I wanted to build a better search for my blog so I started to search for resources that would help me do that. Along the way I tested several different plugins and options. Let me show you how I created a better search for WordPress.

The best way I have found to create a better WordPress search is simply by using a plugin. I have used Search Everything for a long time but have recently realized that it’s not useful at all. All it really does is highlight the term you are searching for within the results page. But it doesn’t really create a better search page.

While trying to find options on how to create better searches I came across an old article from Joost de Valk about making a better WordPress search. The article itself was extremely helpful and I am going to follow and mention lots of the points he makes there. What he uses on his blog supposedly is the Search Reloaded plugin. When I tried to download the plugin it made me log in as a member. Thinking that I could easily sign up and get the plugin I indeed signed up. Still I couldn’t download the plugin because it seems to be part of a product the site is selling.

WordPress Default Search Problem

The huge problem that WordPress’ default search has is that it lists articles based on date and not on relevance. That means it lists the most recent articles that include the term you are searching for. So even when an article only mentions that keyword once will WordPress go back and show it in the search results.

In this article we want to create a search that shows relevant results.

More Relevant Search Results

That’s why I started to search for alternatives and came upon Search Unleashed. I did install Search Unleashed once before but I didn’t know how to use it right because by default it made the search look terrible.

The great thing about the plugin is that it indeed returns better search results as long as you know how to use it. If you rather want to rely on a premium plugin to deliver better results then take a look at the Relevant Search plugin which is the one that’s used on all of the Tut+ websites. It’s supposed to be really good but it’s not free.

I drifted off there, let’s go back to our plugin setup. Basically Search Unleashed let’s you create your own search engine by giving you the option of deciding on priorities.
That means that if you think in order to get relevant results the keyword should be contained in the page title then you should assign this page title the highest priority, in my case I chose 1. You then go ahead and click on the things that you think are relevant too, such as category, content, page excerpt, tags etc. and decide on a priority.

My priority settings for Search Unleashed, click to enlarge the image.

You can actually see how I have configured my search and the priorities I assigned to each type. For me this combination works best but you can change it however you want too. For example if you heavily use tags then this might be a good option to include. Once you have set the priorities be sure to save the settings.

Before any search results will be shown through your WordPress search you need to go to the Search Unleashed page (Tools -> Search Unleashed) and re-index your site. This might take a few moments. Once this is done search your blog using the new search.

Before you use it I recommend to change a few settings in order to make the search look nicer because for some reason the default Search Unleashed layout makes the search results look extremely ugly.
Let’s just fix this. Go to the Search Unleashed -> Options page and change the Search Engine to MySQL Fulltext. If you don’t change this you will still be stuck with the default WordPress engine. In order to also get rid of the ugly search excerpts uncheck both of these boxes:

• Change page title on search results to reflect the search condition
• Highlight searches on search page or default to the_excerpt

The last thing I would recommend is to scroll further down the page and to change the color of Highlight Color #1 to #FEFFBF because that way it’s not as bright.

WordPress Search Excerpts

The search results are still not looking the way they should look. To change this we are going to install the Search Excerpt plugin. Once installed it will show nicer excerpts automatically.

Style the Search Results

We now want to highlight the keyword within the heading of each search excerpt in order to make it stand out. To do that edit your search.php file (Appearance -> Editor -> search.php). Find the code which says the_title(); and change it to echo $title;. Then above it include the following code:

<?php
	$title 	= get_the_title();
	$keys= explode(" ",$s);
	$title 	= preg_replace('/('.implode('|', $keys) .')/iu',
		'<strong>\0</strong>',
		$title);
?>

Now we need to add some CSS styling to the heading (Appearance -> Editor -> style.css):

strong.search-excerpt { background: #FEFFBF; }

Simply add it to your style.css file and save it. Another step is to show the visitors also what they are searching for. This seems dumb but is actually very helpful.

Let’s go ahead and find this code

<h2>Search Results</h2>

and modify it to:

<h2>Search Results for "<em><?php the_search_query(); ?></em>"</h2>

That just makes the search page look nicer. Do the same thing with the “no posts found” line below the endwhile; code.

Show the Number of Results

Just before publishing this article I stumbled across an article from Michael on creating better search pages. In it he mentions to also show the number of results which is what we are going to add to the search page. Just add this code before the one above.

<?php $allsearch = &new WP_Query("s=$s&showposts=-1"); 
 $count = $allsearch->post_count;
wp_reset_query(); ?>

Then change the headline code above to:

<h2>Search results "<em><?php the_search_query(); ?></em>" -
<?php echo $count; ?> Articles</h2>

Now your visitors will also see how many relevant pages were found.

Refining the Search Result Page

To refine searches Joost de Valk suggests to put another search box below your excerpts which is a great idea. Just add this code after the endwhile; in the search.php file:

<h3>Didn't find what you were looking for? Refine your search!</h3>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>

Once you have done that you could also add a number of related searches in order to make it easier for the visitor to find what he is looking for. In order to do this you need to have the Search Suggest plugin installed. Simply add this code below the one I mentioned above:

<?php related_searches(); ?>

This will add related searches below the search form.

