Let face it we all have our strengths and weaknesses.  Why I can put to together some simple lame graphics so things are just better left to a Pro or Guru.  Graphic design might be one of the 1st things you can outsource or out task to help is give your business the right look and feel.  The process is pretty simple you figure out what size graphic’s you need a lot of places will do bundles.  Then you put together your idea’s and requirements and send to to a designer.

Who to use.

A couple companies that are know for this are 99 designs.  With 99 designs you submit your project and then people from around the globe can compete for about a week.  You then can pick the winner.  I never used this site but have heard of many that like the way it works.  Your not stuck with one design.  You get to pick which one you like.  Project cost range from from $100 to $600.

If you looking for quick turnaround and awesome work you should check out 20DollarBanners. 

Low rates and quick turn around, lots of experience 50,000 plus some designs over the years.  You also get up to 5 revisions.

You can learn more about the designer in this Tuan Nguyen Interview

Also my buddy Doug Dillard over at makingmoneyonline.com is running another contest and this time you can win a $109 custom banner package from here. You can learn more about the details by clicking the link.

I hope I win but if not I pretty sure I going to be sending Tuan some business as it is time for this site to get some professional graphics.

I started thinking about what I am looking for and here is a sketch let me know what you think.  As you can see graphic’s are not my think so I busted out the kids crayons.  Now there is a easy way to make some graphic’s crayons and a scanner.

I want something like this I am open to colors but my oldest daughter said green for money and I think that is a good call  

The Cult is sitting on a bridge, my site is to be a bridge between newbie and guru’s.  I want the bridge to have Dollars signs as the supports.  I want would love to see some social media icons sitting on the bridge and peeping out over the letters.  Throw my picture in there somewhere.  Maybe I could be on a boat under the bridge but this is about the extent of my graphic abilities. 

Please let me know and if anyone wants to do take a stab at free graphic’s for this site.  Send them over.  If I like them and use them I will do a post about you.

 

Attracting traffic to a blog or a web site is challenging enough. So from the very beginning, when you start to see visitors coming to read your blog, be sure that they feel comfortable to stick around. And there are a number of ways you can help them to do just that.

Seven Ingredients for building a successful blog with a loyal following

1. Publish Regularly

As your readers become familiar with the frequency of your posts, it will influence their visiting behavior. If your readers know that you post fresh content every day, they will probably come every day to read it. If they know you post on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that’s when they will come.

2. Stay on Topic

Stick to your niche. If your blog doesn’t have a niche, give it one. Readers like blog’s that are focused on a particular theme or topic. If you have no theme and just post about anything, then readers are less likely to become passionate about your blog and will probably move on to somewhere else.

3. Use Meaningful Titles in Posts

This not only announces clearly what the post is about, but it will help people navigate your blog and also influence your ranking with search engines.

4. Interact With Your Readers

Think of your blog like a conversation. You post. Readers comment. Be active and be positive as you interact and converse with your readers.

5. Highlight Your Best Posts

Don’t let your best posts get lost in your archives. It’s always a good idea to link to your best posts from a ‘best posts’ category on the main page. This is something I need to work on myself.  All the guru’s do this do you?

6. Provide Good Navigation to Popular Pages

If you help people find the key pages within your blog, their visit will be a much more enjoyable experience.  Navigation can always be improved, I know I need some work here how well does you navigation work on your site.

7. Avoid Not Posting for Extended Periods

If someone visits your blog and discovers that the last post was three weeks ago, they will probably be disappointed. If you don’t post, people may give you the benefit of the doubt and come back on a few days to check, but you better believe they will lose interest quickly if you fall out of your regular schedule and stop posting.

There you have it. Seven little tips that will make a big difference to your blog’s readership. It’s not rocket science. It’s just using some common sense when posting and interacting with your readers.

A little bit of how to get google Page Rank advice without all the math. Some don’t bother with page rank but as a blogger you should at a bare minimum at least know what is and at a high level how it works.  Also included are a few little tricks that you can do to help boost yours. 

