Are you sick and tired of sitting on the sidelines while watching others make a killer living on the internet? Well if you are, then this is exactly for you. Literally even if you don’t have the slightest clue of how to set up a blog or make money from it, the Wordpress Wizard 2.0 video training program will walk you through it step by step.

Some of the seasoned bloggers out there may laugh at this product however there are millions of people out there who do not know the first thing about blogging. If you’re looking for a methodically categorized video guide on how to create, market and make money from a blog, Wordpress Wizard 2.0 will help you out immensely.

Six Training Modules And More Than 50 Video Tutorials

Wordpress Wizard 2.0 is composed of six training modules which take you from ground zero (how to register a domain name) to RSS and email marketing techniques. All of the video tutorials are made with the beginner in mind. Because of this, you will never feel as if you’re listening to some tech geek rambling on for hours. Everything is explained in plain, understandable terms. Once you have completed the first two modules, you will have the skills necessary to have a Wordpress blog up and running!

You will be provided access to all 50+ videos at once which enables you to skip over the content which you already know and learn the things you don’t know. There is no waiting until the next week to receive a new video. Over time, there will be new videos added to the system which you will be able to view for free with your initial one time membership fee.

Limited Time Discount – Until Friday March 5/10 Only – $30 Off Regular Membership Price

Normally, Wordpress Wizard 2.0 costs a one time payment of $97. However, if you act fast you can receive the special price of only $67. After Friday though, the price will return back to $97. This product is mostly made for the newbie blogger who has no idea what to do. Intermediate to advanced bloggers may already know most of the content included in the system but a newbie blogger will definitely see great value in this well put together Wordpress video guide. Why spend long hours learning how to make a blog on your own when everything you need to know comes complete in this Wordpress video tutorial package?

WordPress Wizard 2.0 is guaranteed by a 60 day, no questions asked money back guarantee. If you’re not 100% satisfied with the product for any reason, let them know within 60 days and they will  promptly refund you your money.

Click here to get started with the Wordpress Wizard 2.0 video training system!

When the Shoemoney System first launched a month ago, it was limiting enrollment positions to only 500 students. Well I have great news for you especially if you missed signing up for this great learning experience the first time around. Jeremy Shoemaker, the creator of the system, has re-opened the doors!

The system is designed incredibly to have you making your first real $100 within the first month and $500 by the end of month two. Another solid guarantee is that after just only 3 months of being on board with the system, you will have made your first actual $1000. It’s all about results. Shoe has also secured exclusive deals with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, SponsoredTweets, Azoogle and a few others. Every student of the ShoeMoney System will be awarded a total of $2,500 in advertising coupons. Those coupons more than pay for the course!

It really does take pure beginners and turns them into experienced online marketers. Not to mention, the support that you receive when you have questions is first class. You are literally able to send Jeremy Shoemaker an email using his personal email address and he replies to you very promptly with a detailed answer to your question. The Shoemoney System also has a team of experts working behind the scenes to help out the students as needed.

Here are some testimonials of what the first 500 students of the inaugural Shoemoney System launch are saying:

+ “I cannot believe this ! In less than 16 hours
with no more time spent than 1.5 hours I have made my
first arbitrage deal on ebay and made my first $437.00!”

+ “Jeremy, thank you thank you thank you for creating
this product. I made my first commission today and I
am very optimistic about the future”

You may take 60 days to test-drive the ShoeMoney System. If you’re not getting mind-blowing results in 60 days, click the button and get a complete no questions asked refund. Keep all the material, coupons and tools as Jeremy’s gift to you.

Click here to experience the same success that other internet marketers are having!

For those of you who knew that I have another blog directed toward another passion of mine (automotive and motorsports topics), I would like to now officially notify you that I have finally finished completing the re-branding of my Informant Zone blog to Automotive Zen.

I wanted to purposely give the blog more of a fitting automotive name and take on a magazine-like appearance since I think that’s what any site reporting on cars and motorsports should look like! Well, at least those are the ones I favor to read the most. I honestly do not like reading automotive reports from websites that do not look automotive related.

I hope you enjoy the new look and feel of Automotive Zen and remember, I am looking for generous writers! The blog/magazine is meant to be intuitively laid out and easy to navigate for anyone searching for the latest automotive and motorsports information!

Finally a program has been released for Twitter advertising where you choose the advertiser versus the advertiser choosing you. This has been the past trend with sites such as Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly where you set up an account and wait, and wait, and wait some more – especially if you do not have a Twitter following of some large proportions or your name isn’t Kim Kardashian. It’s just hard for beginners to make money from those sites.

