NOT a Guru!
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
The first example site is an antiquing-related site for a friend that I finished uploading on January 6, 2009. You can visit it at:
http://www.antiquingwithdecodiva.com.
In posts over the next few days, you’ll see how a second site is built, from scratch, that is similar to the antiquing site.
The 1st Example Site: Goals and Mission.
Elaine, who owns the site, has a goal in mind of selling products as an affiliate, rather than selling her antiques directly on the Internet. The nature of her business is to buy and sell antiques at shows and she would like to write about some of the shows and events on her site. Using a blog is the ideal way to do this, since she can write and publish whenever she wants to, without having to rely on a webmaster to design and upload pages as she goes along.
The First Example Site: Static Front Page and Flagship Product.
The site is structured with a static .html front page which announces her flagship affiliate product, How to Buy and Sell Antiques for Big Profits, which is a Clickbank product that is related to her site’s mission and goals. The html portion of the site also includes an “about” page, terms and conditions and so on. The static portion of the site was created with XSitePro, which published the site map pages on the fly.
The Power of Blogs.
The most powerful component of her site is the blog portion. This is a Wordpress blog that was created with Jeff Johnson’s free SEO Blog software and then updated with some other plugins that I added (we’ll go into a step by step review of how this was done in future posts.)
Elaine is writing articles that are based on her keyword research, various affiliate products, and antique shows and fairs that she is participating in. Her goal is to write every other day. Setting a writing and publishing schedule is critical to a site’s success, and her every other day goal is a noble one. Many people opt to post once a week, and they receive search engine traffic because their sites are updated regularly. However, they will not have the volume of spidered content that Elaine’s site will have with her more ambitious schedule.
Her updates are are easily published and categorized in her blog. Blog publishing requires no advanced computer knowledge … If you can type, you blog. Elaine has never had a site before and the extent of her computer knowledge is word processing. Yet, she can easily update her site now without having to learn how to be a webmaster.
One thing that I want to point out is how powerful using a blog can be if you want search engine traffic, particularly when it is enhanced with Jeff’s SEO blog software. Right before Christmas, I uploaded the basic blog components and the day after the holiday, I showed Elaine how to add posts. Youll see a December 26 post in the blog. However, I did not finish the blog or front page until January 6. As of today, January 16, the site is indexed by all three search engines with no marketing or site promotion yet because we are using a blog on the site:
The above statistics are a screen shot from my SEO Quake plugin on Firefox. To verify this information, check out these links:
- Google has indexed over 160 pages (remember, this site is 10 days old and has not been promoted or marketed whatsoever);
- The domain is now in Yahoo;
- The domain is now in MSN.
The reported pages within the search engines will go up and down over time. However, you’ll see that Elaine is already getting search engine traffic.
In viewing the Awstats reported in Elaine’s control panel (see previous posts on how you can access your own control panel), we find that as of this morning, she has had 125 unique visitors … at this stage, mostly friends:
The search engines are regularly visiting her site. Here’s what has been going on this morning:
The search engines are already delivering traffic to the site:
Here are the keywords people have been using to get to her site:
From these preliminary results, we know that Elaine can expand her articles into more specific information about war bonds and antique furniture in order to attract more visitors.
Adding an Affilite Link into a Blog.
She used two keyphrases in an article (it’s generally better to focus on just one, but this will work for now). Those phrases are: “Gorgeous Antique Silver Victorian” and Vintage Style Jewelry Box.” both of which are based on Amazon keyphrase research. The specific article is here:
Notice that the keyphrases are in the title of the article, and that they appear in the URL (the web address).
To monetize her site with an item sold through Amazon, Elaine needs to first log in to her affiliate area. To get into the Amazon affiliate area, the best place to go if you can’t find it is to scroll down Amazon’s home page at http://www.amazon.com and find the link that reads, Join Associates.
Click that and then log on as an existing Associate.
Logged in as Associate, we’ll search for related products. In this case, I used “Vintage Style Jewelry Box” on the main page so the related keywords show up.
The first result appears to be good one that we can integrate into her article.
To do this, the first thing Elaine needs to do is to grab her affiliate code provided by Amazon. But before we do that, on the bottom of the search page are related searches. She can write about these keywords in her blog and promote related affiliate products:
The search can be done directly in the Associates portion of the Amazon site, but I wanted to show you the related searches that appear on Amazon’s front page. These terms can be very useful for your content writing.
I now clicked the “Join Associates” link at the bottom of the page and since cookies are enabled on my browser, was immediately taken to the associate’s dashboard. You’ll see that there are different linking options, for links and banners, widgets, and an Amazon store.
For Elaine’s blog, we’ll take a look at Links and Banners. From the links and banners section, I clicked “products” and then typed in Vintage Style Jewelry Box. Here are the product search results:
All we need to do is to click the yellow button that reads “Get Link” for the product we chose (the Vintage Style Jewelry Box Cosmetic Box…) and copy and paste the code into the blog article. To copy the code, just click the HIGHLIGHT CODE that you will see, right click on your mouse and select COPY.
When you paste the code in your blog article, MAKE SURE that you have the HTML tab selected:
Once you are in the HTML portion of your blog post (this is all accessible in your Wordpress admin area), paste the affiliate code where you want it:
Click update post (or save post if you’re still drafting) and the product will automatically appear in your blog article.
The Final Article.
Here is Elaine’s article, before the product was added:
To see what the article looks like after the product was added, go to the blog’s article page. We can make the code look “prettier,” which we’ll discuss in future posts.
Today’s Summary.
Blogs, especially when you are using Jeff Johnson’s SEO blog software, will get indexed quickly and attract visitors.
To monetize your site, add affiliate product links. All you do is copy and paste the affiliate code into your site or blog. If you are pasting into a blog, go into the HTML mode and paste the code where you want it to appear.
Using good keywords and keyphrases will be critical to your success.
In future posts, we’ll watch a site get constructed and written totally from scratch. The antiquing site that we’ve talked about today shows how quickly you can get your site into the search engines and start selling products.
~~~ Quick Navigation ~~~
Yesterday: Make Money on the Internet – Recommended Affiliate Programs.
Tomorrow: A Quick Recap and Guide.
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nice stat i think…
Thanks, Maleos. I agree, especially for a brand new site that we have not marketed yet.
Thanks for the complete guidelines in making a web site. This is very useful to me since I am not such a good designer in making web sites.