Mine is only a 1 right now but lets see what happens over the next couple months as I build better back links to my site.  A lot say it takes 6 months to see any results but there are some good benefits to having a higher page rank such as a return on search results for keywords.  Plus it will give you more credibility.

What is Page Rank what is it and why does it matter?

If you want to really learn about page rank check out what wikipedia has to say about PageRank but this might make your head hurt.  Here’s what you need to know with out getting in to the details.  

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google.

Zero is less important

Ten is High Value

My Page rank is low what can I do to help it?

Build more incoming Links.

It pretty simple, every link coming to your site is really like a vote on the internet as to how important your site is.  The PageRank of that site determines how good the vote is.  A link from a higher page rank site have more weight or value.  Also note do follow link have more value then no follow links.  Rules keep changing on no follow but do follow is defiantly better for back link weight.

This month I focused a little on links and SEO and I am now a PageRank 1 not sure when or how but I am .  I think BlogEngage might have helped with this.  I suggest you try it if you havn’t they are a PageRank 4 site that you can plug-in to your blog and also submit your posts to pretty easy and then allow for others to vote.  I see a nice bit of traffic starting to come in from here.

You want to have more high value incoming links!

Google places higher weight on social networking sites.  Thanks one of the reasons you should spend some time setting up your profiles or automating you syndication to these sites you you can do one click broadcast to these where ever possible.

Here is a list of some great know and unknown high page rank sites you can easily get back links from you might want to try.  How many do or have you used?  Starting to see the importance of using these and making it easy for others to use this via your blog to create inbound links for you.  At the end of this post are some that you might or might not have heard of.  I haven’t tried them all but I came across this list once and grabbed it figured it would be nice to share below some of the higher rank sites so you might want to make sure your bookmarked or using some of these from time to time.  See if you can work them in to your posting routine.

Page Rank 9

http://facebook.com
http://slashdot.org
http://technorati.com

Page Rank 8

http://del.icio.us
http://digg.com
http://mixx.com
http://propeller.com
http://reddit.com
http://stumbleupon.com

Page Rank 7

http://folkd.com
http://foxiewire.com
http://google.com/bookmarks
http://mister-wong.com
http://newsvine.com
http://sphere.com
http://squidoo.com
http://wikio.com
http://diigo.com
 

In conclusion if your looking to better your PageRank you might want to try some of the sites above if your not all ready using them.  See if you can get setup on them or get others to bookmark back links for you.  Also give BlogEngage a try, it seems to have helped me.

Well enough about how to get google Page Rank next Part will be on tools, and keywords.  Then I think my 15 minutes is about up.  Remember if you want more then what I am providing here check out SeoBook I have all ready learned a ton from here.

One of the things I wanted to start doing this month and every month moving forward is interview up and coming people in the blogging and make money online world.  I figured what better person to start with then Doug Dillard from Making Money Online Dot Com.

Doug Dillard and Mark Smith have partnered together to run Making Money Online Dot Com which is a blog about these two “Guru Wannabes” and their Journey to Online Fame & Fortune.  I strongly suggest you check out their site and become a regular reader if you haven’t yet.  They have a lot to offer along with a very nice little community of active bloggers that voice their opinions regularly via comments.

I can’t exactly remember how I 1st came across Doug but I am pretty sure it was via comments some where.  Since then Doug and I have started to build a nice little relationship.  I also found myself attracted to his site and enjoy his content as I myself am a Internet Marketing Guru wannabe.  In this interview I ask Doug a couple question about Guru’s and then we go on to some questions about his site.

Thanks again Doug for taking the time to do this and being the 1st Interview on this site!

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QUESTIONS ABOUT GURU’s

Jared: In your eyes what defines a Guru?

Doug: Someone who is very successful in their particular niche and that people look to for advice… would be the short answer.

