EzSEO Newsletter # 221
This week:
1. I’m changing career
2. Wordpress Tutorial - XV
3. Using Wordpress for Affiliate Sites
4. Michael Campbell - I didn’t know he used to be a chef!
5. Page Rank of top ranking pages?
Hi again
Michael Campbell has a new product out, and its a cracker. Plus, there’s another Wordpress tutorial, news of my new "career" and more. Let’s get on..
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1. I’m changing career
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Over the last couple of months I have been thinking a lot about my life and how lucky I have been to be working from home in a job I like. However, I am not the sort of person to rest on my laurels - I like new challenges. I have therefore decided to change my "career". Well, that’s not entirely true. I will keep my existing career (affiliate niche marketing, search engine stuff, this newsletter etc), but I want to have a second career too.
On Monday, it’s my 42nd birthday. How many people can start a new career at that age? Certainly in the bricks and mortar workplace, your employability seems to fall off as you get older. Not so online. Online the only thing holding you back is YOU!
For those of you who have been receiving my newsletter for any length of time, or know me through my products, you would think my career is Internet marketing, right? The reason you think that, is because that is what I am known for. My idea of a new career is that I want to be known for something else as well (totally unrelated to Internet Marketing). I want to become an expert in another field.
Most Internet Marketers have sites in multiple niches, so you could perhaps say a lot of marketers have multiple "careers". The problem with that as far as I see is that those sites are not personal passions. They are simply profitable niches that make the marketer m0ney. How many of those marketers actually get any sort of reputation in those niches? Unless you get a reputation from people who are interested or involved in a niche, I wouldn’t call that niche a career.
So where am I heading with this?
Well I wanted to tell you a true story that I haven’t told anyone before, but first, a little background information.
A couple of months ago I bought a high definition camcorder, and a copy of Sony Vegas (for editing). Its a lot of fun and I soon realised that I enjoyed "playing" around with Vegas and learning new stuff. Then it hit me. Why not turn it into a career? To do this, I would need to become a recognised expert in Sony Vegas and video editing so that I could then start to make a living from it.
I was talking to a friend about this. The conversation went something like this:
Andy: "You know Joe, I am thinking of starting a new career in video editing".
Joe: "Video editing? What do you know about it? You’ve only had your camera for five minutes".
Andy: "Yes, I know, but you have to start somewhere".
Joe: "But isn’t it a bit much to be thinking about a career in this? There is so much you’d have to learn".
In many ways, Joe was correct. Planning to become an expert in something that you know very little about is a big task. If I listened to Joe’s reasoning, I would give up before I even started.
However, I have a secret weapon - passion. Editing videos is a passion. I love sitting at my computer and learning new techniques, so how can I fail? If I call this a "career", I’ll have a legitimate reason for sitting at my computer editing videos (currently I just feel guilty, thinking I should be working or spending time with my family instead).
OK, now the true story I wanted to tell you.
In 2002, I was really just starting my Internet Marketing career. My wife and I had begun our first website in 2001, and by the middle of 2002 it was making us enough money to live on. That first site was built with Site Build It!
Site Build It! has a built in "SEO Guru" to help you optimize pages, and it worked very well. As a consequence, I learned a lot about SEO and how to do it properly. I was by no means an expert, but I did know what worked on our own site.
Towards the end of 2002 I started thinking about creating a site on search engine optimization so I could teach others.
At the time, my role model was Michael Campbell. I read everything he wrote and learnt as much as I could. I had a dream to one day become as well-known as he was. I had a dream to make SEO my career.
I bought a domain name - ez-search-engine-optimization.com.
That’s when the doubts set in. I talked to my wife about my concerns as I was worried that I could not possibly compete in the "search engine optimization" niche as there were so many big players. My wife told me to trust in myself and my abilities, and to just do it. She told me:
"If you don’t try, you’ll never know what you can achieve".
The rest as they say is history. I got to work on the site, and planned a newsletter. The first issue of that newsletter wasn’t delivered to inboxes until October 2003, and I think it went out to around 20 people. The first few months of those newsletters were a "course" in SEO, which went on to become my first SEO eBook "Battle for the Top 10".
The early days were tough, but my secret weapon carried me through. My passion for teaching others how to build pages and sites that ranked well kept me on-track, and I have never looked back.
Back then, if I had let my doubts (or those of "friends" and family) stop me from trying, I would probably be back in my old job teaching science.
The moral of this story? Well I think you can work that one out for yourself, but if you need a bit of help, here are my own thoughts:
1. Age is not a barrier to starting an online business.
2. Believe in yourself, and follow your dream.
3. Don’t let others put you off with their negativity. People will often knock stuff they don’t understand, and Internet Marketing is one of those unknown areas for many people.
4. Following your passion can pull you through when times are tough.
5. Don’t over-analyze. Just do it.
There are a lot of people who never get started with their dream. I can promise you two things.
1. If you don’t try, you will fail.
2. If you have a passion for something, you are more likely to succeed because there is more than just the dream of making m0ney to pull you through when times get tough.
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2. Wordpress Tutorial - XV
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Last week we looked at adding a Feedburner subscription box to your site. This week, I want to show you how to automate an important process.
During the week, one of my newsletter readers wrote to me asking if there was a way to restore a Wordpress blog WITHOUT a backup of the database. Unfortunately he had moved servers, and the one backup he had was corrupted.
The only way I know of restoring a site without a backup (and this is for any type of site) is to look for cached versions of your Wordpress "pages" at Google, and then copying the content and re-pasting it into Wordpress, one by one. Anyone know any other ways? In the tutorial today, I want to show you how easy it is to backup your Wordpress database automatically, and get the backup emailed to you.
