I did it! I published my first squidoo lens today.
It was much easier than I expected, and it doesn't have to be perfect the first time. A lensmaster is free to tweak and change as often as he/she wishes.
Check it out. It's not completely done - needs more pictures and more personal experiences - but I had to start somewhere.
Germany's Best: The Black Forest
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Plug-in Profits, Start Writing Your Internet Success Story Today
Friday, March 30, 2007
I'm a bona fide lensmaster
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Soul Searching
I know it's been a month since I've posted to Common Sense Ebiz, but I've been doing some heavy soul searching and praying.
You see, once again I found myself going in a lot of different directions. Instead of concentrating on the two businesses I have going, I was looking for and downloading ebooks like crazy.
You won't believe this, but on my desktop right now I have two ebooks side by side. One is named "Do You Want Millions?" and the other is "I Want Pennies."
That is the absolute truth! This was not intentional; these are just two ebooks I happened to run across in the past month and thought they deserved a second look.
"Do You Want Millions" is about blogging and the "right" way to go about setting up blogs to make money. "I Want Pennies" has to do with PPC ads for discount coupons. If you would like information on how to get either one of these, email me and I will send the information to you. I am not making commissions on either of these, but will gladly send the link if you request it.
I have also been checking into squidoo.com. Do you Squidoo? If not, you should.
squidoo.com is a great place to write on or off topic and still be able to get money for affiliate programs. In the words (paraphrased) of the founder of Squidoo, Squidoo is not a destination, it is a beginning. This is not where you go to end your journey; it is where you go to start your journey.
In future posts I will write more about Squidoo. I am working on my first lens and will post the link here when I get done. I am a bit of a perfectionist, so it takes me a while to even get going for fear of not doing it right, but I have every intention to get started this week.
Why don't you take a peak at www.squidoo.com for yourself to get a feel for what I'm talking about.
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Plug-in Profits, Start Writing Your Internet Success Story Today
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
What You Say Can and Will Be Used - Either For You or Against You
Even before two interns to US Presidential candidate John Edwards were fired for posts found on their personal blogs, this topic was on my mind.
Article writing and blog posting have become a huge industry on the web and have become a way for many of us to be "who we are" to a faceless audience. Sometimes this anonymity can be intoxicating and we forget that there really are people out there who are going to read what we wrote and judge us on what they find.
In addition to these two girls who have lost their footing in a presidential campaign, I read recently of a number of people who have lost the race for new jobs because employers went online to find out more information about the candidate.
Information found in social networks, such as MySpace, are generally written to an entirely different audience from your employer, but employers and human resource personnel have just as much right and access to these writings as do your peers.
Be careful what you write, whether it is in an article or on your blog or on social networks such as MySpace. What you write will be available in cyberspace for years to come and you can bet that eventually it will be used - either for you or against you.
If you must let off steam, follow these simple rules
A piece of great advice I read one time is to "write down good news; speak bad news." The logic behind this is that what is written can be read and reread and will be remembered word for word. Bad news should not be conveyed in a way that will be remembered as bad news.
Good news, however, what you learned, how you have changed as a result, etc., should be remembered and therefore should be written down for yourself and for others.
You may want to let off steam now by writing an article or a post about your employer or your teacher or some other awful thing that has happened, but before you hit the "publish" button, think about the long-lasting impression your words will have for people in authority whom you one day will not want to alienate.
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Plug-in Profits, Start Writing Your Internet Success Story Today
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Snacks for the Spiders, a Feast for Your Customers
Search engine optimization (SEO) is on the minds of nearly all web masters. As a site is being built, the savvy web master is thinking constantly of how to optimize the site to gain the attention of the search engines.
To this end, web masters spend hours and hours working on keywords, title tags, description tags, and meta tags to act as spider food to get spiders to their site and return to their nest with a higher page rank for the site. In this quest, much time and effort is spent trying to think like a spider to attract attention.
