So you have a beautifully designed website with clear graphics, inspiring images and well written texts, with thousands of hits everyday and you’re asking why you should ever make it mobile friendly? This is why. More and more people are getting too busy doing multiple jobs these days and many of them access the internet usually through their mobile devices. It is estimated that by the year 2013 the number of mobile web users will hit a staggering 1.7 billion. The number of people shopping and buying from their smartphones is expected to reach about 105 million by the end of 2012. It is important to note that websites built with flash technology do not work on mobile devices; this is why you need to understand how to make your website mobile friendly so that you can cut your own cake from the growing mobile marketing opportunities.

Set up a subdomain

Setting up a subdomain as a mirror of your original website is very easy and straight forward, depending on your host. These types of subdomain usually carry an ‘m’ or ‘mobile’ instead of the ‘www’. You can create as much as you want and they are usually just pointing to your existing website.

Install mobile plugins

You can easily transform your website into a mobile-friendly version within 30 seconds if you’re using wordpress. These types of plugins are very easy to use and there are plenty of them available for you to use for free. WP Touch is one of such plugins that give you the chance to customize your site exactly the way you want it. However take note to back up your website before installing and activating any plugins and ensure that you provide options for people to view it in full version also.

Create easy navigation

It’s easy for people to get lost when viewing a site on their mobile so make sure you create easy, distinct and clear ways for visitors to get to your most important information and content. Ensure that you use short drop-downs that will take people to the exact place where the information they’re looking for is. You should also avoid using layers on your site.

Avoid using too many images

The more images you use in a particular article on your site the less traffic you get reading it through mobile devices. So limit the use of images on your articles to one or two; this is the only way someone with slow connection and a mobile device with tiny screen can view your site.

Avoid flash

Flash is good for creating graphical content, videos, audios and attractive animation on your site, but the problem is there are very few mobile devices that could render flash. Devices like ipads and iphones will usually leave a blank space where the flash display is supposed to be. So instead of using flash, you should opt for more open technologies like JavaScript and HTML5, which has the capacity to create images, videos, animations and rich content that flash creates and still be easily rendered by most mobile devices and smart phones.

Bill is the main editor for www.make-a-web-site.com he covers topics like hosting, specifically blog hosting and he can teach you how to start a blog.

If you follow me here on DormRoomCash.com, then you know that I am currently living in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Yes, it is really nice all year round, however, it is not all sunshine. Today, I want to talk to you about why making money online is such a benefit being that I live here in Mexico.

What most people in the United States and other countries don’t realize is that in Mexico, when it rains everybody stays inside and therefore, making any amount of money is very difficult. Right now (as of writing this), I am sitting at my desk watching the rain come down and the waves crash into the beach due to Hurricane Bud.

Unlike most other people here in Mexico, I am still making money and the reason is because I work online. I do things like freelance writing for specific clients, I do jobs on Elance and Freelancer.com and I also run a pretty large portfolio of websites. It is because of all these things that I will not only survive Hurricane Bud but I will come up ahead. This is not something that other’s can say because most people have to take a day or two off when it rains.

What do you do to make money online?

With the way the economy is going and many companies still struggling to keep their head above water it is important that you try other things than just a typical day job. That is why I highly recommend that you do something to make money online. It doesn’t matter if you are creating a top notch website or simply writing articles for other people. I do both and I will continue to do both because I see the benefit in it as well as the fun.

Before I let you go I do have one question for you – What would happen if you were hit by a hurricane and couldn’t work for 2 days?

My Answer:

This has happened to me 3 times before and I will continue to make money because my income is not tied to my general location as much as it is tied to traffic and client needs. So, the only thing that would happen to me is I would be annoyed by the loss of internet and the frequent power outages.

Now, it is your turn. While I am here in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico waiting out Hurricane Bud so that I can get back to the beach I would love to hear what would happen if you suddenly couldn’t work for 2 days.

I know that a lot of you have been asking what my plans are for business moving forward and I plan on addressing that right here. Even if you have not been following my business over the past year or so, it is still a good idea to read this article because I will give you some insights on what has been working to make money and what hasn’t worked very well.

