Day 6 - Your Questions Answered
Hello Visitors,
Recently I emailed everyone asking them what they have been struggling with on the eCourse and if they had any other questions related to blogging. I got 100's of responses from people with some great questions and so today I would like to cover them. If I haven't answered your question, feel free to ask more questions on our forums.
Something I often say is take action and you will be successful, yesterday I was sitting with a bunch of well known guru's and realized it's not about "Taking Action!" It's about Taking The Right Type of Action. So make sure you check out these tips and advice I provide below and then make sure you act on them.
Design and User Optimization
I have existing URL's that I want to move over to wordpress, how do I keep the same URL's as my none Wordpress Blog?
Under the Page Title form is your website URL, click EDIT and you are able to change what the URL is.
I want to make my blog look like it has been around for a lot longer then it has been by changing the date of my posts, how do I do this?
If you go to edit or add a new post, in the top right corner there is a box where you publish your post, above that button is an option to predate your blog posts. I did this recently on an old blog where I switched it over to Wordpress. We wanted to show readers that it was in fact 4 years old and not created yesterday.
How to customize the site in order for it to look a way which is relative to my particular blog?
I recommended a company called Woothemes to you all on the second day, the reason I choose them over any other company is because they give you so many options to customize your blog, its amazing! If you go ahead and purchase a Wootheme, login to your wordpress admin and scroll to the bottom, on the left side you will see a button with the name of your theme. Click that and you will see a lot of options to customize your blog, different colour schemes, different image sizes, different homepage features, different sidebar options and the list goes on. Another great thing about Wordpress is widgets, it lets you easily with no HTML knowledge, edit your sidebar and move different features around. You can see a link to widgets on the sidebar as well.
How do I change the header image from the wordpress theme into a image of my choice and have it resized accordingly?
I recommend you check the Wordpress help files for this, you can see them by clicking here.
Can I use a FREE blog hosting site such as Wordpress.com or Blogger.com?
This is one thing I want to get very clear. This will be your biggest blogging mistake if you go ahead and do that. Definitely go and use a good hosting company and buy your own domain. It will make you look 100x more professional and give you so much more control. Also, so many people get really far and then find they need their own domain and hosting and lose a lot of followers and search engine love because they have to move over to their own domain. Another thing to mention is, no one will buy a FREE hosted blog!
If you want to buy a domain, see GoDaddy.com - you can have 10% off if you use the coupon code: cjcsave10
If you want to buy hosting, see HostGator.com - you can have your first month for 1 cent if you use the coupon code: Retireat21
Legal Questions Answers
NOTE: I cannot provide any legal or financial advice - you must get that advice from a properly authorized professional.
What guidelines should I follow towards creating a privacy policy and terms of use doc on my future site?
If you collect any "personally identifiable" information on your site, you must have a privacy policy to explain what you do with that information. Terms and conditions are optional. They can certainly improve visitors confidence in you if you have them, but they aren't absolutely necessary.
Is there any legal documents to get or pay taxes etc. after advertisers pay me?
As a generalization - circumstances will vary from country-country but in most places you will be required to declare all sources of income (employed or self-employed) usually at least once per year in the form of completing a Tax Return.
Again, this varies from country to country, but in the UK you can "earn" a certain amount of income before paying Tax. But in any case you will be required to complete a tax return (even if no tax is due). Also in the UK if you decide to trade on a self-employed basis you will need to let the HM Revenue & Customs know and make what is called NIC payments. The other option is to set up a Ltd Company - and again there are rules that apply to that.
As I said, get proper advice - that is applicable to where you live, but the short answer is that you will need to complete a Tax Return and Pay Tax on your income. Therefore it is essential that you keep proper documented records of all your trading.
All the top blogs use great images for their blog posts, can I use Google Images, if not, where do I find images?
You are not allowed to use Google Images or any other images, however everyone does it. What I personally do is use a company called iStockPhoto which has millions of professional images you can use for your website at a cost of between $1 and $3 for images.
Making Money With Your Blog Questions
Every where I go, people are buying and selling things in dollars but I am in England. What do I have to do to take dollars and should I be taking dollars?
If you don't take dollars then yet again you will only be limiting your success. The Internet is global and your customers are around the world. To take dollars all you need to do is have a PayPal account and they will transfer the money into pounds when someone sends you dollars. For those who are not familiar with PayPal, what they do is allow you to take and send money online. Once you have money in your PayPal account, you can either withdraw it to your bank account or send it to other people online.
