Curious Little Person

Making Money Online with Squidoo

Sandeep Bajaj — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:16:47 +0000

One of the main objectives of this blog has to been to share what I learn. I do not really believe in just writing content for the sake of building traffic. I’ve always followed quality – hence you would see a huge time lag between my posts. It does bring down readership as my blog could be termed as “passive blog” at times.

Coming to the point – today, would want to share a something out of the box which kinda has given me something I could look forward to in the world of Internet Marketing.

Making Money Online with Squidoo

Squidoo is one of those websites that has good authority and web presence. Creating webpages is termed as “creating a lens”. Lenses can really be about anything you wish to write on except a few topics which they do not allow as per their policy.

I’ve created a few lenses with Squidoo and must say that my experience has been great and this has really left me motivated to create a lot more lenses to make money online. I’ve basically started targeting long tail keywords with the help of keyword research. And yes, the end result is that it has bought some sales which was totally unexpected.

Here is a screenshot from Amazon Affiliate for 2012 Q4.

That’s basically a sweet $9.31 from just 4 articles that I published on Squidoo. Out of these 4 article, 2 articles were the ones that made this money and they are ranking on the first page of Google for the keywords I’ve chosen. Of course, these are keywords that are long tail and have low competition. But again, it’s the basic core idea of creating these lenses.

Would also like to mention that I’ve done no back-linking except for social bookmarking for these lenses. This article has beaten all major brands, but of-course the traffic is minimum. Seo in 2013 has given priority to domain authority, hence well created squidoo lenses tend to rank high in Google SERP’s.

Another learning is that, please do not buy all Internet Marketing products that make promises to make money in a weeks time. These are all marketing gimmicks – you need patience, hard work and perseverance to make it work! And trust me this can be done free as well!

In my future posts - will talk more about creating squidoo lenses and the products i use to make my job easier. I am seriously looking forward to dwell more into squidoo to make a passive income. It definitely does not hurt!

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SEO in 2013

Sandeep Bajaj — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:40:50 +0000

In these days of post panda and penguin updates, one of the big questions is that what is the future of SEO in 2013. We can safely state that without a doubt, SEO has become more challenging and complicated. The good ol’ strategies of writing an article with onpage factors and out beating your competitors in the no. of backlinks with usage of anchor text has totally vanished.

SEO consultants are finding it really very difficult to keep abreast with Google’s changes. Even before consultants are testing to figure out what’s actually working – Google releases a fresh update that changes the complete game. This has led to a lot of frustration in the industry as most of the webmasters aren’t aware of whats working for their websites and whats not.

So the question that comes to my mind is, what’s actually working in SEO in 2013.

Below, are a few pointers that you should keep in mind:

1) Content still remains the king – Writing good quality content has always been and always will be the right kind of strategy to rank highly in SERP’s. This content will get linked up easily only ensuring that you rank higher.

2) Blackhat methods of building backlinks does nto really make sense anymore as they only damage your sites repuatation even further

3) PageRank is not the most critical factor to evaluate how your website is doing. There are hardly any refreshes that Google has done in the past year – may be an indication of a dying metric.

4) Focus on building up a brand aka authority websites. I really cannot comment if thin MFA websites (5 page) really work these days, as i have not tested them out. But in the long run, great content published over time will ensure that you build up a brand and become an authority in your niche.

5) Vary your anchor text, ensure that you use a lot of generic keywords along with your main anchor

6) Be socially active. We all know Google+ is one of google metrics. Ensure you have your author profile picture up and try to build up a good follower base.

Creating a website is simple, but doing something useful out of it is no more an easy task. It is a continous process that takes time, effort and resources.

Do feel free to drop in your comments about what’s working in SEO in 2013

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How To: Stop WordPress from Stripping HTML in Posts & Pages

Sandeep Bajaj — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:28:44 +0000

By default, WordPress strips out some of the HTML code which at times is very crucial in displaying your posts in an appropriate manner. HTML tags like p (new paragraph) and br (line break) get stripped once you click to save.

This can be very annoying and hopefully this feature is included in the future WordPress updates. I actually read up a lot on this issue and tried a lot of stuff that was suggested by many of the bloggers, but all in vain.

Finally, I want to present you a plugin that gets the job done in an easy manner. Come EmbedIt Pro by SuperThemes, which allows you to Embed any HTML code (Youtube, UStream or whatever HTML) in a post, page or widget, deciding precisely where to embed it, either on-the-fly from custom fields OR from your saved HTML Code Snippets. This plugin makes it very easy to add HTML code as you can use the simple shortcodes to get the job done on your posts and pages.

Please have a look at the video to see how it works

Once you are done creating your HTML it’s as easy as copying the short code on any page or post of your blog. This plugin also makes it easy to add HTML code to your sidebar easily. Below is a screenshot of how this plugin will look on your blog. You can easily add new HTML code on your blog and view all the codes that have been created.