 

Jared: Who is your favorite Guru and why do you like them?

Doug: There are a ton of them, but if I had to pick one I would probably say Frank Kern as he makes a ton of money and seems to me like he is having the most fun. I am not sure if that is true, but that’s the feeling I get. I was big into surfing growing up and Frank seems like he is still living the lifestyle, but with no worries about money.

 

Jared: If you could have lunch with any 5 Gurus, who would it be and why?

Doug: Hmmm… that’s a tough one. These are just off the top of my head and I will probably miss someone obvious; Frank Kern, Marlon Sanders, Jim Edwards, Yanik Silver, Dan Kennedy, Tim Ferriss, Darren Rowse, John Chow and David Risley. I know there was more than five, but I started with Internet Marketers, and then remembered some bloggers I wanted to meet… Sorry!

 

Jared: Why do you think people are so much more attracted to Gurus?

Doug:  People are just attracted to successful people, just like people are attracted to movie stars, rock stars, and sports figures. It’s built into our DNA. Internet Gurus are the rock stars of their particular online niches.

 

Jared: At what point would you say you are no longer a Guru Wannabe?

Doug:  I don’t know if I will ever get to that point where I would call myself a Guru. I do hope that we (me and my business partner Mark) get to a point where people will look to us as very knowledgeable in our field and search us out for advice… but that will be for our readers to decide.

 

QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR SITE

 

Jared: Your site seems to be taking off, why do think readers are so involved?

Doug: I hope it’s because we provide interesting and informative content, but there are probably many factors. I have read many books and courses on the subject of blogging, as well as read hundreds (if not thousands) of posts on blogging and we try to implement as many strategies as we can in building our website.

 

Jared: What’s going on with all the commenting?

Doug: If you are referring to me commenting on other sites, there are a couple of reasons I do a lot of that. From a marketing standpoint it is one of the best ways we have found to get people to our site, as well as getting people to comment on our posts. Most bloggers (at least the smart ones), especially the ones just starting out usually visit the sites of the bloggers that comment on their site. If they find the posts interesting, they often return the favor and leave comments on their posts as well.

Now to go one step further, it is even smarter to read all the comments in each post and follow the links back to the “commenter’s” (I know that is not a real word, but it should be) website and see what their blog is about. If you feel that their blog fits well with your particular niche, you should leave comments on the posts that interest you on that site as well. This could go on and on if you like. It just depends how much time you want to spend commenting.

The second reason is I like to continually learn. So visiting as many blogs as I can and leaving comments and getting involved in the post is a great way to learn new things every day.

Jared: How much time do you spend commenting?

Doug: I probably spend at least a good hour everyday commenting on other sites, as well as replying to comments on our site. Some days maybe more, some days maybe less.

 

Jared: Where do you comment?

Doug: Well the first thing I do everyday is work my way down the list of people who comment on our site and see if they posted anything new that day, and if I find it interesting and think I can add some value to the post I will leave a comment. I do feel bad sometimes as there are some people that leave several comments on our site, where I would like to reciprocate and leave a comment on one of their posts, but can’t for some reason. It is usually because when I go to their site they write about stuff I don’t understand (maybe too technical), or it’s about stuff that does not interest me, or perhaps it’s a blog about a certain brand that I don’t use and there is nothing I can really comment about.

After that, if I have the time I will start looking for other sites in our niche or perhaps do a search for a blog on a subject that I am interested in that day. Even if the blog isn’t related to our niche, if I find the post interesting there is a good chance I will comment there as well.

Jared: How much traffic to you think commenting drives?

Doug: Looking at the stats, this month about 38% of our traffic comes from other blogs, which I would assume most of that would be from commenting, but not all.

 

Jared: Any tips or thoughts for breaking outside the same commenting circles?

Doug: Just keep visiting more and more blogs that relate to your niche, as well as other blogs that you think their readers might be interested in what you are writing about. The more you get your name out there, the better chance you have of building your network of loyal readers and friends.