Change the Pagination

Another step I suggest to do is to change the pagination links (which are usually after the endwhile; in the search.php file) that are usually below the search results. My normal pagination links are Older Entries and Previous Entries which I changed to Previous Page and Next Page to make the page look nicer.

Change the Search Form Value

One additional step I recommend to do is to change the default search form value. Google, for example, always keeps the keyword you have searched for in their search box and that’s what we are going to do too. Edit the searchform.php file and find the value=” code within the HTML <input> tag. Simply change it to:

value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>"

Now whenever you search for something the keyword will be put in the box.

Catch Misspelled Words

One very effective aspect Joost mentioned in his article is a way of catching typos. Search Suggest also suggests keywords when someone misspelled something. In order to make use of this add the following line below the “no matches” or “no posts found” code:

<?php spell_suggest(); ?>

Track Search Behaviour

In order to also track what is happening on your search page you can do one of several things. Google Analytics offers an easy solution to tracking site search (read it here) and that’s the method I prefer. If you do so then you will be able to find the search reports under Content -> Site Search in your Analytics dashboard.

Search meter is a WordPress plugin you can install which will show you what people are searching for on your blog and how many of those searches were unsuccessful. If you are more comfortable with that I would recommend to stick to that.

If you want to see the results of this post then simply search my blog using the search in the sidebar.

What do you think? Have you already tried to change the default WordPress search?

How to Create a Better WordPress Search is a post from And Break

And that’s also the reason why I like them. After a talk with Moon on Skype I decided it might be a good idea to create an article dedicated to mini sites on things you need to keep in mind and how to make them better and rank better.

If you want to learn how to build a mini site then read our previous post.

Link Structure

The link structure is an important part of every website, and here we are not only concerned about links from other websites. Your websites should get lots of internal as well as lots of external links. Many people think that external links are much more important than internal ones and I don’t totally agree with that. While external links can get you to rank well for certain keywords, internal links can achieve that as well. I think Hesham does the best job of creating such an internal link structure. If you take a look at his posts then you will see that he always interlinks them.
The reason why I believe this is important (especially for Google) is that even though Google knows about the content of your site it doesn’t trust it as much. In order for Google to believe that your content is relevant it needs links, external or internal ones.
Remember it doesn’t care whether these are external or internal links. So one big part of ranking well on search engines is to interlink your pages using the specific keywords you are targeting for each of those pages. If you have a page on external hard drives then you would also link back to that page with the anchor text “external hard drives”.
In order to do that effectively simply create multiple pages on your mini site with each of them targeting a different keyword. Then interlink all of these pages and the homepage. If you do that you will definitely be ranking a lot better within no time. But don’t go overboard and cluster your pages with links, 2-4 links per page are going to help enough with SEO without destroying the usability of your site.

I’ve also noted on many mini sites that people make the mistake of adding too many external links (links to the product they are promoting) to their mini sites. Don’t do this. Place 2-3 links to your product on each page but make them highly visible.

Domain Wisdom

Most people will tell you that you should go for .com domains if you are looking at building a mini site. And I truly agree with them. There are other people who are using .org, .me and other domains but I don’t usually use them. Either I try to get the .com or .net domain. Generally you will want to have an exact match of the domain and your keyword. If you are again looking to rank for external hard drives then externalharddrives.com would be the ideal domain. But most of the time this domain won’t be available. In that case simply add something to the domain such as pro, hq, info etc. so you would have externalharddriveshq.com which is still pretty good.

Sometimes when looking for keywords you find yourself attracted to keywords like playstation 3 games. That’s a bad decision though. Due to copyright infringement you shouldn’t buy playstation3games.com because you could get sued for it. If you take this thought further you can actually create mini sites that will rank very well though.

Some products have a unique product name. This is usually the case with cameras and displays. Now let’s say you want to promote a camera such as the Nikon D3100. Notice that you can’t use nikon in your domain name since it would be copyright infringement but instead you could try and get the domain d3100.com which would certainly rank highly for the keyword d3100.

If you look at Google’s Keyword Tool you will realize that a broad match of the d3100 has 18,000 searches per month. The exact match will only get you around 3,000. Still if you would rank 1st then this would definitely get you a nice amount of traffic.

You can of course try this technique with other products. For me personally this strategy – adopted from Info Product Killer – has proven to be extremely effective since I have websites ranking on the first page of Google without any backlinks.

Don’t Sell

Another common mini site mistake people make is that they are trying to sell people the product they are promoting. But you don’t have to. If you are promoting a Clickbank product then the sales page will be enough to convince the person to buy it. Because of that you really don’t need to the product on your mini site.
Simply present some information on your mini site. Say what you can about a product but be honest. Honesty is very important on mini sites.
Don’t claim to be a person you are not. Because naturally most people won’t believe you. And it also destroys your credibility. Even though mini sites are very anonymous most of the time you should still behave in the same way that you do on your blog.