I’ve been using this plugin on my new blog http://curiouslittleshopper.com which offers a platform to end users where by they can search for their products through “keywords” and not just “product names”. Since the focus is mostly affiliate marketing through amazon, i needed to add on a lot of HTML code on this blog which was easily done through the help of this plugin.

Do let us know your thoughts on this plugin as well as my new blog

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Thesis Theme 2.0 Review

Sandeep Bajaj — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 05:45:26 +0000

Thesis Theme 2.0 has finally hit the market on 1st October, 2012. Being a user of the thesis theme on my blog for a long time, decided that it would be a good time to review the new functions that the thesis wordpress theme 2.0 has to offer.

I used the theme on a test site and below are my findings.

I’ve tried to update this with all of the “need to know” information about Thesis Theme that should be understood before making that final decision.

If you are an existing member of DIY Themes, you can download Thesis 2.0 for free. Along with this updated version of Thesis, DIY themes has also launched a plugin call “Thesis 2 upgrade helper plugin” which helps existing users of this theme easily upgrade to 2.0 version.

Download Thesis 2.0 WordPress Theme

Thesis 2.0 WordPress Theme Features

1. Drag and Drop Functionality

As you can see in the below picture Thesis 2.0 comes with a drag and drop functionality for your meta elements, other features like favicon, rss feed etc. This helps you change the order of the elements in your HTML Head Section, but this does not really big difference from an SEO point of view…may be Chris Pearson could throw some light. Additionally, you can add google site verification and Google REL author elements with a click of a button. If you run a multi-author blog, then you can enter each author’s Google+ ID on their user profile page

You can tweak your blog post, homepage, and yes, even your 404 page without ever touching one line of code

2. Super Fast Website Speed

All webmasters know the fact that Google considers website speed as one of the ranking factors in their algorithm. And Amazon says that they lose 1% of their sales for every 100ms increase of page load time, hence the importance of webpage loading time.

The old thesis used two style sheets custom.css and custom-functions.css. Thesis 2.0 uses a single stylesheet and the code is more efficient leading to healthier websites and faster loading times

3. Tracking Scripts

Thesis 2.0 makes embedding Tracking Scripts into your WordPress Blog a complete breeze. You Just drop in your Google Analytics ID, and Thesis sets it up exactly how Google recommends.

Additionally, also providing you the feasibility of adding extra Tracking Scripts.

Get Thesis 2.0 WordPress Theme

4. Thesis 2.0 Skin Editor

The most interesting and fantastic part about the Thesis 2.0 theme. As thesis states “They’re looking to run a blog, not become a designer”. Most of the webmasters including myself needed to learn a little bit about CSS if they needed to make minor changes to their blog’s design. No more needed with thesis 2.0

The drag and drop template builder that will save you a ton of valuable time, and gives you the freedom to edit your pages layout without having to fear of breaking your blog’s theme or facing a downtime

5. Create New Custom Templates

The good news is that you can create custom templates easily by using the drag and drop feature. You can make your about page look different from your other content pages easily.

You can create multiple custom templates with the Visual Design Template Editor and save them for future use.

Get Thesis 2.0 WordPress Theme

6. Easily Create 404 Pages

Thesis 2.0 can easily create custom 404 page in wordpress no coding necessary. It’s as simple as changing a few options on the back end of Thesis and you’ve got a custom WordPress 404 page!

My Thoughts

1) No documentation, no tutorials currently. They rushed with the release, but there will be a lot coming up in the future
2) Great Helpful community to ride over your initial set up hiccups
3) Nice little Improvement ideas from Chris & Missieur displaying on a continous basis although not too much of a value add.
4) No boxes, no packages – there would be a lot of information drill down over the coming days
5) If you want to use Thesis 2.0, then use it only on a new site

Get Thesis 2.0 WordPress Theme

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Hosting Giveaway: 3 Web Hosting Accounts From Zyma

Sandeep Bajaj — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 11:07:20 +0000

We are happy to announce our first giveaway.

We have partnered with Zyma Technologies for one year absolutely FREE web hosting! Zyma technologies launched in 2010 and is quickly becoming the No.1 choice for web hosting services on the internet. They’re multi-award winning web hosting package offers the most attractive and comprehensive features for one the best prices on the internet. They’re vision is to become the recommended provider of web hosting services in the world.

Features:

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99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Free Script Installation
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Softaculous Premium
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How to participate in this Unlimited Web Hosting Giveaway?

It’s very simply to participate to Unlimited Web Hosting Accounts From Zyma Giveaway, just follow the Rafflecopter below and post a comment once you complete your participation.
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Best of Luck!

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4 Best Adsense WordPress Plugins

Sandeep Bajaj — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:00:42 +0000

Google Adsense is the most popular PPC Advertising network that offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers delivering text-based Google ads that are relevant to site content pages.