So what is this new money making program called for making cash on Twitter? It’s called My Likes. All you need to do is sign up for an account, link your current Twitter account (using the Twitter OAuth system) to it and start finding advertisers that you would like to promote.

The reason why it’s called My Likes is because you promote the advertisers products in the form of tweeting about how much you like the product. It’s a soft sell versus a hard sell. I like this concept much more than shoving products down peoples’ throats on Twitter. All you’re doing with My Likes is telling people on Twitter or your blog about things that you like.

The great thing about My Likes is that there is no waiting time to get started making money. Just hop into your account and choose the advertisers you wish to promote for! Next, simply Tweet about how much you like their product or place an embedded image/link in a blog article or page. This is great for people who are not Twitter rockstars.

Instead of being paid per tweet, you are paid for every click your promotion ad receives which opens the doors to a better money making opportunity of recurring payments. Your cost-per-click is automatically determined by the system and is constantly adjusted according to how relevant and influential your Likes are.  My Likes does allow you set a tweet price just in case an advertiser wishes to purchase a tweet directly from you.  My Likes also boasts the industries quickest payment schedule since they pay you any earnings over $2 once per week every Friday. You may also opt to donate your earnings to charity if you’re already high roller!

So get right on this My Likes opportunity and good luck with it!

As you may be aware of the fact that I’ve been trying different variations of a template design that I had made, I finally made the decision to go with this theme. I had a few goals in mind when updating the look of this blog and they were to keep the blog looking clean, well structured and easy to read.

I didn’t want any fancy graphics or bells and whistles. What I was after was a functional setup that would entice my readers to keep visiting my site. I hope this design was the right choice and will give the site a solid look and brand presence. I want this blog to be taken seriously as what I write is not a joke!

My articles focus primarily on what I am doing to improve my own blog and how you can do if you follow along. I apologize for the delay in updating my posts however I’ve been working on this offline as well as been moving my Informant Zone blog to another domain which I will reveal shortly! I am also glad to say that Informant Zone is getting a large update in the design department as well.

So keep visiting as my sites are coming out with some great changes and new content on a daily basis (which was my routinely posting schedule). I do my best to keep you guys informed of the latest developments so I really hope that you find my articles useful!

-Justin

Now you should have your keyword decided on and have registered it as your domain name. What we need to do next is set up the actual website for which you will use to promote your affiliate product.

Here is what we will be doing in Part 2:

1. Installing Wordpress.
2. Choosing The Right Wordpress Theme.
3. Essential Plugins For Better SEO.

Step 1: Installing Wordpress

The main reason why I chose Wordpress is because it is very SEO (search engine optimization) friendly and indexes and ranks well with search engines in general but primarily Google. It also offers us some useful features exclusive to Wordpress in the way of flexibility with our sniper site setup.

Firstly you will want to download Wordpress version 2.9.1 and extract the folder onto your desktop. Next you will need to download and install an FTP client to access your server. I prefer to use FileZilla since it is free. When you set up your hosting with Omnis they provide you with your FTP login information in an email. FTP just means File Transfer Protocol. To set up a new site connection in FileZilla just go to File>Site Manager>Click on New Site and enter in the FTP information Omnis gave you then save it and click “connect”. Now you’re in the area that will contain the files of your website! Note: the host will be ftp:yourdomain.com and don’t worry about the Port.

When you log into your Omnis FTP server through FileZilla, you will see your computer contents on the left and the FTP server contents on the right. The bottom right hand box is what we want to be looking at right now. In it you will notice an “etc” and “www” folder. Double click on the “www” folder as this is the root directory of our domain name that we just registered.  We want to put the Wordpress files into this directory.

In the top left box click on desktop as this is where we put the Wordpress folder. You will notice now that the bottom left box is displaying the contents of our desktop. Look for the Wordpress folder and double click to open it. Select all of the files by pressing Ctrl+A, right click on them and click Upload. Now you will see your Wordpress files uploading. This will take a little while so go grab a drink.

Note: You can use Omnis’ File Manager to do this however I am old school and like to use standalone FTP clients. They provide a better layout for visualization than any web hosts’ online FTP clients.

Once you have all of the Wordpress files uploaded to the root directory go type your domain into your browser and there you will see that Wordpress is asking you to install it. Follow the instructions and eventually you will come to a window where it is asking for some database information. For this you will need to go into your Omnis account and click on MySQL Manager then in the next window Create A New Database. Follow the steps Omnis provides creating a new database name, user login name and password. The hostname that Wordpress asks for is just mysql.yourdomain.com. Click next on the Wordpress installation and it will take care of the rest of the installation.