 

Jared: What’s next?

Doug: We have lots of plans for the upcoming months… but you will have to wait and see 

Jared: Looks like you will have visit Making Money Online Dot Com to see what’s next but I am sure it will be some good and helpful stuff!

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Once again I want to thank Doug and wish him and Mark the best of luck on their journey to become Guru’s at Making Money Online Dot Com. If you skimmed this post I suggest you go back and read the section on commenting at the very least Doug reveals some golden nugget’s here that can really help your site!

 

As you know Doug and I both love comments so take a minute and tell me what you think about this interview and Doug’s responses.  I am also looking to do more of this so if your interested let me know and and I will see if your a good fit!

I wanted to stop and take a minute to talk about and give WordPress some credit.  I must say I really like Wordpress .  I haven’t found one thing I couldn’t do with it yet.  I myself discovered wordpress late last year.  Previous I tried if on a few other CMS (Content Management Systems) on other sites over the years and was like wow once I install wordpress and started using it!  Wordpress is easy!

WordPress can save you money.  I once worked for companies that paid some serious money to have there website redeveloped and build on a Commercial Content Managment Systems.  I am talking 50,000-100,000 thousand dollars.  Granite this was a  for a project which included the install, configure, training, new graphics, conversion of old content, servers and some custom code.  But if I were to ever work for a company again that needed a Content Management System or even had a web presence I would strongly encourage Wordpress.  Looking at the outcome of this project I am pretty sure the whole thing could have been done and looked the same on Wordpress.  Now this project happen 6 or 7 years ago and maybe Wordpress wasn’t quite as robust as it is today but if your a company looking to improve your website don’t be scared to look at Wordpress cause it is free.

Many large successful companies use Wordpress.

This was one of the things that attracted me to WordPress.  Check some of these companies out the list.

• • CNN
    Anderson Copper
    Lou Dobbs
    Larry King Live
  • People
  • The New York Times
  • Wired WebMonkey
  • PlayStation

If you want to see more check out the WordPress showcase tag fortune 500. You can also try to submitt you blog here to be showcased they have some criteria it must meet 1st if you qualify I would do it.

What’s so great about word about WordPress.

Here’s my quick list.

• Free
• Easy To Use
• Endless list of Plug-ins
• Great Community of Users
• It works and does what is need to do.

If you use WordPress and have something to add please comment below. Tell me what you like about it.  Can you think of anything you don’t like about it?  Do you use something else if so why?  If you havn’t tried WordPress I suggest you go download it and give it a try today.

They even offer free blogs at http://wordpress.com where you can try it out and tell me what you think.

Here’s the deal I am teaching myself as much as I can about seo in the next month way more then 15 minutes, a couple hours a week.

Why am I doing this?

• I feel I need to better understand seo and its hidden powers.
• I want to make sure I am not hurting my sites when it comes to this.
• SEO consultants make very good money.

Search Engine Optimization is important and what you need to know how to drive traffic from search engines like http://google.com .   Do you know how much daily traffic starts at google.   I have seen rates as high as $500 per hour for this stuff.  I have seen company’s charging for site re-design for SEO services for $1000 to $10,000 per month.  I have seen some testimonials on site’s that claim double traffic and profits after doing having a little seo consultation.

That is pretty exciting to me.  I am lucky I tend to learn new IT skill pretty quickly.  A lot of stuff come natural to me so figured I would start learn more about seo.  My goal is not learning to become a consultant but really to put together a quick reference guide to SEO from my learning that I could share with others where you can learn the bare minimum simple no-brainer stuff you need to know in 15 minutes or 3 blog post.

Consider this part 1 of of SEO in 15 minutes, if you have anything to add or comment please do so below.  I am very thankful to others that share.  I like to give lots of credits to those that share.

SEO can be very complex and confusing.

I know a lot of what I have heard is either dated,vague or way over my head.  Look the basic stuff isn’t really difficult. Next I am going to list some stuff you can try out today.

