Make Money Online Tips
Archive for May, 2010
PPC marketing for the beginner.
May 25th
PPC marketing for the beginner will discuss basically what PPC is, what it isn’t and how to avoid the common pitfalls faced by most beginners.
PPC marketing stands for pay per click this means that when a searcher clicks on your ad you will pay a fixed amount to the search engine advertising platform that you are advertising on. There are many networks large and small that will allow you to advertise using this format. For the sake of clarity we will confine our discussion at this point to the Google PPC platform which is called adwords.
Basically adwords revolves around keywords. You write a small four line advertisement which contains the keyword that you need to trigger your ad. Your ad will appear at the top of the organic results for the keyword search performed by the searcher. In other words your ad will only show if your keyword matches the keyword entered by the searcher. The visitor may see your ad but you will only be charged if they actually click on it.
When you set up your advertising campaign in adwords you will bid on the keywords that you want to use. The price of these keywords varies according to popularity, this popularity is usually directly proportional to the amount of money that the advertiser can potentially earn from being successful with that keyword. For instance, certain industries such as loans, insurance, mortgages and healthcare will command a higher bid price than underwater basket weaving.
When the searcher clicks on your ad they will be taken to a website of your choice, this could be directly to a merchant’s site that you are connected with as an affiliate or more commonly to an intermediate site or landing page that you are using to either pre-sell the prospect, collect their information or merely comply with Google’s rules.
Whether you are sending the prospect directly to the merchant or to a landing page, the contents of that page must be relevant to the search and more importantly the keywords used in your ad. Google wants the experience for the searcher to be congruent with their expectations, in other words if you ad is about “used black guitars” then the page that the searcher lands on must also be about “used black guitars.”
This is important for two reasons firstly if the visitor doesn’t immediately see what they were expecting they will leave the site without buying or clicking through to the merchant. This gives Google a bad name and not only do you have to to pay for the click, you didn’t make any money. When this happens Google will penalize the advertiser by reducing their quality score, this in turn raises the cost of each click for the keyword being bid on.
Basically despite what a lot of people think Google it is just trying to deliver the best experience for people searching and in return giving cheaper keywords to those advertisers who deliver this good experience and penalizing those who don’t.
So make sure that you keep the end user in mind when advertising with PPC using Google adwords. If you keep the searcher happy you will probably keep Google happy. If you follow these guidelines then how to do PPC marketing for the beginner won’t be a costly experience.
Look out for information about other networks who accept PPC advertising.
Free Traffic Using Organic Seo
May 22nd
In the online marketing circle people often talk about getting free traffic using organic SEO. Organic meaning natural and SEO meaning search engine optimization. When you think about it the term really doesn’t makes sense or at least it doesn’t mean what it’s meant to mean.
Search engine optimization is the manipulation of various website metrics in order to score more points with the search engines such as Google Yahoo and Bing. Optimizing your on page factors and artificially building back links offsite can hardly be classed as organic or natural, but nevertheless this is the excepted way of doing things.
There is also the feeling in many circles that the organic SEO method is free. Despite the fact that it doesn’t cost any money, except for your domain and hosting, to build a website in this manner and optimize for search engines it does not mean that it is free. On the contrary building websites in this manner, writing articles and content, and making your site interesting for the visitor takes both a considerable amount of time and some degree of knowledge on the part of the author. In the world of online marketing as with any other endeavour time equals money, the fact that you spent several hours writing and building content for your site has a cost.
When people talk about organic SEO what they mean is that a website will rank naturally and with time and the addition of fresh unique content on a regular basis will gradually rise in the rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. Over time as a website gains more and more visitors in search of its unique content Webmasters will link to the site, these links are called back links and they are used by the Google algorithm to gauge the website’s authority.
Search engine optimization on the other hand is a manipulation of the system. Whilst Google will tell you what they are looking for in a website or more importantly what their searchers are looking for, they do not fully support artificial SEO and they have been known to take action against sites whose methods and footprints are obvious.
That being said everyone is doing it and if you’re not doing it you are getting left behind. So while the reality of organic SEO it is not exactly what it should be, nevertheless we still need to carry out certain procedures to ensure that our sites rank and that we don’t get left behind in our endeavours to reach the number one spot.
In other articles on this site you will find various tips and tricks to increase the effectiveness of your organic SEO. The methods outlined are currently being by the author or another successful marketer or Webmaster whose methods have proven over time to be effective. Please check out the videos in this category.
How to upload a WordPress theme using Filezilla.
May 10th
Sometimes when you are searching Google to find the ideal WordPress theme, you will find it on a website and download it to your computer. At this point it needs to be loaded to your server in order to install on your WordPress blog.
Themes can be downloaded to your computer desktop and then uploaded to your website using FTP (file transfer protocol) and placed into the correct directory on your server.
In order to do this you will need FTP software which will transfer your downloaded files to your server. Many of these programs are available free online, the one that I use is called Filezilla.
When using filezilla to upload your files for the first time, you will need access to the welcome E-mail which was sent to you by your hosting company. This e-mail contains your FTP username and password which you will have to enter into your file manager.This information only needs to be entered once, after the first time you will be to connect your server using the quick connect button.
When adding a theme using this method, on the remote side of your FTP program click on >public_ HTML >your domain >wp-content >themes ….then drag-and-drop your new theme into the themes directory.
When you return to your WordPress blog administration area, by entering “www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin” in the browser window and entering your username and password. Look at your dashboard on the left-hand side, click on appearance, click on themes and your new theme should be on the page in front of you.
One tip that I can give you in order to keep things organized on your computer is to have a file on your desktop which is called WordPress . Inside this WordPress file you need to keep one file called WordPress themes and another one called WordPress plug-ins. Then as you set up new websites you can upload your favourite themes and plug-ins to your server from one location.
Please be patient when you learning how to use an FTP program for the first time. It can be a little tricky finding your way around. If you upload something and it doesn’t work go back to your FTP program and remove the file that you uploaded and try to see what you did wrong. Usually you will find that you transfer the file an incorrect directory.
Using an FTP program will become an important part of your daily routine.
How To Change A WordPress Theme.
May 2nd
In the last video we went through how to install a WordPress blog.
This video will show you how to change a wordpress theme.
Once you get used to the process it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to go through and complete the whole installation. Each time you go through the procedure it gets easier and quicker, you will become an expert in a very short space of time.
Very soon it will only take you five minutes to install wordpress from beginning to end.
Once you have your wordpress theme installed it is time to change the standard default theme to another theme more in keeping with the particular industry you’re involved or your niche or micro-niche.
There are literally thousands and thousands of free WP themes available with a simple search on Google or any search engine. Many of these themes will be perfect to your particular needs, sometimes you just need to spend some time looking through all the pages until you find a theme that suit your needs.
In this method you will select a new inside your wordpress admin area from the “add new” tab, you use the custom selector or choose from popular/recent/updated themes that wordpress suggests.
Pick one that suits your needs.
If you are happy with this particular theme, click on the activate button to install the theme on your domain. You can then click on the visit site button to see what your new website looks like.
The appearance of a new theme will be pretty basic at this time, but in the next video we will be going over some important steps to make your website look much better both for human visitors and SEO spiders from Google and other search engines.
Please watch the video below which will take you through how to change your WordPress theme.
Resources:
One of the best FTP programs is one that I use myself - filezilla.
This program is free to download and there are numerous tutorials on Google and YouTube so that you can learn how to use it correctly.
In a future video we will go over how to upload a theme and a plug-in using filezilla.
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