Learn The Ancient Art Of “Make Money Online”

  September 24, 2009      Leave a Comment    Marvin

Today while I was doing some research on a fast way to turn articles into videos, I stumbled upon a few interesting services. The first Service was Article Video Robot. This service seemed to be pretty professional and I thought it would fulfill my needs to create videos from content fairly quickly. Then I came across this service Article2Video, this service did not seem quite as professional, but also seemed like it would do the trick for a little less money. Then I found xtranormal, and I just had to try it out. I know that with this service I can’t create videos from text in 20 seconds, but it is just so much fun to use. This service allows you to create cartoons using text to speech, animations, music, and lots of other silly stuff. To bad they don’t seem to have an API for this service. I made a quick video about “Make Money Online”… Let me know what you think.

Authority Link Builder Beta Testers Needed

  May 11, 2009      Leave a Comment    Marvin

If you are tired of spending countless hours looking for quality backlinks then we have a solution for you. We have been working on a new service to help you build authority one-way backlinks to your websites and we need your help to test the service. We are looking for 10 people to test the effectiveness of our old age, high page rank blog network. For more information, go to Authority Link Builder. After the 10 positions are filled, we will close down the service and then re-open after beta testing is complete.

How to Get Your Website Listed in DMOZ

  February 24, 2009      7 Comments    Marvin

Most internet marketers that have learned the importance of link building, have probably tried to get their site listed in some sort of website directory. There are thousands of directories, but most webmasters want to get their website listed in places like, Yahoo Directory, BOTW, Business.com, and the holy grail of directories DMOZ.org. DMOZ, or ODP, is a free directory that is maintained by volunteer editors. It is legendary for having an extraordinary amount of link authority, and also for its pesky editors that seem to hate internet marketers. I happen to be one of those pesky editors and I would like to show you how to get your website listed in DMOZ, without having to cheat, steal or bribe your way into the directory.

Yeah I know what you are thinking…. You would rather give blood than try to get your website listed in DMOZ, but it really isn’t that bad. You just need to understand the ODP community. The community has good intentions but many times it has lazy editors, like me. =) So if your website doesn’t get listed right away don’t feel bad.

Ok so let’s get started. First, if you want to get your website listed in DMOZ, make sure that it is ready for an editor’s review. Don’t try to list your website if it has an awful design, no or poor content, and broken links. Make sure you go through everything and your website is in tip top condition. If your website is not complete you can count on your submission being rejected.

Once you have checked your website and you know that it is ready for a DMOZ editor’s scrutiny, then go to http://www.dmoz.org/add.html and read DMOZ submission guidelines.

The main thing is that your website does not sell illegal items, promote porn, have many affiliate links and is not under construction.

Ok, so now that you know the guidelines and your site is ready, you need to find the appropriate category for your listing. This is a very important step, because you want your listing to be taken serious by an editor and you also want to be in a category that has lots of link authority.

If you are selling a product, you will usually want to get listed in the shopping category, but you could also apply in other categories. Let’s say your business is located in Rochester NY, and you sell alternative medicine for colon cleansing.

You could try to list your product under http://www.dmoz.org/Shopping/Health/Alternative/, which has a PR 5 with 33 backlinks and is 3 category levels deep.

You could also list your site under http://www.dmoz.org/Health/Alternative/Fasting_and_Cleansing/Enemas/, which has a pr 4, no backlinks, and is also 4 levels deep. Notice that the shopping category often has more link authority than many other categories.

You could also list your site in your locality category:

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_York/Localities/R/Rochester/Business_and_Economy/, which has 0 pr, 1 link and is 8 category levels deep.

Normally it is best to try to get into the shopping category first if you are selling products, then sometimes you can apply to other categories once your website is listed. Getting listed in a locality category is better than nothing, but usually is not that much of a benefit. Often times editors will allow you to be listed in a locality category as well as another category.

Once you find the best category for your website, simply click on the suggest url link:

This step is very important, and many webmasters do not do this correctly, which is one of the main reasons that their websites do not get in the directory. Make sure to follow their guidelines very carefully.

1. Submit your website’s home page, and not subpages.
2. Enter the title of your website. (usually this is the same as your domain name or title tag of your website)
3. Enter a description of your website and DON’T MAKE IT A SALES PITCH! ( I say this because most internet marketers copy the description from their website which is usually a sales pitch) You want this to be an overview of what your website offers and features. Look at other examples of what other people submitted in the category that you are trying to get into and do what they did.

   Once you fill out the required information, submit your form to DMOZ! Ok, I know that you thought you were all done, but that is where most people stop. This part is the secret of getting your website listed in DMOZ.

   Find the editor(s) editing the category that you submitted your website to. You can usually find their name listed at the bottom of the category.