Additional Thoughts

I recently created a small video on one of my mini sites in which I talked about the certain things that make my website rank well. I think it is going to help you understand the things I’ve talked about above. The mini site I am looking at in the video is Hybrid Cars Disadvantages.

What Do You Think About Mini Sites?

I personally love mini sites as I mentioned above. They offer me a way of earning an income while not having to work too hard. But what do you think? Do you like the concept? Was the information above any useful?

How to Build More Successful Mini Sites is a post from And Break

This month has been a good month and one of the first months in which I indeed made money online. The reason why I think this is the case is that it always takes time to build up your skills and create successful websites. So let’s dive right in and see what happened this month.

And Break Overview

In terms of traffic this month has been down from the last one. I guess that is due to my lack of writing for other blogs, such as Famous Bloggers, or because I didn’t get to comment as often, and on as many blogs, as I used to. I hope it will get better next month though since I will certainly have a much more normal day to day life.

The traffic is not down too much and you can see the reason that the traffic decreased, is because fewer new people visited the blog this month. That does support my theory that I didn’t promote my blog as much and thus was not able to draw lots of new people in.

Subscribers

• September: 97 (+44%)
• August: 67

As you can see the number of subscribers has increased by around 44% which I think is pretty good if you consider that I actually got less traffic in the meantime.

September Income

• Google Adsense
  • $0.87
• Affiliate Earnings
  • Amazon (US and Germany): $10.56
  • Copy Writing Scorecard: $11.99
• Total: $23.42

It is actually exciting to see that I am starting to make money. I made a little bit of money last month but I only really started to make money this month. I have only made $23.42 which is not really impressive, but still not bad considering that I’ve made no money the months before.

As you can see from above I made some money through Adsense. This was only through 1 click and came from my public speaking mini site. So if I got more visitors to the mini site it could become a main source of income. The mini site is actually doing a lot better now and I think I need to attribute that to my better knowledge of SEO.

The money I made through Amazon came through my other mini sites. They are centered around hard drives and other physical objects. I did indeed manage to sell a few things that way. The interesting aspect of Amazon is to see how many people buy something completely different than the product you were initially promoting. Because of that I will try to build further upon and get more people to these sites.

YouTube Videos

I always wanted to be able to create videos and upload them to Youtube. The only problem was that I didn’t have the software to do it. This month I decided to buy iShowU HD Pro which I believe is a great piece of software. It simply enables you to make videos and to record your voice while talking. If someone of you is using a Mac then I would recommend you try it out. I think there is a demo available for download.

Hacking Attempts

In this month alone I had two hacking attempts to my blog and I am actually glad that I got to know about them. I installed a plugin called WordPress Firewall a few months ago. All it does is to block certain requests and to warn you about potential attacks.
Whenever you get attacked it will automatically notify you via email which I find extremely useful. And that’s the reason why I got over at least 30 mails from this plugin (as you can see in the picture above). The problem with this plugin is that it also usually stops you from making any changes to your blog. This happened to me when I tried to change some code in my theme. Right after that it send me an email showing me what I tried to change. I actually hated it for doing that but then again it’s always good to see that a plugin is actually working. The one way you can get around this is to just disable the plugin when you are making some important changes.

Recommended Reading

• How to Milk Your High Search Engine Ranking for All It’s Worth – This is a great article by Ana in which she discusses a recent study about search engines and how you can get more traffic from them.
• 40 Day Challenge – This is such a good and long thread full of information on SEO. I think this certainly improved my search engine optimization skills. But be aware that it’s going to take a long time to read it.
• Affiliate SEO: How Websites Are Ranking in the Most Profitable Niches – This is a great article from Glen where he shares his insight on how certain websites are ranking within highly competitive niches, definitely worth reading.
• Top 10 Books that Helped Me Make Money Online in the Past Years – I really liked this article from Mike because I love books. I have read most of the books he mentioned but what you need to understand is simple. In order to get anywhere in life you need to want to learn. And that’s what this article is about.
• 5 Steps to Make More Money from Your Website with Less Traffic – This is another great article about how you can make money online. The reason why I like it so much is because Corbett argues that you don’t need a lot of traffic in order to make money.

Future Changes

I am currently thinking of making my blog more like Income Diary. I like Michael’s blog and I think he is doing a great job. I certainly don’t want to copy him but I do know that I want to get rid of my banner section here.

I went back and forth with putting banners on this blog. When I started out I clustered this place with banners. But then I decided to remove them. After a while I then again added them. The reason why I think it’s good to remove them (at least for my blog) is that they really don’t add any value to my blog. Instead I could include a little biography of myself or share some important content.
So what do you think? Should I remove the banners? Should I go in the direction of Income Diary?

My Blog Report – September 2010 is a post from And Break

I have always had a lot of trouble on deciding whether I should post more or less often. In order to make a decision I need your help.

I have been creating a long article about Google Analytics and how you can use for your blog. It took me a while to compile the information and I am not nearly close to being able to publish it. Yet I want it to be of high quality before I publish it. On the other hand I also don’t want to keep you waiting since I always try to post an article once a week.

So what are the reasons for posting more often?

Why Quantity?