While I do highly recommend that you learn how spiders work and what they are looking for (sign up for the free lessons from www.seoelite.com for a great overview of how to optimize your site), I further recommend that a site be built to attract and keep customers. While spiders, as they report back to home base and move your site up in the index, will help customers find your site, customers will not stay there or spend their money on your products if the site is not built for them as well as the spiders. In other words, provide snacks to attact spiders and a feast to keep customers.
To this end
Optimize your site for keywords that are relevant to your customers
Few things irritate me more than to search for "running shoes," for example, only to be met with shoe stores that sell everything but running shoes but had some web master that knew people would look for running shoes and might settle for black leather pumps instead. I don't know about you, but instead of deciding to buy dress shoes instead of running shoes, I move on from that site with a mental note not to return.
Write copy to tell customers what your site is about
Once a spider finds your site, it is looking for keywords that tell it what your site is all about. Guess what! Customers are looking for the same thing. Customers want to know, within a few seconds of landing on your site, if they will find what they are looking for within your pages. Use the pages of your site to inform both spiders and customers of your purpose for opening shop on the world wide web.
Provide the products customers came to find
As in the suggestion above, don't use keywords for products you do not provide. If you do not provide golf shoes, never have, never will, do not use the keyword "golf shoes" to rope customers into buying cowbody boots instead. People who are ready to buy from the internet know what they want and do not want to have their time wasted on sites that do not offer the products they are looking for. If, on the other hand, you do sell golf shoes but are temporarily out of stock, by all means use the keyword "golf shoes," but be honest with the customer to let them know that you will do your best to get the golf shoes back in stock as soon as possible and that you will let them know when they are available.
Make navigation easy for your customers
Spiders don't look at your site the same way people do. While spiders crawl a site in a set manner, right to left, top to bottom, site navigation must make sense to customers too. Make navigation buttons easy to find and simple to understand. Use words and menus that make sense to your customers.
Make the site attractive to people
Spiders don't look at anything but words. They don't see color, let alone pictures. While pictures and color can excite or turn off customers, a site is not indexed by the spider's report because it looks good. Read information on userability and site usage. Understand how people use the internet and what they are looking for in a site. Build your site to keep the attention of people, not just spiders.
In the areas that spiders see - words, glorious words - customers and spiders are looking for the same things: keywords that are relevant to your site, copy that tells what your site is about, and products they came to your site to find. Beyond that, make navigation intuitive for your customers and make the site attractive to people.
In the end, SEO must take into consideration both the customer and the spiders, and if it comes to a tie, break the tie in favor of the customer and the spiders will reward you in the end.
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Plug-in Profits, Start Writing Your Internet Success Story Today
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Article Writing , Blogging, and SEO - A Few of My Favorite Sites
Like you, I am bombarded with offers for all kinds of article writing, blogging, SEO, marketing, and social bookmarking sites among other things. For someone who is new to the internet, and even for some of us who have used it for years to find just about anything we are looking for, it is easy to get lost in a sea of information. It is also easy to spend a lot of money on the latest information that is "going to change the way you do business and make you a lot of money at the same time."
While those opportunities evidently do exist, I remain very skeptical of all get-rich-quick schemes, even those from people who have been around a while and still promote making $10,000.00 in a day and so on. Many people have done that, but for most of them it took years of putting in their time and trying different things before they reached that level.
Two parts of internet business that I am just now ready to get a handle on are article writing and blogging. Coming in a close third is SEO (search engine optimization). Not that I feel I have a handle on it, but it does not overwhelm me now just to think about it as it did in the past.
As you can tell if you've read my posts, article writing has quickly become a passion for me. I don't write an article a day as some folks do, but I am probably on task to write 3 a week on average. If all goes as planned, that will increase in coming months, and I look forward to the increase. Along with article writing, my blog is starting to get more attention and is becoming a hobby as well as a passion.
The other part of internet business that seems overwheling is SEO. All of us know that it needs to be done, but few of us feel capable of providing the best SEO for our own sites, let alone helping someone else do it.