If there is no editor listed in your category then move up one level. Keep doing this until you find an editor listed. Once you find an editor, email them explaining that you listed your website in their category and ask them politely to take a look at your website. Let them know that you are new to DMOZ and would appreciate them reviewing your website and letting you know if there are any problems. Give the editor a few days to reply and if they don’t, email them again. Also try to find another editor in the same category or move up one level to find a higher ranked editor. Usually the farther up the higher level the editor is.

This last tip works well because most editors do not check DMOZ regularly. They do not usually get notified when new listings are submitted and normally just stop by every few weeks. A personal email is a great way to get their attention. Also, by being personal and friendly, they will often reply if there are any problems with your submission.

I hope that helps you to get your website listed in DMOZ, let me know if you have any questions.

Understand Why Your Competition is Beating You at SEO

  February 18, 2009      Leave a Comment    Marvin

Do you ever sit in front of your computer shaking your head, wondering how your competition is beating you in Google. If you do, then you are not alone. Many internet marketers search their main keyphrases every day only to find that they are still being beat by that pesky competitor. That competitor may or may not understand SEO, many times they dont. You may have more links built then them, more content, better quality images and material, better prices, but they still outrank you. So how do they do it?

Without getting into all of the technical SEO and competitive analysis, nichewatch is a simple tool that will help you to determine why your competition is outranking you.

First, you will need to go to nichewatch.com and create a new account.

Once you have created an account, you can then input your keyphrase and url:

Your results with a free account will display the top 20 competitors. If you included your url, your website will be included at the top of the results. From these results you can determine how your site ranks for different SEO factors compared to your competition. The major factors are backlinks, indexed pages, anchor text, title tags and on page text.

Although nichewatch is not 100% accurate every time, it is a quick way to compare your website or a particular page on your website to your competition and determine what is necessary to overtake that competitor in search engine results.

How to Monitor and Analyze Website Performance by Tracking Basic Seo Metrics

  February 11, 2009      4 Comments    Marvin

Making money online can be a lot of fun, but when sales are down, or when your website is losing traffic, it can be very frustrating to not understand why this is happening. Many internet marketers are so busy promoting their website, fulfilling orders, and taking care of customer support, that they only have time to monitor their sales. When sales are up, they must be doing something right. When sales are down, they are doing something wrong or it is because of an economic recession, a holiday, or possibly a season finale of American Idol, but most of the time they are just guessing. If you fall into this category, then I hope this short tutorial will help you to monitor and analyze basic SEO metrics on your website. Monitoring basic SEO metrics will help you to better understand your website’s performance, and help you to catch problems before they get out of hand.

Here are a few tools that we will be using for this tutorial:

Microsoft Excel (or some type of spreadsheet)

Search Status (firefox addon)

Awstats (or some other server side web analytics program)

Google Webmaster Tools (this is a free service provided by google)

Once you have those tools ready, create an excel sheet with the following SEO website metrics:

1. Backlinks (Yahoo and Google)
2. Indexing (Yahoo, Google, and MSN)
3. Google Cash Date
4. Google Bot Last Visit
5. Traffic (Unique Visitors)
6. Page Rank (Not necessary to track this, but I still do it for fun)
7. Alexa Rank (Not very accurate, but can be used to measure against competition)
8. Compete Rank (More accurate than Alexa, but only works well for US websites)

When you are done your excel sheet should look something like this:

To determine backlinks from Google and Yahoo we will use Search Status and Google Webmaster Tools.

For Google backlink results, navigate to your webmaster tools area located within your google account.

Once in webmaster tools, select the Links tab, then select “Pages with external links”.

There you will see the amount of backlinks per page and also the total amount of backlinks that Google is reporting (enter this amount on your excel sheet).

For Yahoo backlink results, go to the home page of your website and right click on the Search Status tool:

Navigate to show backward links, then domain external, left click on Yahoo:

You will then be taken to the Yahoo search results page with the following query:

linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com (replace “yourdomain” with your actual domain name)

Enter the amount of backlinks returned by yahoo on your excel sheet.

To Determine Indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, right click on Search Status, select Show Indexed Pages, left click on All.

Enter Results Returned on your excel chart:

When you are looking at your Google Index results, you can also check the cache date of your index(home) page.

To retrieve data about Google bot’s last visit to your website, you will need to check your server log data using a tool similar to Awstats. These tools are usually located within Cpanel or Plesk on your server.

You may also want to check your Webmaster Tools for valuable Google bot crawl data. You can find this data by clicking on Crawl Stats located under statistics:

You can also get the unique visitor (traffic) data within your Awstats data or similar analytics program.

To get your Page Rank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank, simply hover over each of the bars in your browser. These bars come with the Search Status tool.