There are several factors that speak for choosing quantity over quality. The first one is that you will obviously post more often. That means your blog will be updated more. Thus this will have an effect on search engine optimization and also on the traffic you are getting. That’s because people will be coming back more often in order to check whether you have new content (which you usually will).

Quantity for me, just to clarify this, means writing shorter articles. You can’t post long articles as often as you could post small ones (at least I can’t). Since people don’t have a lot of time these days it would be an advantage to go with smaller but more frequent articles.

Reasons for Quantity:

• Fast pace world thus people are more interested in short to the point information
• More traffic
• Better search engine rankings (probably)
• Easier to stick to your schedule

Why Quality?

Obviously quality has certain advantages. I personally have always believed in quality. Why? I think there is just too much junk out there. You can of course create lots of articles that are of high quality but I believe ultimately the quality will suffer.

The other reason why quality is so important because it’s a great way to set yourself apart from other blogs and people. If you really do put together great information then people will be grateful for that.

When people post more often the blog is more like a community, and there is nothing wrong with that. People stop by because they are friends or they do the same thing that the person is doing. But with quality blogs it’s the case that people visit them in order to learn about the important information they present.

Even though when you write quality articles you will be not posting as often I am much more comfortable with posting such articles. I always try to create great articles but sometimes I know that they aren’t the best what I could have done. But I believe I should have.

Reasons for Quality:

• Lots of websites containing bad information
• A good way to set yourself apart

Conclusion

Obviously there are popular websites that show us that both can work. Blogs such as Viperchill or Dosh Dosh show that you there is huge demand for quality articles. On the other hand there are lots of blogs and websites, such as FamousBloggers, that update a lot more often but are still extremely successful.

To be honest I would also like to go more in the direction of posting less frequently. Not because that would mean I wouldn’t have to work so hard on this blog but because I could spend more time on polishing the articles.

I Want to Hear Your Opinion

I would love to get some feedback. What do you think is better? Would you be fine with me posting less frequent but articles of higher quality? Tell me what you think, because it’s going to impact the direction in which this blog is heading.

Quality vs. Quantity – What Do You Think? is a post from And Break

After this post you will know how to avoid the common pitfalls of blogging.

Not Building Trust

The one thing that blogging boils down to is trust.  That sounds simple, but so many people don’t get it. I didn’t get it either until a few months ago. And ever since then my blog has attracted more and more traffic.

You need to remember that people are coming to your blog because they want to speak to a person. A real person, not some company representative.

Just write the way you would speak around your friends. You wouldn’t go up to a friend and start a promotional speech about a product you own. You would actually start a conversation first and then maybe you will move on to the topic that’s related to what you want to talk about. Then you might say that you have found a great product which helps you to solve that problem and you share that information with a friend.

How Can You Build Trust?

• Write Honest Reviews
• Help Your Fellow Readers and Bloggers
• Connect to Other Bloggers
• Meet them in Real Life
• Offer Useful Information

These are all easy ways to build trust, just use them.

Not Making Your Blog Human

Show your personality. It’s your blog so you can write about whatever you want to. Share your point of view on certain topics.

Nothing is worse then trying to take your personality out of your blog. The blog is you. You are the blog. Just remember that along the way.

And yes, there might be people who disagree with you or don’t like your blog. But to be honest you can’t satisfy everyone. And you don’t need to.

Take a look at Mars Dorian. He has one of the most personal blogs out there and is able to perfectly deliver his message. The reason why is because he is using his personality.

Not Saying Thank You

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more important than saying “Thank you.”  A thank you can go such a long way. Your readers will definitely appreciate you if you say “thank you”. Wouldn’t you want to make someone happy? There is nothing better than putting a smile on someone’s face.

How can you use this advice when blogging? Maybe you have a loyal follower of yours who always comments on your posts. Just reach out to him and say thanks for being so loyal.

But there are also other ways. When you write a post you can simply take the time to include someone who helped you with the article or who gave you an important idea. Everyone wants to feel appreciated. Don’t you?

God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?”
-William Arthur Ward

Not Listening to Your Readers

Your readers are the most important part of your blog. Listen to them.

If you get several questions about a particular product then why not do the favor and and answer them in an article? That’s what Pat did. He got questions from readers about the new Subscriber Magnet plugin who asked him about whether he could recommend it. Because of their questions he decided to take a look at it and review it. This is a great way to build upon an earlier point, creating trust.

Tell me what you think. What are important mistakes you make? What mistakes am I making on my blog?

4 Mistakes that Will Easily Suffocate Your Reader Engagement is a post from And Break

In this article I want to show you a different method through which you can increase your traffic and build backlinks at the same time.

I have personally used many strategies to build links to sites but I never liked using most of them. Even though some of them worked they required a lot of work and it also didn’t feel natural using these methods. Recently I read a link building strategy method that Kathy mention on her blog. The whole strategy revolves around one WordPress plugin: KeywordLuv.

How Does KeywordLuv Work?

