August 4th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
You Can Start Now And It Costs You Nothing Other Than Your Time
You really have nothing to lose. You could spend months wondering if, or you could keep telling yourself that one day you’ll give it a go. At earning an income online.
If you have absolutely no clue how to do this, now is your opportunity to start something. It’s free to do, it started only on 1st August 2008 - so you are really not too late, it’ll take you until the end of August and you will emerge a different person from the one that started the course.
It’s called the Thirty Day Challenge and is orchestrated by Ed Dale - an Australian online marketer who, once per year gives anyone who wants it the chance to learn about, and start to, make a living online.
But Why Would Ed Do That?
Well, for the sceptics amongst you - Ed will make money in the end - he already does using his expertise online. This exercise markets Ed the person but he is doing this because being a wealthy smart guy doesn’t mean you have to be a mean git.
I know there are some people who think that last statement is untrue. I’ve got a friend who never does anything because he thinks everything is a con.
I guess a lot of people are like that.
Well, Ed Dale isn’t out to con anyone. He actually enjoys the process of teaching others and of course the online fame that brings him. Stop asking yourself why he would do it and take advantage of the opportunity.
Written by Liz Jamieson
Posted in: SEO and Marketing, Small Business
Tags: earn online, online marketing
July 14th, 2008 / No Comments » / by Liz Jamieson
I started a new blog on 1st July. It’s called Daily Web Tools and I will be adding a new post at least every weekday.
Daily Web Tools is a blog that will be of interest to webmasters, especially those who are new to the game of running, writing and maintaining their own web sites.
Please subscribe to it now as via it, I’ll deliver a useful website or software tool every day to your feed reader.
At the moment it contains precisely 10 posts. But I want to set it up so that it will become more popular as I add more posts.
This is what I am doing to achieve that in the first few days. If you have any other suggestions, please add them here.
Beginners Steps To Blog Promotion
Set The Blog Up As A Wordpress Blog
Wordpress is a fabulous tool, it’s free to install, and is infinitely customizable using plugins, widgets and good old code edits (if you are able). And even if you are not. It is still worth using.
Set The Blog Up On Wordpress.org
In other words self-host the blog. Forget about wordpress.com because it is too limiting. Your choice of theme is limited, and you can’t add plugins at will, and you are unable to apply any SEO techniques to improve the site’s search engine visibility. Further, at the time of writing you are not able by any normal means, to monetize your hosted blog.
Pick a Nice Theme
I always start a blog off with Neil Merton’s Web2.0 Theme. It’s clean, clever, and customizable. And did I mention, it has no images. But very soon after launch . . . . . . get an appropriate theme written for you by someone on eLance (or some other outsourcing website). Better to do this a few weeks in, when you have decided how you want your new, constantly expanding, blog to look.
Write Posts As Frequently As Possible
On Daily Web Tools I am deliberately aiming to write every day. This helps your blog get noticed, especially if what you write is of real use to your target audience. Do this for a few days, then start the publicising task.
First Steps - Blog To Do List
- Set up a gravatar and add a gravatar plugin
- Add a Google Analytics plugin so that you can monitor your traffic, starting with no traffic
- Add a plugin to help with SEO - like All in One SEO
- Add the Askimet plugin to handle spam or you’ll drown in it
- Add the Sociable plugin to promote within the social media sites
- Add the What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin
- Add a Google Sitemaps plugin for both XML and HTML, then sign up to Google’s Webmaster Tools to associate it with the sitemap. Proceed to monitor the report you get there.
- Add a Related Posts plugin
- Go Settings/Writing and add a number of update services. A great list can be found here.
- Set Up FeedBurner and burn your feeds, including the comments
- In the settings/writing admin panel on Wordpress, add a number of ping services that are relevant to your blog in the ping services box.
- Go to Technorati and claim your blog
- Add your blog to MyBlogLog, and then try to visit other blogs within MyBlogLog and get your gravatar noticed.
- Sign up to Google Alerts for your keywords and use this to give yourself ideas about what to blog about.
- Set an hour per day aside to read other people’s blogs within your market sector and comment where you can add value
- Make a commitment to write regularly - either every week day, or once per week, depending on the type of blog you have started. The more often you post, the more chance your blog has of being noticed.
- Once you have a decent number of posts, start to submit your blog to blog directories.
Written by Liz Jamieson
Posted in: SEO and Marketing, wordpress
Tags: blogging, wordpress