In this post I am recommending a few of my favorite FREE sources for help with article writing, blogging, and SEO. Of course, I have provided quite a bit of information on article writing in my posts, but my passion for article writing started with a free resource from http://completeminisites.com. Bill Morin offers some ebooks here for sale, but you can get the 3-part course on article writing for free. I started there then ran across Steve at http://www.999articles.com. His series is a bit longer and will come over a period of days unless you pay for the course, but he gives very good information on the various parts of articles and how to write them for maximum impact.
For blogging I recommend starting with Jim DeSantis at Online Tribune Internet Marketing (http://on-line-tribune-internet-marketing.blogspot.com). Jim provides great information in his blogs and is more than willing to share what he knows.
On the SEO front, I recommend Brad Callen at SEO Elite http://www.seoelite.com you can buy the ebook or just take the free course through email. It is not an all-inclusive read, but it will give you some good ideas on what good SEO is and how to tell if it has been done correctly.
A man who has become near and dear to me is Tim at Traffic Slurp UK SEO Services, a UK based SEO firm. Tim published one of my articles and is working on SEO for me. He really knows his stuff. You can get some great "How to" information from Traffic Slurp or you can hire Tim and his staff to spearhead your SEO for higher search engine rankings.
One great tool Tim uses is his Competitor Link Analysis. Read my article on Increasing PageRank and you'll understand why this tool is so valuable. This tool will help you find out what authority sites are linking to your competitors and give you direction for seeking out these sites for yourself. It gives you this information and so much more. If you are interested in getting quality links for your site, this FREE tool is a must.
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Friday, February 16, 2007
How Your Blog Can Help Your Article Marketing Campaign and Vice Versa
It seems many of us have taken to article marketing for an unprecedented increase in traffic to our websites. To this end, we write maybe an article a day or three a week at minimum, post them to our blog (for even more exposure), and submit them to our ever-increasing list of article directories. We feel proud of ourselves for having accomplished this much in so short a time.
Then, one day, out of the clear blue, we read that there may be a problem with our system. Duplicate content - the problem of the search engines not being able to see that every article that bears my name was actually written by me no matter where it was found first, second, or last.
In order to avoid this, the suggestions abound. Maybe we shouldn't post the same article to more than one directory; maybe we can post a version of the same article to different directories, but it must be changed by at least 30% in order not to be banned by the indexers; maybe we can post to our blog first, ping it, wait 24 hours, then post to article directories; maybe none of it matters and we can post anything we want wherever we want.
In forums and blogs throughout the world, there is much discussion about duplicate content. But no one has the answer. Maybe not even Google, the top dog we are trying to impress in the first place. It seems that Yahoo has a handle on this, but Google can't quite get the math right.
No wonder. Have you ever looked at the algorithm used to figure PageRank? I used to work as a copy editor for a physics journal and these equations look a lot like the same ones used to work out problems of black holes and nuclear physics. There are so many summations, sigmas, fractions, matrices, and the like that one little sigma in place of an epsilon can cause the entire thing to blow up - and no I don't mean the world. I mean the PageRank algorithm. If this is how the PageRank algorithm is structured, I wonder how the duplicate content algorithm is structured?
With the ongoing marketing of such software as Article Submitter Pro that submits the same article to more than 300 directories, and individual directories making an article available to be used in ezines and blogs throughout the world, the biggest problem with duplicate content seems to be posting the same article on your own blog and in article directories. For some reason, this could be held against you.
In order to get around this problem, it was suggested by a few reliable sources that I post the article to my blog first, ping it, wait 24 hours, then submit to article directories. In the past few days, however, I've come up with perhaps a more conservative approach that has the potential to increase the exposure of both my content and my name, and thus the traffic to my site.
What is this new revelation?
I write freely and in a more "down to earth" manner in my blog then use the same content to write my article and submit it. Because articles are generally written in a more formal tone, though not stuffy, I take the words from my blog that are just written as they come to me and turn them into an article that is a bit more organized and maybe contains quotes and information from research.
In addition to providing the foundation for my article, the style of writing in my blog might appeal to a slightly different audience and be picked up from there rather than from an article directory.
Beyond providing the foundation for an article, my blog gives a reader who clicks on a link in my article resource box more information than they found in the article. Blog posts can generally be as long as you want them to be, without losing your reader's attention. I can include website links and examples that either are not allowed in an article or just take up too much space.
