I love the Giants.. what can I say!?

So I have been contemplating on getting a few .co’s for some affiliate sites since all of the keyword rich .com’s are already taken. I came across a site that had a similar curiosity about .co’s and so they did a simple test. back in July 2011, they registered two domains:

• 27conversions.co
• 27conversions.com

They optimized the .co site as far as meta and h1 tag etc., while they left the .com untouched. Therefore if google had no preference, the slightly optimized .co site should outrank the un-optimized .com site. However five months later (today), I googled, “27 conversions” and the .com outranked the .co (even though the .co WAS optimized, and the .com was NOT).

So, although it’s not a very detailed test, it is an indication that the .com has more weight than the .co.

I’m thinking of doing a similar case study but using about 10 domain extensions, and see where they all fall. Wait… no I’m not. I’m freakin busy!!! lol.

However, if you would rather save your money, or if you just rather do things on your own, then read on… I will show you how to use a free software called PHP List to run email campaigns (and save you the headache that most go through when trying to set this up properly).

Shared Hosting Issues

Shared Hosting… we hate it, right? They say it’s unlimited bandwidth, but then one day they suspend your account because your site got a lot of traffic and apparantly you used too much memory and “such and such nodes of a cluster”, etc. blah blah blah… lol. what? uh ok.

Anyway, along with the ‘unlimited’ bandwidth (sarcasm), you also are limited to the amount of emails that you can send per hour (and per day). I use Lunarpages and my hourly limit is 400 emails (and 8000 per day). So if you have an email list of 420, you certainly cannot bcc them all in outlook. well, you can, but your email accounts for your domain will be suspended. So lets avoid that and just install PHPLIst.

PHP List

If your shared host has cPanel, then log on and navigate to fantastico (and now softaculous). Install phplist on the domain that you want to send emails from. If you do not have cPanel, then that sux… lol joking, kinda… you will have to visit their site and download and install it manually: PHP List.

Setting the Send Speed

Since most shared hosting providers have a limit on the amount of emails that you can send per hour, we have to configure PHPList to not allow more than the max amount to be processed. There are two methods to doing this. The first is using the throttle, and the second is by using batch processing. Both are set from within the config file. So download the config.php file (via ftp) and open it up in your favorite editor (mine is dreamweaver).

METHOD 1 – Using Throttle
You can use throttle to ensure that you stay below 400 emails per hour. Throttle basically creates pauses after each email is sent. So if you set your throttle to 15 (which would create a 15 second pause after each email sent), then you would only send 240 emails per hour. One hour equals 3600 seconds; 3600 seconds divided by 15 seconds equals 240 emails per hour. Look at the config file and set your values like so:

# batch processing disabled:
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);

# Batch_period is not effective when batch processing is disabled:
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

# Pause between messages (in seconds) to send no more than 240 messages per hour:
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,15);

METHOD 2 – Using Batch Processing
Instead of using the throttle method, you can use another method called batch processing. Basically you set the amount of emails that you want to send per batch (Batch Size); then you set the batch period. So if your batch period is set to 3600 seconds (one hour), and your batch size is set to 360, you will send a maximum of 360 emails every hour. You can still set the throttle to 1 second just to be safe and not overload the server. This will pause for one second after each email sent (as oppossed to sending 360 emails all at once). If you would like to do this method, set your config values like below:

# Send a batch of 360 messages per batch period:
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,360);

# batch period is set to 3600 seconds (=1 hour):
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

# Pause between messages (in seconds) to avoid overloading the server:
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,1);

Cron Jobs

Regardless which method you choose above (Throttle or Batch Processing), you will need to create a cron job to process the queue. Why? Well you could just log into phplist and after creating your message, just click the “process queue” button… HOWEVER, Then you are using a web browser to process & send your emails. This would be bad for a few reasons… One, your browser session will likely time out before all of your emails have been sent. Two, PHPList will log you out due to inactivity before all of your emails have been sent. In both cases, since you are using the web browser to send your emails, the process would be interupted and ended.