The first thing that I want to get to is this site – DormRoomCash.com.

I lost a lot of traffic over the past month due to Google’s over-optimization penalty, so I am simply re-evaluating my business and making sure I am as productive as possible. Being that my traffic on this site dropped by more than 80% I will not be posting as many posts here.

What will I be doing instead?

My plan is to pick up my guest posting and also do some article marketing in order to dilute my anchor text backlinks. What I figured out is that my link building strategy that I used when I first started this site was too much for the recent changes. Also, I noticed that somebody was building mass links to my site over the past month. My guess is a competitor did this but I can’t be 100% sure about that. All I know is that I will be trying to dilute my keyword density in order to accommodate Google and hopefully that will increase my search engine rankings. Once that happens, I will then start posting more on this site.

What will I do with all my spare time?

About 2 years ago I created a very lucrative website (Sorry, I won’t release the niche or industry) and I am going to be spending a lot more time working on it. In the past 3 weeks I have created 38 new posts for the website, I have written 9 guest posts for link building purposes and I have also started a pretty in depth link building campaign. My goal is to get each page that I have to rank within the first 2 pages of its 2 desired keywords.

If I can do this and my rough calculations are correct, then the site should earn anywhere between $2,000 – $3,200 per month by September. This will be a tough task since I am not 100% sure if the link building campaign that I will be using will work as well as I hope. But, you never know until you try.

On top of that I have 18 niche websites that are all between #11 and #19 for their primary keywords, so I will be building backlinks to those sites as well. However, instead of using my keyword I will be using generic links such as; click here, for more information, www.sitenamehere.com, and other things like that. The reason for this is to help dilute my keyword density before I go ahead and create guest posts for the site using my actual keyword.

Again, this will be a tough task to take on along with my other projects, however, I want to get my earnings back up.

So, that is what I have been up to the last few weeks. I know that I have been lacking here on DormRoomCash.com but that is only because my main business takes priority over this. I know that is not a good thing to say, however, I use this blog to talk about things that I am doing and if I am not making money, then there is no reason why you should be listening to me, right?

Well, I will try to get up a new post each week, that is my goal at least. If you do have any questions please comment below and I will answer them as soon as I possibly can.

Before you start yelling at your screen and calling me an “Idiot” or any other word with a general meaning of stupid, dumb or crazy, I first want to say that Google is and will continue to be the leading search engine. There is no questioning that, however, I do question the fact of Google being that much better than Bing.

We all know that if you want to get traffic to your website, then you have to target Google and their users. Now, if you get any visitors from Bing, then take a look at your analytics and you will see that they are better than Google.

Why?

Traffic coming over from Bing normally has more time to look around a site. What this means is that the time on site will increase, your conversions will be better and most importantly, you will give the reader a better blogging experience.

This is why Bing is better than Google.

I know that I will get a lot of crap for saying this but with all the updates that Google does it is not safe anymore to concentrate on only getting traffic from their search engine. Yes, Google sends bloggers lots of traffic each month but with an ever changing algorithm it is not safe to put all your eggs in one basket. That is why you should still concentrate on Google but keep in mind that both Bing and Yahoo provide a decent amount of traffic as well. In some cases, you will actually get more traffic from Bing and Yahoo depending on what the keyword is that you are targeting.

In many niches it is better to get traffic from Bing because they cater to a more professional audience, which is great for selling products and getting more comments on your site.

Being that Google is very private with how they rank websites, we can only guess what will work but with Bing things are a little different. Bing has actually came out and said what they look for and this is very beneficial to bloggers in any niche. Below you will see some of the factors that can increase your search engine rankings on Bing.

How To Rank Higher In Bing

Target Exact Match Keywords

This is a no-brainer for some people but I wanted to bring it up because there is a slight difference. Do you know how you can search for something on Google and get a slight variation of the keyword? Well, that doesn’t happen all that much with Bing. For example, if you search for “Tips on teaching a parrot to talk” you will find just that. On Google, you may find things like, “Advice on teaching your parrot to talk” or “Tips and ways to teach parrots how to talk”.  This is why exact match keywords are so important.