This plugin basically let’s you optimize your comment for SEO purposes. That means that if you comment on a blog that instead of only using your name you can add an @ and include your keywords behind it. Remember that this strategy only works on dofollow blogs. There is no point in using this strategy on nofollow blogs as you will not get a link back to your website.

Enter your name and add an @ and behind that your keywords

With this in mind you search for a page you want to promote on your blog. A page which you think could rank well in search engines with some backlinks. You can of course also choose your homepage. It doesn’t really matter.

Let’s say your blog is about Internet marketing and you want to target that specific keyword. You would then create comments with the name as follows: Your Name @ Internet Marketing Blog. Then you add the URL. If you want to promote a subpage then do so just copy and paste the URL of the subpage.

The Best Way to Comment Fast

There is one simply problem with this strategy, it can be time consuming. Typing all of these things in the comment forms can be tedious especially if you comment on a lot of websites. That’s why I use a Firefox plugin which automatically does that for me. It’s called easyComment. Once you install it in Firefox all you really need to do is to enter your information in it, such as URL, name, email address and you can even post a comment. Once you have set that up whenever you visit a blog just simply click on the easyComment button and it will automatically insert all of that into the comment form.

In order to find out whether a blog is a dofollow or nofollow blog you can install the NoDoFollow plugin. I personally use the SEO for Firefox plugin which also highlights your nofollow links. The problem with both plugins is also that they can only highlight whether it’s nofollow or dofollow if there are already comments on the page itself. So that’s definitely something you should keep in mind.

If you really want to only post comments on dofollow blogs then use the plugins above. I simply comment on every blog I come across because it takes so much more time for me to find out whether it’s dofollow or nofollow that it doesn’t make sense to me.

Finding KeywordLuv Enabled Blogs

After setting up this plugin you then need to go and find WordPress blogs that use the KeywordLuv plugin. Everyone knows Google and thus it’s the place we turn to in order to find our blogs. I’ve tried several methods to find blogs that have KeywordLuv installed and I will just tell you about the strategy that worked best for me.

To find our blogs with KeywordLuv enabled we will simply go over to Google’s Blog Search. There you simply enter “YourName@YourKeywords” Your Niche and then hit search. Now there will be a lot of pages popping up and some will be more relevant then others. Sometimes there will also be false-negative blogs which don’t have KeywordLuv enabled but not often.

Click on the single blogs listed there. Once you arrive on the page go ahead and comment on it. Click on the easyComment button in the bottom of the browser in order for the plugin to fill in all of your comment information. It will also automatically jump to the comment section.

Kathy also mentioned that you can use SEO Quake to then sort websites in Google according to their PR. I have tried it but it didn’t work for me (I probably did something wrong).

Set Aside Time to Build Backlinks

In order to effectively build these links set aside some time every day and comment on KeywordLuv enabled blogs. The reason why I like the strategy so much is because it works so well and it also incorporates what I do anyway. I go to visit blogs and comment on them the whole time so being able to build backlinks through them is a great plus.

Now if you keep on doing this for several weeks then you will definitely come across a lot of blogs. I simply bookmark each blog I like and add it to my KeywordLuv folder. That way when I want to build targeted backlinks again, all I have to do is go to all of my bookmarked pages.

If you don’t like to bookmark websites you can also go ahead and create a spreadsheet.

My Link Building Experience

I have now used this technique maybe for around 3-4 days. And I must say that I am extremely happy with the results I’ve seen so far.

Before using this strategy I took a screen shot of the page to which I wanted to build some additional backlinks. Down below you can see the results.

Within a few days I have been able to go from 54 backlinks to 73. And in that time I didn’t even use the technique too actively. I just checked the backlinks again and they were at around 140.

I think my search engine traffic for the targeted page has gone up. And also of course I have seen lots of people visiting my site because of me leaving comments on their blogs.

There are of course other alternatives for building backlinks such as software that automatically builds backlinks to your site. Try out this link building strategy and afterwards share your experience with me.

What do you think? Did you know about this strategy already?

How to Build Backlinks the Smart Way is a post from And Break

There is nothing you can’t do. There is no obstacle you can’t overcome. There are just a few things you need to understand, to live life to its fullest potential.

Let’s hear them.

Success

You can think of success as climbing a mountain. The higher you climb the closer you come to succeeding. Of course it’s hard getting to the mountain top. But if you work hard enough you will be able to do it. Further think of failure as climbing back down the mountain.

You Can’t Climb Higher than the Mountain Peak

There is one small aspect you need to understand when you are experiencing success: It is limited. It’s the same with climbing a mountain. The higher you climb the better you feel. And once you reach the top you realize that you have finally made it, you have achieved what you want to achieve.

But what you don’t realize is that you can’t climb higher. There is no way you can have more success. That’s when you realize you also need to climb back down. And that’s the way life is. You can’t always succeed, you will also fail.

Be Prepared to Go Back Down

In order to be able to easily climb down you need to prepare yourself. Before even climbing the mountain just picture what you will do: You will climb the mountain and reach the top. And you will of course also have to climb back down.

Why should life be any different? There is nothing that grows for ever. Nor will your business. You need to realize that  once you are prepared for the down swing, it will be a lot easier to come back up again.