That’s why you need to create a cron job. What is a cron job? It’s a process that executes commands at specified times. Hmm, what command (you ask)? Well, the command that will go into phplist and process the queue. This will process the email list on the server instead of the browser. Now you don’t need to worry about the browser timing out and ending your email process. But wait, your server can also time out (some time out after 20 minutes)… So, you can set your cron job to run every 15 minutes (so that if it times out, it will restart in 15 minutes anyway, and continue processing the emails where it left off.

Set Up a Cron Job

First you need to comment out the following line in phplist config file:

# $commandline_users = array(“admin”);

Then uncomment this line:

$commandline_users = array();

If you are using cpanel, then it can’t get any easier. Just login to your cPanel and select cron jobs. Select 15 minutes (like in the attached image), and enter the following on the command line:

/usr/local/bin/php/home/***CPANELUSERNAME***/
public_html/***DOMAIN***/phplist/admin/index.php -p processqueue

The above must be all on one line. Also, make sure you fill in your cpanel user name and domain.
FYI: I delete my crons after the emails have all been sent.

Using PHPList

Well, This post is sooo long already, so I’m not going to go into detail about how to use phplist. I will do a very quick bullet list just to get you in the right direction.

• Add your email list to phplist. Make sure your email is in the list also (so you can send a test email to yourself)
• Set all users to receive html emails: manage users | reconcile users | mark all users to recv html
• Create a blank template. just paste “[content]” into the template (minus the quotations)
• Create the message
• Send yourself a test to make sure it looks good
• Select the list to send it to, then click “send message to the selected mailing lists”

FYI: DO NOT process the queue. The cron job will process the queue for you.
That’s it, Hope this has helped.

Step 1 – Set up your Database

If the database does not exist, well then obviously create one. Log into your hosts cPanel or whatever your host uses; Set the ‘host’ to ‘%’ (minus the quotes); Create the username and password. If the database already exists then go on to the next step.

* Write down the server number from your cPanel.

Step 2 – ODBC Setup

Grab and install the latest ODBC from this link: ODBC

ADD new connection: Control Panel > System > Admin Tools > data Sources > ADD > Select MySql ODBC 5.1 > Finish

A new window appears, fill out the following info found in the login tab:

• Data Source Name
• Server (Get the latest Server from your host cPanel, etc)
• User (Use the user name that you assigned to the database in section 1
• Password (The password that you assigned to the database in section 1
• Database (Select the correct database)

Step 3 – Microsoft Access ODBC Setup

Open Microsoft Access and navigate to the following:
External data -> get odbc > machine data source >
Select the data source that you created in step 2.
Select all tables.

That’s it. Microsoft Access should now show you a list of connections that are directly linked to the mysql database.

Well you can check out his site here: http://lovebscott.com

What theme?

CATALYST of course! If you can imagine it, than you can do it with Catalyst. It’s very simple to create custom pages, layouts, hooks, etc. Easily set widths, footer columns, and more. If you can’t code, no problem, they have made it easy for non-coders by making most of the css easily editable from their options pages. But I found it easier (and faster) to just use firebug and enter my own CSS than messing with their CSS Builder section.

What Plugins?

