and hurdles along the way that we all need strong stamina and tenacity, and belief in our ultimate goal. It is so easy to lose focus and be discouraged, and at times it takes a lot of strength to keep going and keep faithful of the outcome.

This video will pick you up, and give you that special “shiver” down the spine that will make you keep going and keep at it. Because that’s one of the most important things in Internet Marketing – to keep going, and never give up. Believe and you WILL get there.

And there is so much more in that video, it’s just brilliant.

Enough said, here it is!!! Enjoy! – P.S. Please re-tweet freely, many people would probably love to listen to it…