EzSEO Newsletter # 213
This week:
1. “Wordpress For Affiliate Sites” News
2. Wordpress Tutorial - VIII
3. Moving a Normal Website Over To Wordpress
4. An “Unsuccess” Story Update
Hi again
Sorry its a day late. He had some friends over on Saturday, and it became a very late might. I didn’t feel up to the newsletter on Sunday morning ;O)
This friend of mine is a little concerned over his job security, and so we got talking about online business. He was never the type of guy I thought would be worried and stressed, but he does have a baby now, so I guess that extra responsibility is enough to tip even the more laid back people over the edge. I am hoping he comes on board with my new Wordpress for Affiliate Sites community opening this week. He seemed very interested, but as with many professional people (and a small baby), he is a little short of time.
This week, we’ll continue with our Wordpress tutorials, there’s an update on that “unsuccess” story I told you about, and I’ll tell you how I have started to move an old Dreamweaver site over to Wordpress (and the issues to be concerned about if you want to do something similar).
Let’s get on…
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1. “Wordpress For Affiliate Sites” News
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Those who subscribed for updates on this new site I am opening got some exciting news this week. I am almost ready to open the doors.
The content for the first two weeks is complete, and uploaded. I only have a couple of teething problems that I need to sort out, so the doors should open in the next week.
If you are interested in learning how I use Wordpress to create affiliate sites, and watch as I create a site from scratch, then read more here:
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2. Wordpress Tutorial - VIII
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Last week we looked at setting up permalinks on your site.
If you have missed any of the Wordpress Tutorials, and to see the new ones, go to this site:
When you get there, click the link on the right to “Wordpress Tutorials”.
So far in this series we have covered the following:
* Advantages of Wordpress and how to install it (both manually and using Fantastico).
* Installing Plugins, my top 10 plugins, and how to activate and keep them updated.
* Adding the homepage as a static page.
* A few other essential pages you need to add, including Terms, Privacy and a Contact Us page complete with form for your visitors to fill in to contact you.
* Setting up permalinks. This forces Wordpress to use a URL structure YOU specify rather than the default one that Wordpress comes with.
Today I want to cover a few points on Wordpress themes, and how to install them. Normally, I wouldn’t install a theme just yet, because there are no posts on the site, so it is difficult to see what the themes look like for all pages concerned.
However, since changing themes is so easy, I figure there is no harm in doing it now. You can change the look of your site now, and if you decide later you don’t like it, or find a better one, you can change it again. Changing themes is as simple as uploading the Theme, and activating it. Its a very similar process to the one we used for plugins.
Head on over to the Affiliate Minder site, click the link to the Wordpress Tutorials section, and read the article on Choosing a Wordpress Theme. There will be a link at the end of that article pointing to a second article on how to install the theme.
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3. Converting a Normal Website Over To Wordpress
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For the last couple of days, I have been converting an old site of mine over to the Wordpress platform.
The old site was built in Dreamweaver and Content Publisher in the days when SEO was nothing more than main phrase in filename, title, h1 tags and several times in the content. Basically the content is very poor. However, that site still makes a couple of dollars a day, so I did not want to just dump the site. After all, a couple of dollars a day is over $700 a year.
I formulated a plan, and started to carry out that plan this week.
My plan is to create an authority site in this niche, with rich, quality content that is updated frequently. I want to use Wordpress because it is my new site building tool of choice.
The dilemma is this. What do I do with the old content?
I could import it into Wordpress, but URLs would change. I could actually set things up so that URLs would not change, but when the site was built, I had different ideas about structuring a website, and that structure is just not something I would do today.
My immediate solution was to create an HTML template that matched my new Wordpress theme. Since the original site pages were created with Content Publisher, I could simply use my new template, and regenerate all of the old content pages so they had the look of the new Wordpress theme.
Once those pages were uploaded, I setup my new Wordpress theme, created a homepage for the site, and the other “essential” pages (you can read about what I consider essential pages in the Wordpress tutorials on the Affiliate Minder site).
I added links to the article maps that Content Publisher created for me to the sidebar that appears in my Wordpress posts. These article maps are simply HTML sitemaps that link to each of the content pages. Since the old site had three separate “sub-niches”, I had three separate sitemaps.
So the state of play at the moment is that I now have my old site setup as a Wordpress site, and all of my old content still have their old URLs. These pages wont be included in the Google XML sitemap that the plugin creates because they are not in the Wordpress database as posts or pages, but there are links to those pages.
I can now add new content to the site using that “Windows Live Writer” tool I told you about a couple of weeks ago, quickly and easily.
There is more work to be done, and I’ll keep you updated on any problems I have along the way. The next step is to re-write ALL of the old content (and dump some of it if it cannot be turned into something useful), and add that new content to my new category system within Wordpress. I will be looking at redirecting the old URLs to the new ones.
Hopefully that $2 a day will increase significantly as I re-write the content, and slot it away in a more appropriate category.
If you have moved a regular website over to Wordpress and have any horror stories, or success stories you would like to share, I’d love to hear them.
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4. An “Unsuccess” Story Update
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Last week I told you about a guy who had built a site, but nobody came. In 9 months, he had just one sale.
He blamed Site Build It! for the site failing. I hear this a lot, especially from people who want to buy my SEO Website Builder because they think that my site builder can miraculously get them top rankings.
I have to explain, that while a site building tool can help with linking of pages together, etc, it is not the site building tool that will ultimately decide the success or failure of a site, it is the person operating the tool.
I finished my article last week with this:
“When a site fails to get traffic, its because those pages are not visible to people looking for that information. That is what you need to fix. Starting again on a new site or a new system is likely to lead to failure again, because you’ll repeat the same mistakes.
I am waiting to hear back from David to see if we can find the reasons for his Site build It site failing. I’ll let you know what we find out.”
I just wanted to update you on this. I have since talked with David again, and he answered my questions very openly.
The first question I asked him was about off-page factors, as I felt this was why his site failed, not because of the website itself. Here is the question, and his answer:
Question: How many links did you get pointing to your site, and how hard did you work at getting links into the various pages of your site?
Answer: I had no links pointing to my site and I did not work at getting links into the various pages of my site.
Bingo.
Just as I expected, off-page work needed.
I asked him if he still owned the site, but he said he didn’t. That’s such a shame as he tells me it was around 80 pages in size. He did however, keep the content he had written, so can create a new site with that content.
The moral of this story? I’m not sure. The big problem is that this guy (like most people who try and fail), only completed half the job. Creating the site is only the BEGINNING of the work. You need to continue working on a site, and you have to also work on off-page factors we have talked about in this newsletter. If you are following someone elses strategy (in this case he was following Ken Evoy’s Site Build It! manual), you need to complete all steps, not just the fun ones.
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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