And, on the flip side, if someone bookmarks my blog and finds a link back to my article or searches for my name, I get more exposure and the chance for my article to be picked up by ezines and blogs if they like the article style better.
Even if you aren't concerned about duplicate content between your blog and your articles, it's a win-win situation to write a blog post directed to your particular audience then modify it to appeal to an even wider audience through article directories.
If you just do not have the time to post to a blog and rewrite the post to submit to an article, at the very least post to your blog first, ping your blog, then wait 24 hours before submitting the article to an article directory. This should't cause too much trouble for the sigmas, summations, and epsilons in the algorithm.
Copyright © Claudia Pate
Plug-in Profits, Start Writing Your Internet Success Story Today
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Get Quality Backlinks to Increase PageRank Fast
What is PageRank?
The PageRank of a website in Google indicates the importance of the website in the eyes of Google. This is based on many factors, but should build over time as your site gains notariety, popularity, and traffic.
The Google PageRank, or number value Google places on a website, is largely based on the importance (popularity) of the site based on the PageRank of the sites linking back to it. A large part of your internet marketing campaign must focus on getting backlinks from sites with a PageRank higher than yours.
How do I find a PageRank?
You can find the PageRank of any website by downloading the Google toolbar. Just a little left of the center of the tool bar is an icon labeled "PageRank." When you visit any site, the bar will fill to indicate where that site stands on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the highest). You can hold your cursor over the bar without clicking on it to see the number value of the PageRank.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links that point back to your site. These can be links you have received from other sites in exchange or reciprocal linking agreements, one-way links placed on another site that leads to your site, or links placed strategically by you in forum posts, blogs, and the resource box of published articles. Backlinks are also achieved when you submit your website to article directories.
When exchanging links, posting in forums, or submitting articles, it is best to use keywords in the text of the link to "anchor" your text. By placing keywords in the text of the link instead of your website name or words such as "Click here," the keyword(s) are anchored to your url.
Example:
Use
Work at home opportunities
Instead of
Common Sense Ebiz
This not only creates a backlink to your site, it links your keywords to your site, thus enticing the spider with an extra morsel (spiders love keywords nearly as much as backlinks).
Do I really need backlinks?
Yes. You really need backlinks.
Backlinks are needed to get the attention of Googlebot as he spiders through the web seeking where to go next. While it is hard to imagine, a spider does not search the web in alphabetical order, scouring all the A's, then the B's, all the way through Z. Instead, spiders start with one site (which one, who knows?), scours the data there then is sent off through the links it finds on that site. If your site is found on that site, you get searched. If not, the spider doesn't even know you exist. If the spider finds you on another site, you get searched again, and the pattern continues until all sites have been searched and re-searched.
After the spider has seen your site over and over again, it begins to think, "This site must be important because so many other sites find it important." And this site is even more important if a lot of other "important" (quality) sites find it important.
It's like dating the football captain or the head cheerleader: your popularity goes up because you are with someone else who is more popular than you.
Backlinks also serve to help visitors find you. Links on a web page are like the directory at the mall. "If you didn't find what you were looking for here, maybe you can find what you are looking for'at "Ebiz for the Small Fry'." Click on this link and find out.
Backlinks on forum posts, blogs, and article resource boxes are also left behind to help readers, who don't even know you exist, find their way to your site.
You do need backlinks, but more importantly, you need quality backlinks.
Where do I get quality backlinks?
It is not enough to have a huge number of backlinks; in fact it is frowned upon to have too many. It is best to have a few quality backlinks than a bunch of backlinks that are not seen as "quality" links. So, you ask again, where do I get quality backlinks?
In their PageRank algorithm, Google has not hidden the fact that your mother was right: your reputation is only as good as the people you hang around with. If you strive to get good, quality backlinks, your reputation and presence on the internet will grow and will be felt throughout the world.
Get your free copy of Dotcomology today to find out more about starting your own online business or marketing a brick-and-mortar business online.
Click Here to Discover "Dotcomology" Now!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