Some people will make it look like achieving success was a smooth ride. Just remember: it wasn’t. And it never will.

Those who are successful in the long run are the people who know that in life there will be times when you have achieved everything you wanted. And there will also be times when you are simply failing.  Successful people always keep both in mind.

You Are Not Good at Climbing Mountains?

If you doubt your abilities about being able to climb a mountains then there is one simple yet highly effective solution. Learn to climb.

When I first started blogging I didn’t possess any Internet marketing skills whatsoever. And that may have been a mistake. But over the years I learned more and more.

There is nothing wrong with not being able to do something. But it’s wrong to not do anything about it.

The Growth Cycle

Even though some people might make it look like their success was a smooth ride, believe me it wasn’t. Let’s say the curve below shows you the growth of a business. If you simply look at the line you think that it was constantly growing. Yet when you take a closer look at it you realize that it wasn’t.

The curve looks like it was a smooth ride, yet it wasn't. It's always an up and down.

It’s an up and down. Understanding this cycle will help you to get further in life.

Failure

Life will throw many things at you and you can do nothing about that. What you can do is to find a way to deal with these obstacles. And that’s where the problem lies. Some people just don’t.

Let’s suppose you are doing a hurdle race. You hear the shot ringing in your ears and you know that you need to start running. And that’s what you do. Every second you come closer to that first hurdle. The others have already jumped over it but for some reason you know that you won’t be able to jump as high. So what should you do?

There are obvious answers:

1. You could try and jump over it.
2. You could run around it.
3. You could crouch down and pass it that way.

What you will find is that many people are going to choose the first way. They are going to try and jump over it again and again failing each time. They couldn’t possibly take the other ways because they don’t see them. They don’t recognize them. All they know is that that’s the way everyone took. Therefore it must be the right one.

The few people that choose to take the last two paths are the people that are changing lives around the world. They know that everyone always used to jump over the hurdles. Yet this path doesn’t satisfy them. They try to find another way, an possibly easier one.

Which path would you have chosen?

The Path No One Has Chosen

The reason why it’s so hard for people to take the second and third path is because no one has done it before. And that’s where our human mind comes in.

It simply tell us that if something hasn’t been done before, it’s impossible. Because otherwise someone would have chosen that path already. Wrong!

Just because nobody has been able to do it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. You can. All you need to do is to think of the way you want to take. And keep on working till you find that either you were wrong or you were right. What do you have to lose?

Hitting Rock Bottom

Completely failing isn’t a bad thing in itself. It’s actually good. Why? Because once you have reached the lowest point you can only climb higher. When you have reached the worst time in your life then it can’t get worse. It can only get better.

Blaming Yourself

Some of the problems people have is that whenever there is something bad happening around them they project it onto something that they can’t change. Let’s look at an example to understand this better. Suppose you built a website through which you want to make money. After a while you start to realize that it’s not working the way you wanted it to work. The website doesn’t make any money and doesn’t get any traffic. Now there are two ways people respond to this:

1. they blame something else, e.g. they blame Google for changing their algorithms lately
2. they see the results and realize that they haven’t worked hard enough or that they don’t have enough knowledge

The route most people will take is the first one. That’s because it’s much easier to blame something that is outside your reach (like blaming Google) then it is to blame yourself. The person choosing the second path criticizes himself and projects the failure onto himself, onto his lack of skills. Why is that so powerful?

Because that way you can change something. Blaming someone else is the easy route because you will never need to question yourself or your skills. Yet that’s what life is about. By blaming some outside source you basically say “well it’s not my fault, it’s Google’s and because of that I have no way of changing anything”. I have seen so many people do this, and it’s wrong. Why wouldn’t you want to change yourself? Accept the way you are and accept your mistakes. Then do something about it.

Your Path

What I’ve said above is important but in order to be able to live your life the way you want to, you need to understand more. You need to find your own path through life.

Life is Never Easy

Life isn’t easy. And you know what, it’s not supposed to. If life were easy then there would be people everywhere earning millions of dollars each year. But they don’t. Some do.

You Are Not Limited

The biggest misunderstanding of us humans is that we think we are limited. Yet the thought of that limitation is really what limits us – what keeps us from doing things that were deemed impossible.

Your mind is your only limitation. If you can imagine it then you can do it.

Would have people believed you if you suggested a century ago that you could easily make a full time income through the Internet? The Internet has only existed for around 20-30 years.Yet it has completely transformed the way we live.

But the web is just one example. If you look around you will see that there are many more.

All you do need to understand is that there are no limits.

Challenge Your Beliefs

What ultimately makes you successful is your ability to challenge your beliefs.

In 10th grade I decided that I wanted to come to the U.S. as an exchange student. My father and grandmother didn’t like my decision. The reason was simple. I was going to stay with two adult men. And yes they are gay.

It wasn’t only my father and my grandmother who were skeptical but I myself was skeptical too. At that point in time I had only really seen gay people on TV and in movies. And they were always depicted the same way.