You can view all tutorials on the Affiliate Minder website.
When you get there, click the link on the right to "Wordpress Tutorials".
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3. Using Wordpress for Affiliate Sites
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I have tried a number of site building tools. Namo Web Editor, Site Build It!, HTML Kit, and others.
For the last few years, I have been a Dreamweaver user. All of my sites were created with Dreamweaver, and I could not imagine changing the editor.
When XSite Pro came out, I bought it, but I never really took to it. When version 2 came out I got a fr.ee upgrade. Again, I preferred Dreamweaver.
I thought that I would continue to use Dreamweaver until I was old and grey, but things have changed. I have a new site builder, and it’s fr.ee - Wordpress.
Over the last year, not only have I started building new sites with Wordpress, but I have also been converting a number of my niche sites over to the Wordpress platform.
There are a lot of reasons that I love Wordpress, but rather than repeat them all here, I can point you to an article I wrote on the advantages of Wordpress as an "Affiliate Site Builder". You can read that article here:
http://affiliate-minder.com/wordpresstutorials/advantages-of-using-wordpress-for-affiliate-sites/
If you are evaluating site building tools, do have a look at Wordpress. There is a learning curve like anything else, but the effort is worth it.
If you need step by step instructions on how to use Wordpress, you can join my Wordpress for Affiliate Sites coaching program.
Content is delivered on roughly a weekly basis, and takes you through every single step I take in creating a new site and promoting it. In the course, I am actually building a real site, and you’ll get videos showing you every step, as well as accompanying support documents like PDFs and mind maps.
Each month consists of 4 modules (the total course is expected to last around 4-5 months).
The first month contains around 2 hours 18 minutes of video, plus accompanying PDFs and Mind Maps.
The second month has over 3 hours of video plus support files.
The third month is still being "written".
This course is unlike any other, and was designed to prevent information overload and help keep you on task. It is designed for all levels of experience, including complete newbies. On top of everything else, you’ll get personal help and advice from myself, as well as a great bunch of people on the forum.
You can get more details of that program here:
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4. Michael Campbell - I didn’t know he used to be a chef!
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Michael Campbell is one of the good guys online, and his longevity as a teacher in the Affiliate Marketing arena is testament to that. As I said earlier, he was my role model when I first started out (he still is).
Michael has started a new series of podcasts where he interviews some of the top names in affiliate marketing on a range of topics.
The first "series" of 6 podcasts is entitled, "Affiliate Marketing Principles and Strategies". It includes 3.5 hours of "wisdom and tactics" that are used to dominate today’s marketplace by these top marketers:
1) Super affiliate Dave Tropeano
2) SEO marketing specialist Jerry West
3) Affiliate manager Ginette Degner
4) Pay Per Click Ninja Christian Weselak
5) Social media wizard Colin McDougall
6) Product creation genius Dr. Neil Shearing
You can download these podcasts and listen to them on your computer, your iPod or your iPhone as you go about your daily business.
These experts answer questions like:
How much can one expect to earn with affiliate marketing, the best way to start, favourite products to market, how to know if a market is profitable, opt-ins and autoresponders, social media and so much more.
Imagine the valuable information you could learn from experts who are actually walking the walk, and making 6+ figures a year in online income.
Michael Campbell chips in with some real nuggets of information, as well as some insights into his life - I didn’t know he used to be a Chef! Like me with my video editing "career", Michael is planning on becoming an expert on a non-internet marketing niche based on one of his passions.
These podcasts are entertaining as well as great value. They are packed with cut & paste information.
The "Affiliate Marketing Principles and Strategies" podcasts are the first in a series that Michael is producing. You can read more about them here:
Michael Campbell’s Affiliate Marketing Principles and Strategies Podcasts
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5. Page Rank of top ranking pages?
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In the last few weeks we have looked at a variety of factors often associated with good search engine rankings. So far we have looked at page length, age, Google sitemap & whether pages actually validate properly. We have done this for the following three phrases:
RGP contact lens
bbq plans
heart rate monitor
Today I would like to look at the Page Rank (PR) of the top pages ranking for these terms. This is something that many people work hard at building, but is it really as important as everyone thinks?
Again, I am using the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox to get this data. I have averaged out the values for the three terms.
RGP contact lens - Average PR = 3.2 (with one page showing N/A).
bbq plans - Average PR = 1.5
heart rate monitor - Average PR = 4.5
and a couple of others:
credit cards - Average PR = 5.0
Student Loans - Average PR = 6.5
halloween masks - Average PR = 3.7
Note: It should be noted that at any one time, the value of PR we see is an old value. Google does not let us see the latest, current value.
PR is certainly important in the ranking of your pages, but it is important to remember that PR is a result of incoming links, and it is those that should occupy your thoughts, rather than PR itself.
The keywords I checked showed very few pages in the top 10 with zero Page Rank, and a general rule of thumb seems to be as follows:
As the profitability (or demand) of a niche increased, so apparently does the Page Rank required to rank well. This is a natural consequence of increasing competition for those phrases. As competition increases, sites have had to work harder at building incoming links if they want to rank in the top 10, so their PR is higher. In niches with less demand, sites haven’t had to work so hard in getting top rankings, so their PRs aren’t usually as high.
Therefore it is still very important to get quality links pointing to the pages on your site.
Remember how PR is built. Its the incoming links and what they say about your pages that create the PR. Concentrate your efforts on acquiring quality inbound links to your site, and you PR will increase, giving you more "ranking power" and the ability to compete for higher demand phrases.
Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
Have a great week!
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