If you can, monitor these basic SEO metrics on a daily basis. If you are unable to keep up with these stats on a daily basis, a weekly report will work. You can also add daily sales totals, conversions and determine conversion rates on this excel sheet.

If you record these metrics properly and analyze trends, you can normally notice problems in early stages. Then you can begin to analyze the troubled area in more detail.

Internet Burnout: How to get excited about your business again!

  September 2, 2008      1 Comment    admin

Imagine this: Sales are slumping or leveling off, you work 70-80 hours a week, you check your ranking in Google like its your job, and you get irritated and annoyed every time someone asks you “so how is your business going?”

Is that you? Do you ever wish you could just turn off the computer and get a “real” job? Here’s your wake up call.

Last Christmas season the Internet was responsible for about 20% of the Christmas rush to the tune of $27 Billion dollars in December alone. This is number has grown every year since only purchases were possible. The only other best time to be on the Internet was 10 years ago when the first millionaires were made through email marketing.

There are no other jobs in the world that allow you to have virtually the entire world market with almost no startup costs. Never before has that been possible. We are living in an age where everyone is a star through the success of Youtube, the blogosphere and any other social revolution you can name.

There are currently less than 1 billion active Internet users. That number is projected to balloon to over 3 billion by 2011. If that its more than 24 MILLION new internet users a day until the end of 2011. That means 24 million new CUSTOMERS a day until the end of 2011.

Most Internet burnout occurs by insisting you’re going to do everything yourself. The smartest thing you can do as a business owner is start firing yourself from your various responsibilities. This next week keep a journal of all the things you do in a days time. At the end of the day review them and think about what you can delegate. At the end of the week, calculate how much time you spent on things that actually make the business money, and what time you spent doing basic clerical work that someone else could have done.

By taking a “hit” and hiring someone for $10 or $15 an hour, you can spend more time making money and less time “running the business.” You’ll find that your mind will be
much more refreshed, and you’ll more than make up the new hire’s salary within a month. Always hire 6 months ahead. Hire for where you want to be, not where you are. The Internet is exploding and you don’t have time to be burnt out running a business, free up your mind and watch your profits soar.

By: Eli Peterson
www.sitesource101.com

 

Can Your Business Survive a Bad US Economy?

  August 13, 2008      Comments Off    admin

With the dollar the weakest its ever been, unemployment up as high as gas prices, the credit crisis and record foreclosures, its clear that the average merican is tightening their wallet. Everyone is looking to save money, and your business is more than likely experiencing the crunch.

How do you get around it?

Diversification. When one market is doing bad, another thrives. Thats the name of the game. Look deep into your market and distinguish what is loosing, what is going up, and where the money is. People flock to the internet to find good deals on things in order to save on gas and to bargain shop. This might be the perfect time to position yourself for a lot of new business. Markets around the world are doing poorly however China and India are in the biggest booms of their histories. You may want to open a Chinese site.

Raise Rates. Depending on your product or service, you donʼt have to just “eat” every new expense you get. If prices of bottles went up along with shipping, boxes and product, you should raise your rates. Make sure you email your list explaining rates are going to go up and to “stock up now” and you may have the best month your company has ever had, bad economy or not!

Stop Spending. Most people honestly donʼt know where all their money goes. They make $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 a month, and still seem to live paycheck to paycheck. Look at what the money is going out on, pay down credit cards with the highest interest rates, or transfer balances to better ones. There are only two ways to have more money, earn more, or spend less. When you get a bump in sales, pay off previous credit card debt, or save it for the future. If you have money in savings right now, you are earning a lot less interest than your credit cards are charging, so pay them off right now and look at your credit cards as your “savings” or “safety net” until you stash some away for a rainy day. Youʼll be saving a LOT in finance charges.

Look at your staff. No one likes to be the tough boss that lays people off, but if you are in a money crunch, you need to remember this is a business and not a friendship. Speak directly to your employees and make sure they know they need to do their job or you really have no other choice. Remember you may be saving $2,000 a month on an employee, but you may be loosing $20,000 in sales. No employee makes what they are worth, and if they do, theyʼre over paid.

Whatever you do, donʼt touch your IRA or 401k, or 403b plans. Save for the future, spend less in the present, and use Site Source 101ʼs specialized tools to assess what you need to do to make more money.

By: Eli Peterson
www.sitesource101.com

How to Rank #1 in Google

  May 5, 2008      Comments Off    admin

Ranking no. #1 in google is not an easy step it requires knowledge, expertise and determination to get the ranking. Starting an online business is great way to generate extra income and money but before anything else you must know what you are doing or what will you be doing in order to bring traffic to your website. There are already thousands of materials that can help you, but you should always remember that starting with a good foundation is a lot easier and effective.