EzSEO Newsletter # 210

This week:

1. Fat Content Creator

2. Wordpress Tutorial - V

3. Wordpress For Affiliate Sites Update

4. Using Sub-domains?

Hi again

Hope you have had a good week.

Our weather forecast for this weekend was clear skies over the whole island.  Well, in true weather forecast style, clouds started to roll in at midday yesterday, and today it looks like rain.

let’s get on with the newsletter..

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1. Fat Content Creator
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Since I released KRA Pro, one of the most frequent questions I have been asked actually had nothing to do with KRA Pro.

Instead, the question actually referred to the Fat Content Creator software.  This is the article editor that comes with the Fat Content Course.  This editor has a lot of people excited after reading my themeing reports, and seeing how this tool can help you theme your content for better search rankings.

What a number of people wanted to know was can they buy the Fat Content Creator without buying the entire course.

The answer, until today, has been no.

Between Today, and Tuesday 22nd July, I have decided to offer the Fat Content Creator software to those who subscribe to my newsletter, or the KRA/KRA Pro sub-lists I have.

On the 22nd, I will be removing it from sale, so this is a small window of opportunity for everyone who begged me to release it.

If you don’t know what this tool can do, I suggest you go and read some of the following theme reports.  There are three of them in between the links for Video 1 and Video 2.

Themeing Content

They use this tool extensively to analyse top pages in Google.

Of course, the primary purpose of this tool is not to research other pages, but to help you write your own highly themed content. You’ll get the idea of how to do this by reading the reports.

For anyone who wants to get this software BEFORE Tuesday 22nd, here is the link:

Fat Content Creator

You wont get a long sales page.  This offer is strictly for those who know what I am talking about ;O)

NOTE: Anybody who has bought the Fat Content Course in the past should upgrade to the latest version of this software.  Login to the Fat Content Course Download area (with the same login details you were originally sent, or access the download area from within the Fat Content Creator Software itself), and scroll down the page to the link about the Latest Version.

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2. Wordpress Tutorial - V
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Last week we looked at activating plugins and also keeping them up to date.

If you have missed any of the Wordpress Tutorials, you can view each on this site:

Wordpress Tutorials

When you get there, click the link on the right to “Wordpress Tutorials”.

As things stand, you’ll currently have a blog that looks like the generic Wordpress blog, containing a hello world post, and an about page.

We still have a fair bit of customizing to do, but today I want to show you how to add a homepage for your site.  When this is up, it will mean that the search engines can at least get some meaningful content to index, and you can tweak this over the coming weeks as we complete the Wordpress to Affiliate Site customizations in preparation for adding more content.

Before that, there is a new video to watch on the Affiliate Minder site.  Its shows a brief overview of the Top 10 Wordpress plugins that you have installed, and what they do.  You can view this video at the bottom of the Top 10 Plugins article.

Just go to:

http://affiliate-minder.com

Click the link to the Wordpress Plugins page, and follow the link to the “Top 10 Wordpress Plugins” page.

Then scroll to the bottom, the video is there.

OK, back to the homepage.

Login to your Wordpress Dashboard.

Click on the Manage -> Posts menu at the top to open up a list of existing Wordpress posts.

You’ll see a post with the title “Hello World”.  This is the post that is seen on your Wordpress blog after initial install, and was put there by Wordpress to get you started.

If you click the title of the post, it will take you to the editing screen where you can edit the post.

If necessary, click the back button on your browser to go back to the Manage Posts screen.

Click the check box at the beginning of this line, and then click the Delete button (above the list of posts on the left).

If you go back to your blogs homepage (you can click the View Site button), you’ll see that the homepage has changed.  It now says “Not Found - Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

That’s because you have deleted the only post in your blog.

OK, back in your Wordpress dashboard, click the Manage - Pages menu at the top of the screen.

You’ll see an About page exists.  I recommend you delete that as well at this stage.  We will be recreating all the “support pages” we need later in the tutorials.

You have just deleted the only content your blog had.  We need to add some…

We are going to add a homepage.

We’ll explore the differences between pages and posts in a later tutorial, but for now, click the Write -> Page (NOT Post).  We want to create a PAGE for the homepage.

Now you are on your own for a bit.

Enter a title for the homepage.  This is going to be the title of the visible page (not the title in the meta tags).

Enter in the content of your homepage.  I would recommend just adding text at the moment.  What you are trying to do is setup a homepage that the search engines can index now.

I recommend that you click the Full Screen button in the WYSIWYG editor, so that you have a little more space.

