Affiliate Commandments

Posted on April 17, 2007 by admin

I just bought Affiliate Commandments, which is the most recent offering from the author of Day Job Killer and Affiliate Project X. Affiliate Commandments is a short ebook that guides you through a few common sense aspects of internet marketing. It only costs $10 so it is worth checking out to see if it interests you.

The contents of Affiliate Commandments covers the following topics:

  1. Riding the Product Wave – Basically, promote a product when it is new or popular.
  2. Build your Product Portfolio – Don’t just promote 1 product.
  3. Track your Keywords – How to and why.
  4. Copy the Best – If it works for someone else, then try it yourself.
  5. All Keywords are not Created Equal – How different keywords inspire different actions.
  6. Adwords Copy 101 – How to write good adwords.

Like I said, Affiliate Commandments covers some fairly simple concepts. But for $10, you might want to give it a whirl to see if you can get any fresh ideas from it.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

Linkerati

Posted on March 20, 2007 by admin

I’m getting addicted to Rands posts at SEOmoz. 2 of his latest offerings are gems packed with great info on how to attract links from the link savvy users of the internet – who Rand calls the Linkerati:

virtually anyone whose goal is to find external content and link to it, or whose own content creation on the web naturally means that they will create and/or share links.

Yesterday he gave away the secret to ranking at the search engines, and today he follows it up with how to create content that appeals to the linkerati.

There are some great examples of how to create ideas for content for some unsexy niches and a list of the types of people who are always on the lookout for linkable content.

If how to get started in linkbaiting has been a challenge, then I would recommend taking a look at Rands post.

Posted in Link Building | Leave a comment

Keyword Research

Posted on March 18, 2007 by admin

This is going to be a super quick introduction to Keyword Research. The main reason for this is that I plan to release a free Worpress Plugin this week that is related to the topic of keyword research and want to write a supporting article for it.

If you are wanting to get specific pages ranking in search engine results for particular search queries then you need to implement some keyword research.

For example, if you were thinking of starting a niche website all about “Chicken Recipes”, then you would want to find out what people are searching for related to chicken recipes.

The way to do this would be to head over to your favourite keyword research tool and type in chicken recipes as the search query.

So, say that your keyword research tool of choice is the free Wordtracker Keyword Tool, you would be able to get 100 of the currently most popular.

You could then copy and paste these keywords into a spreadsheet and head off to start writing your content – 1 article for each set of keywords.

Now you need to remember that the most searched terms are often the most hotly contested for high rankings. For instance it may be fairly difficult to rank well for “chicken recipes” alone. However, you may get a good ranking for some of the lesser searched phrases fairly easily.

Also, if you click on some of the less searched phrases, you will produce another set of up to 100 keywords that contain those keywords that you clicked on. Some of these can be obscure searches, but can be really easy to rank for and can guarantee several visits a day. Get a couple of hundred of these pages online and you’ll be getting some good traffic.

So that is real basic keyword research. Fundamental, what you need to do is find what people are searching for and provide them with content. It follows the basic rules of supply and demand.

Posted in Keyword Research | 1 Comment

Perry Marshall interviews Monte Cahn

Posted on March 15, 2007 by admin

I receive an interesting CD in the post last week as part of my Perry Marshalls Renaissance Club membership, where Perry Marshall interviews Monte Cahn (of Moniker.com) on the topic of Domain Name as Real Estate – which basically covers the topic of Domaining.

I’ve been wanting to dip my toe into the practice of domaining since reading I Secretly Want To Be A Domainer (who wouldn’t!), and since Monte Cahn is synonymous with domaining, I thought that this interview came at just the right time.

The interview covered concepts such as:

  • Monetizing a domain name so that you just buy the domain name and let it sit to (usually) earn money from PPC advertising.
  • Speculating in domain names by buying in anticipation of a rise in value.
  • The fact that select domain names are only going to rise in value as time goes on.
  • Holding a super cool domain name can be used to influence the whole online market for that vertical – e.g. whoever holds Vodka.com owns the online vodka market.

Before listening to this interview, I had thought that domaining was owning 1 or 2 word expired domain names and just making money from the type in traffic and existing inbound links. However, there are actually heaps of ways to make your living as a domainer, and it got me thinking that I am already in the domaining game since I own a load of domains that I set up with some content and they just sit there making a few $’s a week in PPC and affiliate sales.

If you want to hear more from Monte Cahn, then I would suggest checking out the Domain Masters Archive over at Webmaster Radio.

P.S. If you have ever considered buying The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords, then the Renaissance Club membership is the ideal way to get hold of it for just $29.

Posted in Domaining, Perry Marshall | Leave a comment

Running XAMPP on Windows XP Home

Posted on March 13, 2007 by admin

I’m having real problems running XAMPP on my PC that is running Window XP Home Edition with SP2.

I also run ZoneAlarm, AVG Antivirus and AVG Anti Spyware, so I don’t know if any of this affects how XAMPP runs.