That’s why I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. So the day came when I had to leave for the U.S. and I said goodbye to my friends and family. Once I got on the plane I wasn’t really too sad about leaving Germany because I was excited to see what the U.S. was like. I still remember landing at the airport and knowing none of the people. It was a strange feeling. And it was also strange to see my host parents for the first time.

And I have to tell you my host parents are the nicest people I have ever met in my life. And on top of that they weren’t like the gay couples you would see on TV. They were nothing like that.

All I wanted to say with this is: Constantly challenge your beliefs. Because if you don’t then you will never truly grow. Your beliefs are what most of the time keeps you from achieving what you want to achieve.

Shape Your Reality

The trouble some people have is they don’t understand that you can shape the world the way you want it to be. If you believe that the world is a cruel place then no one can stop you. You will go through the world looking for bad things to happen to support this reality of yours. And exactly that is what you are going to find. A cruel world.

On the other hand if you think of the world as a place of happiness then the same happens. You support this image through every experience you make. Let’s suppose you go to school and you find that one of your friends is not talking to you and looking away the whole time. If you believe the world is a bad place then you will just see the person as angry and mean. However if you see the world as a nice place you try to understand why he is behaving that way. Maybe it’s because his farther had an accident today? Maybe he lost his favorite watch? It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is the way you think about life. Change your attitude. Change the World.

It’s really that simple.

The Lazy Route

One of the things you encounter constantly is people buying products (especially on the Internet) which promise to help them in some way. It might be a new diet or an Internet marketing course about making money. After people buy these products you see one of two things happening:

• either they read it, acknowledge the useful information and put it in their folder with all the other books and programs they have bought over the time and never touch it again
• or they read the book with excitement and start applying all of the techniques mentioned in the book

Our mind tells us that whenever you can choose the easy path, that you should do so. I mean why shouldn’t you. The only problem with this is that usually there is no easy way.

You won’t be able to generate $1,000 in a month without any knowledge whatsoever. It just won’t happen. In order to succeed in life you need to work hard. There is no shortcut, even if you want to find one.

But what I can tell you is that if you believe in something and work hard towards this goal you will eventually be able to achieve it.

Believe in Yourself

Do me one last favor and believe in yourself. Especially as an entrepreneur there will be many rough times in your life. I guess every blogger experienced these moments.

I’ve found myself questioning whether it was really the right decision to start a blog. I believe it was. But there are always these moments where these thoughts start to slip. Where you question all the decisions you have made in your life.

My sister and I talked a lot about my blogging habit and how I thought I could make money through it. The saddest part of the conversation was that she told me that she didn’t believe I was going to make it. And to be honest that didn’t even hurt me so much. The great thing about my sister not believing in me was that it helped me to keep going. To prove her wrong.

Believe in yourself, even if no one else does.

Share your thoughts on life. What is necessary to understand about life?

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
-Nelson Mandela

Glimpses on Understanding Life is a post from And Break

I recently told you about how I built all my mini affiliate sites. The crucial step in building such a website is always the research. Once you have found a niche for your mini site most of your work is done.

However you don’t want to waste too much time with setting your site up. In order to speed up the process Unique Blog Designs has created the Affiliate Theme.

The reason why I initially purchased it is because I needed a way of building lots of sites fast. That of course requires a theme with lots of customization options. There are other themes out there which you can use such as the FlexSqueeze Theme and Socrates Theme (which I probably would have bought had I known about it earlier) but for me the Affiliate Theme seemed like the best option.

How Does it Work?

Basically the Affiliate Theme is a highly customizable WordPress theme. You can quickly change almost everything about it. Now the reason for this is that as an affiliate you have to customize your sites a lot, especially when you are building a lot of sites. Which is normally the case when you are trying to make money through mini sites.

To be able to easily customize it you automatically get some header and background graphics. The ones below are all the header graphics I got with the theme (by purchasing the multi-use-package):

The header graphics that come with the theme

I was kind of disappointed because of the lack of header graphics, but I will come back to that later. The theme also comes with background images but to be honest I haven’t used them. I just didn’t like most of the images.

The Settings

The header settings

In the beginning I had trouble getting the header graphics to work. You can easily upload a header image to be used in the theme. So that’s what I did. But after uploading and saving the theme, the header image was still not showing up on my blog.

What I found out later was that in order for it to show up you actually had to switch the header display settings from text to custom header graphic. From then on it just worked great.

As I’ve mentioned the theme is highly customizable and therefore there are a lot of things you can change. I didn’t include all the options here because they would take up way too much space. If you want to see the whole settings panel then just go to the Affiliate theme website and click on What Is It? -> Theme Options Panel. There you can see all of the options there are for the theme.

Building Mini Sites

When you create a new blog and use the default Affiliate Theme settings on it, then the website just looks ugly. But within half an hour you can make it look extremely nice. I have to admit though that I haven’t been able to change the theme within half an hour so that it looks good but the more you use it the easier it becomes.

I recently built a mini site around hybrid cars. If I had to guess then it took me around an hour and a half to build my hybrid cars disadvantages mini site. I feel that the website looks great even though I really didn’t spend a lot of time working on it. That’s really the advantage of the this theme.