You need to sign up with Google Adsense and paste a code on your site that will then show up contextual advertisements on your site and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click. Contextual advertisements are ads which are relevant to your content. However, implementing and tweaking AdSense ads on a WordPress blog can be tedious task for a new user because you would need to mess with the code of your theme which leaves most webmasters uncomfortable. Luckily for us, we have wordpress plugins which help you implement, control and overview AdSense ads on your blog easily. We’ve listed down around 10 wordpress adsense plugins that help get the job done easily.

1. WhyDoWork Adsense – This is one of my favorite plugins as it actually lives up to it’s name. This plugin allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. Additionally, you can set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then X days (x is the number of days you decide). Easy to understand and implement. You just need to copy the code and your adsense ads are setup are ready to go. Download here

2. Wp-Insert – This is one of the most popular Ad Management plugins and covers any network. You can run any ad-network along with adsense or any other network. One of the cool features of this plugin is that you have the option to control the appearance of each and every ad. It also helps create a privacy policy for your blog at the click of a button. Download here

3. Simple Adsense Plugin – This plugin allows you to do that well and even allows you to show Google Adsense on a time-delay basis. For example, you can show the Adsense a few days after the post goes live so you can reward your daily readers and then maximize profit through organic returns, which is the most-high source of Google Adsense earnings. Download here

4. QuickSense Plugin – This plugin can be used for various ad networks like buysell ads, chitika etc. QuickSense offers a quick & flexible way to insert AdSense or any Ad code into a blog post. It comes with a simple settings page, and it does not overwhelm you with complicated options. Download here

Do let us know incase you’ve come across any other plugin that helps you add and manage adsense code easily.

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Show Review Star Rating In Google Search Results

Sandeep Bajaj — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 12:26:58 +0000

If you’ve been noticing Google search results, you would have found many search results with reviews of products or services that contain review stars. If you’re on the wordpress platform and would like to have the same review stars for your pages on search results, here’s a tutorial showing how you can implement the same solution on your blog

Steps to Install Review Stars on Google Search Results

Step 1 -> Install & Activate AuthorHReview WordPress Plugin on your blog from the WordPress Plugin directory.

Step 2 -> Go the plugin settings where you will be given an option to display the review rating stars on blog’s home page and single post.

Step 3 -> After setting up the authorhreview plugin, go to the post and enter the review details of the product / service which you would like to review and ultimately select how much you would like to rate your product.

There are some required fields like Name of the Product, URL of the product, Review Summary and the Rating as you can see below.

Step 4 -> Once this is done, you can test whether the wordpress plugin is working accurately or not be testing it out on the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool

If setup accurately, you usually will see results showing the review stars the next time your page is visited by the Google Bot and the cache is updated. This should usually take around 3-4 days.

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How to Setup Google AdSense Custom Channels?

Sandeep Bajaj — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 07:09:09 +0000

A Google Adsense Custom channel is a tracking mechanism to understand which ad units are performing and generating revenue for you. It is a very useful tool if you’re using more than one ad layout on your site and would you like to know which ad type with details like placement, color, type etc are performing better. This will help you understand how your traffic flows and what is really generating revenue for you.

Below are a few examples of ways you can group and track ad units with custom channels:

Ad sizes and colors
Location of ads on a page — left side vs. right side, embedded in content or above it
Page topics — articles about sports vs. entertainment

How to Setup Google Adsense Custom Channel

Step 1: To setup a google adsense channel, you will need to login to your google adsense account and go to My Ads Section. Under the My Ads Section traverse along to content and click on the tab New Custom Channel. Below we’ve given a screenshot for ease of understanding.

Step 2: In this step you will need to define the Ad Unit you would like to track performance for and provide a name for the channel as shown below. A suggestion would be to provide a name that you can easily identify you’re ad unit in future. This will help incase you run multiple ad units on your site and wish to track all of them through custom channels. Just to give you an idea on the naming conventions I’ve used - “right sidebar – top” and “post-top”

Setting up custom channels is a very simple process that many publishers miss out on. It helps increase your adsense revenue as will be able to test which kind of ad units generate the most revenue for you.

I also want to bring to you 3 google adsense custom channel videos which has been released by the google adsense themselves. I suggest you to go through these videos to get a better understanding of the importance of google adsense channels.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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Anchor Text Optimization in 2012

Sandeep Bajaj — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 04:49:51 +0000

In the month of April 2012, google announced its major update to reward high quality site popularly known as the penguin update. Although I’ve not written about the penguin update on my blog, I’m very well aware that these updates have hit many small businesses real hard as search engine rankings have just vanished overnight after years of effort.

It was very evident that the update was aimed at targeting websites that used unethical link building techniques and focused on keyword stuffing to get the ranking boost in SERP’s. Many sites like Unique Article Wizard and Build My Rank that used to distribute spun content within their own blog network are totally finished as the sites in their network have been deindexed by google and user’s have lost their rankings.

