Ninja Blog Setup

Learn WordPress at Ninja Blog University

Shawn — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:26:40 +0000

Ninja Blog University is now open and offers over 100 high-quality video tutorials for anyone wanting to learn how to start, manage and grow a WordPress blog. You’ll learn everything from selecting your domain name and hosting account to creating email lists, social media accounts and affiliate marketing. Want to turn your blog into a membership site? We’ve got you covered! Our Black Belt module will show you how to do that plus other advanced topics. At Ninja Blog University, you’ll enter as a n00b and leave as a pro!

How To Find A Good Domain Name On The Secondary Market

Shawn — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:10:31 +0000

You had a great idea for a new website and you immediately hurried off to search for a domain name at a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap…only to find you can’t come up with a related domain name that’s actually available. It’s a situation most webmasters have found themselves in at one time or another. So what do you do? Often times, you end up buying a domain name you’re not all that happy with. Next time this happens to you, try checking out the secondary market before you give up on finding that perfect gem.

GoDaddy Auctions is sort of like eBay for domain names. Although domains there can go for tens of thousands of dollars, don’t let that discourage you. There are thousands of domain names available for much, much less than that. Some are even cheaper than the typical annual renewal fee so you may even find one for less than ten bucks. If your budget will allow you to spend a few hundred dollars or so, there are some great two and three word dot coms available in that price range. Many of these domain names are several years old, so you may even get the advantage of having an aged domain.

It’s easy to narrow the field of available domain names using GoDaddy’s flexible search feature. You can plug your keywords into the search box and find domains that begin with, end with or simply contain your selected keywords. You can narrow the range even more by selecting a minimum and maximum price. You can also choose to look at only certain domain extensions like .com and .net. This can be a great way to find some good niche type domains. To show you how easy it is using a niche like dog training, I entered the words “dogtraining” in the search box, set the keyword parameters to “contains”, selected a price range of $100-$500 and chose to show only .coms and .nets. A sample of the results is shown below.

Looking at that list, I see some good opportunities if I were planning a website about dog training. DogTrainingHints.com would be especially attractive to me and at less than $300, it wouldn’t break the bank if you were expecting your site to make a decent monthly income. What about doing a site targeting cow dogs? CowDogTraining.com would be perfect!

I did another search using “homeinspect” as the keywords to search domains targeting the home inspection niche.

StandardHomeInspections.com wouldn’t be a bad domain name at all for the home inspection market and if I were targeting the New York City area, NYCHomeInspections.com would be an extremely targeted keyword rich domain.

Before you can place a bid or purchase a domain at GoDaddy Auctions, you’ll have to sign up, but it’s only five bucks a year. Purchasing a domain is easy because GoDaddy handles the transaction for you. You simply pay GoDaddy and they take care of getting the funds to the seller. Then, the domain pops up in the domain manager of your GoDaddy account. It’s that simple. The next time you’re having trouble finding a good domain name, you should head on over to GoDaddy Auctions and take a look. You might be surprised at what you find.

Are You Making Money From Your Blog Yet?

Shawn — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:56:07 +0000

Maybe you’re just thinking about starting a blog and wondering how much you can actually make online or maybe you’ve been blogging for some time now and still aren’t making even a part-time income. Either way, you’ll want to check out a great article from Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneur’s Journey. In it, he profiles multiple bloggers who are earning anywhere from mid four figures a month to over six figures a month! And guess what? Most of them are NOT blogging about making money online. It’s a very inspiring post so go check it out here: How To Make Money With Your Blog

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.

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.

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.