My blog is about a million and one things, how do I monetize my website if every page is about a different niche.
The best thing to do is run a CPC advertising network on your website such as Google Adsense. They will display different adverts on your blog depending on what the post is about.
Is it possible I venture into the niche that is profitable but which I lack the knowledge on?
Like I mentioned earlier, if you blog about your passion and provide value then the money will come. You won't be able to do this in a niche you know nothing about. Stick to what you know!
I would like to know where I could find advertisers for my blog?
One thing I say a lot is provide value and the money comes. This is so true with finding advertisers, they will find you if you have a valuable website so I would concentrate on content first. If you are still struggling to find advertisers, I recommend going to webmaster forums and marketplaces such as Digital Point and Sitepoint where you can offer your advertising for sale to other webmasters, this has always worked for me.
How do you know which affiliates to go with and which make the most money per conversion?
A lot of the time it's down to testing. Quite often I will try something for a month and find it either works or it doesn't. Depending on which affiliate network you work with, most will have a top converting affiliate program section to show you how well they convert, I usually pick from here. Something that is important to remember is pick things that are good products and not because they make you the most money. There is nothing worse than a great website, promoting rubbish products because it makes them look bad and their readers lose trust.
If you want to find good affiliate products to promote, I recommend you try ClickBank, they even show you what products convert the most.
How do I know the companies I am affiliated to know that the traffic I send them is from my site?
What happens is when one of your readers click on your affiliate links and go to the website, it stores a cookie on their computer which recognizes who sent them there to order. Affiliate programs are not always perfect, I have missed out on sales in the past because the process isn't always 100% safe, it's just a risk we have to sometimes take to make money. My affiliate income is about 80% of all my income so it seems to work fine for me.
Content and Optimizing it for the Search Engines
I work a 9 - 5 job right now and don't have the time to produce much content. I don't want to use an article writing service as they seem not to do a good job?
Great question and something I completely agree with, I hate to see websites use article writing services because they don't provide the quality you need to become an authority in your niche. What I do is I ask top people in my niche to answer questions for me. I do this in two ways:
- I ask them to do an interview for my blog where I ask them questions over email and they will respond. For this, you want to ask the top people in your niche for an interview, for example if you have a cooking website, you may want to ask Gordon Ramsey to do an interview or the inventor of some cook wear. Preparing the question usually takes only 5 minutes and because of this, people will now associate your blog with these big names and it will make your blog look like an authority.
- The second thing you can do is ask top people in your niche to do guest posts. I have often done this with my interviews. Once they have done an interview and if it gets a good result, then I will ask them to actually spend some time once a month to share more of their knowledge with my readers. Usually they agree because it can be great for marketing and ego.
This question came up a lot so I decided to create a video on it for you guys:
Should I have lots of content to my blog before trying to actually get traffic to the site?
Nope, I started IncomeDiary a couple months back with 3 articles. The biggest mistake people make is by waiting till their website is perfect and often it never will be. Just aim for 70% and your site will go far. Get your blog online and start promoting once you have your first couple articles online.
Do you personally outsource some of your content writing?
I won't lie to you, all my best content is outsourced. I mentioned above I hate getting articles written up for me, so what I use instead is a outsourcing company to do research for me. For example I ask them to research the top 30 earning websites, this usually takes them around 5 hours costing me $50. With this information, I simply insert it into a blog post and do a short introduction. I recommend everyone tries this out, most of these types of articles send me at least 5,000 visitors which would cost me around $2000, so the return is huge!
Where do you come up with all your blog post ideas?
Creating content is really easy, everyone can just copy my articles and bring them to their own niche. For example I did the top earning websites, well you could do, the top 30 earning golfers, or top 30 earning race drivers and so on. Another bit of creative content I do is 10 Reasons Why It Sucks To Be A Young Entrepreneur, you could do the same for your niche, 10 reasons why it sucks to be a golfer. Once you have done that post you can do 10 reasons why it rocks to be a golfer. Top lists are so easy to do and take very little time so try it out!
Should you look to write specifically on one topic-area only?
Often by doing this you limit the level of your success although it's best to be the best at something small than just alright at lots of things. If you are blogging at Sports then you may want to start with F1 Racing and then move over to Bikes and Water sports once you are at the top of the F1 niche.