NOTE: On occasions, when saving information into a post or page, my computer returns with an error as if my network connection had timed out.  This resulted in loss of data on more than one occasion.  I always recommend saving your work as you go, or the alternative is to create your content in a text editor, and then copy and paste it into your Wordpress Dashboard.  There are even some applications that run off-line that can post to your blogs, and if interested, I would recommend you look at the fr.ee one by Microsoft called “Windows Live Writer”.  Mac users can no doubt find alternatives.

Microsoft Live Writer allows you to format content, add images, select categories for posting, etc, and then publish when you are happy with a click of a button.  Its very cool, and takes care of image uploads for you.  I highly recommend it. The only downside that I have found is that you will need to login to your Wordpress Dashboard to fill in the tags & also the meta data accepted by the Headspace plugin you installed.

When you are happy with your content, enter 4 or 5 tags in the box provided.  Think of tags as words that define your content.  If you were to file your content away in a filing system, what categories would you put it under?  These are the types of words to put in the tags.

Scroll down the page a little more, and enter the Headspace Title and Description.  These will be used as the meta tags in your homepage, so take time to get them right.

As you scroll down, you’ll a section called Comments & Pings.  We’ll look in more detail at these two concepts, but for now, click the little arrow to the left of the “Comments & Pings” section to open it up, and then uncheck “Allow Comments”.  We don’t really want comments on the homepage, but that is your choice.  If you do, you can leave it checked.

OK, that’s it for your homepage at the moment.  Scroll back to the top, and look for the “Publish” button.  It’s right next to the Save button that you hopefully used while writing your content.

NOTE: There is also a preview button that opens the page you are working on in a new window.  This is useful to check your content before going live with it. e.g.. are images showing up properly?  Are the paragraphs laid out properly, do links work, etc.

You have just created the page to be used as your homepage, but if you click “View Site”, you wont see it there yet.  You will however see a link to it in the right hand sidebar.

To get Wordpress to use this page as your blog homepage, you need to tell it to do so.

Click on the Settings -> Reading menu at the top.

You’ll see the fist item on the page is “Front Page Displays”.  This tells Wordpress what you want to display on your homepage.

Click the radio button to enable “A Static Page”.  Open up the “Front Page” drop down box, and select your newly created homepage.

Scroll down and click the “Save Changes” button.

Now when viewing your blog homepage, you’ll see the homepage content you just created.

You can view this tutorial including screenshots on the Affiliate Minder website.

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3. Wordpress For Affiliate Sites News
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Over the last couple of weeks I have “leaked” my plans to run a Wordpress For Affiliate Sites “Community” to my newsletter subscribers.  If you have missed these posts, you can read more about my plans on the Affiliate Minder website.  Just click the link top left to the “Wordpress for Affiliate Sites Community”.

http://affiliate-minder.com

I just wanted to update you on the progress here. I have been working hard to integrate everything so that the course can run smoothly.  This last week I have successfully managed to integrate aMember, Wordpress and vBulletin board into onto a single system that will allow me to deliver content on a regular basis, as well as offering a full forum for members to go to discuss both the course, and their own sites/issue/questions, etc.

This was the hardest part for me.  Now this is set up, the only thing left is to start creating and uploading content.  Since I will be building the site in real-time, I cannot do too much more before the doors open.

One thing I want to do is to map out the course, so I have a schedule to stick with.  That will ensure that there are regular updates, with new information, videos, PDFs and probably MP3s.

If you have signed up for notification of this “community”, you should be getting another email from me very soon.

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4. Using Sub-domains?
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I got an email from one subscriber asking me about sub-domains.  It use to be that Google treated sub-domains as separate domains, but with a massive increase in “sub-domain” spam, Google seems to have changed its position over the last year or so.  It looks like sub-domains are now being treated in much the same way as folders on a site, rather than completely different sites.

For this reason, I don’t recommend that you use sub-domains as the basis for your site empire.  Different topics should definitely be kept on different domains to keep those domains as tightly themed as possible.

You can still use sub-domains in situations that would also be appropriate for folders, e.g. Language translations of a site into multiple languages, with each language on its own sub-domain, or perhaps in Silo type site structure where each sub-domain contains highly related content on one aspect of the niche.

I would recommend using separate domains for separate niches.

I would also favour folders rather than sub-domains, purely because sub-domains have been used for so much spamming that search engines may decide in the future that if you use a sub-domain instead of a folder, you may be up to no good.  This is highly unlikely, but I do like to stay away from trouble ;O)

If you have existing sites using sub-domains that are doing OK, leave them.  Just plan to change your strategy as you take on new niches.

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:

http://ezseonews.com/archives

Have a great week!

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