Keyword Explanation

Even if you only have a bit of experience with the internet, you will probably know what a keyword is, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, here is a brief explanation:

A keyword is a word that is particularly relevant to a piece of content, e.g. an article, a webpage, a blog post etc. For example, the keywords that I would be aiming to promote for this article are “keyword”, and “optimising”. At a push, you could also include “keywords” and “optimisation“. You will find out later on why these slight changes are significant.

Keywords are used by web developers to push their sites to the top of search engines. This works because search engines like Google use keywords to judge the relevance of an article or site, and then use this information when indexing sites. So an article that has been optimised for the keywords “growing”, “herbs”, and “home”, will have the edge over a site with no optimisation when someone searches in Google something like “tips on growing herbs at home”.

Keyword Optimising Your Content

When it comes to keyword optimisation for an article, some people have the philosophy of just cramming in keywords as often as possible. This is not a brilliant idea, as anybody reading an article will be able to tell when this technique is being used. It doesn’t appear professional and it is not fun to read. Also, modern search engines can tell when this is happening, and tend to avoid pushing this sort of the site up the results.

Rather, you should write for the viewer, and if you stay on topic, the keywords should throw themselves in automatically. Then you can dust over the article, adding more where possible and appropriate.

There are a couple of places where you should try to concentrate your efforts, namely the title of the content, and the beginning and end of your content. Optimising the title should be quite self-explanatory, as it is what search engines actually display as results, and are so very important in catching the attention of readers, and letting search engine crawlers know what your content is about.

However, the importance of the beginning and end of your content may not be as obvious. You probably noticed that the first two words of this article were “keywords” and “optimising”, and you may also have noticed the short summary at the end of every JacobTeal.com article. This is because these are the sections most indexed by search engines, and if a reader sees right at the start of the article that they have found something relevant, they will be more likely to keep reading.

A Note on Spelling in Keywords

One thing to remember is that keywords have to be accurate to the letter. A search engine will see “keyword” and “keywords” as two completely different words, so when writing your content you should try to include both plural and singular as much as possible. Also, you should be careful of English/American spellings, for example, you may not want to only include “color” rather than “colour” if you are aiming for an audience on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, if you constantly switch your spelling it make look like you are making mistakes, so you may want to decide at the beginning which you will use. This is mainly only important if the keyword is one that will be searched for directly. So if someone searches for “best baby room color”, and you have optimised the keyword “colour”, it will not be as effective.

Keyword Optimisation Summary

Basically, keyword optimisation can be summed up like this:

• Choose between 2 and 5 keywords for each piece of content
• Write for the readers, not the search engines
• Don’t over-saturate your article
• Watch out for spelling

And that’s it! Now you should be ready to keyword optimise your own content!

Just as a point of interest, here’s how many times I used my two main keywords in this article:

“Keyword” –  17 uses     “keywords” – 15 uses

What did you think of this article? Need any more advice? Please contact me via Facebook, Twitter, or the comments box below!

This has been Jacob Teal,

helping you keyword optimise your content.^{(See, keywords at the end!)}

500 POUNDS/DOLLARS A MONTH!!!!

The Idea

So what is this big idea? You may get delivered to your house on a regular basis a local news leaflet or parish update. If you do, you will know the sort of semi-pathetic news stories that feature in them. You know, things like: how Mrs. Smith’s cat was safely retrieved from the tree at the end of her garden, or the local shop that is now selling a new flavour of chewing gum. Okay, so maybe that last one is a little overly pathetic, but you know what I mean.

What you may not know however, is that these local newsletters can earn hundreds of pounds/dollars every month! “How?” I hear you ask. Well, the name of this game is ADVERTISING.

Local shops will pay good money for advertising slots in a newsletter, for one simple reason. If you go into a shop and say that they could feature an advert in a newsletter that will be distributed to two or three hundred people in the local area, they would have to be stupid not to agree. Why? Because those two or three hundred people are probably the shop’s entire target audience!

Let’s face it, nobody is going to want to travel miles to get to a local butcher, so by advertising said butcher in your newsletter, you will be appealing to everybody that he is possibly trying to sell to.

By selling a small advertising slot on your newsletter to the butcher for around £3-£10 (depending on how many people the newsletter is distributed to), you can help him gain some business, and earn a bit of money in the process. Now times this by the number of adverts you can fit in your newsletter, and you could be earning up to £100 every time it is published! (10 advertising slots at £10, or more advertising slots at a lower price).

Producing the Newsletter

You can use any DTP^? software like Microsoft Publisher, or even word-processing software like Microsoft Word to create your newsletter. All you need is one or two stories, and a few boxes around the outside for your adverts. The stories don’t need to be particularly exciting – remember the newsletter will be distributed free – but they should be well written, or shops may think twice about getting involved.

When it comes to the actual design of the site, all you need to do are these three steps:

1) Get your header. Your newsletter’s title doesn’t matter too much, but should be simple and effective. When JacobTeal.com did this project, we used the title “News For You”. You can get some decent fonts and text effects absolutely free from www.cooltext.com.