In the midst of all these changes, the ones that caught my eye were the changes pertaining to Anchor Text. Google did mention “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites”

Impact on Anchor Text in 2012

Google is also hitting websites for aggressive anchor text for keywords in backlinks even before Penguin. Post-Penguin, anchor text diversity becomes more critical.

So, what exactly is anchor text diversity?

Most of us have learnt somewhere along the way that the anchor text of a backlink tells Google what the site is about. So in order to get a site ranked well in Google for a specific anchor text (keyword), it only made sense to use that same anchor text for every single one of our backlinks.

However, Google appears to have finally caught on and has begun taking into account when websites have an abnormal number of identical anchor texts pointing to a site. Or in terms we are talking about, sites with very little text distribution in the links pointing to them.

So how can we effectively rank websites for specific keywords?

The first thing is we can use the idea of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) when choosing anchor text. Let’s say that your main keyword that you want to rank for is “sport watches”. LSI keywords for that would be keywords like best sport watches, outdoor sport watches, sport watches website and so on. See how these are all keywords that basically mean the same thing but are different.

However, using the idea of LSI alone is not enough. One of the biggest things Google is looking at now is natural looking SEO. So to look as natural as possible, you want to mix in some anchor texts that aren’t so keyword targeted that a normal person might use. For example, you might use “click here” or “watch comparison website”

So in summary, you want to use the idea of LSI as well as take into consideration what would look natural to Google to come up with a couple of dozen anchor texts that are all related around your main anchor text.

Anchor Text Analysis

Microsite Masters examined historical data for thousands of websites to investigate whether sites that saw their rankings drop after Penguin were also guilty of having no anchor text diversity for “optimization” or “money” keywords (i.e., whatever term you’re trying to rank No. 1 for) as opposed to more natural-looking mix of linking anchor text (e.g., Your Website’s Title, example.com, www.example.com, “click here”, “here”, “blog post”, etc.).

The results are quite interesting. According to Microsite Masters “It means that every single site we looked at which got negatively hit by the Penguin Update had a “money keyword” as its anchor text for over 60% of its incoming links. On the other hand, the sites that were not hit by the update had much more random percentages. Having over 60% of your anchor text being a money keyword did not guarantee that your site would be hit by the penalty (many of the sites not affected had numbers just as bad), but if under 50% of your anchor text for incoming links were “money keywords” it’s all but guaranteed you weren’t affected by this update.”

Therefore, keeping in mind all the above points and analysis, a useful thumb rule would be to optimize anchor texts in the following manner:

60% URL based or non-keyword anchor texts
30% broad match or partial keyword and rephrased anchor texts
Only 10% exact match keyword anchor texts

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How to Display Author Profile Picture in Search Results

Sandeep Bajaj — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:48:56 +0000

If you’ve been performing a lot of searches on Google recently, you would have noticed that few of the search results have a profile picture displayed right next to the them. Why does this happen? Due to Google+

As a blogger or content publisher this is an important step as you end up claiming authorship for your content that’s available on google search results. Additionally, one of the major advantages is that – your CTRs may improve on Google because regular users might be attracted to a picture next to search results because of several reasons like trust, authority or just being a good profile picture.

Also, there are rumors that in future Google is going to consider this as one of their ranking factors. So, you might as well be in the game rather than out.

Steps to Display your Google Plus Author Profile Picture

Step 1: Create a profile at Google+ if you do not have one already with a good, recognizable headshot as your profile photo

Step 2: Create an About Me page on your blog and link it to your Google+ profile page. While creating the link to your Google+ profile page ensure to add “rel=me” tag to your hyperlink as shown below

rel=”me”>My Profile

Note – Replace “profile_url” with your Google+ profile url and remember that your link must contain the rel=author parameter. If it’s missing, Google won’t be able to associate your content with your Google+ profile.

Step 3: Now, all your blog posts (content) should link to your about me page. This can be done by using an “about me” widget on your sidebar/footer or adding the link in your author bio right below your post. While creating the link to your About Me page ensure to add “rel=author” tag to your hyperlink as shown below

rel=”author”>About Me

Note – If you’re adding the “rel=author” tag to your author bio, you will unable to do so as by default wordpress strips out the tag. You need to refer the following guide to implement “rel=author” in your author bio

Step4: The last step would be to sign in to your Google+ account and go to your about page and then simply type in your blog or other site URL in the “Contributor to” section. Your site is now linked to your Google+ profile page.

That’s about it. Now you need to wait for Google to crawl your pages and display your profile picture in search engines. It normally takes around 2-3 days for your profile picture to display in Google search engine result pages.

To test how your profile picture looks in search results you can use the rich snippets tool

Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining the Google Authorship

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