Great! Now you have a website with Wordpress installed on it! If you type in your domain name you will see just a very simple website. That is the Wordpress default theme.

Step 2: Choosing The Right Wordpress Theme

There are thousands of free themes out there. However, the default theme works great if you’re promoting an affiliate product like weight loss where you are trying to come off as a middle-aged woman who is not tech savvy. If you’re into promoting products like software or money making systems then you will want something a little more professional looking. However don’t ever go over the top with your theme design to the point where you don’t seem believable to the visitor. The theme needs to fit the character you’re trying to portray. Remember, we are trying to drive sales and not win a design contest.

Another key to success in using the right theme is to put yourself in the position of the potential buyer. Ask yourself a question like “What would the look and feel be of a website that you would feel comfortable buying this product from?”

Generally, for a personal story type website where I am trying to come off as a person who has lost a lot of weight and am sharing my discovery, I use a simple theme like the Wordpress default. If I am doing a product review I will tend to use the i2Theme.

A great versatile theme I like to use outside of the default Wordpress theme is the i2Theme by MangoOrange. It’s simple, clean and doesn’t make you look like a money hungry affiliate.

Installing a Wordpress theme is simple. Download the Wordpress theme that you would like to use (keep in mind my suggestions for theme selection) and extract the theme file to your desktop. Log into your FTP server using FileZilla. When you double click on the “www” down in the bottom right box you will see all of the Wordpress files appear. Next you click on the “wp-content” folder and then the “themes” folder. This is the directory that you will upload your theme to. Look in the bottom left box (which should be displaying your desktop files) select the theme folder, right click and click “Upload”.

Once it is done uploading, go back to your Wordpress admin panel by typing www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. In this page you will enter your user name and password which would’ve been given to you when you installed Wordpress in Step 1. Next, click “Appearance” and then under that “Themes”. Now you should see the theme that you just finished uploading to your site’s theme directory. Simply click on “Activate” under the thumbnail picture and you’re set! Go check out how your theme looks now.

Step 3: Essential Plugins For Better SEO

There are 2 plugins I recommend to enhance your website’s SEO. To get to where you need to be to install plugins, log in to your Wordpress admin panel by typing www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Now that you’re logged in you will need to click on “Add New” under the “Plugins” column.  To the right of that you will now see a search box. The first plugin we want is Google XML Sitemaps. Type that in and hit search. It should be the first one on the list in the search results. Click on “Install” on the far right hand side. A small window will come up in which you will need to click on the orange button that says “Install Now”. Another window will come up after installation with an “Activate” button. Click that to activate. Now you’ve installed your first plugin!

For the next plugin we will use the same procedure outlined above to install and activate it. The name of the plugin is All-In-One SEO Pack.

Now that we have the basic foundation of our website set up, we are off to a good start. In Part 3 I will show you how to optimize the entire website for better SEO.

Let’s look at the key elements that will get us started with our affiliate sniper site.

1. Our target market and product.
2. Main keyword research.
3. Registering our domain name and getting hosting if you don’t already have that.

Now I will break those points down into further detail so that you may follow along exactly.

Step 1: Our Target Market And Product Choice

The easiest way to get started in affiliate marketing (especially if you’re new to this) is with a company called ClickBank as most affiliate networks out there screen applicants and many newbie’s do not even get accepted the first go around. So head over to ClickBank and sign up. It’s free and they have a wealth of good products to promote.

Next you will need to decide what it is that you would like to promote on your sniper site. I often look for something that I understand, provides a reoccurring payment (means I get residual payments monthly for as long as the user I referred stays signed on – denoted as “Future $” in ClickBank) and a commission percentage of at least 70%. Also, the gravity of the product is important since it represents the popularity of the product and will give you an idea of its conversion rate. An example of conversion rate would be something like for every 10 people who come and view the product, 2 actually sign up and buy it. That would be called a 20% conversion rate.

Now that we have the payout criteria of what our product should meet lets decide on the product itself. Again, if there is a niche that you understand and it can be monetized well, then go for it. The other way is take a look at what peoples’ problems are on the web. Problems they are actually willing to pay for a solution to solve. Yahoo Answers is a great source to start looking for what the market wants. Off the top of my head, weight loss and financial problems (ironically) are problems people a willing to pay for a solution.