2) Put your advert boxes in place and set their layout so that text works around them (in Microsoft programs you can do this by going to Layout and clicking Square). Make sure that the boxes are not too obtrusive but that they still stand out. “News For You” had the advert boxes around the outside of the A4 page.

3) Insert your stories. As I have already said, these don’t have to be incredibly exciting – remember this is a free newsletter – but should be well written or shops maybe put off. Not a very good writer? No problem! Why not pay a friend who does have a way with words to write the articles for you? They would probably be happy to do it for around five pounds/dollars, and you should be making enough profit to easily cover that. However, the clever businessman/woman cuts cost wherever possible, and if you can write the articles yourself, you should.

Printing the Newsletter

There are a large number of printing sites on the internet, and with a bit of digging, it should be easy enough to find the one that’s right for you. Remember to make sure you know all of the costs involved before you buy, such as printing cost, paper cost, and postage and packaging. The site we used for “News For You” was www.myrepro.co.uk. Once again, I recommend you get your newsletter printed in black and white to save on printing costs.

Profits

Basically, the money you can earn from this project can be worked out by this formula:

Number of Ads x Price of Ad – Printing Cost = Lots of money for you!

Expanding Your Empire!

The best thing about this idea is that it is completely scalable! Say you have a friend in the next village/town from you. Why not pay this friend to deliver your newsletter in their area? Then you have a whole new group of shops to sell advertising space to, and you won’t even have to deliver the newsletters yourself! In fact, you could even pay someone to deliver the newsletter in your “starting” area, and do absolutely no manual work yourself!

* * *

Follow this simple guide, and within a week you could be earning up to 100 pounds/dollars a month. Within 4 months you could have spread to 3 or more areas, and be earning around 250 pounds/dollars a month, and within a year you could be earning up to

500 POUNDS/DOLLARS A MONTH!!!!

So there it is, your complete guide to making money with a local newspaper provided absolutely free by me, Jacob Teal, on JacobTeal.com.

All I ask in return for this free advice that could potentially make you a LOT of money, is that you tell your friends about the site, and share with them this post. Here is the link, just copy and paste it to your Facebook status or new Tweet, and you will make me very very happy! http://www.jacobteal.com/2011/08/06/make-money-local-newsletter

If you have any questions about the guide, please contact me at any time via the JacobTeal.com Facebook Page, by tweeting me @J_Teal, or by emailing me directly at – contact(at)jacobteal(dot)com. Also, please get in touch if you try putting this guide to use, and let me know how it went!

This has been Jacob Teal,

helping you make money with a local newsletter.^{(Why put this here?)}

They say “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Well, the same can’t be said when it comes to domain names. Choosing the right domain is very important, otherwise your brand new idea will never take off. This article will give you some pointers about choosing the right domain for your site, and help you on your way to internet greatness.

So what is a domain?

A domain name, or URL^? is your site’s address. It is what people will use to link to your site, what people will type into their search bar to find your site, and what they will tell their friends to type into their address bars.

There are two main effective types of domain:

• Keyword Domain
• Brand Domain

Keyword Domains

These make use of keywords in the URL, for example www.plumber.com or www.joiners-in-manchester.com.

Advantages:

• People might find your site by accident, for example if someone needs a joiner and they live in Manchester, they might just type into the address bar “www.joiners-in-manchester.com” and hope they get lucky.

• It may give you a slight keyword SEO^? advantage.

Disadvantages:

• URL^?s that are stuffed with too many keywords can look cheap.

• Chances are most of the good keyword based domains will be taken.

Brand Domains

Domains that try to create a brand identity, and rely more on social networking, advertising, and word-of-mouth traffic e.g. www.jacobteal.com ;).

Advantages:

• Looks slicker and more professional.

• Great once the site is well-established, and people start to tell their friends and link to the site.

• It’s easier to spread the word through social networking.

• People are more likely to come back for more if they like your site.

Disadvantages:

• A reputable brand identity can be quite hard to build up.

Other Types of Domain

Misspelling Domains – e.g. www.plummer.com

(A) People may find your site by accident.

(D) No good for getting returning traffic unless your content is REALLY good.
People might leave the site as soon as they realise their mistake.

Random Domains – e.g. www.flipflopWabba.com

(A) Curiosity may have killed the cat, but with a random domain it will lead people to click your links.

(D) Absolutely no chance of people finding your site through search engines until you have a very strong brand identity.

Jacob Teal Recommends – Choosing a Domain

For me, it has to be brand domains all the way. Being able to create a brand that you can share through social networking and other mediums is simply priceless. Besides, having a brand name rather than just a bunch of keywords will make your site far more appealing to visitors, and will make them much more likely to visit again. And hey, you’re here, so it obviously worked on you .

What did you think of this article? Do you agree? Disagree? Need more advice? Feel free to contact me at any time. You can write on My Facebook Page, tweet me on My Twitter Profile, or leave a comment in the box below.