• Digg Digg Social Plugin – An extremely customizable social bookmark plugin. This is a part of my arsenol. Digg Digg features a floating social box, inline buttons, small or large, counts or no counts, you can even manually place shortcode wherever you want social buttons
• FS Contact Form – I use this on every site. Create multiple forms; add custom fields; Set required or not. I used it for the contact form and the advertise page on his site
• Sidebar Login – This I had to hack so that it will redirect to the wp-login page because I can only use the facebook connect from that page. But I like this plugin because once logged in, it displays your avatar on the sidebar
• WP-DBManager – Great plugin to optimize and automatically backup your sql databases. It will email them to you
• Custom Post Type Shortcode – allows you to list custom post types on any page (or post) via shortcode. The downfall to this plugin is that it does not support pagination yet, but the developer states that it is in the works. You can still get Custom Post Types to paginate via Archive Categories. i.e., YourSite.com/CustomPostType/. Then use Catalyst to determine if you will show exerpts or full content (FYI exerpts will only display thumbnail of featured image and text [not videos etc])
• All In One SEO – Doesn’t everyone use this? lol. I like Platinum SEO more (lately) but it was conflicting with the theme or another plugin. I Didn’t have time to waste trying to figure it out
• Embed Iframe – I don’t like Iframes, but this plugin worked well. I used it to wrap his store website inside of his blogs theme/site
• Ultimate Facebook – To get that large facebook box on the sidebar where it displays thumbnails of the people that are following
• Recent Posts Plus – Very customizable plugin to replace the default recent posts plugins. It allows you to display specified categories, thumbnails, etc
• In Post Ads – use this to… you guessed it, insert ads into posts
• Google XML Sitemaps – Obvious
• All In One Event Calendar – The best one I found, it also comes with a sidebar widget that displays upcoming events
• Akismet – I doubt I had to list this, but hopefully everyone uses this anyway

* Update: Digg Digg was replaced with AddToAny because B Scott wanted Tumblr which Digg Digg did not have.

My friend is a registered dietetic technician and she wrote the first two articles for me. She is also writing the ebook that I am targeting for the site. We have a nice partnership: She writes the content and ebook; I build the site and rank it; We split the profits… This works for me because I hate writing content. Yes, hate is a strong word, and I HATE writing content. :)

Build a List?

I prefer to build a list, but again, I don’t want to write the content for the emails. Later on I’ll try to convince her to write a few short emails containing a free (and useful) paragraph from the ebook in each email. That is ideal so that we could cross promote other products along with the ebook, but I dont want to scare her off from contributing. Most people want to see results before they invest real time into a project. OK, so I’ll wait until she makes some money on this and then try to get her to create the content for the emails. * I’ll use aweber of course to automate the emails.

TIP: Mailchimp is a pretty good list manager also, (and free) but it doesn’t allow you to use affiliate links in the emails. So if you need an email program for your own products and services etc (newsletters etc), then its perfect, but if you`re an internet marketer using aff links, than you should just spend the money on aweber (hopefully you make the money back with your first list).

Ranking

I did the ‘onpage’ seo and im about to start backlinking. I should wait until she has finished the ebook before I start, but im anxious, so onward… lol.
I’ll post part 3 as soon as the page starts ranking… tic toc tic toc… :)

What is a Stop Word?

It’s a word that is filtered out before querying. So basically if the EMD for your keyword is not available, you can add a stop word to the domain name and theoretically it should be ignored by google, which would then bring you pretty close to having the EMD. It’s pretty much the next best option when the EMD is not available. FYI – The stop word I used in my site is “about”.

SEO Competition

Ok, well as I’m sure you know, If you are not on the first page of google, then you do not exist. That’s my motto. lol. Therefore who cares that there are 33.6 million competing pages for my keyword term. I only care about the top ten because those are the ones that I’m about to go to war with. lol. Those are the ones that made it to the first page of google.

In the ‘SEO Competition’ snapshot above, you can see that only two sites have alot of backlinking going on (BLP column). The first site is a .gov, so cross him off the list because It’s hard enough to compete with a .gov, let alone that site which has 743,616 page backlinks; a PR8; and 23,000+ edu/gov backlinks.. I’ll just leave that shark alone.. I’m going to have to bully position #2 instead. :)

Next Step

Ok, well I’m real curious how this stop word will affect my ranking efforts. I’ll get working on creating the site, backlinking and seo campaigns.. I’ll track the serps movement and update my blog throughout the process.

If anyone is curious about how the site will be monetized:
My friend is a registered Dietetic Technician and she’s writing an ebook that will be recommended and sold on the site (I guess I just gave a big hint as to what niche I’m in – lol). I’ll also put a few affiliate ads on the site.

Ok, well.. to be continued…