Step 2: Researching Our Main Keyword

So now you should’ve decided on what you wish to promote. Our next step is keyword research and is likely the most important step involved in making this entire project successful. I am going to arbitrarily choose a niche here to give you an example of how to research a keyword for it. The niche in this case will be dog houses. Later, we will want our domain name to be our final chosen keyword.

Note: Your keyword can be the merchants product name in which case if the domain for that name is already taken I just add “review” or “info” to the end of it. You may also try .net and .org if .com is already taken. This can get a lot of natural traffic since many people search for products by typing in the product name which obviously makes it a good keyword.

The example I am using here is a keyword based on a niche. So now I’ve gone over to Google’s Keyword Tool (which is free to use by the way) and I’ve typed in a root keyword which I think relates to this niche.

Criteria that I use when finding my keyword:

1. Around 2,000-4,000 Global Monthly Search Volume. The reason why I chose these numbers is because anything higher than this will usually mean the competition for the keyword will be a lot higher. Also, anything less will make money, but not enough to be worth my time building a site around it since it will be lacking in search volume.
2. 10,000 or less competing sites when you enter the keyword in quotation marks into Google. Such as “dog houses”. Anymore than that and we will have a hard time getting our site to rank on the first page. You’ll see what I mean later.
3. Try to pick a long tail keyword. The reason why is because our chances of ranking for more variations are greater. A 3 term keyword is great. Also, authority sites tend to dominate the shorter and broader keywords.

I started with a general root keyword by typing in dog houses. Of course, it came up with a ton of keywords – most of which the competition was high. I sorted the Global Monthly Search Volume by descending order simply by clicking on it. I also selected Phrase for the Match Type. Why? Because we are looking for a phrase keyword. I will explain this in a bit.

Click To Enlarge

Looking through the keyword list I found dog house designs. I entered it into Google in quotation marks and the number of competition pages Google found for this term was 3,590. That fits within our criteria. Not to mention it has a search volume of 2,900 searches per month which is decent for what we’re doing. It might take you a couple of tries to find a keyword with the low competition you are looking for but just keep trying. Just don’t bother entering in the keywords with like 30,000 searches per month since those are almost always too competitive.

Click To Enlarge

One little trick you can do is take a suitable keyword that Google has found and re-enter it back into the keyword search tool if you are having problems finding one with low enough competition. I also recommend checking the “Additional keywords to consider” which you’ll see if you scroll down to the bottom of the related keywords list.

So the reason why I chose Phrase for Match Type in the keyword tool is because I want to see the search volume for that exact phrase. Google looks at it as a whole unit, if you will, in the search results. It will not take into account a variation like dog house interior designs as it would if you selected Broad for the Match Type. Also, we do not want the Exact match either since that limits search results to our keyword phrase exclusively.  The Phrase match will allow variations but with the core phrase still intact such as awesome dog house designs or dog house designs on dvd. This gives us the best flexibility with the keyword while still keeping it focused for our purposes.

Google’s explanation:

Broad match: keyword (no punctuation)
Allows your ad to show for searches on similar phrases and relevant variations

Phrase match: “keyword”
Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase

Exact match: [keyword]
Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively

Negative match: -keyword
Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term

Now that our keyword has met all of our criteria, we do a search with it in Google without the quotation marks and just do a scan on the first page to see what our competition is like since that is the page we are shooting for. The odd time you will however come across the situation where you are just not able to find a suitable keyword so you may have to look into another niche.

I do the search in FireFox with a Google page rank and Alexa rating plugin. Any site that comes up whose home page has a Google page rank of 4 or higher and less than 500,000 on Alexa will be generally tough to out rank. So check those stats out. Also, we cannot out rank authority sites. These are sites with tons of relevant content, tons of back links and are generally well known. So if the first page is littered with these types of sites, move onto the next keyword. Wikipedia, WikiHow and large product sites are some examples of this.

Sites we can out rank are blogs, article submission sites, social bookmarking sites and web pages like Yahoo Answers. The only reason why they would be ranking so high is because Google could not find anything more relevant to show.

Click To Enlarge

For those of you who are impatient and do not prefer to research a keyword the manual way, I do recommend an automated keyword finding piece of software called Micro Niche Finder. It will do the entire task in a fraction of the time. It’s a great tool to increase your productivity. However my free way works perfectly fine.

Step 3: Registering A Domain Name And Hosting It

Lastly is to register the keyword as your domain name. Example: doghousedesigns.com If possible try to get .com. If not you may use .net or .org. I personally use Omnis Network for my hosting and domain purchases. I am not going to get into how to set up a domain or hosting package as Omnis does provide you with information on that as well as many other free sources on the net.