On-Page SEO Is Critical

As with all search engines, on-page SEO is very important and this is especially true for Bing. Bing like to see websites with the keyword in the Title and the URL, they like to see a higher keyword density and also the keyword in the Meta description and in various H2 and H4 tags. There are many factors that come into play with on-page SEO but the nice thing is that sometimes on-page SEO is more than enough to get your site ranked high on the search engines without any links.

Link Quantity Over Quality

Unlike Google, Bing prefers more links than quality links. Now, I am not saying that Bing wants to see 1,000 garbage links and no high Page Rank links from relative blogs, they want to see both. Bing values quantity and quality somewhat the same, however, they look at quantity to see how valuable a site really is.

Again, I am not saying that Bing will deliver more traffic than Google, however, you will deliver a better user experience and possible get more conversions to your email lists, affiliate products and even ebook sales. Just keep in mind that Bing is a search engine that continues to send traffic to blogs all over the world and being that there is not as much competition on Bing, it is a source of traffic that you can exploit.

I can remember my first $10 online. It was a big deal, and it made me very proud to see real money sitting in an account that I’d conjured out of cyberspace. When the initial excitement had faded, though, I realized that $10 is in fact, not a lot of money. I’m in the UK, and it equates to about two beers in a pub or one spin through a car wash. No matter how brilliantly that $10 was created, it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I make money online out of my websites, and I’m going to assume you do the same, just for the sake of this article, but even if you don’t, the points are still relevant.

It is at this point, after the initial excitement wares off, and the realisation that it’s going to take a lot of time and hard work to get anywhere sets in, that you have one of two choices. You can give up, or you can upscale. Now most people choose the first of those options, not straight away, of course, they give it some time and wait till things get really difficult. But you don’t want to give up, do you? You want to turn this into a solid income and perhaps even a full time ‘job’, so how do we take that $10 and turn it into something a bit more substantial?

What I’d like you to take away from reading this article is a sense of perspective over that $10. How many visitors has it taken you to achieve that? 1,000? 2,000? Quite a lot, you’ll agree, and multiplying that by enough to make even $1,000 seems like a task equal to climbing everest. Lets say that it took 1,500 people to earn that cash. Google serves 3 Billion search queries a day. Think about that, 3 Billion. So, your 1,500 is roughly 0.0000005% of those search queries. But you don’t want to rely on Google. Let’s take Youtube for example, too. They serve over 87 million searches daily. Let’s take a slice of that, shall we? And Facebook…2.7 Billion pages are Facebook ‘liked’ every day. Every single day. We’ll have a chunk of that, too.

You can see where I’m going with this. Your 1,500 people, if you were trying to cram them into one room, would be a lot, but the truth is, you’re dealing with billions of searches and users of the internet every single day. The first $10 is the most difficult, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that, but when you start to look at percentages, I’m sure you can see the scope for growth.

I know what you’re thinking. This is all very well, Ben, but HOW do I make my numbers grow? You can see tons of information and tips on that over on my site, which documents my journey to make a living online, but in summary, I’ve put a few methods below.

• Match more search queries. Turn your 1,500 into 150,000 by matching more search queries. Research them using Google’s Keyword Tool, and match them by A) Creating more content and/or B) Creating more content.
• Build a mailing list – Keep people coming back to your site with a mailing list, don’t be satisfied with one visit per person, when you could have 100 visits per person every year.
• Be everywhere. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google. Make sure you give yourself as many chances to be found as possible by being in as many places as possible.
• Social Bookmarks. People do use StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious and the others to find cool things to look at on the internet, plus it helps with your SEO.
• Create new forms of income – stay on the lookout for new products to promote and new advertisers.
• Guest Post. Like I’m doing right now. Hopefully you guys will check out my blog, be interested and follow me etc. – that’s the aim. By guest posting on other people’s blogs you can both improve your SEO and grab the attention of their readers.

This post is all about perspective. I’m not trying to say it’s easy to increase your numbers, it really isn’t, but there are always people out there looking for new content, and every day is a new opportunity to attract the visitors you need. It takes time, but if you can continue a steady growth you can scale that $10 to $10,000, then, over time, to $100,000 and more.