List of some easy things you can do today to optimize your site for search engines

Choosing The Right Keywords

- use google to test searches for 3-5 word keyword searches notice how many returns
- Also note at the bottom of the search page common alternatives
-Keep a list of these by post category or topic so you can have it handy for each post
-Drop your keywords in your text body of your content target 7-10%
-This will improve and optimize keyword density

Your URL and Title Tag and Headers

- These have more weight tip use keyword in url and title and use some headers
- Make your title something that people would search for

Internal Links

- Create internal links search engines love these.
- Setup an archive page use display titles and categories for links not dates.
- Add related post plug-in to word press.  I use (YARPP)

Make sure you Meta Descriptions makes sense and is defined

-see if you can do something here to attract people.

This might be the difference between someone skipping your site and moving to the next one on the list.  Look at mine below just caught a typo in mine as I am writing this post. But see how this might attract people vs. blank or something that make on sense.  Some even put a nice call to action here.

A mater of fact I am going to change mine to Come follow or Click here to learn about the leaders

Above are some some simple things that everyone should know and think about as far as seo beginner stuff these a must at a minimum.

Like I said I am still learning this myself but think I can have a nice guide ready to share over the next couple weeks as some of the stuff is really common sense once you hear it you will think about it every time you do a post.

For those that have time for more and learn from an seo GURU here is the best site I have come across so far.  Seobook I would strongly suggest if you have the time you check out his free stuff, firefox plugins Aaron Wall gives away training and some crazy mad scientist tools for analyzing your and other sites.  They also have a paid program that seems like it would be really good for those that want to get more serious about seo.

Please comment and let me know if you have any that I missed.  I have more coming but I will be reading your comments for any additional tip’s thoughts or  idea’s.

This month I wanted to start it off with a little focus on what I am going to do to increase my odds of making a little money.  Last month I really stated to understand a little bit about traffic and how to generate that so I will continue those activates but need to put a little focus on marketing and monetization.  I figured the best way to make sure I am doing enough marketing is to actually have a plan each month and then do it so here is mine for this month.

After reading and hearing about some of the success that others newer internet marketers and bloggers have had I came up with a list of items to work on this month.  These activities should help the chances of this site to make money.

My Marketing Strategy

• Add infolinks – Done don’t expect much from this but only took 5 minutes to do should be able to generate some pocket change with this.
• Rotate and review Sidebar Ad’s – Make sure Ad’s are fresh and relevant
  - signed up for NeverBlue pretty slick CPA which also has build in banner rotations.
• Change all affiliate links to unique gocodes url – for masking and tracking
• Create Paid Member’s Area – seems this page gets a lot of traffic $10 a month and provide access to my huge private library of stuff I can’t give away but have rights to sell.
• Updated Free Members Area with some Free Affiliate Products
• Sneak in more affiliate links to post or product do a product review every 4th Post
• Paid Website Reviews if I see any that seem relevant to this site
• Begin Development of my 1st Product/Service, I don’t think I will get this launch as this month looks crazy already but I want to target early or mid next month and hope to start promotions this month.
  More to come on this need to keep it secret for now but lets just say it has something to do with social media-free and free blog setup and training!

My Monitory Goals

I want to double sales every month till that is no longer realistic.  So right now that is more then realistic as last month I only had one sale $46 but one is better then none and it seems my traffic is growing at a nice pace so that should really help.  Plus last months sale was to a membership site so that sale should continue every month for the rest of the year. The power of re-occurring sales.

Well that my plan lets see what happens.  Do anyone else out there sit down and determine their marketing strategy every month.  Anybody else have anything to add I love to hear you thoughts and comments.

Looking forward to a good month.  Wow I started this post on 2nd just getting it out now at least the month isn’t over yet.

I also wanted to thank The Gooroo for introducing me to Neverblue you can learn more about his success with this affiliate marketing campaign tool here .