Ninja Blog Setup

Aweber Email List Setup

Shawn — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:38:10 +0000

Ok, if you’ve browsed around the web and learned anything at all about internet marketing, you’ve surely come across the phrase “the money is in the list!” I can’t even begin to count how many websites I’ve read that on or how many times I’ve heard it in some video. But guess what? It’s true!

Sure, you can make money without building a list, but take a look at just about any major website that sells something. Most of them are going to have some type of form where you can sign up to get something. It might be a coupon, an ebook, free information or maybe a free download of some kind. Why do they do this? Because they make money from that list…and if you don’t have a list, you are absolutely leaving money on the table!

Now, I’m certainly not saying you should use your list to spam people…that will make them unsubscribe in a hurry! However, if you are providing great information through your blog, you will gain the trust of many people and they will be happy to sign up for your free newsletter because they want more quality information from you. Then, when you send them quality newsletters filled with the information they are looking for, and you mix in some targeted affiliate links from time to time, you can generate some sweet affiliate income. Your chances of earning more money grows as you add more and more people to your list. The bigger your list…the bigger your paycheck!

So, if you’re going to be serious about internet marketing, YA GOTTA GET A LIST!!, and the best way to do that is with Aweber. It’s what I use and it’s probably the most popular email marketing service on the web. The best part is, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee so there’s no risk to try it out. Sign up here and start building that list!

WordPress 3.0 Is Here, But Don’t Upgrade Just Yet

Shawn — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:27:17 +0000

WordPress 3.0 has just been released and is jam-packed full of a bunch of great new features. One of the biggest new features in my opinion is a much improved custom navigation area that offers extreme flexibility in setting up your navigation menus. Also, the default WordPress theme has finally been retired and replaced with a new theme called Twenty Ten that actually looks pretty darn nice. I’m not saying it’s going to replace all the premium themes on the market (it’s not), but it will work very nicely for bloggers who aren’t ready to spend the extra money for a premium theme.

Although the new release may have you itching to go upgrade your existing sites..WAIT!! Before upgrading, you will want to give plugin and theme designers a chance to upgrade their plugins and themes. They’ll be busy over the next few weeks working out all the bugs and making sure their products work well with WordPress 3.0. There’s nothing like upgrading only to find out that half your plugins don’t work or your theme no longer displays properly. My advice…be patient and give it about thirty days. It will be much safer to upgrade then.

For a glimpse of the new WordPress 3.0 and all the sweet new features, check out the video below.

Freedom Isn’t Free

Shawn — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:02:03 +0000

As we all celebrate this Memorial Day weekend and enjoy some down-time with our friends and family, let’s remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we can be free…you are not forgotten.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have a great weekend everyone!

This Week Around the Web

Shawn — Sat, 01 May 2010 02:37:57 +0000

Great tips and info from the amazing intertubes…

Should I Spend Time on Meta Keywords Tags?: The short answer is no, you can forget about them.
How To Make Your Own Luck: Johnny gives you the truth about being lucky online in the typical Johnny way. He’s went from zero to a six figure income with his blogging empire, and he did it in a little over a year so you might want to check his post out.
Benefits Sell, Features Don’t, and Here is Why: Learn how to tell your potential customers what they want to know, not what you think they want to know.

This Week Around the Web

Shawn — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:32:13 +0000

Here are this weeks little jewels from around the web:

The Houdini Guide to Getting Noticed Online: This post over on Copyblogger will give you five good ideas about making people remember who you are. Warning: the picture of Houdini is borderline NSFW, lol.
Google Webmaster Help: If Google is choosing their own description snippets for your pages rather than using your own meta description tags, Matt explains why and gives some tips on raising the chances of your meta descriptions being chosen.
DIY Themes released Thesis version 1.7 this week and it has some neat changes including a way to backup/restore your custom settings and an easy way to beautify your affiliate links. I made a video showing the new features which you can see here.
Darren Rowse announced that his ProBlogger site had been acquired by Google. Of course, it turned out to be an April Fool’s joke but it sure created a lot of buzz for him.

Thesis 1.7: New Features Plus a Surprise for Affiliates

Shawn — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:45:36 +0000

Thesis 1.7 has just been released by DIY Themes and there are some great new features including additional SEO controls, a way to backup and restore your theme customizations, plus a super easy way for affiliates to mask beautify their affiliate links for better click-throughs! Check out my video below for a quick overview of what’s new, then head on over to DIY Themes and see why so many internet marketers are in love with Thesis.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, I just recently launched my new Thesis blog setups so if you’re planning on starting a new blog and you want the Thesis theme, you’ll get it included as part of my setup package.