This has been Jacob Teal,

helping you choose a domain ^{(Why put this here?)}

What’s Next: Choosing a Host

So you’ve come up with an idea, and now you want to get your site online. You may have visited some of the hundreds of web-host review sites that are out there, and you might even have an idea of which host you’re going to choose. However, before you go ahead and buy a hosting package, there are few things to consider.

1) Hosting Service Domain Price

A domain name, or URL^?, is a site’s address. With some hosting services, like iPage, you can host unlimited domains with one hosting package. For example, this website, (www.jacobteal.com), and my other website, (www.whatarethosewordsworth.com) are hosted in the same package from iPage, so I didn’t have to fork out for a second time to host this site.

Before you buy, you should make sure that you know how much a domain will cost you on top of the cost of hosting. A reasonable price is around £12.99, which is how much it costs for a “.com” domain from iPage.

For advice on how to choose a domain, see the full domain article.

2) Hosting Service Bandwidth Allowance

Bandwidth is basically how much traffic your site can handle. You want to drive as many people as possible to your site, so imagine your potential audience as people in cars, all trying to get there. Do you want to make your audience of potentially thousands all squeeze into a single-lane country track to get in, or would you rather have a wide open highway leading to your site? If you choose a web-host that offers a small bandwidth, you will stunt the growth of your site before you even get started. Most good hosts these days provide unlimited bandwidth, so this shouldn’t be a problem if you choose wisely.

3) Hosting Service Maximum Disk Usage

This is how much room your site takes up, i.e. how big it is. Time for another metaphor: imagine you’re having a house party, and your guests are your site’s content. You’ll have trouble trying to squeeze all of your guests into a tiny bungalow without knocking over at least one bowl of crisps and making a mess everywhere. So why not have your party in a mansion? Hello more guests (more content), goodbye mess.

Unless you’re planning to start a site with a large amount of content, disk usage shouldn’t be a problem. However it’s relatively easy to find a host that provides unlimited disk usage, and the site I host with offers both unlimited bandwidth and disk usage for free. As I have mentioned earlier in this post, I host with iPage.

4) Hosting Service Accessibility

The host you choose might well have all the great features you need, and be the perfect price, but none of that is any good if you can’t actually get on and build your site. For the tech savvy, most if not all hosts offer FTP^? services that make it possible for you to upload your pages and files directly into your site’s directory. Some hosts offer online web-editors, although most are text-based and you will need to have at least some knowledge of code in order to use them.

One alternative to designing your site yourself is installing WordPress to your domain.

5) Host Customer Service

If your host’s customer service sucks, chances are something will go wrong and you won’t be able to fix it. That’s why it’s incredibly important that before you pledge your allegiance to a hosting service, you should have a nosy into their customer service reputation. There will always be some bad reviews of every site, as at least one person is bound to have had a bad experience with every host. However, if it seems that a hosting service gets generally good reviews, then you may be on to a winner.

Something to take into account when reading reviews is that the average person who gets everything they expect from their host is not likely to go shouting about it on every review site there is. Contrarily, if someone has had an incredibly bad experience with host, they probably will want to express their disgust to anyone and everyone they can. For this reason, don’t let one bad review put you off. However, if it does seem that a hosting service gets a lot of bad reviews, it may be time to jump ship!

Finally, you will sometimes find reviews that seem far to good to be true. Well, chances are, they are. Some of the dodgier, (and more reputable!) web-hosts pay people to post glowing recommendations on the major review sites, and some even pay the review sites directly. If you see a review like this:

“I loved (host) so much; they made all of my dreams come true! I never knew hosting a site could be so easy and fun!”

then someone has probably been taking bribes. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid the host, but just that you shouldn’t take that particular review into account when it comes to making a decision. Once again, if you begin to see lots of these “over-the-moon” reviews, it should put you off that particular host.

Choosing a Host – The Decision

So now it’s time to make your decision. Remember to take all of the things I mentioned in to account, and read some reviews. If you do this, you should be fine, and your site will be up an running in no time!

Jacob Teal Recommends – Choosing a Host

When it comes to web-hosting, in my opinion you can’t get much better than iPage. For around £25 a year, you get unlimited bandwidth (for a super wide highway to your site), unlimited disk usage (time for a house-party!) and incredible customer support. iPage offers a customer support live-chat service, where you can speak to an expert who will guide you through fixing any problem, or just fix it for you. iPage also allows for unlimited domains under one hosting package, so you can add another domain, and a whole other site, to your package at any time for just £12.99. It really is great!

So I hope you’ve found this article helpful, and that the misty darkness that is choosing a host is much clearer for you now. If you have any problems or queries (or if you’re actually having a house-party ) feel free to get in touch with me at any time. Visit my Facebook page, mention me on my Twitter account, or leave a comment in the box below – and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

This was Jacob Teal,

helping you choose a host for your site. ^{(Why put this here?)}

What’s Next:  How to Choose a Domain