EzSEO Newsletter # 192
February 10, 2008 by Andy
This week:
1. Get a link – Part I
2. Poll Results
3. Working with template headers
4. Reading PDFs on your computer
5. Other News
Hi again
If you enjoyed the digg tip last week, you’ll look forward to the next few newsletters where I’ll share with you some of my favourite white hat methods for getting inbound links to your site.
Today, we also analyze the poll results from last week plus more. Let’s get on…
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1. Get a link – Part I
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In the newsletter last week, I gave you one great way to get a link to one of your pages on your site. That method not only gets the inbound link, but can often get your page indexed and ranking high in Google in only a few hours (assuming the content is high quality).
While on-page factors are increasingly important, it is still true that off-page factors are more important. In other words, Google wants to know what other sites are saying about your site.
If lots of similar topic sites link to your site, then Google will assume your site is important, and will rank you accordingly.
Getting links to pages is one of the areas that most people neglect. Why? Simply because it takes too much work… Or does it.
Over the next few weeks, I want to give you link building tips that will help build quality, natural links to your site. These tips will build into a good link building resource that you can apply to any and all of your sites.
Let’s say tip #1 was the one from last week.
Tip #2 – getting links back from other people’s blogs. The way this works is that you leave comments on other peoples blogs, with a link back you your site in the comment.
Now, you are probably thinking one of the following:
1. Blog “auto-comment” posting software is spam.
Yes it is. Don’t use it.
2. Leaving crappy comments on other people’s blogs is spam.
Yes it is. Don’t do it.
3. Most blogs use the nofollow tag rendering any link back useless.
Yes they do. Find ones that don’t use the tag.
OK, so what is the best strategy to use here to avoid the spam trap?
Well, you need to find on-topic blogs that do not use the nofollow tag, and then leave comments that are high quality and informative. The information you leave should be complimentary to the original blog post.
Great. We have a plan.
One question though.. How do you find related blogs that do not use the nofollow link?
Well, I have a special treat for you, and it is fre.e.
Neil Shearing has created some software that he is giving away, and it does just that. Type in your main niche keyword, set a few options, and the software will go off and find these blogs for you. Just make sure you use it for good rather than evil ;O).
1. Find on-topic blogs.
2. Post genuinely useful comments
You can find the software here:
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2. Poll Results
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Last week, I ran a poll in this newsletter. You can see it here:
Reasons for not starting an online business
The “turn-out” was a little disappointing, but that could mean there are not that many of you that have not already made a start on your online business. Yeahh!!
The results were interesting.
43% of those who replied said that they had not started an online business because:
“I am always buying new ebooks and courses looking for the best way to start, so never get started”.
The same number of people also gave this as their reason:
“I am lost. There is so much information out there, and I don’t know where to begin”.
Interestingly only 3.4% of people stated they did not have time. I would have expected this to be a lot higher.
The first of the two popular answers highlights a real problem with getting started. A lot of people buy one product after another and never have time to start anything because just as they have finished reading one eBook (or course), they are buying into the next great m0ney-making scheme.
Why is this? Well, I would suggest that it is because people are generally lazy. They will buy something and possibly read it. Note I say possibly. A lot of people wont even do that!! Those that read it will probably decide that there is too much work involved (or decide that they can’t get rich enough, quickly enough with that method), and go out looking for the next best thing.
If you fall into this category, you will never complete the steps to creating a business online. You will forever be looking for the easiest, most lucrative method of making m0ney 0nline, and in the process, you will waste a lot of money and get nowhere.
You need to find a product by someone you trust, or has been recommended to you, and stick with it. Give it your full attention for a few months and try it. Only after you have tried, and tried again at something should you move on.
The other popular answer is another real problem. There is so much information out there that it is difficult to know where to start. Something that makes this even harder is that the internet has a long memory. Things that were posted years ago are still out there now, and because things change so quickly, the information can be wrong.
Take for example this snippet of advice I just found online at the about.com website (an authority site):
“Keywords help search engines to categorize your site, and to allow people to find your pages more quickly”.
This may sound like good information but if I tell you that this sentence was talking about the keywords in your meta keywords tag, you should realise that this is old information. Search engines currently do not use the meta keyword tag to categorise your page. They use to several years ago, but not know.
How on earth are you supposed to know what is good and what is bad?
Both of these problems probably affect the same people since those who are buying everything that comes out, will soon find their Internet Marketing reference library becomes the source of their problem – too much information.
What can you do about this?
If you want to start a solid online affiliate marketing business, then a good place to start would be to read and apply the information in my freely available “Creating Fat Affiliate Sites” eBook. If you have lost your copy, go to my ezseonews.com site, and look down the left menu for it. You’ll see it under the Just Released section (that needs to be moved!).
After reading this eBook (its about 170 pages in length, so I recommend you print it off to make notes as you go through), you’ll know exactly what tools you need to get started. There are some things you will need to buy, but the budget is nothing compared to what you would need to setup a bricks and mortar business in the “real world”.
Here are some of the things you will need:
1. Web Editor (there are some fr.ee ones around, but most require you to know some HTML).
2. Web Hosting – this costs a few bucks a month.
3. Domain name – a few bucks a year.
4. Keyword Research tool – there are some fr-ee ones, but you generally get what you pay for.
5. An autoresponder is useful, and there is a fr.ee one at yourmailinglistprovider.com
Note that a lot of what you need can be low cost or fr.ee. That doesn’t mean I recommend you take the fr.ee route.