Will User Opt-Out Be the Death of Google Analytics?

Shawn — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:26:22 +0000

Just a few days ago, Google announced they will soon be releasing a plugin to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. I don’t know about you but as a webmaster I think any website analytics program with user opt-out is completely insane. It is the webmaster, not the user, who decides what type of analtyics program to place on their website so why would Google want to alienate webmasters by taking away from them the very thing they are wanting. Won’t this discourage webmasters from using GA? Think about it…you put analytics on your website so you can find out as much as you can about where your visitors come from, how long they stay, how many pages they view, if they make a purchase, what keywords they used to find your site, etc, etc. Now Google comes along and creates a way for those very visitors to browse your site like they are invisible? The whole point of website analytics is to provide tracking information on website visitors, so why allow the visitor to decide not to be tracked? I mean it’s not like we’re getting their personal information so we can steal their identity and sell it to some street vendor in Nigeria. What’s up Google? Shouldn’t an analytics program actually, you know, track visitors?

I know the number of surfers who will actually use this feature may be a small but I imagine it will grow in popularity as time goes on. Who knows, maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill but this announcement is certainly going to make me check out some alternative website statistic providers. I may stick with Google Analytics in the end, but I think this is a stupid move for Google.

Here are a couple alternatives I know of although I’ve not used either one:

StatCounter – looks a little like it’s stuck in the 90’s but seems to track everything you need.
GetClicky – this one looks really neat although it requires a fee for more than one site.

Anybody tried these or have another stat program you would recommend?

PS: If after visiting this page you start getting emails from Barrister Pablo Ariwa of the Mutual Bank of Nigeria, don’t worry…it’s a complete coincidence.

How To Create HTML Anchor Text Links

Shawn — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:54:50 +0000

This may seem like a very basic webmaster concept, but many of those who are new to building websites do not know how to use html anchor text links in their content and some of those who do know do not use them properly. If you don’t know what anchor text is, it’s the text on a website that you can click on and it takes you to another page or site. It’s usually a different color than the other text and may be underlined, although not always. The actual words being used to create the link is called the anchor text. This text helps tell the search engine spiders what the page being linked to is about.

For example, if you have a website about shoes and you link to another page on your site using the words “funny clown shoes”, then you are telling the search engines that particular page is about funny clown shoes. However, I see all the time where people use the words “click here” in their anchor text. This is telling the search engines that your page is about “click here” which makes no sense and won’t help your page rank for funny clown shoes. By using “funny clown shoes” instead, you are telling the search engines that your page is about funny clown shoes and when they follow that link and find actual content on your page talking about clown shoes, then the chances of your page showing up somewhere in the search results for “funny clown shoes” is much higher.

How do you create html anchor text links? If you are using a WYSIWYG editor like WordPress has, you can just highlight the desired text, click on the button in the toolbar that looks like a little chain link and insert the desired page’s url into the appropriate box. However, if you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you can use html instead. Just insert the following code into your content making sure to replace the text and url with your specific information. Make sure you don’t leave out any characters.

your url here">your anchor text here

So for example, this:

Google

will give you this: Google

Now you know the most basic elements of using html anchor text links to help build your rankings and drive more targeted traffic to your site.

This Week Around The Web

Shawn — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 23:38:37 +0000

I’ve not posted a lot lately because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in offline and online projects, plus its tax time and we all know what that means. Anyway, I came across a few great articles this week that I thought I would pass along:

WordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need – Glenn over at ViperChill has written a great post on making sure your blog is up to snuff on its SEO.
How to Boost Blog and Website Traffic with Article Marketing – Pat over at Smart Passive Income guides you through the process of using article marketing to boost traffic to your blog.
When Should You Quit a Blog and Move On? – Darren at ProBlogger tells you why and when you might want to pull the plug on a blog, then follows up with a post on 7 Ways to End a Blog.

Enjoy the reading!

Matt Cutts on Effective Organic Link Building

Shawn — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:31:26 +0000

There are lots of ways out there to generate links back to your website. Some of them are spammy or blackhat/grayhat type methods such as blog comment spamming, forum spamming, blasting your links all over Twitter or maybe submitting a few hundred bookmarks to various social bookmarking sites. The list could go on and on but we’ve all heard it said time and time again that the absolute best way to get links is to create great content so that others will link back to you in a natural and organic way. Well, here’s a great video I thought I would pass along to you of Matt Cutts explaining several ways to get those elusive organic links.

Click here to view the embedded video.