My blog will be about myself and my business, should I call the URL my name so for example, JohnSmith.com?
I love reading personal blogs but at the end of the day it only allows you to go so far. There are blogs that earn upwards of $40,000 a month and if they were to sell they could get over a million dollars, problem is their blog is their name which makes it next to impossible to sell.
Driving Traffic To Your Blog
Should I be using social bookmarking like Digg and Stumbleupon to drive traffic to my blog?
I often don't but when I do, the effects can be huge! I have often reached the homepage of DIGG which has got me features on other websites such as Yahoo news, AOL news, PCworld and even newspapers around the world totalling to xxx,xxx's of visitors to my website in a very short amount of time. Not only that but you get really good search engine rankings because of it which can effect your business for ever.
See my Dad's website for more information on getting to the front of websites like Digg and having the same effects I have had from it.
I want to rank number one in the search engines for my keywords, how do I out rank all my huge competitors and become number one?
This is by no means an easy task but I will share one tip I know that has let me rank on many occasions number 1 for hugely competitive search terms. That is Digg! By hitting the front page of digg, it automatically tells Google that you are an authority for that keyword or phrase. I will show you a couple examples of the results. We rank number 1 on Retiredat21.com for the term "Self Improvement Advice" over night, some of you know how hugely competitive that niche is but for those who don't, that sent us 250,000 visitors in 10 days and drives us 1000's of visitors a week for that term. Another example is I rank number 2 for "Young Entrepreneurs" because I did a top young entrepreneurs post and posted it on Digg. This sends me 100's of visitors a day and made me an authority for my niche, I am 100% sure, if I didn't get front page on Digg for that, then I wouldn't be anywhere near as popular in my niche.
I often try to get to the front page of social networking websites such as Digg because I hear the effects can make me a lot money very quickly, how do I do it?
You are right, the day I hit the front page for the first time I earned around $1000 but because of hitting the front page, I have probably earned an additional $10,000 through long term traffic and search engine rankings.
The problem is, it's not easy! A few things I recommend you do to increase your chances:
- You make lots of friends on Digg, add everyone you can so they see your Digg submissions and messages.
- Become friends with a top digg user, often called Power User. When they submit an article to digg, that is usually enough to get to front page, attracting usually 150+ Diggs in the first 24 hours, which is usually what you need to get front page.
- The other hugely important thing you need is creative and quality traffic! So often people do this wrong. What I suggest you do is join my father's and Dean Hunt's membership website, Buzz Profits - where they cover this in great detail. It costs $47 a month and even if you only get front page once a year, you will be $xxxx's ahead of the rest, so in my opinion, well worth it!
I often read that I should be commenting on all blog posts and forum posts in my niche to drive traffic, is this true?
I personally don't do it because I don't see much results, having said that, if you do it on a high level then you will see higher results. It's worth giving it a couple days and seeing how it goes. I often comment on blog posts, not for traffic but for brand awareness, so people realize I am still alive and kicking!
When you covered how you drive traffic to your website, you didn't mention Stumbleupon and some other social network websites. How come and should I be using them?
Just like the quality of content, you also want quality traffic and that's something Stumbleupon doesn't provide and also so many other social sites don't. You only want to be working on bringing quality traffic such as Search Engine Traffic, Paid Traffic and Twitter Traffic.
The Twitter software you shared with us for FREE has blown me away, should I be focusing on making money directly from Twitter or use it to drive traffic to my blog and make money there?
You have to remember, you're building an asset by creating a blog, something you can hopefully sell one day for a lot of money. If you are not promoting your blog on twitter then you are not going to be getting as good results from your blog, so it won't earn as much money. Although it is easy to make money directly on twitter, it is frowned upon and will end up getting you banned. What I do is promote my blog posts and then monetize them instead, for me, this works best!
I hope today's email has opened up your eyes to some new ideas and hopefully made you think about what your end in mind actually is!
To our success in 2010,
Michael Dunlop
PS. If you need any help with anything mentioned in the eCourse then check out our NEW support forums!
PPS. Just to remember to provide quality and value, the the money will follow!
PPPS. If you want to learn more about blogging then check out my friends Blogging eBook.
Midascode Ltd, 5 and 6 Azure Suites, Churchill Court, 112 The Street, Rustington, W Sussex BN16 3DA, UNITED KINGDOM
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