The above items, together with my Fat Affiliate Sites eBook are all you need to get started.
If you want to avoid the keyword research and all the other planning stages of your site, you could consider one of my Niche Blueprints:
They contain complete keyword research (and a special copy of KRA to manipulate the data) for a niche, plus all of the other stuff you need to know, like recommended affiliate programs, how to structure your site, which keywords to use for which pages etc etc.
If m0ney is less of an issue, I highly recommend starting the way I did – with a Site Build It! license.
This package will give you everything you need to get started, and you can be sure that the training manuals they give you are always up to date with the latest information.
SBI really is a good deal when you look at everything that is included.
OK, let’s assume you have a little knowledge and that you have dabbled in affiliate/Adsense sites, even made some inc0me. Starting over with the above suggestions may not sound too exciting, or motivating. For you, I would recommend you try to take your affiliate marketing to the next level and introduce some PPC into the mix.
To learn how to use PPC effectively, so you don’t end up losing your shirt, I would recommend Perry Marshall’s fr.ee 5 day course.
(incidentally, I use Maxthon as a web browser, and this link takes me to a hypertracker website. If you end up there, copy and paste the link into Internet Explorer or Firefox, and it should resolve correctly).
Incidentally, the best course I have seen on using PPC for affiliate sales, is the one I reviewed last week by Dave Tropeano. You can read the review at my blog. Its the Long Tail Strategies item.
For everyone who answered the poll, you need to ask yourself this question.
“Do I really want to start an online business”?
If you answer yes, then you need to take action and actually do something to start the ball rolling. Still undecided? Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is this:
“Am I prepared to do what it takes to start an online business”?
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3. Working with template header graphics
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A question that comes up a lot is how to use header graphics on fluid templates. A fluid template is one that resizes as you change your browser size. You can see an example of a fluid template on my ezseonews.com site.
Open the site and try resizing your browser. You can see that the main text on the page is fluid. It expands and contracts to fill all available space.
With a fixed width template, resizing your browser does not have any effect on the web page.
An example of a fixed width template is this one for Ryan Deiss’s Piggy Back Traffic.
Load that up and resize the browser.
You will notice that resizing the browser has a very different effect. The background “space” on either side of the main content expands or contracts, but main content stays the same.
In the fixed layout, the header graphic is not a problem. You can create the graphic to be the exact width of the content, and you know that never changes.
Things are not so simple with fluid templates. As you resize your browser, the header needs to resize too. Obviously you cannot resize the header image itself as the browser resizes, or it would become distorted. You have to use another method which gives the illusion that the header is resizing.
In my ezseonews.com site, the solution was to simply put in a plain colour background that matched the background colour of my image.
You can see just the logo here:
http://www.ezseonews.com/logo.jpg
I simply copied the background colour and used that in my template for the header section.
This is very easy if your header image is a plain colour. If you use gradients, or irregular patterns on the logo image, things are a little more complicated (something to bear in mind when you are creating your logo).
NOTE: You will notice that the background colour is actually a gradient of darker on the left, to lighter on the right. To allow for this, I aligned the graphic to the left, made sure the header section was the exact same height as the graphic (so that the ligher background would not appear above and below my image), and then matched my background colour to the right hand “lighter” blue.
Have a look at this header:
http://www.creatingfatcontent.com/logo.gif
A plain background colour could not be used (well it could, but it would look back).
You can see the solution I used in action on this page.
The solution is not perfect, but it is better than using a plain background colour.
I’ll tell you how to deal with this type of logo next week, and also some considerations you should take into account when designing your logo.
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4. Reading PDFs on your computer
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PDF files are great.
Reading PDFs on your computer is not – or so I thought.
In an effort to do my bit for paper conservation, I decided to find a solution. Firstly, I needed to get a laptop that had one of those twistable screens – the kind I see the news readers on Sky News using.
I wanted to be able to sit in a comfortable armchair (perhaps in front of the TV) with my laptop in portrait orientation, and one page of the PDF visible on the screen at a time (to prevent a lot of scrolling).
I bought an HP TX 1270 tablet for the job. I justified the expense because these tablets allow you to “write” on the screen with a special plastic pen. That would also be great for Camtasia videos as I could scribble directly onto the videos, to highlight points.
Well, this laptop removed one great hurdle. It allowed me to read PDFs while sitting in my comfortable chair.
However, one thing still made me go back to the printed form.
Scribbling notes in the margins of the PDF!
This is something I always do when I have a printed copy, but it is not something I am able to do with Adobe Reader.
This was a major stumbling block for me. I say “was”, because it is not any more. I found a tool that allowed me to scribble notes to my hearts contents as I read the PDF.
Not only that, but I could insert blank pages into the document (giving me a whole page of notes where necessary), as well as a number of other cool editing features.
If you have a tablet PC, or a USB graphics tablet, or even if you want to be able to make notes on PDFs with your mouse (there are a lot of highlighting options that are very easy with a mouse), then this software may be just what you need.
The software in question is called Bluebeam PDF Revu. Do a search of Google for it.
I cannot imagine a better tool currently exists, but if you know of any similar software, please let me know. I am still using the trial of BlueBeam PDF Revu, and am intending to register it soon if nothing better comes up.
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5. Other News
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I have been getting a lot of questions about the release of KRA Pro. Please have patience.
This week, I have again been working solidly on KRA Pro. The software is currently being tested by my beta testers, and I am working on documentation. The documentation should be complete this week, and as long as testing goes well, you should know the release date next week.
When I have more news I will let you know.
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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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2008 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
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