My Thoughts

I personally like the idea and the way it works. But there are certainly points which I don’t like. As I’ve shown above you only get a few header images. Especially with such a theme I expected to get more images like these. Another aspect which I don’t like are the background images. I haven’t used any of these because I don’t like the way they look. There are also some additional minor problems such as not being able to change the font below a certain number of pixels because the option does not exist. This is a minor issue which can be easily fixed by inserting another piece of CSS into the website.

I still use this theme on all of my mini sites. It’s a great theme for affiliates to use especially because of its high flexibility. Even though the issues mentioned above are annoying you can always create your own background or header image, which is what I did anyway. Once you are accustomed to using it you will be able to build mini sites a lot faster. One advantage of this theme over others is that it’s SEO optimized by default.

In the end I really enjoy using this theme. I hope the article gave you a good idea of the theme and how you can use it. I can truly recommend the Affiliate theme.

What do you think? Have you used something similar?

The Perfect WordPress Theme for Affiliates? is a post from And Break

I started creating a site a few months ago just to find out whether it would be possible to easily get long tail traffic to a new website. That’s the experiment I am sharing with you here.

Mini Sites vs Long Tail Sites

I recently introduced you to the idea of mini sites. Basically what you do is to pick a very specific niche and try to rank for that certain keyword. A golf mini site for example could be centered around the perfect golf swing. You then purchase the domain theperfectgolfswing.com (which is probably already taken) and set up your mini site. Once your site is up and running you add a few, but highly relevant, pages to it. Once you have done that you simply wait for visitors to arrive on your mini site.

Long tail sites are quite similiar, yet completely different from mini sites. With a long tail site you are aiming at a lot broader keyword which is at least getting over 10,000 searches per month. Your goal is not to actually get the site to rank for that broad keyword but to get your individual posts to rank well. The articles of a long tail site are highly targeted and aim at keywords that have no competition.

The Theory

My theory was that the more specific the niche is that you are trying to rank for, the less the competition. That’s what has been mostly transforming the blogosphere, people are blogging about much smaller niches in order to be able to compete.

So here is what I did. I purchased a domain name and set up a blog. I focused the “WordPress Tutorials” niche trying to get some traffic. The site I created is called Downtown WordPress and is all about WordPress tutorials.

The reason why you are relying on search engine traffic, for both mini sites and long tail sites, is because it’s the most profitable. If you get tons of traffic from social media sites then you learn to appreciate traffic coming from search engines.

The Blog Posts

On the blog I started creating rather short posts with long titles. One post was called Speeding Up WordPress by Putting CSS Files in the Header. The post itself doesn’t contain lots of information it just basically talks about how you need to move your CSS files in the header.

After writing the post I optimized it for search engines. That means I added specific meta keywords to it, changed the title slightly and added a meta description.

That’s what I did with lots of posts. I created several of them and used SEO to get them to rank well.

The Issues

The problem with this technique is that it’s rather hit-or-miss method. For some articles you are getting a nice amount of traffic and with others you are getting nothing at all. Furthermore there is no way you can check whether the keywords you are targeting are actually getting traffic because they are way too specific. Even Google Keywords won’t help you in that case.

Traffic

Top Traffic Sources

As you can see I am at least getting some traffic. This is not anything near the figures I wanted it to be but I haven’t worked on the site so much and I think there are only 7 articles on it. So if I keep on writing and adding new articles to it then this could become a site that could earn me a decent passive income. But we will see, I will definitely keep you updated.

Have I Made Money?

It shouldn’t be too hard to make money through long tail websites. All I did in this case was to add some banners to it. But you can of course try out other things. I don’t think I have made money through the site yet but that’s probably because of the low traffic I am receiving at the moment.

Conclusion

I think that long tail sites have potential especially since the competition on the Internet is getting stronger and stronger. You could build long tail sites around some competitive niches and still get some decent traffic to it. Of course the technique highly depends on the number of articles you have on your site, the more you have the better you are off.

Remember that in order to save yourself some time you could actually buy sites that already have lots of content and save yourself time that way. One last thing I want to mention is the huge SEO potential of such websites. Let’s say you have a long tail site with around 500 pages. Now if you were to simply place a link in the sidebar of the blog you would get 500 backlinks to a site.

What do you think? Do you like the concept or do you think it’s useless?

How About Long Tail Sites? is a post from And Break

One of the main problems every entrepreneur has, is to find a way to keep going, to motivate himself. That’s what I want to cover in this short post.

How do you keep going when you doubt everything you have done?

Goals

Reaching your goals is never easy. Still if you have a goal and work hard towards it then nothing is impossible. One of my main goals is to make money online. Not necessarily just to make money but also because for me it means independence from my parents.

I believe I work hard towards this goal. And it’s not always easy to keep going. Yet there is one thing that always motivates me when I am so close to giving up:

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

-Thomas Edison

This is what keeps me going all the time.

How do you motivate yourself? How do you keep going?

The Road to Success is a post from And Break