Basically, everything is fine for about 30 minutes. Then ZoneAlarm shuts down and all the modules in XAMPP go into Error. Then there appears to be a memory leak that causes nothing to start up and I have to re-boot.

Also, if I stop all XAMPP modules before they go into error, my PC still continues to run slowly and I have to re-boot anyway.

If anyone has any ideas why this happens, I would be grateful if you could leave a comment. It’s a real pain in the butt as I’m trying to add feature requests to the really simple sitemap plugin.

If I find a fix elsewhere then I will update this post.

UPDATE:
I have found a workaround for this:
Instead of using the XAMPP Control Panel to start Apache and MySql, I have been running xampp_start.exe. You can do this by simply double clicking xampp_start.exe in the programs/xampp folder.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments

Really Simple Sitemap

Posted on March 11, 2007 by admin

Really Simple Sitemap is my first go at creating a plugin for WordPress. It was inspired by these 2 useful posts by SEO Blackhat and WageRank.

Really Simple Sitemap basically lists all of your published posts so that a user (or search engine) is never more that 2 clicks away from any post on your blog – See my Sitemap for an example.

I reckon that using this plugin would be especially useful if you are considering stopping the GoogleBot from indexing your archives, categories, feeds, etc… with a robots.txt file.

Here are the instructions to get it working:

  1. Download Really Simple Sitemap then unzip it and save it to the plugins folder of your WordPress install.
  2. Activate the plugin.
  3. Create a page and call it Sitemap (or call it whatever you like).
  4. Add the following text : <!--rs sitemap--> – This text will be replaced by your sitemap.
  5. Use the Options->RS Sitemap to set the ordering of your posts, show or hide private posts, and show or hide pages.

All of your published posts will then be output as links in the order of most recently published.

If there is enough interest in this plugin, I may add some extra functionality like sorting options.

I would be keen to get some feedback, so please leave a comment – including any extra functionality you would like to see included.

Really Simple Sitemap only works with WordPress 2.1.x.
Current Version: 1.2.

Updates 20 April 2007 (V 1.2):

1. Made the code more efficient so the database is only hit if the post or page requires a site map.

Updates 13 March 2007 (V 1.1):

1. Added an Options page to set ordering of posts, showing or hiding private posts, and showing pages.

2. Default table prefix is no longer hard coded.

Download Really Simple Sitemap

Posted in SEO, Wordpress | 52 Comments

Site Map

Posted on March 8, 2007 by admin

This site map is generated by the Really Simple Sitemap plugin.

Posted in Internet Wealth | Comments Off

Tasks Jr

Posted on March 7, 2007 by admin

I don’t know how many task-list-todo type software I’ve tried to try and get my working life in order.

But I reckon that I have found “the one” that is going to help my help me take all my ideas from concept to fruition – Tasks Jr which is developed by Alex King.

It has everything I have been looking for in a Task List app:

  1. Really simple, yet functional.
  2. Online so I can use it on my laptop and workstation without having to sync.
  3. Ability to host on my own web server.

Tasks Jr is actually the free version of Tasks™ and Tasks Pro™, and lacks many of their advanced features.

One feature that Tasks Jr lacks is security, in that you have no username and password, but I have overcome this by installing it into a password protected folder which will do for now until I decide to upgrade to the next version.

If you are trying to find a task manager, then I would suggest you give this software a whirl. There is a demo at the website and there are also affordable hosting options available at UseTasks.com.

Posted in Software | Leave a comment

SEO Simple 3 Column WordPress Theme

Posted on March 6, 2007 by admin

I finally finished the 3 column version of SEO Simple WordPress Theme.

The layout is such that the post area appears to the left of the screen and two sidebar columns are at the right. This provides a bit more space for adding more links and adverts and other bits and pieces.

You can see the regular and 3 column themes in action here. I have added a theme switcher so that you can toggle between them both.

Download: SEO Simple 3 Column

Posted in SEO, Wordpress | Leave a comment

SEO Book – Aaron Wall

Posted on February 18, 2007 by admin

Now I finally bought Aaron Walls SEO Book. It’s a 331 page behemoth of an eBook and it will take me a while to review it, so I will be writing this post in chunks … bit by bit.

<UPDATE>
Aaron has recently hinted that he may quit selling his SEO Book and changing his business model. So, you may want to get this highly undervalued tool sooner rather than later.
</UPDATE>

My first take on SEO Book is that it is incredibly comprehensive. So far I’m on page 20 and have learnt a heap of ideas – not so much about SEO – but it has made me think more about running an online business. It makes me thing about things like strategy, goals, and making the most of personal strengths and weaknesses.

Allready I’m looking at other peoples websites and getting ideas for sites that are not the ‘content’ type sites that I normally work with.

Anyway, I’ll return to this post to update it as I get further into SEO Book.

You can visit the SEO Book website here.

Posted in Aaron Wall, SEO, SEO Book | 2 Comments