Part 2 which I will start working on next will be about setting up the bare bones of our sniper site in terms of platform choice and some other components that we will need. So keep checking back!

If anyone has any questions on this article please comment and I will do my best to answer you.

I’m going to speak here primarily about Wordpress themes since Wordpress is the platform I use and understand the most. When I first started, I didn’t know anything about what made a theme effective and impressionable to my readers. No really, I am not kidding. The first version of my Informant Zone theme had the look and feel of Miami Vice. Yes, the color scheme was pink and teal.

Despite my blog reaching a Google page rank of 4 with the Miami Vice theme, I wasn’t retaining long term readers. Gee, I wonder why. So it was high time I learned a thing or two of what a successful blog design was composed of and here is what I came up with.

1. The overuse of banners and Adsense creates a very stressful overall feel and look. Blogs which appear to have more advertising than content tend to perform very poorly. The point of a blog is to remain focused on content. That is why I read other blogs. To find out information that I wish to know about – not to look at advertising.
2. 3 column theme designs really need to be used with caution otherwise they make a blog look cluttered. Used correctly though they can be effective. I haven’t seen many instances of this though. The John Chow.com theme works well because the 3 columns only appear on the front page while the posts are reduced to 2 columns.
3. You do not necessarily need tons of flash graphics (or any types of graphics for that matter) on your site to gain attention. I personally steer away from going to sites with tons of graphics period. Some of the most successful blogs out there use very minimal graphics at best. Sites loaded with art (unless you are a site based on art) tend to load slow and not rank so well with search engines.
4. Do not be gadget happy. Adding things like a Google page rank checker, world clock and other interactive widgets only reduces the attention paid to your content. After all, you are writing your content to have it noticed aren’t you?
5. Plugins such as Top Commentators, Related Posts, Popular Posts and social bookmarking buttons all add to your blog’s sociability. So use them and make it interactive and known. The SexyBookmarks Wordpress plugin can provide you with buttons such as the ones I have at the bottom of your articles.
6. Color schemes come in a wide variety and no Wordpress theme is worse than one with a wide variety of colors. Try to keep it to a minimum of 2, 3 if you really have to and can incorporate the third color wisely. Unless your blog is meant to showcase the opening introductions of each season of In Living Color, I suggest you stay away from a myriad of colors. Oh and don’t go with the Miami Vice colors either!
7. Try to at least have your subscribe to RSS icon in a prominently visible position for everyone to see. If I can’t find the icon quickly, I don’t bother subscribing.
8. Music that plays immediately when a visitor arrives at your blog is annoying. I don’t even recommend doing it even if you provide a “mute” option. Only enable music on your site if it does not automatically play when someone loads the page but rather allows them to turn it on from a small noticeable panel if you really must have it on your blog. I tried adding the Miami Vice sound track to my first blog and other than the Phil Collins song “In The Air Tonight” my readers were up in arms.

With this information in mind, I hope you are able to use it to your advantage and build a more functional blog. Just remember that people like clean and structured looking blogs. Blog readers tend to surf fast and if they cannot find what they are searching for in a timely manner, they leave. Since I made some tweaks to my own blog, I noticed that the time spent on each of my pages increased substantially.

I am not sure if you EVER thought that there could be a correlation between these two things but I think there is! I was lying in bed the other night and this kept me awake so I just had to write something about it! Here is my list of why bloggers are like whores

1. Bloggers will do just about anything to make a quick buck.
2. Speaking of bucks – bloggers love to ride that traffic bull hard like it’s their Daddy until they get bucked off and have to look for more traffic to ride on.
3. Bloggers blog-hump other blogs/bloggers just to get a backlink
4. Bloggers will say anything just to get into bed with Google
5. Bloggers are controlled by pimps. Those pimps are the Affiliate Ad Networks. Bloggers do the dirty work and the networks take a huge cut.
6. Bloggers change their affiliate networks faster than a whore changes her diaphragm.
7. Bloggers drop affiliate links more than a whore drops her panties.
8. Bloggers are as obsessed with keywords as a whore is with birth control medication.
9. Bloggers check their stats more often than a whore goes to the clinic to check for STD’s.
10. Bloggers, like whores, are educated sluts. They know how to leverage the “hits” they get, “position” themselves creatively to maximize profits and generate leads through “social” networking.

That’s the list I came up with. I would love to hear more if anyone can think of them. I will continue to update this as more comparisons pop into my head.